White House spokesman Sean Spicer says a three-page draft executive order calling for a review of U.S. methods of interrogating suspected terrorists and the possibility of reopening the CIA’s infamous black sites “is not a White House document” and he has “no idea where it came from.”
The document was obtained and reported on by The New York Times here and the Associated Press here. The AP noted that the review would "recommend to the president whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States." Spicer said in his daily briefing:
"It is not a White House document, and I would just urge those people who have reported on it, this is now I think the second day that we've had a document that was not a White House document get reported on as a factual document [...] It is not a White House document. I have no idea where it came from."
White House sources told Fox News that the draft order dates back to the transition when thousands of these were being written. There is, they said, no plan to revive overseas "black sites" or to review official interrogation procedures laid out in the Army Field Manual.
If what these sources say is true—an introductory clause that should be attached to nearly every statement emanating from named or unnamed White House sources these days—it’s good news. But as Joshua Keating writes at Slate:
“It’s not quite clear from this whether ‘not a White House document’ means it didn’t actually come from the White House or if it’s merely not official yet. If it’s really under consideration, though, or even just an indication of the administration’s thinking, it’s disturbing.
The fact of the matter is, the draft order comports with what Pr*sident Trump said more than once during his campaign. Charles Savage reports:
The draft order does not direct any immediate reopening of C.I.A. prisons or revival of torture tactics, which are now banned by statute. But it sets up high-level policy reviews to make further recommendations in both areas to Mr. Trump, who vowed during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”
Elisa Massimino, the director of Human Rights First, denounced the draft order as “flirting with a return to the ‘enhanced interrogation program’ and the environment that gave rise to it.” She noted that numerous retired military leaders have rejected torture as “illegal, immoral and damaging to national security,” and she said that many of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees had seemed to share that view in their confirmation testimony.
The draft order would also dump the Obama administration’s initiative to close the U.S. detention facility on the forcibly leased land at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and direct the Pentagon to send any new "enemy combatants" it captures there. as of today, 41 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. There were once nearly 800 prisoners held there. At the beginning of 2009, when President Obama vowed to shut down the facility, 242 prisoners were being held.
Combined with “extraordinary rendition”—the CIA snatching of suspected terrorists from the streets of several other nations, most of them U.S. allies—and torturing them in secret prisons in Romania, Poland, Thailand and elsewhere, the Bush administration’s pretense that Guantánamo was not subject to U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions sparked strong opposition inside and outside the United States. That opposition led to Supreme Court decisions undercutting the administration’s policies in the matter.
Under current law, any prisoners under the control of U.S. authorities—including the CIA—can only be interrogated using methods found in the Army Field Manual. Barred are techniques such as stress positions, waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
High officials other than Pr*sident Trump—such as then-Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as White House legal counsel—argued in favor of torture. But they didn’t announce those views until after evidence of torture emerged publicly when former CIA counterintelligence agent John Kiriakou spilled the beans to ABC in 2007.
Not only was the CIA torturing people, he said, but this was government policy signed by Bush himself. The Bush administration couldn’t find anything to prosecute Kiriakou for, but the Obama administration charged him with five felonies. He faced 45 years in prison and decided to take a 2.5-year plea deal instead. He was the only CIA employee to do prison time related to agency torture.
Secrecy allowed the U.S. to continue torturing for years, a clear indication that officials ordering it knew—despite the legal gobbledegook they cooked up as justification—that what they were doing was over the line. Secrecy could become the Trump regime’s friend in this matter, too.