The day after Christmas in 2002 Dana Priest and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported what, in retrospect, should have been a bombshell. The United States had officially abandoned all pretext of honoring human rights. After revealing that prisoners in Afghanistan were being “held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights,” they go on to say:
In the multifaceted global war on terrorism waged by the Bush administration, one of the most opaque — yet vital — fronts is the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. U.S. officials have said little publicly about the captives’ names, numbers or whereabouts, and virtually nothing about interrogation methods. But interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials — including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners — provide insight into how the U.S. government is prosecuting this part of the war.
The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.
While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.
That’s ten sources. Let’s take ten excerpts from this article.
1.
“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. “I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA..”
2.
According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”
3.
In some cases, highly trained CIA officers question captives through interpreters. In others, the intelligence agency undertakes a “false flag” operation using fake decor and disguises meant to deceive a captive into thinking he is imprisoned in a country with a reputation for brutality, when, in reality, he is still in CIA hands.
4.
According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often “softened up” by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner’s resistance.
5.
Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, “our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath.”
6.
Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that “pain control in wounded patients is a very subjective thing.”
7.
But five officials acknowledged, as one of them put it, “that sometimes a friendly country can be invited to ‘want’ someone we grab.” Then, other officials said, the foreign government will charge him with a crime of some sort.
One official who has had direct involvement in renditions said he knew they were likely to be tortured. “I . . . do it with my eyes open,” he said.
8.
“Based largely on the Central American human rights experience,” said Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general, “we don’t do torture, and we can’t countenance torture in terms of we can’t know of it.” But if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, “we can use the fruits of it.”
9.
Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a narrow definition of what counts as “knowing” that a suspect has been tortured. “If we’re not there in the room, who is to say?” said one official conversant with recent reports of renditions.
10.
After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt’s general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.
“You can be sure,” one Bush administration official said, “that we are not spending a lot of time on that now.”
The reality was even worse than Priest and Gellman described on December 26, 2002. In 2005, Priest would reveal the CIA’s black prison sites (for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006). It turned out that we didn’t outsource all the torture. Tell me again why we should just look forward?