In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom
New York Times’ columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps"--a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.
When I looked at these photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. After more than a decade of studying the Philippine military’s torture techniques for a monograph published by Yale back 1999, I could see the tell-tale signs of the CIA’s psychological methods. For example, that iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows, not the sadism of a few “creeps,” but instead the two key trademark’s of the CIA’s psychological torture. The hood was for sensory disorientation. The arms were extended for self-inflicted pain. It was that simple; it was that obvious.
After making that argument in an op-ed for the
Boston Globe two weeks after CBS published the photos, I began exploring the historical continuity, the connections, between the CIA torture research back in the 1950s and Abu Ghraib in 2004. By using the past to interrogate the present, I published a book titled
A Question of Torture last January that tracks the trail of an extraordinary historical and institutional continuity through countless pages of declassified documents. The findings are disturbing and bear directly upon the ongoing bitter debate over torture that culminated in the enactment of the Military Commissions law just last October.
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From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere.
But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture.
With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.
For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs. One of Hebb’s subjects, University of California-Berkeley English professor Peter Dale Scott, has described the impact of this experience in his 1992 epic poem, “Listening to the Candle”:
nothing in those weeks added up yet the very aimlessness
preconditioning my mind…
of sensory deprivation
as a paid volunteer
in the McGill experiment
for the US Air Force
(two CIA reps at the meeting)
my ears sore from their earphones’
amniotic hum my eyes
under two bulging halves of ping pong balls
arms covered to the tips with cardboard tubes
those familiar hallucination
I was the first to report
as for example the string
of cut-out paper men
emerging from a manhole
in the side of a snow-white hill
distinctly two-dimensional
Dr. Hebb himself reported that after just two to three days of such isolation “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.”
If you compare a drawing of Dr. Hebb’s student volunteers published in “Scientific American” with later photos of Guantanamo detainees, the similarity is, for good reason, striking.
During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at time—while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began. Again, it you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see repeated use of this method, now called “stress positions.”
After codification in its 1963 KUBARK manual, the CIA spent the next thirty years propagating these torture techniques within the US intelligence community and among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America.
Although the Agency trained military interrogators from across Latin America, our knowledge of the actual torture techniques comes from a single handbook for a Honduran training session, the CIA’s “Human Resources Exploitation Manual — 1983.” To establish control at the outset the questioner should, the CIA instructor tells his Honduran trainees, “manipulate the subject’s environment, to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.” To effect this psychological disruption, this 1983 handbook specified techniques that seem strikingly similar to those outlined 20 years
earlier in the Kubark Manual and those that would be used 20 years
later at Abu Ghraib.
After the Cold War
When the Cold War came to a close, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the infliction of “severe” psychological and physical pain. On the surface, the United States had apparently resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.
Yet when President William Clinton sent this UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration—with four detailed diplomatic “reservations” focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages. That word was “mental.”
Significantly, these intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost. Of equal import, this definition was reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention--first in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and then in the War Crimes Act of 1996.
Remember that obscure number--
Section 2340—for, as we will see, it is the key to unlocking the meaning of the controversial Military Commissions Law enacted by the US Congress just last September.
In effect, Washington had split the UN Convention down the middle, banning physical torture but exempting psychological abuse. By failing to repudiate the CIA’s use of torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
War on Terror
Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President Bush gave his White House staff wide secret orders, saying, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”
In the months that followed, Administration attorneys translated their president’s otherwise unlawful orders into U.S. policy into three controversial, neo-conservative legal doctrines: (1.) the president is above the law, (2.) torture is legally acceptable, and (3.) the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not US territory.
To focus on the single doctrine most germane to the history of psychological torture, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee found grounds, in his now notorious August 2002 memo, for exculpating any CIA interrogators who tortured, but later claimed their intention was information instead of pain. Moreover, by parsing the UN and US definitions of torture as “severe” physical or mental pain, Bybee concluded that pain equivalent to “organ failure” was legal—effectively allowing torture right up to the point of death.
Less visibly, the administration began building a global gulag for torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, and a half-dozen additional sites worldwide. In February 2002, the White House assured the CIA
that the administration’s public pledge to abide by spirit of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to its operatives; and, significantly, it allowed the Agency ten “enhanced” interrogation methods designed by Agency psychologists that included “water boarding.”
Waterboarding
Over the past three years, this term “water boarding” has surfaced periodically in press accounts of CIA interrogation without any real understanding of psychologically devastating impact of this seemingly benign method. It has a venerable lineage, first appearing in a 1541 French judicial handbook, where it was called “Torturae Gallicae Ordinariae” or “Standard Gallic Torture.” But it would now become, under the War on Terror, what CIA director Porter Goss called, in March 2005 congressional testimony, a “professional interrogation technique.”
There are several methods for achieving water boarding’s perverse effect of drowning in open air: most frequently, by making the victim lie prone and then constricting breathing with a wet cloth, a technique favored by both the French Inquisition and the CIA; or, alternatively, by forcing water directly and deeply into the lungs, as French paratroopers did during the Algerian War.
After French soldiers used the technique on Henri Alleg during the Battle for Algiers in 1957, this journalist wrote a moving description that turned the French people against both torture and the Algerian War. “I tried,” Alleg wrote, “by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me.”
Let us think about the deeper meaning of Alleg’s sparse words--“a terrible agony, that of death itself.” As the water blocks air to the lungs, the human organism’s powerful mammalian diving reflex kicks in, and the brain is wracked by horrifically painful panic signals--death, death, death. After a few endless minutes, the victim vomits out the water, the lungs suck air, and panic subsides. And then it happens again, and again, and again--each time inscribing the searing trauma of near death in human memory.
Guantanamo
In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to command Guantanamo with wide latitude for interrogation, making this prison an ad hoc behavioral laboratory. Moving beyond the CIA’s original attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamo’s interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab “cultural sensitivity” to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. General Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias, such as fear of dark or attachment to mother.
Through this total three-phase attack on sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyche, Guantanamo perfected the CIA’s psychological paradigm. Significantly, after regular inspections of Guantanamo from 2002 the 2004, the Red Cross reported: “The construction of such a system…cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”
Abu Ghraib
These enhanced interrogation policies, originally used only against top Al Qaeda operatives, soon proliferated to involve thousands of ordinary Iraqis when Baghdad erupted in a wave of terror bombings during mid 2003 that launched the resistance to the US occupation. After a visit from the Guantanamo chief General Miller in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, issued orders for sophisticated psychological torture.
As you read the following extract from those orders, please look for the defining attributes of psychological torture--specifically, sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and that recent innovation, attacks on Arab cultural sensitivities.
U. Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperatures or introducing an unpleasant smell)…
V. Sleep Adjustment: Adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g. reversing the sleeping cycles from night to day).
X. Isolation: Isolating the detainee from other detainees ... [for] 30 days.
Y. Presence of Military Working Dogs: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations…
AA. Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock...
CC. Stress Positions: Use of physical posturing (sitting, standing, kneeling, prone, etc.
Indeed, my review of the hundreds of still-classified photos taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib reveals, not random, idiosyncratic acts from separate, sadistic minds, but just three psychological torture techniques repeated over and over ad nauseum: hooding for sensory deprivation; short shackling, long shackling, and enforced standing for self inflicted pain; and dogs, total nudity, and sexual humiliation for that recent innovation, exploitation of Arab cultural sensitivity. It is no accident that Private Lynndie England was photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.
After Abu Ghraib
Let’s look at the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, seeing how America moved by degrees to legalization of these CIA psychological torture techniques.
Confronted by public anger over detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, the Bush White House has fought back by defending torture as a presidential prerogative. By contrast, an ad hoc civil society coalition of courts, press, and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse.
In a dramatic denouement of June 2006, the US Supreme Court decided in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Bush’s military commissions were illegal because they did not meet the requirement, under common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, that Guantanamo detainees be tried with “all the judicial guarantees…recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”
Then on September 6, in a dramatic bid to legalize his now-illegal policies in the aftermath of the
Hamdan decision, President Bush announced he was transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had authorized “torture” while simultaneously defending the CIA's use of a tough “alternative set of procedures” to extract “vital information.” To allow what he called the “CIA program” to go forward, President Bush announced that he was sending legislation to Congress that would legalize the same presidential prerogatives in treating detainees that had been challenged by the Supreme Court.
At first, Bush’s bill seemed to arouse strong opposition by three Republican veterans on the Senate Armed Services Committee--Senators Graham, McCain, and Warner. But after tense, daylong negotiations inside Vice President Cheney’s Senate office on September 21, these Republican partisans reached a compromise that sailed through Congress within a week, and without any amendments, to become the Military Commissions Law 2006.
Among its many objectionable features, this law strips detainees of their habeas corpus rights, sanctions endless detention without trial, and allows the use of tortured testimony before Guantanamo’s Military Commissions. Most significantly, this law allows future CIA interrogators ample latitude for use of psychological torture by using, verbatim, the narrow definition of “severe mental pain” the U.S. first adopted back in 1994 when it ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and enacted a complementary Federal law, Section 2340 of the US code, to give force to this treaty.
The current law’s elusive definition of “severe mental pain” is concealed under Para. 950 V, Part B, Sub-Section B on page 70 of the 96-page “Military Commissions Law 2006” that reads: “Severe Mental Pain or Suffering Defined: In this section, this term ‘severe mental pain…’ has the meaning given that term in Sect. 2340 (2) of Title 18 [of the Federal code].”
And what is that definition in section 2340? This is, of course, the same highly limiting definition the US first adopted back in 1994-95 when it ratified the UN Anti-Torture Convention.
Simply put, this legislation’s highly restricted standard for severe mental suffering does not prohibit any aspect of the sophisticated torture techniques that the CIA has refined, over the past half-century, into a total assault on the human psyche.
To make this point clear, let us compare the law’s very narrow, four-part standard for “severe mental suffering” with the CIA’s psychological techniques to see which, if any, of the agency’s actual methods are banned. Under this law, Section 2340, there are only four practices that constitute, in any way, “severe mental pain,” including: drug injection; death threats; threats against another; and extreme physical pain.
In actual practice, this definition does not ban any of the dozens of CIA psychological methods developed over five decades, which include:
--First, self-inflicted pain, via enforced standing and so-called “stress positions” which are cruel contortions enforced by shackling.
--Second, sensory disorientation through temporal and environmental manipulation exemplified sleep deprivation, protracted isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, isolation and intensive interrogation.
--Third, attacks on cultural identity through sexual humiliation and use of dogs.
--Fourth, attacks on individual psyche by exploiting fears and phobias.
--Fifth, hybrid methods such as water boarding.
--Sixth and most importantly, creative combinations of all these methods which otherwise might seem, individually, banal if not benign.
If you wish an analogy to make the curious exclusionary logic of this legislation perfectly clear, it would be as if US homicide law had taken a leaf from the popular board game “Clue” and defined murder as only those killings “done by Mrs. White, in the Conservatory, with the Candlestick”—thus, by its omissions, legalizing all murders done by more conventional means such as poison, pistols, rifles, knives, ropes, clubs, or bombs.
To test my critical, perhaps overly cynical assessment of this new law, let us ask whether this new law bans the most extreme of the CIA’s “enhanced” methods--water boarding. While the White House has refused comment, Vice President Cheney stated recently that using “a dunk in water” to extract information was “a no-brainer for me.” As the administration’s leader on interrogation policy, Cheney’s words make clear, despite White House denials, that water boarding is legal under the new law.
By its omissions, this legislation has effectively legalized the CIA’s right to use methods that the international community, embodied in the Red Cross and the UN Human Rights Committee, considers psychological torture. For the first time in the 200 years since 1791 when United States ratified the Fifth Amendment banning self-incrimination, Congress has passed a law allowing coerced testimony into US courts.
The implications of this Military Commissions Law are profound and will most certainly face legal challenge. Indeed, just a few weeks ago seven retired Federal judges challenged this law before the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, saying that it has “one specific and fundamental flaw”: i.e., it allows the military tribunals to accept evidence obtained by torture. But when this case reaches the Supreme Court, we cannot expect that a more conservative Roberts court will overturn this law with the same ringing rhetoric that we have seen in two recent landmark decisions,
Rasul v. Bush and
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Conclusion
If this law stands, with its provisions for torture and drumhead justice, then the United States will suffer continuing damage to its moral leadership in the international community. Looking through a glass darkly into the future, Washington may try to return to that convenient contradiction that marked US policy during the Cold War: public compliance with human rights treaties and secret torture in contravention of those same diplomatic conventions.
Yet the world is no longer blind to these once-clandestine CIA methods and this attempt at secrecy will likely produce another scandal similar to Abu Ghraib. But next time our protestations of innocence will ring hollow and the damage to US prestige will be even greater.
Graphic photos of bin Laden raid out 
Ex-Navy SEAL on bin Laden raid 
Interrogation's role in finding bin Laden 
Intelligence that led to bin Laden death 
Comments (42)
Rob wrote on December 10, 2007 5:22 PM: Thank god someone is protecting us.This man is a true american hero.
The terrorists will be watching this and planning.
We need true patriots.
judyinnm wrote on December 10, 2007 5:50 PM: I would prefer my "true american hero" not resemble the "true american enemies" so closely.
Anonymous wrote on December 10, 2007 6:01 PM: What isn't adding up: CIA personnel would have us believe the WH "didn't know" about things, yet look at the evidence about the WH 'knowing':
A. WH Connection
Libby "knew" enough about Plame to out her over the WMD issues; yet, now the WH claims they are in the "dark" about what the CIA was doing with evidence of prisoner abuse?
B. POW Working Group Memoranda
DoD JAGs "knew" enough about what was going on in the GTMO prisons to raise concerns with DOJ OLC -- WH legal counsel -- in the form of Memoranda in 2001 to the POW Working Group; yet those same counsel want us to believe the President had "no idea" what was going on with the objects of that abuse as captured on film?
- When did Members of Congress get DOJ OLC copies of responses to the JAG memoranda on the POW treatment?
- How long, after Members of Congress received these DoD JAG Memoranda related to prisoner treatment, have by-name Members of Congress know about prisoner abuse in violation of Geneva?
- Why have Members of Congress, as was done with the FISA gag orders, not announced the problem: "This President gives us (incomplete) evidence about his illegal activity; and we are illegally agreeing to comply with a non-investigation of that illegal activity; and this problem exists not just in the FISA issues, but also Geneva and other legal matters in Congress? [Stop permitting the Executive to classify evidence of illegal activity; or expect Congress to do nothing about war crimes evidence they've been given]
- Why should anyone believe, given DOJ Staff counsel discredited over the US Atty firings, for anyone to believe that the WH "didn't know" about what was going on with the CIA tape destruction?
- Why, given the supposed "executive privilege" that would shield "all" data in the Executive Branch, did someone believe the claim of "state secrets" would _not_ prevail, mandating destruction of a supposedly non-existent event: Torture; when was this "concern that the legal defense would fail" first known; and how does it compare to the WH-GOP e-mail destruction timelines?
- When did Spike Bowman, sent in 2002 to GTMO to review for DOJ these events at GMTO, first learn of the existence of the CIA tape; and what involvement did he have in telling the WH of the existence of this tape; and when did the 6th Military Police Group provide information to DoD JCS on the existence of video tapes which the CIA had retained?
C. OVP
Addington "knew" about the Eastern European torture issues, causing him to suggest that a "change" in prisoner location would be an admission the prisoner treatment was illegal; but DOJ OLC argued before the Supreme Court that the rendition program -- the means to transport people for that illegal abuse captured on CIA video tape -- is a "state secret": How can that be? Check 32 CFR 2800 for the security guidelines that tell OVP to safeguard this information, not permit it to be destroyed:
- Where are the OVP Memoranda related to this Video tape;
- Which DOJ-related translation service was on contract to transcript the CIA video tape;
- Which legal counsel was working with the OVP-WH that has publicly commented on these issues related to Rendition, by refusing to deny that they were given access to intelligence data from GTMO; and
- What is this law firm's association with Boeing (allegedly connected with Jeppeson, the alleged "rendition scheduler") by way of providing attestation services for the audit of legal compliance?
D. Unitary Executive
The same Congress that was "briefed" about the FISA issues (used as a basis to cause personnel to be detained and rendered), now claims -- again -- that it was "gagged" and "couldn't talk about it"; but then we realize DoJ OLC and CIA were briefing the Congress on these CIA waterboarding issues, yet the President claims he didn't "approve" that disclosure to Congress? So much for the claim that the President has "total" control over all legal opinions, information, and data inside the Executive Branch.
- Where's the effort to identify the DOJ staffers in OLC who disclosed in 2002 to Congress the details of this illegal prisoner abuse in violation of Geneva; and
- Why has it taken this long to investigate an alleged war crime committed in the wake of 2001?
- What else -- that we haven't been told about publicly -- have members of Congress been told in "secret" that is evidence of grave breaches of Geneva, FISA, the Constitution, or other public statute: _Domestic warrantless interrogation program_ of US Citizens?
- How many _US citizens_ do Members of Congress know have been rendered and are still being held in floating interrogation cells under command of the NAVY?
- When does Congress plan to review the FISA violations in the context of Rendition: How illegally captured (false) information was subsequently to "justify" illegal abuse (as captured on destroyed video tapes) to support rendition of those prisoners for other abuse?
will o dwisp wrote on December 10, 2007 6:15 PM: true americans don't praise torture
lestatdelc wrote on December 10, 2007 6:19 PM: "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
I call bullshit.
lestatdelc wrote on December 10, 2007 6:20 PM: will o dwisp wrote on December 10, 2007 6:15 PM:
true americans don't praise torture
Exactly.
nofltwlt wrote on December 10, 2007 6:25 PM: What the hell is wrong Americans? If a person tortured another person then their identies should be made known and the should be punished either by the legal system or the ridicule they must suffer.
If the were ordered to torture, and did not have the good sense or will to object, then the along with their supervisors should suffer the same consequences.
The perps in this case are the superviors, clear up the change, as well as the torturers.
Jim Houston wrote on December 10, 2007 6:29 PM: So how does this guys statement line up with the CIA's account that the tapes were destroyed to protect the interrogators?
TheraP wrote on December 10, 2007 7:00 PM: Spring and Summer: "I just don't recall... who decided... what happened ... if I ever knew..."
Now: "I destroyed the evidence." "I ordered torture." "I knew."
What's coming next?
shipwreckedcrew wrote on December 10, 2007 7:16 PM: You've got everything correct here, except on thing.
Waterboarding wasn't classified as torture in the Office of Legal Counsel opinion written by John yoo to cover the CIA's coercive interrogation techniques.
That policy memo was later withdrawn by Jack Goldsmith, and it was rightfully criticized when it came to light.
But that doesn't change the fact that it was in place when the interrogation took place, and it said waterboarding was not violation of the 1994 law implementing the global treaty banning torture -- which did not itself define "torture."
Contigo wrote on December 10, 2007 7:29 PM: will o dwisp wrote on December 10, 2007 6:15 PM:
true americans don't praise torture
But they do know of its value in carefully selected extreme circumstances, where the info obtained can be lifesaving. But you are correct that torture is not praised, nor should it be, but neither is war. However, there are cases were both are sometimes necessary. Especially questionable and debatable forms of so-called "torture" like waterboarding from which there is no pain and no lasting effects, but has markedly accurate results.
uncle tio wrote on December 10, 2007 7:58 PM: >markedly accurate results
Any proof of this? ANY?
Didn't think so.
Babson wrote on December 10, 2007 8:02 PM: "...waterboarding from which there is no pain and no lasting effects, but has markedly accurate results."
Firstly, waterboarding IS painful. Waterboarding is as painful as drowning because waterboarding is drowning. Not "simulated drowning", but real live actual drowning. Waterboarding forces water into the lungs and can lead to death.
As for "markedly accurate results", this is pure speculation. No evidence has ever been provided of attacks thwarted as the result of waterboarding or other tortures apart from the say so of officals who we have every reason to disbelieve, given their track record. Further, people being tortured will eventually tell you anything at all that they think will get you to stop - Meetings with Osama, secret cave installations, imaginary attacks happening next Tuesday or being a witch and having meetings with Satan.
Dee Illuminati wrote on December 10, 2007 8:13 PM: John Kiriakou makes an interesting statement, I waterboarded an individual and that act prevented subsequent attacks.
What I see here is the "Jury Nullification" defense of waterboarding. This is an interesting turn of events as even "if" the legality of the interrogation tactic and theme can be adjudicated as 'torture' it is the basis traditionally where utilizing coercion stood:
A draconian act, outside the pale of law, made rational and understood, within the context of the immediate dire circumstances.
Similar cannon of law applies to cannabalism, which I have posted on repeatedly and 'temporary' mental state law, adjudication based on the mental state of a defendant.
And this is where the neocon Sr. management broke the law. They took the claim of 'lurid and insidious circumstances' such as a 'ticking o bomb scenario' or 'would you chew your arm off if trapped in a sinking boat' scenario, and then used these 'scenarios' to rationalize an assertion that if you disagreed with the US policy in part or parcel you were subject to the same treatment.
It was psychological warfare dirrected at the US populace based on scenario based circumstances where a Arab or a sympathizer or 'sleeper cell' would take some WMD (of which none were found) and target US civillian population's.
In a genuine "Clint Eastwood" scenario where the villian was withholding the identity of a buried kidnap victim, then yes the act of coercion is "jury nullified" in the context of the circumstances.
John Kiriakou is stating:
There was "Jury Nullification" principles at stake and that the coercion illustrates this factually.
I'm glad that John Kiriakou did not say that he had a 'hunch' and just to be sure, pulled some fingernails.
But John Kiriakou does identify the litmus of "jury nullification" which is the results.
My personal take is this: That coercion and torture is always illegal, and that in some lurid and insidious cases that the act is correct, few, damn few, and that jury nullification is required in all cases were coercion and torture is used.
Our US law system was NOT the burden to fighting terrorism as the neocons said, it was instead the flexible tool that allows 12 jurors to decide based on fact the legality of an act.
Actually John Kiriakou was the first to say: I tortured and that act was within in the realm of jury nullification.
This should be left to a prosecutor, defendant attorney, and a US Jury to decide!
That folks is TRULY US law!
pv2k wrote on December 10, 2007 8:36 PM: Waterboarding has no lasting effects???
Being delusional is a 'lasting effect,' isn't it?
Kiriakou is even quoted saying, " [H]e (Abu Zubaydah)told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night..."
Any crackpot claiming a visit by Allah aka God, has to be delusional and any Jew or Christian who believes that in fact happened is denying their own faith.
I wonder if Zubaydah also told his interrogators the route Santa plans on taking at Xmas this year?
;)
IntelVet wrote on December 10, 2007 8:38 PM: "will o dwisp wrote on December 10, 2007 6:15 PM:
true americans don't praise torture"
************
True Americans do not tolerate torture, in any way, shape or form, much less "praise" it.
It takes a truly disturbed person to think they can accomplish anything with torture, though it does provide a refuge for mentally ill people who do not distinguish themselves in other ways.
--paraphrased from a lecture at USAFA before the religious freaks took over and the rapes started.
and, "breaking" after being water-boarded for 35 seconds? Pulease! Sounds to me like the guy could not wait to spew "information", likely afraid he would forget what he was supposed to say if stressed too much. --former instructor.
TheraP wrote on December 10, 2007 8:53 PM: Seems to me that asserting "anything" (torture or otherwise... and I am totally against torture) prevented attacks is to assert proving a negative.
If attacks haven't occurred, you can't say what exactly that is due to. So again, these folks want us to believe that their reprehensible behavior has had a positive result. And you can neither prove a negative or assert the causality of a negative or correlation with a negative.
That's another flaw in the argument.
These people simply assert things. Over and over. No matter how illogical. And that's supposed to make it so.
rita wrote on December 10, 2007 8:55 PM: Read the transcript of Brian Ross' interview. It does not sound like the agent did the waterboarding or even was present when the guy was waterboarded. It also sounds like he is repeating a lot of hearsay. But it is interesting to see how more senior officials were involved in every step of the interrogation.
McCabe wrote on December 10, 2007 9:44 PM: This story is slanted. The guy interviewed didn't torture anybody. This is more bad journalism with all these blogs trying to scoop each other.
Anonymous wrote on December 10, 2007 10:05 PM: Kirakou has been in the media before - both as penning a crtical piece on how Afghanistan was falling apart and being ignored. He also appears as being a location consultant to Paramount studios for an upcoming Afghan film.
He's billed as a CIA officer in Pakistan from 1998 - 2004.
I don't doubt his experience credentials, but you've got to be wary about someone who has been in the media lately - who, under CIA rules, should not be talking about these things.
O. S. Wilde wrote on December 10, 2007 10:06 PM: Odd coincidence, the timing of this "disclosure." Why wasn't this made public a year or two ago? Perhaps, because now a cover-up is underway. That explains undermining another lie, about destroying the tapes to protect agent identities.
Shifting lies--how do they keep track of them all? Oh yes, obviously even that has broken down.
wildcat87 wrote on December 11, 2007 12:02 AM: I just saw Nightline and need to read the transcripts but I do find it interesting that he fears reprisals from neither the CIA nor terrorists.
Mary wrote on December 11, 2007 2:01 AM: pv2k
Suskind, in his book, and ex-FBI agent Coleman make no bones about the fact that Zubaydah was crazy.
"'Ths guy is insande, certifiable, split personality," Coleman told a top official at FBI after a few days reviewing the Zubaydah haul."
p. 100, Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine"
In prior pages they discussed the Zubaydah diary taken when he was. According to Suskind (seemingly relying at least in part on Coleman, who actually reviewed the Zubaydah documents) Zubaydah wrote to his diary as if he were three different people. A 10 yo boy - Hani 1, a Hani (2) who was Zubaydah's age, and yet another Hani (3) who was 3 years older than Zubaydah.
In that diary, Zubaydah dwelled on things like what people ate and wore and obsessed over niggling items of transporting people and their families - nothing operational.
And Suskind's description seems to coincide in one place with Kiriakous - Zubaydah did answer questions. Whatever answer it took to make the torture stop - he'd give. He described all kinds of attacks, on water supplies, shopping malls, the so-called dirty bombs Jose Padilla would create (by swinging buckets over his head), etc. And we went on alert time and after time for wild goose chases. And we disappeared an American citizen on American soil into years of his own torture, based on the tortured statements of Zubaydah.
As a matter of fact, Suskind indicates that Coleman's opinion - that Zubaydah was an expendable, non-operations, "greeter" "...was echoed at the top of the CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President." Suskind, p. 100
The problem was that by this time, the President had already jumped the gun and made speeches about how important Zubaydah was - so he told Tenet to get something out of Zubaydah - - not to block dozens of future attacks, not because he was an operational treasure trove - but to go ahead and torture the badly injured crazy guy to keep Bush from losing face.
"'I said he was important,' Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?'
'No sir, Mr. President.'"
Suskind, p. 100.
Kiriakou would be considerably more believable if he gave context and valid response to any of that.
Timo Sinnemäki wrote on December 11, 2007 4:45 AM: So the CIA destroys tapes, 1) allegedly for the sole reason of protecting their operatives, while 2) asserting as an indisputable fact that any discomfiting methods that the tapes may have displayed were absolutely necessary.
But point 2 is false, since the FBI has disputed it from the beginning, casting a strong suspicion on point 1: an entirely plausible alternative explanation is that they instead wanted to cover up that their use of torture ruined what progress the FBI had made with actually sound interrogation methods.
pluky wrote on December 11, 2007 10:31 AM: Contigo: "markedly accurate results"
Let's be clear here. Torture is neither effective nor efficient in eliciting information from an unwilling subject. It is both effective and efficient in coercing confessions whether or not the subject is guilty or innocent.
buzz wrote on December 11, 2007 10:37 AM: Kiriakou's vague claim to having interrupted "maybe dozens" of terrorist scenarios is the Jack Bauer defense, plain and simple.
And let's consider the administration's definition of a scary terrorist plot.
Maybe Zubaydah told the spooks where the "Florida Seven's" boots were hidden.
Dave wrote on December 11, 2007 10:38 AM: George Bush has the tiniest pecker in the Western Hemisphere, but he is definitely the biggest asshole.
JimBob wrote on December 11, 2007 10:42 AM: And we're supposed to believe this? Let's have details, or forget about it. The guy steps forward and says Zubaydah answered questions that disrupted attacks. Which ones? Where? When? Let's have some corroboration from other agents, put 'em on the stand and make sure they all say the same thing. This reeks of Bush's team tossing someone into the spotlight to justify their actions. I don't believe a word of it. Broke him in 35 seconds? Puh-leeze!
S.L. wrote on December 11, 2007 10:49 AM: I share the skepticism of Anonymous above. Every ex-CIA operative that writes a book or an article has to get it vetted by the CIA first. It seems the CIA would not allow an operative to give a detailed on-air interview describing a capture and interrogation--including place names--in Pakistan in which he doesn't even seem to be choosing his words carefully. I would not be surprised to find that this guy never worked for the CIA at all and is banking on the fact that the CIA can't disclose who isn't an agent, anymore than they can disclose who is. (Heck, I find it hard to believe that he's married.)
Even if he did work for the CIA, he implies that he was gone *before* they waterboarded Zubaydah, so his knowledge of the results of that waterboarding are totally hearsay.
Finally, he says that as far as he knows only two people were waterboarded and that the prisoner he knows details about was waterboarded only once. And then he makes the statement: "I'm involved in this-- this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture, versus the quality of information that we-- that we often get after using the water-boarding technique."
Often? And people conclude from this sample of two that waterboarding "works"?
TEL wrote on December 11, 2007 11:47 AM: S.L.-
I don't doubt the fact that Kiriakou worked for the CIA. And there is no way that he'd be talking about this stuff without direction from the CIA.
I think he has now been given the task of defending the CIA and White House's torture program. He's the perfect spokesman - no longer with the CIA, wasn't actually present when the torture occurred, and absolutely believes what he is saying. He apparently also is smart enough to understand that the "torture is necessary for our safety" ship has sailed, so is making the right noises to cater to more than a hard-line audience.
And the earlier poster's statement about waterboarding not being torture - read some history about torture in the Spanish Inquisition and onwards. It is one of the classical torture methods. I remember going to the London Dungeon in 1991 (before it was turned into a child-friendly carnival ride), which had visual re-enactments of the most common torture methods in British history, and two the most frightening were waterboarding and being chained doubled over - neither drew blood, but both made every moment the subject was conscious hell. It's the psychology of waterboarding that makes it so destructive.
buzz wrote on December 11, 2007 1:04 PM: (Re: My 10:37 post)
David Kurtz from the TPM main page:
12.11.07 -- 10:37AM // link
Jury Deadlocked in Liberty 7 Trial
"Remember those guys? They were the paintballers trash talking about bringing down the Sears Tower.
Turns out a jury is having a hard time with the case. Go figure."
parrot wrote on December 11, 2007 2:16 PM: And you wondered why the U.S wouldn't sign on to the World Criminal Court? If you're a criminal, why would you want to be under its jurisdiction, right?
Contigo wrote on December 11, 2007 2:48 PM: parrot wrote on December 11, 2007 2:16 PM:
And you wondered why the U.S wouldn't sign on to the World Criminal Court? If you're a criminal, why would you want to be under its jurisdiction, right?
Actually the Founding Fathers wanted the Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the Land. They didn't want us to be governed by some effeminate judge sitting in the Hague.
anonymous_unless_youre_NSA wrote on December 11, 2007 3:16 PM: I have been waiting for this.
Every day the papers are full of headlines talking about the generalities of "torture," which by definition is repugnant to any sane and moral person.
Meanwhile, there is a hidden world of CIA operatives and their brethren, reading these articles and watching the posturing going on on Capitol Hill. A good many of these operatives are presumably just itching to do what Kiriakou has done: bring "torture" down to the mundane level of a disagreeable but not heinous task, which may have gotten useful results. Not something you'd be proud to tell your kids or your mother about, but neither is a day on the killing floor at the slaughterhouse, yet it happens every day, and people understand that someone has to do these disagreeable tasks. And so many of us, (including me), do enjoy a good steak...
It's hard to believe that Kiriakou is not some form of Administration plant, or at least was given a nod to tell his story. The only thing that gives me pause is that this Administration, if it were controlling the puppet strings here, would be much more likely to have someone go public who was involved with a more notorious bad guy like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"), perhaps the best-known "terrorist mastermind" to the American public.
I would also expect them to 'reveal,' through their plant, a clear-cut and not-yet-publicized story of the foiling of a major terrorist plot.
Perhaps they are showing some unusual subtlety on this one, lest it be too obvious...
I am also wondering when the press will connect the dots on the Kiriakou story to the reporting of Gerald Posner in "While America Slept." Perhaps our nation's crack reporters have yet to figure out that the "Zubaydah" mentioned by Kiriakous is the same "Zubaida" described in Posner's book.
Below is an excerpt from a Washington Post review of Posner's 2003 book, which summarizes his revelations about the CIA's interrogation of Zubaydah / Zubaida:
Gerald Posner, a lawyer-turned-author, also touches on the 1993 attack as a prelude to horrors ahead.
"Why America Slept" is a solidly researched catalogue of what Posner calls "fumbled investigations and misplaced priorities," but it lacks page-turning prose until the end, when he lays out a remarkable tale suggesting there could have been more Saudi Arabian complicity in the 9/11 plot than previously known.
Citing two "government sources," Posner details the U.S. interrogation of Abu Zubaida, a Saudi-born al Qaeda operations chief who was wounded by gunfire during his March 2002 capture in Pakistan. By withholding pain medication, administering sodium pentothal and setting up a "false-flag" operation to make Zubaida think he was in a Saudi prison and certain to be executed, the CIA may have gotten more than it bargained for from the ruse.
In Posner's telling, Zubaida was actually relieved to see his "Saudi" inquisitors (played by two Arab American Special Forces soldiers) and gave them, from memory, the home and cell phone numbers of a senior member of the Saudi ruling family. "He will tell you what to do," the terrorist told them.
The numbers, according to Posner, belonged to Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz -- better known to Americans as the owner of War Emblem, the horse that won last year's Kentucky Derby.
Zubaida also spilled secrets about alleged cooperation among bin Laden, the Saudi royals and Pakistani officials, and he claimed both countries knew the attack on America was imminent. To confirm his tale, Zubaida gave the interrogators private phone numbers for two more Saudi princes.
Within four months, all three princes met untimely ends in Saudi Arabia, in rapid succession. The horse owner died of a heart attack at 43; his cousin died in a car wreck en route to the funeral; the third, age 25, "died of thirst" during a trip in the summer heat.
Posner, always the measured skeptic, draws no conclusions but says he believes his sources. In any event, he is certainly saying something new.
melior wrote on December 11, 2007 4:06 PM:
Q: How many legs does a horse have if you call a tail a leg?
A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't mean a tail is a leg.
Just because Cheney insists waterboarding isn't torture doesn't mean it isn't torture.
Contigo wrote on December 11, 2007 4:40 PM: Just because Cheney insists waterboarding isn't torture doesn't mean it isn't torture.
No one cares what Cheney or Harry Reid thinks. The technique is useful and effective and should continue to be used when necessary.
Henk wrote on December 11, 2007 5:16 PM: This guy no doubt spouted all kinds of BS just to stop the torture and that CIA and FBI chasing their tails. Wasting time and money.
But Chenney found some use for all the bullshit. Remember all those goofy assed terror alerts prior to George Bush's re-taking of the White House? They make a little more sense to me now.
toomuchtolose wrote on December 11, 2007 5:56 PM: Years ago when American servicemen were being held as prisoners and had to do propaganda speeches that would be seen in the U.S., they would parrot the speech as written for them BUT they would all be showung an extended middle finger. They knew their captors would not understand the relevance of that gesture but Americans would.
Maybe the man said he talked with Allah because he believed Americans and everyone else would understand that to be a disclaimer for everything he said thereafter.
chancelucky wrote on December 11, 2007 8:52 PM: I think the really interesting thing is that Kiriakou's interview is trying so hard to slip in the "meme" that waterboarding procured useful information.
I'm thinking that the tapes were destroyed quite possibly because they were actually proof that waterboarding didn't work as in Zubaydah basically produced gibberish as Ron Suskind claimed in his 2005 book.
cherylholmes wrote on December 12, 2007 2:02 AM: What does it matter anyway? We can do whatever the hell we want, or rather, the WH can. There is no Constitution (goddam piece of paper in a box) no Geneva Convention, no treaty with anyone or anyplace. Gonzales and the Supremo's saw to that. Hell, we're not even the "United" States anymore. You know what we are.
Jerry wrote on December 12, 2007 3:52 PM: I don't know what he said on CNN, but I saw his interview on Nightline. Everybody might want to go back and check the transcripts
He stated, quite clearly, that he was NOT present when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. This was second hand information that was relayed to him by somebody else. The person who gave him that information might not have been present, either.
So, you have an ex-CIA officer giving second or third hand information and presenting it as "truth". Unreliable, on the face of it.
I should point out that I'm a former Army Interrogator, and don't subscribe to the coercive methods that have been described. In my opinion, they aren't effective and actually are counterproductive in the end.