Undoubtedly, there are many aspects of the just-released summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program that can and should be pondered.
But, having written on the national U.S. defense and national security sector’s use of private contractors for over twenty years, I naturally focus my attention on the CIA’s reliance on private contractors for the devising and implementation of an “enhanced interrogation” — i.e., torture – program.
It is worth emphasizing that the use of contractors described in the committee summary — including the roles played by what the Washington Post Friday called the “two questionably credentialed advisers, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,” who were paid more than $80 million before the CIA cut its ties with them — focused only on the use of contractors in the interrogation program. It did not look at other contractor uses, such as their involvement in the rendition of suspected terrorists
The United States has used torture, both psychological and physical, going back decades, as historian Alfred McCoy richly detailed in his 2012 book Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogations. And it is not as if the military did not know how to do harsh interrogations as the Army’s 519th Military Intelligence Battalion demonstrated at Abu Ghraib. The government recognized long ago that some activities are so sensitive and consequential that they should be done only by the government, not the private sector.
In his 2008 book Spies For Hire, Tim Shorrock quotes Eugene Fidell, then president of the National Institute for Military Justice, who was troubled by the CIA’s and Pentagon’s use of private contractors to interrogate enemy prisoners. “That’s’ really playing with fire,” he said. “That kind of activity, which so closely entails the national interest and exposes the country to terrible opprobrium, is something that ought to be done only by people who are government employees.”
So, why would the government turn to the private sector for this, and what does that say about governmental control of and accountability, or lack thereof, for the use of private security and military contractors?
I don’t ask this rhetorically. There has been lots of debate over what constitute inherently governmental activities – things only the government should do. But almost nobody, outside of companies that are paid to do it, believes that the private sector should be involved in interrogation.
In 2010, for example, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy issued a proposed policy memo to agencies instructing them to use the definition of “inherently governmental” in the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR). The FAIR Act classifies an activity as “inherently governmental” when it is so intimately related to the public interest that it must be performed by federal employees.
When my book, Shadow Force, on the use of private security contractors in Iraq was published in 2009, I noted that “An Army policy directive published in 2000,” and still in effect today, classifies any job that involves “the gathering and analysis” of tactical intelligence as “an inherently governmental function barred from private sector performance.”
Yet, that is a restriction that seems more honored in the breach. A Georgetown University law review article last year noted:
Private companies are hired to train troops, collect and analyze intelligence, and carry out special operations. For instance, one company allegedly participated in an extraordinary rendition through a contract for air transport. Two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors helped design and oversee the interrogation of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Employees of CIA contractors CACI and Titan have allegedly been involved in the oversight and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility. One source estimates that “more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS)–the heart, brains and soul of the CIA–has been outsourced to private firms.
In fact, the outsourcing to the private sector that the government used to reserve for itself has been gathering momentum for decades. With regard to national security functions, it started, at least conceptually, in the Reagan era, gathered steam in the Clinton Administration, and rocketed up into the stratosphere in the years after 9/11. Currently, contractors are so entwined with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and numerous other agencies that they are similar to the creature in the Alien movies; trying to remove them would kill the patient.
The reasons for this are many, but some stand out. First, government, whether Republican- or Democratic-led, has bought into the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the “magic of the marketplace,” as Reagan put it, with the presumption that the private sector just does things better. Like the Bionic Man, it is supposedly cheaper, more agile and more efficient.
This is debatable when it comes to municipal services. It becomes even dodgier when applied to the national security sector. For some twenty years now, I have been asking advocates of the private military and security contracting industry to show me empirically based, methodologically sound studies that prove this point. I have not yet been shown any.
Peter Singer, a former scholar at the Brookings Institution, once wrote an article in Foreign Affairs journal in which he noted:
Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s current, supposedly business-minded leadership seems to have forgotten Economics 101. All too often, it outsources first and never bothers to ask questions later. That something is done privately does not necessarily make it better, quicker, or cheaper. Rather, it is through leveraging free-market mechanisms that one potentially gets better private results. Success is likely only if a contract is competed for on the open market, if the winning firm can specialize on the job and build in redundancies, if the client is able to provide oversight and management to guard its own interests, and if the contractor is properly motivated by the fear of being fired. Forget these simple rules, as the U.S. government often does, and the result is not the best of privatization but the worst of monopolization.
Common sense, if nothing else, should tell people that economic rationales for using contractors for interrogations are nonsense. Free markets require competitive environments and numerous customers, yet the government is often the only customer. And even private contractors have their limits on what they are willing to do. In September 2005, CACI announced that it would cease providing interrogation services when its contract expired at the end of that month.
Another, far more likely reason that the intelligence community would use contractors is that it is easier to keep things secret. A government agency carrying out torture could be subject to congressional oversight, weak and ineffective as it often is. But a private company generally doesn’t have to worry about that.
Despite a decade’s worth of strong reporting on the subject, the deep involvement of private contractors in our national-security apparatus is only dimly acknowledged — and even less appreciated — by the general public. One has only to ask how many casualties the U.S. has suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The body count almost never includes contractors — nearly 1500 in Afghanistan as of the end of 2013, according to the Department of Labor. In Iraq, the toll was higher. If people don’t care about contractors when they are actually dying on behalf of the government, the probability that anyone cares when they violate law on behalf of the government is practically zero.
Torture has been illegal in the United States since the Senate ratified the UN’s Convention Against Torture in 1994. So, the temptation for the CIA to employ contractors to further hide U.S. government use of torture must have been almost irresistible.
Furthermore, the use of private contractors may well have served as a way to satisfy U.S. government officials’ bloodlust — torture for torture’s sake — even though, according to the Senate committee’s report, it did not help to gain enough useful intelligence to justify its use. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this week:
And why the private contractors? Maybe because the actual government interrogators didn’t believe torture worked either. Some complained that, after Mitchell and Jessen arrived, reasonably cooperative prisoners were suddenly brutalized under the theory that the original approach had been too “sissified.”
Nor is the use of contractors in intelligence for troubling purposes limited to torture. In fact, as I write this, the Associated Press is running a story that about how the U.S. Agency for International Development used contractors for more than two years to secretly infiltrate Cuba’s underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the Castro government.
The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to break the information blockade” and build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.
On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.
The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s communist government.
The worst truth, however, is this: as the National Security Agency surveillance scandal confirms, private companies are so comfortably and deeply embedded with the national security state — and happily making billions in the process — that separation, let alone divorce, seems almost entirely out of the question.
Every day, private contractors are breaking scores, if not hundreds, of domestic and foreign laws. And why wouldn’t they, considering that the government is willing to grant them immunity or indemnify them against any charges that might be brought against them?
Of course, not all contractors are bad or doing bad things. Most, in fact, are doing their best to implement whatever contact they are working on. But as long as a government is allowed by its own public to do things in the name of ensuring public safety, we can expect similar atrocities in the future. To paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:
The fault, dear American public, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
David Isenberg is an independent researcher and writer on U.S. military, foreign policy, and national and international security issues. He a Senior Analyst with the online geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and is a U.S. Navy veteran., He is author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. His blog, The PMSC Observer, focuses on private military and security contracting, a subject he has testified on to Congress.
Image Credit: Mike Licht
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The nation’s current attempt at catharsis through a gargantuan report prepared by the Democratic staff of a Senate committee exhibits some familiar patterns. Most of them involve treating a government agency as if it were Dorian Gray’s portrait, which can take on all the hideous marks of our own transgressions while we present ourselves as pure and innocent. The saturation coverage of the report and most early comment about it have displayed several misconceptions and misdirections.
One misconception is that we, the public, and our representatives in Congress are learning something new from this report that better enables us to make policies and set national priorities—better than we already could have done, based on what we already knew about this whole unpleasant business. In fact, the main directions of the activity in question and even many of the relevant gory details have long been public knowledge. Many people seem to believe that wallowing in still more gory details is a form of expiation. The basis for that belief is hard to understand.
The report itself and almost all the coverage of it misses what is the main, big story—missed perhaps because we ourselves are characters in it. The story is that the American people, and thus our political leaders, have had a major change in fears, mood, and priorities from the early days after the 9/11 until the present. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans were far more militant, more willing to take on costs and risks, and more willing to compromise long-held values in the name of counterterrorism. The interrogation techniques that are now the subject of controversy and abhorrence were condoned or even encouraged back then by our political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. As time has gone by without another terrorist spectacular in the U.S. homeland, pendulums have swung back, moods have changed again, and old values have reasserted themselves. It is difficult for anyone, but perhaps most of all for elected politicians, to admit this kind of inconsistency. Thus we get the current effort to focus ignominy on a single agency, where people who were on the tail end of that entire political process happened to work, as a substitute for such admission.
This is by no means the first time that waves of fear in America have resulted in deviation from liberal values, with the deviation later becoming a source of shame and regret. There is a long history of this, going back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century. Another example, now universally seen as a black mark on American history, was the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
Another misconception is that because a report comes from a Congressional committee or some ad hoc commission, it is the Voice of God and the ultimate source of truth on whatever subject it addresses rather than what it really is, which is one particular set of perspectives or opinions. Another official pronouncement is the CIA’s report on the report, which for anyone who bothers to look at it comes across as a sober and balanced treatment of the subject that carefully differentiates between the valid observations in the Senate committee staff’s report and the significant errors in it. The CIA’s report was prepared under senior officers who had no stake in the interrogation program. It is by no means the reaction of someone in a defensive crouch. Unfortunately few people will look at that report and make any effort to learn from it. The Washington Post barely mentioned its existence, let alone any of the substance in it, in its saturation coverage of the Senate committee report.
Anyone who did bother to look and learn from the CIA report would realize how mistaken is another notion being widely voiced: that the abusive interrogation techniques were the result of an agency or elements within it “running amok.” The program in question was authorized by the topmost authorities in the executive branch, as those authorities have confirmed in their public statements or memoirs. Congressional overseers were informed, according to the instructions of those topmost authorities and according to standard practice with sensitive covert actions. Overseers had ample opportunities to object but did not.
A final misconception being displayed from people on various sides of this issue is that the question of whether any useful information was gained from application of the controversial techniques has to be treated in an all-or-nothing manner. People, including authors of the Senate committee report, wishing to make an anti-torture statement seem to believe that they have to argue that the techniques never gained any useful information. They don’t have to argue that. In acting as if they do, they are exhibiting another American trait, which the political scientist Robert Jervis noted almost four decades ago, which is to resist recognizing that there are trade-offs among important values. The coercive interrogation techniques involve such a trade-off. One can accept that the techniques did yield some information that contributed to U.S. security and still oppose any use of such techniques because they are contrary to other important American values, as well as hurting the standing of the United States abroad and yielding bad information along with the good. This is the position expressed by former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Amid all that is misleading in the committee report itself and in reactions to it, some kudos are in order for other reactions. One compliment should go to the Obama White House, which provided in its statement on the subject a principled declaration that torture is wrong along with some recognition of the public emotions and moods that underlay what was done several years ago. A particularly graceful touch was a reference to how “the previous administration faced agonizing choices” in how to secure the United States amid the post-9/11 fears. This fair and correct way of framing the recent history was the opposite of what could have been a partisan “those guys did torture and we didn’t” approach.
Also worthy of compliments in the same vein is Senator John McCain, who made an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate opposing any use of torture. McCain often is as hard-minded a partisan warrior as anyone, but on this matter he spoke on the basis of principle.
Finally, kudos should go to the CIA for not going into a defensive crouch but instead recognizing deficiencies in performance where they did exist and, unlike the Senate committee report, coming up with specific recommendations for improvement. This response, too, represented important American values. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his own statement, “I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made and learn from those mistakes.”
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>Finally, someone in the US government has followed through on President Barack Obama’s judgment that CIA-conducted and “-outsourced” torture—let’s call it by its common name—is “not who we are” as a nation. Finally, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has given us a (still heavily-redacted) account of what the CIA did between 2002 and 2006.
There is good as well as bad news in all of this mess. After all, the Senate Committee (or at least its Democratic members) was prepared to see the United States “come clean” about some practices that—certainly in hindsight and, for people of any true moral sense, as should have been obvious at the time—are unacceptable to a civilized society.
How many other countries would have done the same? Quite a few it turns out, at least 28 at last count, in what are typically known as “truth and reconciliation commissions.” Notable have been those in South Africa, Argentina, and Chile. However, by contrast with crimes in those countries, mostly against their own people, what was done by US government officials and their paid servants—some US “contractors” and some foreign governments—directly affected only a few people; most of them were avowed enemies of the United States; and at least some of whom were involved in the worst foreign attack on the continental US since 1814.
The published part of the report actually contains few surprises, other than to reveal that some of the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), an antiseptic euphemism like the Vietnam War’s “termination with extreme prejudice,” was much more brutal than hitherto reported. More details than previously known were provided by how officials of the Central Intelligence Agency lied to Congress—a felony—and also, supposedly, to senior officials in the George W. Bush White House (which had its own share of the cover-up). Further, the report confirmed what many terrorism experts and insiders-now-outsiders had said before: that such techniques rarely if ever produce “actionable” intelligence and certainly not in this case.
Thus, the argument is now being made widely around the world that the United States—self-styled since 1630 as a City Upon a Hill, the producer of regular human rights reports about every other country on the planet, and a list-keeper of other peoples’ misdeeds—has confessed to its own inhumane acts.
Yes, that is still part of the (relatively) good news. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) and her Senate committee did not have to release the report. While the journalism community would continue to sniff at the edges of scandal, and awareness of thus-and-so would long be whispered around Washington, the full picture could have probably been buried, not quietly, but still buried.
The unalloyed bad news comes in different forms. As the inevitably-to-be-leaked list grows of foreign countries that either allowed the CIA to build private, purpose-built prisons or even took part in the “extraordinary rendition” of US terrorism suspects (to be tortured away from prying American eyes), there will be domestic embarrassment for some political leaderships that have not already been called to account (e.g., as has happened in Poland). As President Obama summed it up this week: “These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”
The “bad guys,” especially the thugs of the world who have been subjected to American criticism or who themselves engage in immoral actions—like al-Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS or IS), and a host of brutal governments, many but not all in the Middle East—will now claim a US precedent for what they do, and terrorist groups will use the Senate Committee revelations as a recruiting tool.
By any standard, the US is not in their league as a miscreant. There is the issue of provocation to balance against the immorality of the CIA’s torture program. But at the same time, there is also the issue of efficacy—was the immorality worth the price? As President Obama said of the report this week: “It reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” They were not only wrong; they didn’t work.
More bad news will be felt immediately by America’s diplomats abroad. They will just have to hunker down, stick to the talking points that Washington gives them and, we hope, contrast our openness (though it took far too long) with rampant terrorism and state oppression by people who would not dream of repentance or accountability. We can also expect Schadenfreude on the part of some of our closest allies, including in Europe. “Too bad about what happened in the United States, tut, tut,” they will say. Some friendly governments will face popular resistance to cooperating with the US in other actions abroad, as this report comes hard on the heels of revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying on foreign leaders. However, these views will be tempered among those who recognize that damage to America’s standing could also negatively impact them, since they still need us as a security guarantor, a point that was underscored earlier this year by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
We are already seeing the worst of the bad news, and it is at home. Senator John McCain (R-Az.), who himself was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, has welcomed the issuance of the report; but for most other Republican members of Congress, it is the Democrats and Barack Obama who are somehow to blame for this whole business. They contest the evidence and claim that water-boarding and other EITs did indeed help forestall further terrorism on our shores. They see a witch hunt by the current administration, although President Obama said in April 2009 that “For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.” (Whether such a pledge should have been made is another matter.) The Attorney General, Eric Holder, followed through on that pledge in August 2012 by dropping two prominent cases. Even worse are former officials of the CIA who have joined the chorus in arguing that what was done protected the nation. Their efforts at self-justification add to the case that the CIA needs a thorough house-cleaning. The agency’s leaders during the period in question should be denied any further government service. Those who lied to Congress should be prosecuted; the lawyers who justified the breaking of laws should be disbarred. (If that could be done to a sitting president for lying about sex, surely it should be done in this case.) And no one should be allowed to get away with saying, however they phrase it, “We were just following orders.” That line of argument fell to pieces at Nuremberg almost seven decades ago. Prosecution? Maybe not—though it would be true to the rule of law and would send a useful message. No further government service? Definitely. Actions, whatever the sincerity of motives, must have consequences.
Maybe some larger good can begin to come out of all this. I do not mean just, as President Obama has said: “I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” That is a worthy goal—though all-too-likely of short duration, as can be testified to by those of us who remember the hearings in the 1970s by the Senate’s Church Committee, whose report and resulting national debate should have stopped in its tracks what the CIA did after 9/11.
The larger good can be a recognition that accountability needs to be returned to government, in general – a quality that has never been in great supply. The last senior political figure to quit over an issue of principle and policy was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1979, following the abortive hostage rescue mission in Iran. While Britain tried to sort out responsibility after its prime minister, Tony Blair, misled his country into joining the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, we have never done so and never will. We have never held accountable the small group of senior officials who consciously misled not just the president of the United States but also the American people, thereby leading the country into one of the most costly mistakes ever in US engagement abroad.
There can be no doubt that we are a great nation; we are basically a moral society, and the overwhelming majority of people in government, including most but unfortunately not all elected politicians, Republicans and Democrats, are so as well and work to do what they think is the best for our country.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has started us thinking once again about the demands of creating “a more perfect union” and has reminded us that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Let us hope that we also make a serious start on raising both the standard and the practice of accountability, across the board, to validate President Obama’s statement: “Today is also a reminder that upholding the values we profess doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us stronger and that the United States of America will remain the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known.”
]]>Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the CIA of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.
While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the Obama administration, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that U.S. officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report.
“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”
He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”
He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorised and used torture and other ill-treatment.
“This is a wake-up call to the USA; they must disclose the full truth about the human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure justice for the victims,” said Amnesty’s Latin America director, Erika Guevara.
The Senate Committee’s report, actually a 524-page, partially-redacted summary of a still-classified 6,300-page report on the treatment of at least 119 terrorist suspects detained in secret locations overseas, accused the CIA not only of engaging in torture that was “brutal and far worse” than has previously been reported, but also of regularly misleading the White House and Congress both about what it was doing and the purported value of the intelligence it derived from those practices.
Water-boarding, for example, was used against detainees more often and in more of the CIA’s “black sites” than previously known; sleep deprivation was used for up to a week at a time against some suspects; others received “rectal feeding” or “hydration’; and still others were forced to stand on broken feet or legs.
In at least one case, a detainee was frozen to death; in the case of Abu Zubayda, an alleged “high-value” Al Qaeda detainee who was subject to dozens of water-boardings, the treatment was so brutal, several CIA officers asked to be transferred if it did not stop.
While the CIA officers and former Bush administration officials, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long insisted that key information – including intelligence that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — was obtained from EITs, the report concluded that these techniques were ineffective.
Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive EITs provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report, which relied on the CIA’s own cables and reports.
In some cases, detainees subjected to EITs gave misinformation about “terrorist threats” which did not actually exist, the report found. Of the 119 known detainees subject to EITs, at least 26 should never have been held, it said.
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who fought hard for months to release the report over the CIA’s fierce objections, wrote in its Forward that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, “she could understand the CIA’s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”
“Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security,” according to Feinstein.
For his part, CIA director John Brennan, a career CIA officer appointed by Obama whose role in the Bush administration’s detention programme remains cloudy, “acknowledge(d) that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”
“The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.”
But he also defended the EITs, insisting that “interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” A fact sheet released by the CIA claimed, as an example, that one detainee, after undergoing EITs, identified bin Laden’s courier, which subsequently led the CIA to the Al Qaeda chief’s location.
With several notable exceptions, Republicans also defended the CIA and the Bush administration’s orders to permit EITs. Indeed, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican members released a minority report that noted that the majority of staff had not interviewed any CIA officers directly involved in the programme.
“There is no reason whatsoever for this report to ever be published,” said the Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss. “This is purely a partisan tactic” which he said was designed to attack the Bush administration. Republicans also warned that the report’s release would endanger U.S. service personnel and citizens abroad by fuelling anti-American sentiment, especially in the Muslim world.
But Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam war, defended the report, calling it “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose …but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”
McCain has championed efforts to pass legislation outlawing torture, particularly because Obama’s 2009 executive orders prohibiting such practices could be reversed by a future president.
Passage of such a law – whose prospects appear virtually nil in light of Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years – is one of the demands, along with release of the full report, of most human-rights groups here.
“The Obama administration and Congress should work together to build a durable consensus against torture by pursuing legislation that demonstrates bipartisan unity and fidelity to our ideals,” said Elisa Massimino, director of Human Rights First.
Many groups, however, want Obama to go further by prosecuting those responsible for the EIT programme, a step that his administration made clear from the outset it was loathe to do.
“We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture programme,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented a number of detainees at Guantanamo, including Abu Zubaydah, in U.S. courts. “They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and, if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under principles of universal jurisdiction.”
“The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction,” according to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”
Noting that health professionals, including doctors and psychologists also played a role in the EITs, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also called for legal accountability. “For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director.
“The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability,” she said.
This article was first published by IPS and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>Jamshed Malakzai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.
In April 1987, Afghanistan ratified the UN Convention against Torture. [...]]]>
Jamshed Malakzai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.
In April 1987, Afghanistan ratified the UN Convention against Torture. But it did not stop the government nor its opponents from using torture to punish and extract information from political rivals. The crimes were never probed; the victims were never compensated.
Nayeem Jan, 46, a resident of Shewa district in Nangarhar province, was nearly beaten to death in a prison run by a mujaheddin commander. Death would have been an escape from the torture, he says.
He was the star pupil of his school, Sayed Jamaludin High School, and a good trader before the war came to Shewa.
“I graduated in 1977 (two years before the Soviet troops entered Afghanistan). I had many dreams like my peers. I wanted to join the government, and be a good officer, but luck did not favour me and I got into business like my father,” he says.
He continued to do business through most of the Soviet years. In 1988, Shewa district was captured by mujaheddin, and his life changed forever.
“I was sleeping deeply – it was 5 o’clock early morning that the war started in the district,” he recalls. “We thought of fleeing but nobody could move. The mujaheddin had already entered the district governor’s building,” he adds.
He had no idea which faction of the mujaheddin had captured the district, he says. At nine o’clock the next morning he saw the flag of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar hanging in one of the towers of the district building. “We were very fearful,” he recalls. “The mujaheddin were searching the houses and asking for guns. They kicked down the door to our house, and a group of armed people entered.”
Ruined by war
The next hour was going to be the most tragic in his life. “My 13-year-old sister was injured seriously. They took my elder brother, two uncles and me. They put my two uncles in a room full of hay and set it on fire, killing both. They said my uncles were communists. Both of them were teachers,” he says, sadly.
The mujaheddin commander kept Jan in a private jail in the Mohammad Gat area of Kunar province. During his two-months imprisonment guards tortured him to force a confession.
“They were asking me to confess (to being a communist), but as I had not done anything wrong I had to deny. They kept beating me till I fainted. I had heard terrible stories of torture of communists, but the torture by this commander was unimaginable. You can still see the marks on my body,” he says.
Jan’s family had a good name in Shewa district. “We had good flocks (of sheep and goats) and business, we had a bus. But the armed men took everything.”
The family left Shewa district for Jalalabad city and later Peshawar, where Jan bought a horse and drove a buggy. “My brother started work in an iron factory and my father was working as a daily labourer wherever he could find work,” he says.
One more move and eight years of poverty later, Nayeem’s parentls had both died, now making him head of a family that included his much younger sisters, and his own five children.
When the family returned to Afghanistan in 1999, “The country was hell,” he recalls. “There was nothing but war. So we went back to Pakistan, and we became vegetable and fruit hawkers. We would push a cart the whole day,” he says.
No reprieve
In 2003, he heard about the new government in Kabul on the radio. He heard stories of how people were being rehabilitated. Almost overnight the family packed their bags and pnce again returned to Afghanistan. Jan hoped he would get a “good job”. But it was not to be so.
Now his sons and he eke out a living as daily wage workers. “I wish there had been no revolution,” he says.
The Najibullah government at least was giving food rations to all its officers, Jan remembers. Today, “No one is giving us anything…”
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Suhaila Weda Khamoosh and Ali Arash write for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war crimes through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In [...]]]>
Suhaila Weda Khamoosh and Ali Arash write for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war crimes through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this experiences, Nooria Wesal of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’s Wesal recounts experience that turned her into an activist.
Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid
It was 1983 and Nooria Wesal was designing a letter at home in Jamal Mena, Kabul, when her house was besieged.
“Intelligence agents arrested me and confiscated all the anti-Communist material,” she recalls. “They took me to the interrogation centre in Shah Darak.”
Nooria was still a schoolgirl at the Rabiya Balki High School when she was arrested. A member of the Hezb-e Wahdat-affiliated youth party, Nasr, she was in charge of printing bulletins and distributing material to students at universities and union members.
For the next three months in Shah Darak prison she saw neither sunrise nor sunset. Like her fellow prisoners, she was beaten, starved and tortured. “I faced sleep-deprivation, electric shocks, beating and kicking,” she recalls.
Sentenced to two years in prison for anti-Communist party activities she was transferred to the dreaded Pol-e-Charkhi prison. She describes the prison as the “most frightening in the world”.
She was imprisoned in a cell, where she could neither stand nor lie down, she said. “The goal of the jailers was to face political prisoners with gradual death,” she said.
For the first six months she was not allowed to even comb her hair, cut her nails or receive visitors. Later, she was moved to a room with nomadic Kuchi prisoners who were accused of transporting weapons for the mujaheddin. “I had not talked to anyone for six months. My jaws hurt trying to talk. I thought I had lost the ability to speak,” she says.
There were old women, pregnant women and even newly married women prisoners in the jail. “All of them were not against the government or linked with the mujaheddin — there were many innocent women,” says Nooria. “There was a teacher from the Ayesha Durani High School. Her crime was that she told her students that we were gradually losing our country.”
In 1985, Nooria was released in a prisoner swap by Ahmad Shah Massoud, a central figure in the resistance against Soviet occupation.
Anything but ordinary
On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened itsnotorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of [...]]]>
On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened itsnotorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date — a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.
The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices – euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — that went with them. It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.
As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty – for anyone who doesn’t know by now — is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding. Of course, you know how it all ends.
However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.
Here, then, are the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.
First, Rouse Fear. From its opening scene, Zero Dark Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the need for torture. The movie begins in darkness with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams for help of people trapped inside the towers of the World Trade Center: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?… It’s so hot. I’m burning up…” a female voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black screen yields to a full view of Ammar being roughed up by men in black ski masks and then strung up, arms wide apart.
The sounds of torture replace the desperate pleas of the victims. “Is he ever getting out?” Maya asks. “Never,” her close CIA associate Dan (Jason Clarke) answers. These are meant to be words of reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11. Bigelow’s first step, then, is to echo former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s mantra from that now-distant moment in which he claimed the nation needed to go to “the dark side.” That was part of his impassioned demand that, given the immense threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was the only way to seek retribution and security.
Bigelow also follows Cheney’s lead into a world of fear. The Bush administration understood that, for their global dreams, including a future invasion of Iraq, to become reality, fear was their best ally. From Terre Haute to El Paso, Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, Americans were to be regularly reminded that they were deeply and eternally endangered by terrorists.
Bigelow similarly keeps the fear monitor bleeping whenever she can. Interspersed with the narrative of the bin Laden chase, she provides often blood-filled footage from terrorist attacks around the globe in the decade after 9/11: the 2004 bombings of oil installations in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 22; the 2005 suicide bombings in London that killed 56; the 2008 Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad that killed 54 people; and the thwarted Times Square bombing of May, 2010. We are in constant jeopardy, she wants us to remember, and uses Maya to remind us of this throughout.
Second, Undermine the Law. Torture is illegal under both American and international law. It was only pronounced “legal” in a series of secret memorandums produced by the Bush Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of the administration. (Top officials, including Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, evidently even had torture techniques demonstrated for them in the White House before green-lighting them.) Maintaining that there was no way Americans could be kept safe via purely legal methods, they asked for and were given secret legal authority to make torture the go-to option in their Global War on Terror. Yet Bigelow never even nods toward this striking rethinking of the law. She assumes the legality of the acts she portrays up close and personal, only hedging her bets toward the movie’s end when she indicates in passing that the legal system was a potential impediment to getting bin Laden. “Who the hell am I supposed to ask [for confirmation about the courier], some guy at Gitmo who’s all lawyered up?” asks Obama’s national security advisor in the filmic run-up to the raid.
Just as new policies were put in place to legalize torture, so the detention of terror suspects without charges or trials (including people who, we now know, were treated horrifically despite being innocent of anything) became a foundational act of the administration. Specifically, government lawyers were employed to create particularly tortured (if you’ll excuse the word) legal documents exempting detainees from the Geneva Conventions, thus enabling their interrogation under conditions that blatantly violated domestic and international laws.
Zero Dark Thirty accepts without hesitation or question the importance of this unconstitutional detention policy as crucial to the torture program. From the very first days of the war on terror, the U.S. government rounded up individuals globally and began to question them brutally. Whether they actually had information to reveal, whether the government had any concrete evidence against them, they held hundreds — in the end, thousands – of detainees in U.S. custody at secret CIA black sites worldwide, in the prisons of allied states known for their own torture policies, at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo, which was the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s offshore detention system.
Dan and Maya themselves not only travel to secret black sites to obtain valuable information from detainees, but to the cages and interrogation booths at Bagram where men in those now-familiar orange jumpsuits are shown awaiting a nightmare experience. Bigelow’s film repeatedly suggests that it was crucially important for national security to keep a pool of potential information sources — those detainees — available just in case they might one day turn out to have information.
Third, Indulge in the Horror: Torture is displayed onscreen in what can only be called pornographic detail for nearly the film’s first hour. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty eerily mimics the obsessive, essentially fetishistic approach of Bush’s top officials to the subject. Cheney, former Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff David Addington, and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, among others, plunged into the minutiae of “enhanced interrogation” tactics, micro-managing just what levels of abuse should and should not apply, would and would not constitute torture after 9/11.
In black site after black site, on victim after victim, the movie shows acts of torture in exquisite detail, Bigelow’s camera seeming to relish its gruesomeness: waterboarding, stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation resulting in memory loss and severe disorientation, sexual humiliation, containment in a small box, and more. Whenever she gets the chance, Bigelow seems to take the opportunity to suggest that this mangling of human flesh and immersion in brutality on the part of Americans is at least understandable and probably worthwhile. The film’s almost subliminal message on the subject of torture should remind us of the way in which a form of sadism-as-patriotic-duty filtered down to the troops on the ground, as evidenced by the now infamous 2004 photos from Abu Ghraib of smiling American soldiers offering thumbs-up responses to their ability to humiliate and hurt captives in dog collars.
Fourth, Dehumanize the Victims. Like the national security establishment that promoted torture policies, Bigelow dehumanizes her victims. Despite repeated beatings, humiliations, and aggressive torture techniques of various sorts, Ammar never becomes even a faintly sympathetic character to anyone in the film. As a result, there is never anyone for the audience to identify with who becomes emotionally distraught over the abuses. Dehumanization was a necessary tool in promoting torture; now, it is a necessary tool in promotingZero Dark Thirty, which desensitizes its audience in ways that should be frightening to us and make us wonder who exactly we have become in the years since 9/11.
Fifth, Never Doubt That Torture Works. Given all this, it’s a small step to touting the effectiveness of torture in eliciting the truth. “In the end, everybody breaks, bro’: it’s biology,” Dan says to his victim. He also repeats over and over, “If you lie to me, I hurt you” — meaning, “If I hurt you, you won’t lie to me.” Maya concurs, telling Ammar, bruised, bloodied, and begging for her help, that he can stop his pain by telling the truth.
How many times does the American public need to be told that torture did notyield the results the government promised? How many times does it need to besaid that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times obviously didn’t work? How many times does it need to be pointed out that torture can — and did — produce misleading or false information, notably in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who confessed under torture that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Sixth, Hold No One Accountable. The Obama administration made thedetermination that holding Bush administration figures, CIA officials, or the actual torturers responsible for what they did in a court of law was far more trouble than it might ever be worth. Instead, the president chose to move onand officially never look back. Bigelow takes advantage of this passivity to suggest to her audience that the only downside of torture is the fear of accountability. As he prepares to leave Pakistan, Dan tells Maya, “You gotta be real careful with the detainees now. Politics are changing and you don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes…”
The sad truth is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented U.S. torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it. With scant public debate and no public record of accountability, Bigelow feels free to leave out even a scintilla of criticism of that torture program. Her film is thus one more example of the fact that without accountability, the pernicious narrative continues, possibly gaining traction as it does.
Seventh, Employ the Media. While the Bush administration had the Fox television series 24 as a weekly reminder that torture keeps us safe, the current administration, bent on its no-accountability policy, has Bigelow’s film on its side. It’s the perfect piece of propaganda, with all the appeal that naked brutality, fear, and revenge can bring.
Hollywood and most of its critics have embraced the film. It has already been named among the best films of the year, and is considered a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy. If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?
Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days and the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.
Copyright 2013 Karen J. Greenberg
]]>Justice is a fiction in much of the Persian Gulf. Nowhere is this truer than in Bahrain, a place where torture and state terror have become the norm. The country’s political elites talk frequently about freedom and the need for legal and political order. The reality, however, is that Bahrain’s judicial [...]]]>
Justice is a fiction in much of the Persian Gulf. Nowhere is this truer than in Bahrain, a place where torture and state terror have become the norm. The country’s political elites talk frequently about freedom and the need for legal and political order. The reality, however, is that Bahrain’s judicial system is little more than theater. The courts are sites in which freedoms are not assured, but where they are subordinated to the whims of centralized tyranny. Over the last two years, Bahrain has blithely ignored almost all of its domestic and international commitments to refrain from torture, to protect free speech and to honor due process, all conventions that the country has ostensibly built into its “constitutional” order.
In the most recent instance, the country’s highest court upheld lengthy prison sentences for 13 prominent human rights and political activists, including life imprisonment in some of the world’s most brutal dungeons. Having already been subjected to late night abductions, military tribunals, torture, and false accusation, it is hardly surprising that the imprisoned were unable to find relief in Bahrain’s sham appeals process.
More remarkable is the unwillingness of Bahrain’s most important Western patron, the United States, to openly acknowledge that its partner and host to the 5th Fleet is not merely managing its way through a crisis, but building a regime of fear and violence all while claiming the opposite. In her comments yesterday at the State Department’s daily briefing, spokesperson Victoria Nuland offered what has become a familiar refrain — a mild rebuke dressed up in principle, but one that makes clear that the US is unwilling to say or do more.
The US position on Bahrain’s excesses, in ways that are eerily similar to the island country’s own theatrical posturing, is more histrionic than substantive. Clearly, in spite of their claims otherwise, American leaders are mostly content with the status quo. Nuland expressed “regret” and “concern” about Bahrain’s high court’s decision to uphold the convictions of key opposition figures yesterday. She added “that this decision further restricts freedom of expression and compromises the atmosphere within Bahrain for reconciliation.”
The reality is that there is nothing further to restrict. The only clear willingness for reconciliation has come from the country’s opposition, not the government. In also calling for further investigations into torture and accountability, Ms. Nuland asks her listeners to suspend disbelief and to consider seriously that Bahrain has any real interest in the pursuit of a meaningful resolution. It has been clear for two years that Bahrain’s leaders desire victory and vengeance, the total destruction of the democratic opposition.
While American leaders almost certainly would prefer a political resolution to Bahrain’s challenges, they have done little to help advance the cause. Bahrain’s leaders have learned that mild admonishment is a small price to pay while they consolidate a new era of authoritarianism. They understand that the American approach is feeble and feckless, if often justified, because of Bahrain’s strategic significance. Long a reliable partner in the US mission to police and patrol the Persian Gulf and to ensure the “flow of oil,” American unwillingness to come down too hard on Manama is also a sign of deference to Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has little interest in seeing Bahrain’s opposition enjoy political gain.
It is, however, well past time to think seriously about whether US strategy in the Gulf is working or, instead, whether it helps abet the very conditions of instability that threaten the region and prospects for more open and durable regional politics. The reality is that oil’s flow does not need protecting. Bahrain does not deserve a pass because it is home to American military facilities.
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In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s [...]]]>
In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s record on civil liberties and national security. Much of the commentary, however, is clearly “concern trolling” — it comes from people who are seeking primarily to vindicate the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror by suggesting that Obama has adopted it wholesale. (Jim Lakely’s piece from today is one example.) Regardless, the general outlines of the argument are clear: by (for the most part) falling in line behind Obama’s reelection, despite policies like his expansion of the drone war and his failure to close Guantanamo, those who criticized Bush’s foreign policy have demonstrated the basic hypocrisy of their position.
The argument has both important elements of truth and notable overstatements. As I’ve written before, it has been genuinely dismaying to see the lack of concern about the drone war among most liberal commentators, and the failure to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on drone strikes (and the administration’s policy of assassinations more generally) has been striking and frequently shameful. On the other hand, while Obama’s record on civil liberties is certainly nothing to be proud of, the notion that he has been “no different from Bush” is exaggerated. On some issues, like banning waterboarding, he has reversed Bush administration policies. On others, like the failure to close Guantanamo, his maintenance of the status quo has stemmed more from demagogic opposition from congressional Republicans than from a desire to continue current policies. (Many of the people who now cite Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo as vindication of Bush’s policies are the same ones who screamed bloody murder about terrorists running loose on American soil when Obama initially attempted to close the prison.)
But in assessing the support for Obama’s reelection among what has been clumsily labeled the “antiwar left,” the real question we should consider is what alternatives were on offer. (I find the term “antiwar left” unhelpful because it runs together several distinct groups united only by their distaste for Bush’s foreign policy — genuine leftists who never really supported Obama, liberals who did, paleoconservatives who increasingly came to.) One could always vote for Jill Stein or another third-party protest candidate, or not vote at all. But if one accepted that either Obama or Romney was going to win, and decided to choose the candidate most aligned with antiwar principles, who would it be?
The charge of hypocrisy would stick better if Romney had run on a platform criticizing Obama’s conduct of the drone war, or his record on civil liberties. Notably, however, Romney chose not to do so. The level of agreement between the two candidates during the final debate in Boca Raton was one sign of Romney’s decision not to attack Obama from the left on foreign policy. On Afghanistan, his campaign vacillated between vague criticisms without ever offering a coherent critique of Obama. On the issues of torture and civil liberties, Romney made clear that he would be far more authoritarian than even Obama — for instance, his famous pledge to “double Guantanamo” during the 2008 campaign, or his advisors’ call to rescind Obama’s executive order banning torture.
The main issue where Romney differentiated himself from Obama on foreign policy was the Middle East, where Romney pledged to basically outsource US foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu and take a far more hawkish line against Iran. To what extent he would have followed through on this will remain a mystery. One plausible line of argument suggested that his Iran rhetoric was mostly bluster, and that in office he would follow the more realist line of a Robert Zoellick rather than the bellicosity of a John Bolton. Still, it’s easy to understand why few anti-interventionists would want to invest all their hopes in the possibility that Romney might be lying about his hawkish intentions.
So what was the “antiwar left” to do? Romney basically endorsed every Obama policy that they found troubling, distinguishing himself only by being more openly contemptuous of civil liberties for alleged terrorists and more publicly eager to start a war with Iran. In these circumstances, the left’s support of Obama could be read as hypocrisy — or it could be read as a perfectly defensible willingness to hold one’s nose and vote for the lesser evil.
]]>The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released their “Torture Database”website, making over 100,000 pages of government documents on the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation policies, primarily obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU, searchable by the general public.
Alexander Abdo, a Staff Attorney with the [...]]]>
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released their “Torture Database”website, making over 100,000 pages of government documents on the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation policies, primarily obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU, searchable by the general public.
Alexander Abdo, a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, announced the new database in a Guardian column today. Abdo wrote:
…[T]the government has yet to create a single, official report documenting the post 9/11 abuses. There is hope that the Senate Intelligence Committee will fill the void when it completes its long-expected report on the CIA’s program later this year. In the meantime, the ACLU today is launching the Torture Database to help fill the transparency gap. Our database allows researchers and the public to conduct sophisticated searches of thousands of documents relating to the Bush administration’s policies on rendition, detention, and interrogation.
Abdo and the ACLU hope the database will put pressure on the Obama administration to release more information about torture and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) authorized during the Bush administration. “[The Obama administration] continues to withhold hundreds of CIA cables describing the use of waterboarding and other harsh techniques, hundreds of photographs of detainee abuse throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, and the presidential memorandum that authorized the CIA to establish its secret prisons overseas,” writes Abdo.
The database includes: Justice Department legal memos authorizing torture; autopsy reports completed by Army medical examiners after detainees died in U.S. custody; reports documenting and evaluating the interrogation practices of the military and CIA; and a series of email and correspondences “linking the CIA’s and military’s interrogation policies to officials at the highest levels of our government.”
While much of the database is dedicated to documents outlining torture and EITs, the ACLU emphasizes that the site also offers “inspiring and heroic stories” in the form of written dissents from soldiers, lawyers, officials and others as they resisted the interrogation policies approved by senior political leaders.