Monday, April 20, 2009

Torture in the 21st Century

For the past few days, I've been reading the "torture memos" and thinking about them. In previous posts, I've discussed Voltaire, who spoke out against torture in 18th-century France when European countries were still torturing citizens in the name of the state and of religion. Voltaire's imagined scenario where the wife of a torturer is first horrified and then interested and then inured to the horror seems so in keeping with the matter-of-fact tone of these 21st-century torture memos. Torture had become banal. The writers of the torture memos would have their readers believe that--totally ignoring moral considerations--torture was necessary, that torture could be targeted, that torture could be quantified, and that torture could be contained. Yet evidence proves otherwise.

Abu Zubaydah's capture in 2002 gave the administration what it needed, someone on whom to practice its newly-minted attitude toward torture. In a speech in April of that year, President Bush's characterization of Zubaydah as "one of [al-Qaeda's] top operatives" was proven incorrect. Dan Coleman, an FBI agent working with the CIA's bin Laden unit, read Zubaydah's secret diary and, along with many others, concluded that the guy was "insane, certifiable, split personality....He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights...He knew very little about real operations, or strategy." (Ron Suskind. The One Percent Doctrine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006: p. 100). Yet the President and Vice-president continued to claim publicly that Zubaydah was a top operative:

"Around the room a lot of people just rolled their eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was, in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO [chief operating officer]," said one top CIA official, who attended the 5 p.m. meeting where the issue of Zubaydah came up. (Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, p. 101)

When Zubaydah was captured, he had suffered serious injuries, but the United States gave him the "'finest medical attention on the planet,' said one CIA official. 'We got him in very good health, so we could start to torture him'" (Suskind, p. 100). Zubaydah was

"stabilized in mid-May [2002], and, thus, ready. An extraordinary moment in the "war on terror" was about to unfold. After months of interdepartmental exchanges over the detainment, interrogation, and prosecution of captives in the "war on terror"--as well as debates over which "debriefing" techniques would work most effectively on al Qaeda--the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered. (Suskind, p. 111).

And the torture memos just released reveal that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, in August 2002. That's just the waterboarding, not to mention other methods of coercion used against him ("confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall"--Scott Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure, The New York Times, April 18, 2009). The harsh coercive measures "were ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew... Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence officer with direct knowledge of the case" (Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure"). Even the most important information he had to provide--"naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed...as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot" (Shane, "Divisions Arose...")--was given up before these harsher interrogation methods were begun. The United States was to later capture KSM and to waterboard him 183 times in one month, in March 2003. And have we forgotten what happened the following fall at Abu Ghraib? The greenlight for torture trickled down to the military rank and file.

So much for "targeting" and "containing" torture.

The language of the torture memos is extremely dry, matter-of-fact, while describing the most grotesque methods of coercion. The memo of May 30, 2005, claims that "the interrogations at issue here are employed by the CIA only as reasonably deemed necessary to protect against grave threats to the United States interests, a determination that is made at CIA Headquarters, with input from the on-scene interrogation team, pursuant to careful screening procedures that ensure that the techniques will be used as little as possible on as few detainees as possible." Yet the history of the torture used on Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed clearly suggests the real problems with "careful screening procedures" and with using torture "as little as possible." Waterboarding someone 183 times in one month does not meet the standards of "as little as possible." Nor does applying the same method 83 times in one month to a mentally-unbalanced person who had already provided under less coercive means the useful information he had. The fact that these claims can be made so dryly, so surely, so deceptively should make a person with any remaining morality recoil in disgust.

The torture memo of May, 2005, authorizes up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, in which the detainee is kept standing and shackled, usually with hands tied in front of his body, under his chin. Or the hands can be raised above the head "for no more than two hours." The sleep-deprived detainee is given perhaps a two-to-three-foot diameter space in which to move. The detainee may also be kept nude. The memo confidently claims that keeping the detainee nude "does not involve any sexual abuse or threats of sexual abuse." Again, what's so coldly claimed on the page may not necessarily translate so coolly in the field. One has only to take another look at those pictures taken at Abu Ghraib to see the hollowness of such a claim.

Because the detainee is forced to stand, sleep-deprived and shackled, there is the problem of bodily functions. The lawyerly tone of the memo-writer assures readers that

a detainee undergoing sleep deprivation frequently wears an adult diaper. . . Diapers are checked and changed as needed so that no detainee should be allowed to remain in a soiled diaper, and the detainee's skin condition is monitored. You have informed us that diapers are used solely for sanitary and health reasons and not in order to humiliate the detainee. (p. 13 of Memorandum to John A. Riggs, Senior Deputy General Counsel, CIA; May 30, 2005)

Oh, of course, nudity, dietary manipulation, and sleep deprivation are not meant to humiliate prisoners. No, they are "conditioning techniques...used to put the detainee in a 'baseline' state, and to 'demonstrate to the [detainee] that he has no control over basic human needs" (p. 12, memo of May 30,2005). In other words, they are techniques used to dehumanize prisoners, to turn them into that "haggard, pale, defeated" man, no longer human to his keepers, described by Voltaire over two hundred years ago. The "conditioning" process prepares the way for "coercive" techniques of slamming the prisoner's head into a wall, dousing the prisoner with cold water, forcing the prisoner in stress positions and cramped confinement, and, the pièce de résistance, waterboarding the prisoner.

The memo of May 30, 2005, written by Steven Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, is but one of the torture memos. The one that has been targeted as the most egregious is that one dated August 1, 2002, and written by Jay Bybee, former Assistant Attorney General and now Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can read that memo here: at the Washington Post.

The argument of those who claim that torturing "enemy combatants" or possible Qaeda operatives keeps Americans safe is countered by men in the field, people who are charged with getting information from the enemy. Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym] who "led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006," writes that:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. (Matthew Alexander, "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," The Washington Post, November 30, 2008.)

Many are calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, who flourishes in his after-torture role as the Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. I concur, even though, as Marty Kaplan suggests, impeaching Bybee may "leave unplumbed the mystery of his moral blindness, and maybe, awfully, ours." Not to impeach him seems even more complicit to me. To put all this behind us when we haven't even fully confronted it doesn't seem right, either. I'm not necessarily advocating prosecution of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I do wish our collective disgust with their leadership would make Cheney particularly STFU. Cheney continues to slam President Obama publicly. "'I don't think we have much to apologize for,'" he recently told Sean Hannity in an interview. "[Waterboarding] worked,'" he added.[Ummmmm......266 times on two people?!] "'It's been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives and preventing another mass casualty attack on the US.'" The rule of law doesn't count much with these people. Neither does morality.

And now, to a blog roll of other voices on the topic of torture and consequences:

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