Waterboarding at Tuol Sleng S-21 Prison by Khmer Rouge (Cambodian artist Van Nath was one of only 14 people who survived this prison. He was kept alive to paint portraits and make sculptures of the Khmer leaders. His art since then has focused on what he witnessed).
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For those of us who didn't spend our Holidays poring over the 500-page Senate Report on the CIA's torture program as we sipped our eggnog and munched Christmas cookies, an interview of Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books provides some insightful, if disturbing observations. Danner, a Berkeley professor, staff writer for the New Yorker and regular NYRB contributer, has been writing about torture and the CIA since just after the September 11th attacks. His synopsis of and reaction to the recent Senate report is among the most well-informed we are likely to see. While some of his points will be familiar to those who have followed the issue closely (such as the revelations about the CIA paying two completely untrained psychologists 80 million dollars to "design" the torture techniques ultimately put in place) others are unusually novel and acute, not just because he analyzes what the CIA did, but specifically how what they did continues to affect us now as Americans, in our media and in our national politics.
The following are excerpts from the interview of Danner by Hugh Eakin as published in the NYRB "Blog" section.
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Danner notes that what immediately "jumps out" of the Senate report is the constant effort by the CIA to lie about the supposed effectiveness of the torture "program":
[T]he degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, life-saving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating.
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Another telling aspect of the Report is the tacit recognition by the CIA that they're doing something fundamentally wrong, something that would evoke public revulsion. However, the CIA's impulse is not to stop the activity then and there, but rather how to couch it in terms palatable to the public:
From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers, raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture—that is the word used—if it was used to stop imminent attacks.
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One of the less remarked aspects of the Senate's investigation was the seamless way the torture "lexicon" has morphed during the last few years. The Report makes clear that while the Bush Administration invariably stuck to the term "enhanced interrogation," a sanitized term picked up and parroted endlessly by our media through the course of the Bush years, the CIA called it "torture" from the start, even before it initiated the program. It is also clear from the timeline, according to Danner, that the CIA planned to torture even before it had apprehended any detainees. So the "ticking time bomb" scenario trotted out by the apologists to justify torture in moments of duress, is a complete fiction.
Danner discusses at length the torture of Abu Zubaydah as vividly exemplifying every problem with its use. The report suggests that he was little more than a "travel agent" for Al Qaeda and not a member of the organization. But because the CIA was (wrongly) convinced he was an Al Qaeda "leader" and thus almost certainly withholding information he was put under forced sleep deprivation fror 180 hours and waterboarded 83 times, even though he could not possibly provide anything of value:
It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed at the direct orders of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.
It’s an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world for more suffering and more torture.
And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information.
The torture techniques described in the report were "not only depraved, immoral, illegal; they were counterproductive. Put another way, the United States would have been in a better position to know about al-Qaeda and to prevent future attacks if these techniques had not been used."
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One of the most startling features of the Report is the complete lack of evidence of any discussion among the CIA or the Bush Administration as to the implications and manner of conducting what would seem to be a transformative moment in U.S. policy:
You expect that government officials who make the momentous decision to introduce an officially sanctioned torture program in the United States would have a series of serious meetings in which they would analyze the history of interrogation as it has been used by different government agencies. They would consult with allies who have a history of using these and other techniques, about what works and what doesn’t. They would make a general study of what is necessary and what is not. They would consult with legal experts. They would do a number of things.
In this case, as far as we can tell, most of these things were not done. We find a bare minimum of policy discussion.
Danner points out, however, that the Senate Report did not examine the actions of the Executive Branch in great detail as its report was focused on the agency. As a result, "we really don’t have definitive answers on who made critical decisions within the executive branch and when they were made."
And there’s a reason for that. The Republicans refused to sign on to the Senate investigation unless these areas were put beyond the committee’s ken. The original vote by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to pursue the CIA investigation in 2009 was 14-1, and they got the Republicans on board by agreeing not to look at the executive.
Which brings us to Danner's observations about the "political" aspects of the report--the partisan response to its release. He points out that while Republicans have nearly universally come out in defense of the CIA and in favor of torture, none have addressed the report's specifics and those who have denounced it have done so only in the vaguest of terms (he cites Dick Cheney's brisk rejoinder to the report as a "piece of crap"). But he doesn't let Democrats off the hook either, and he pointedly criticizes President Obama whom he describes as essentially AWOL on the issue, even though very real legal grounds exist to prosecute the CIA (such as lying to the DOJ in 2002 about the supposed "limits" and "legality" of the torture they had already begun to inflict on people). In Danner's view Obama's reticence to not only prosecute those responsible but to do more than simply declare, again in the "vaguest of terms," that this is not "who we are as a country" reflects the near-total dependency of the Executive Branch on the CIA in the "post 9/11" world, from their drones to their paramilitary assassination squads. The Administration apparently fears the same type of reaction from the CIA as was presented to Mayor DeBlasio when he criticized the NYPD. And a country whose leadership is beholden to a demonstrably incompetent and dishonest intelligence service bodes ill for all of us.
But the most profound and ultimately, the most degrading aspect of all this is in full view, every day, in our corporate-owned news media: thanks to a concerted CIA "media outreach" effort, we have become a nation where torture becomes a subject to be debated at fancy cocktail parties:
This kind of corruption through mendacity has continued, and we see it clearly now, in this cheerleading society organized by the CIA, consisting mostly of ex-officials, who have come out publicly not only to defend the agency but also to defend torture itself. The CIA is not supposed to be lobbying for torture in the public realm. That’s not what the billions of dollars the taxpayers give it is supposed to be spent on.
We’re in this surrealistic world, in which, twelve years after these decisions to use torture have secretly been made, we’re seeing a public effort at disinformation spreading throughout the country, through all the media outlets, cheerleading for torture. It’s quite an astonishing thing: torture, which used to be illegal, which used to be anathema, has now become a policy choice.