interrogation Posts

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

More from the U.S. War of Terror. Two years ago officials of the Central Intelligence Agency purposefully destroyed taped evidence of its torture program.

They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The CIA guys were put in a difficult position: more or less ordered by their President to torture prisoners suspected of belonging to al Qaeda in an moment of history--the tapes were made in 2002--when many Americans were willing to look the other way. But it should go without saying that torture is never okay, never justified. Many studies have proven it generally doesn't provide reliable information as the victim says whatever they think their captor wants to hear just to end the pain. How many court cases against real al Qaeda agents are going to have to be thrown out now that we know the evidence is a product of abuse?

There are times when men and women of honor have to say no to their superiors, no to their President and no to the American people, when they must draw a line in the sand for the sake of decency and humanity. That would have been hard enough in 2002. But to destroy the evidence is 2005 is pure obstruction of justice. The CIA is hiding the acts it performed in our name from us. Everyone involved in the cover-up and destruction belongs in jail. Let's hope for democracy's sake that they end up there.

There's a reasonable expectation that intelligence agencies should be possessed of a certain degree of intelligence. The graphic pictures of U.S. military personnel torturing prisoners in iraq and Guantanamo Bay outraged Americans and brought condemnation from all corners of the civilized world.

The stories that came out of Badgdad's Al Grahib prison gave a boost to the iraqi insurgency, proof of the brutality of the American invaders that could be paraded across the screens of Al Jazeera. We've never heard that any reliable intelligence information ever came from the degrading interrogation practices employed at Al Grahib, which shouldn't be a surprise: torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique (many of the detainees at Al Grahib were taxi drivers at the wrong place at the wrong time when a military sweep came through). Torture's real purposes are usually much baser: revenge, humiliation and base cruelty.

Lesson to the White House: Unless you want to stroke the insurgency (and get more U.S. soldiers killed), lay off the torture.

Unfortunately we have a White House that doesn't learn lessons very well. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 last week on a John McCain-sponsored amendment to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees held by the United States government. President George W. Bush is now actively lobbying the Senate to add a loophole that would allow U.S. intelligence agency to continue torture.

Yes, that's right, the President of the United States ("Beacon of the Free World," "The Light of Democracy," etc.) is officially going on record as a supporter of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. It's a sign of a certain kind of inhumanity, or at least insensitivity, that Bush even had the guts to approach the author of the anti-torture amendment asking for the CIA exemption, for McCain spent much of his Vietnam War service being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.

What kind of intelligence is needed to know Bush's lobbying is yet another gift to the propaganda arm of iraqi insurgency? It looks like we'll be getting to that 2,000th solider soon.

Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker, claims that the Abu Ghraib torture was an extension of a secret torture program designed for high-level Al Qaeda leaders

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in iraq.

It reminds me of the pacifist-dilemma questions. You know them: "you're a pacifist, heh?, well what if your grandmother was being brutally attacked in front of you, you'd use violence then right?" (or "what if you could go back to 1936 and kill Hitler," etc., etc.) The questioner isn't actually concerned about your grandmother (and they don't have a time machine standing by). The questions are meant to test the boundaries of one's pacifism with impossible or highly-unlikely scenarios. If you admit you might consider physical force in a specific situation, the question is expanded and the scenario made more abstract as the force is made more likely. The questioner is leading one down the slippery slope: pretty soon you've signed up for the Army and are killing someone else's grandmother in a foreign land.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played the pacifist dilemma game in Afghanistan and extended it to iraq. He asked what we should do if we captured a high-level Al Qaeda informant or leader. He probably built up some juicy Tom Clancy scenario: an imminent attack on New York, a close-mouthed Al Qaeda lieutenant, what wouldn't we do to save those thousands of people? It's a tough question, certainly. Rumsfeld answer:

he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror.

Like all pacifist dilemma games, this one too has a slippery slope. Inhumane interrogation techniques set up for "high value" Al Qaeda leaders are now used for taxi drivers in Baghdad. Most of the inmates at Abu Ghraib prison were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Few have been charged with anything. But they are being subjected to the worse kind of "interrogation" (read: torture) the U.S. military can cook up.

Related: David McReynolds talks about the "What about Hitler" question in part four of The Philosophy of Nonviolence.

An article in The Guardian reports that detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay are also being beaten and argues that "brutality against detainees has become an institutionalised feature of America's war on terror." One freed British prisoner said 'They tied me up like a beast and began kicking me.'

Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of Christ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down to feel-good cliches. Can the debate on this movie help us return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort?

There has been a lot of speculation of the "highly unusual" role of New York Times reporter Judith Miller in Iraq War II. She was particularly cozy with Iraqi dissident leader Ahmed Chalabi, which was the source of many of her often-wrong news reports. She filed a lot of reports about weapons of mass destruction that were later found to be wrong and according to this Washington Post article she even participated in a improper interrogation of a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. She threatened U.S. generals with hostile articles in the Times if the unit she was attached to was pulled out of a good reporting vantage point (the decision to redeploy was rescinded, presumably due to Miller's pressure).
    Since when do U.S. army units base their deployments on reporter's whims and threats? And why are improper interrogations being held for the benefit of a celebrity journalist from a powerful paper? It seems like the Times needs to do some more soul-searching and that it's recent scandals might not be over.