28 March 2006
Olga Talamante survived torture by the security forces in Argentina during the 'dirty war'. Jack Cloonan spent years investigating organized crime and terrorist groups as an FBI agent. What do they have in common? They both believe that torture is useless and evil.
A day earlier I had been a not-too-unusual 24-year-old American student from UC Santa Cruz, working with the Peronist Youth organization for social change in Azul, Argentina. For the next 16 months, I would become one of thousands of political prisoners and torture victims taken into custody as Argentina first declared martial law and then later suffered a right-wing military coup. But I was one of the lucky ones -- a survivor, thanks to family and friends in the United States who won my release on March 27, 1976.
When I returned home to California and testified about the torture, my stories horrified listeners. But we could feel safe here because torture was the province of brutal, unsophisticated despots. It was a time when the average American could not imagine our soldiers abroad participating in anything remotely similar. Now, three years into the Iraq war, we have seen the images of Abu Ghraib and read accounts of the atrocities at Baghdad's Camp Nama.
Americans once shocked by my experience now hear officials defend torture as a necessary evil in the war against terrorism. But it is only evil.
Surviving to tell the tale of tortureOlga Talamante,
The Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2006
The story of Olga Talamante, currently Executive Director of the Chicana/Latina Foundation, was not uncommon for Argentina of that time. Many people perished in the infamous 'dirty war' but many victims did survive to tell the tale.
Talamante's point that torture is "only evil" is backed up by other victims of torture, in Argentina and elsewhere. There was one story I read - which I unfortunately can not locate right this minute - about a prisoner of the Argentine security forces during the time of the 'dirty war'. That person, among other things, had been subjected to an over two weeks' sleep deprivation. At one point he broke down and decided to give his interrogators the information they were asking for - namely, the names and addresses of the activists he knew that they were interested in. There was only one problem - in his state at the time he could not recall them. That comes as little surprise - I can myself testify to becoming very slow intellectually after as little as two days without sleep.
The idea that torture works as an interrogation tool in the 'war on terror' or any other endeavor is contradicted by many an investigator, too. Consider, for instance, this Jason Vest's article in The American Prospect (Pray and Tell, July 3, 2005 issue):
When I finally met Jack Cloonan on a violent and aberrantly wintry spring night at the City Hall Restaurant in lower Manhattan's Tribeca earlier this year, I asked him if he was surprised by the refusal of most FBI agents to endorse or embrace the new rules of interrogation. He said he wasn't. "FBI agents, as officers of the court, know what the rules are," he said with quiet conviction as the storm raged outside. "We have procedures to follow. We firmly believe in this thing called due process, and do not see it as something passé or something that should be seen as an impediment."
When I went to see him a couple of months later at his family's suburban New Jersey home, at a moment when the flow of daily stories revealing new instances of torture had run dry, he said that as appalling as the stories were, he was at least proud that documents were validating the FBI approach to interrogation, even if the administration wasn't interested.
A soft-spoken, mustached man in sweater and slacks with an air of tranquility and a taste for alt-country music, Cloonan -- who retired from the bureau's New York field office after 32 years in 2002, and is now a sometimes analyst for ABC News -- has had a career that's about 10 percent The Sopranos and 90 percent Fredrick Forsyth. While his 1980s deep-cover performance as a mobbed-up, public-official-bribing owner of a Newark, New Jersey, towing company is fondly remembered by some, most of Cloonan's FBI years were spent working counterintelligence and, later, counterterrorism, on the multiagency Joint Terrorism Task Force. In addition to running FBI operations directed at the Taliban's quasi-official New York mission in the late '90s, Cloonan was on the New York field office's Osama bin Laden squad from its beginnings in 1996.
(The unit successfully apprehended and brought to trial the al-Qaeda members responsible for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Echoing the sentiments of other serious students of al-Qaeda, Peter Bergen, a Brookings Institution fellow and a CNN terrorism analyst, told me that the bulk of the U.S. government's best pre-9-11 al-Qaeda intelligence came out of that investigation -- an endeavor in which the interviews of suspects, Cloonan gently but pointedly told me, hewed strictly to FBI procedures that make no allowances for violence.)
Based on his experiences interviewing Islamist radicals everywhere from New York City to Khartoum, Cloonan believes that interrogations can gather intelligence that's both operationally actionable and court admissible ("nothing that shocks the conscience of the court," as he puts it), and holds that torture -- by hands American or foreign -- is rarely ever useful or necessary. Cloonan and a New York Police Department detective secured actionable intelligence from a suspect in the foiled millennium-bombing plot in just six hours on December 30, 1999 -- by following FBI procedure, and by encouraging a suspect to pray during his Ramadan fast. The suspect even agreed to place calls to his confederates, which led to their speedy arrests.
As such, Cloonan is extremely unhappy with the post-9-11 article of faith that all manner of extraordinary mechanisms, from rendition to torture, are somehow both necessary and devoid of negative consequences. He took serious issue with the notion that violent coercion is the only means of getting Islamist terrorism suspects to talk. When I asked him to elaborate, he told the story of "Joe the Moroccan" -- or, more formally, L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a member of the al-Qaeda cell that bombed the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and the U.S. government's star witness in the embassy-bombings case.
The story coming out from both sides of the divide - that is, from both the prisoners and the interrogators - is that torture doesn't really help in finding out what the circumstances are of a certain event. There is, however, little doubt in anybody's mind that it works as an intimidation tool. Could that be why so many of our officials,
from Vice President Cheney on down, are so fond of it?