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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

A Shining Beacon of Freedom

Jane Mayer has an incredible piece in this week's New Yorker on the "black sites," the secret CIA prisons where terror suspects were rendered to shield them from public view. The Red Cross has finally had the opportunity to talk to some of those detained, and the classified report based on those conversations shows that a system of torture and abuse was put in place at the highest levels, in complete violation of US law and international treaties to which the US is a signatory, which are also legally binding. And these programs to use the tactics of terror to fight terror have never been fully disavowed:

In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.


Administration apologists claim that the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) prove that these techniques are effective and save lives. Only KSM's confessions cannot be fully corroborated. They conflict with other stories. And they are clearly the words of a desperate man who would say anything to stop the pain. The CIA is only looking at the metric of information, not its veracity. And therefore it considers torturing KSM to be effective. Only it DOESN'T work in providing legitimate intelligence. Yet it goes on due to a twisted ideology in the minds of the very top of our political leadership.

By contrast, the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency’s director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, “Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was signed off by the C.I.A. director.”


The interrogation techniques came directly out of Vietnam-era torture programs, and also SERE, a Korean War-era program developed by the American military to teach Special Forces soldiers how to survive Soviet torture techniques. They appropriated the Soviet ideas and turned them around on these detainees.

The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.” [...]

Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)


The KGB was looking for propaganda victories, not actual intelligence. They wanted Americans to confess to something, anything, to prove their moral superiority. We took the exact same program and used it to supposedly gather intelligence. But actually we were doing the same thing. The goal was to legitimize the techniques used through any confessions and information possible.

Read the whole article. It sounds like something out of the 13th century. Not only has this kind of torture turned us into the enemy abroad, neutered our voice on human rights issues, and given Al Qaeda the greatest recruitment tool they can imagine, it also doesn't work in giving us a leg up on intelligence. Plus, once we've exhausted the limited time horizon where these detainees can be useful, we cannot put them out into a regular prison population or the larger world because of the crimes we have committed. We've created a small city worth of disappeareds, people with no country, no location, nothing.

I'm disgusted by this and the taxpayer dollars that went to fund it:

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.


And the worst part is that we've taught a generation of psychotic conservatives that not of this degrading and humiliating treatment matters, that it's just harmless, that it falls within the legal principle of who cares. We've built an army of moral zombies who follow their Dear Leader no matter where he leads them. It's a nightmare from which I am hoping to one day awaken.

UPDATE: Jack Bauer in 20 years:

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

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