Torture and Detention

by hilzoy

In the first part of this series, I described the torture of Jose Padilla, and started to try to explain it. I began by describing the “mosaic theory” of intelligence gathering, according to which one should try to collect little bits of intelligence and fit them together into a bigger picture. In the second part, I described the KUBARK manual, a 1963 CIA handbook that has been described as the ‘Bible of interrogation’, and argued that the techniques of interrogation it recommends have been used on Padilla and others.

The KUBARK manual recommends that interrogators first try to produce ‘regression’ in detainees, and then provide a rationalization that will allow them to escape by cooperating. The manual describes interrogations that have a clear endpoint: the subject cooperates. In my last post, I argued that since 9/11, interrogation has been freed from the constraints that normally circumscribe it: the legal system in the US, and the difficulty of holding detainees for long periods of time abroad. Under these conditions, merging the KUBARK approach to interrogation with the mosaic theory will produce an effort to induce more and more regression, without any clear end at all. In this post I want to try to explain what this means. Specifically, I want to argue for the following thesis:

That our government designed a system of interrogation whose express purpose was to inflict serious psychological damage on people we were interrogating.

Think about that.

Moreover: since this was a CIA manual, the people the CIA was trying to drive insane would have been kidnapped, not arrested and convicted. Therefore, as Publius notes, they might, for all we know, be completely innocent. (Especially since this was during the period when the very same CIA was hatching plans to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding conch shell, and to give him a diving suit “infected with a fungus that would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease.” Hardly their soberest moment.)

Anyways: let’s start with the term ‘regression’.

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by hilzoy

In the first part of this series, I described the torture of Jose Padilla, and started to answer the question: why is this happening? I described the “mosaic theory” of intelligence gathering — the view that one should try to collect tiny pieces of intelligence and fit them together into a bigger picture.

As I said in that post, the mosaic theory is fine in itself, but it does provide a reason to hold people indefinitely, since one can never know when they might produce some tiny snippet of information whose importance they might not even be aware of. And I quoted an FBI affidavit that suggested that the government regarded the mosaic theory in that way.

Nonetheless, the FBI’s use of the mosaic theory has always been limited. The FBI operates within the United States, and both the information it gathers and its treatment of prisoners, have to stand up in court. For this reason it can neither detain prisoners indefinitely, nor violate their rights while they are in custody.

The CIA is in a different situation entirely. It normally operates outside the US, and its goal is normally not criminal prosecution but intelligence gathering. For this reason it is not subject to the same strictures as the FBI or domestic police forces. It does not need to justify its detention of people to US courts, or to interrogate them in ways that would stand up in a court of law. It would be surprising if its interrogation procedures did not reflect these differences.

However, there are practical limits on what the CIA can do. One of the most important, for our purposes, is that it is hard for it to detain prisoners indefinitely. It would have to do so outside the US in order to avoid the requirements of the US legal system, and this means that its detentions either exist at the sufferance of other governments, whose continued acquiescence cannot be counted on, or rely heavily on secrecy, which cannot be counted on either. In either case, it’s hard to see how the CIA could count on being able to detain people — especially large numbers of people — indefinitely. Possibly the CIA has detained some people for long stretches of time, but these would have to be a small number of exceptional cases.

This means that the CIA has also had to operate within certain practical limits. I imagine that there are many fewer limits on what the CIA can do in a particular case than there are for the FBI — to my knowledge, the President cannot order the FBI to assassinate someone, for instance. But the CIA cannot detain any significant number of people for long stretches of time without risking discovery and the compromise of its operations. And that means that, for very different reasons, neither our domestic law enforcement agencies nor our intelligence services could seriously consider the possibility of detaining people in perpetuity.

After 9/11, however, the administration decided that this had changed, and it came up with several ways of detaining people indefinitely: prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and elsewhere, and the idea of designating people as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ to avoid both US law and the Geneva Conventions. In so doing, it created enough of a legal rationale that agencies that had always seen themselves as bound by the law had some reason for thinking that they could go along with things like the indefinite detention of a US citizen against whom no charges had been filed, and who had no access to counsel.

This created a possibility that neither domestic law enforcement agencies nor the intelligence community had needed to take seriously before: the possibility of detaining large numbers of people for as long as necessary, without having to answer to the US courts, foreign governments, or anyone else. I suspect that the fact that they had not needed to take this possibility seriously before meant that they had not thought it through seriously: earlier, the question how one would handle the indefinite detention of large numbers of people would have been just idle speculation.

Moreover, the point of this detention, after 9/11, was partly to get dangerous people into custody and off the street, but also, and importantly, to gather intelligence. And this fact, I think, meant that the interrogations used on detainees would have been based on practices used in the intelligence community, not domestic law enforcement. This is the kind of interrogation that the intelligence community has always done, and it stands to reason that its procedure would have been adopted. (Anyone remember all those news stories about the FBI scrambling to adjust to the post-9/11 world of intelligence gathering as opposed to law enforcement?)

So: what were those CIA procedures?

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by hilzoy

Some stories are hard for me to write about. One appeared last month, and then again last week: the story of the torture of Jose Padilla. Much of the description of his treatment comes from a brief (pdf) filed by Padilla’s attorneys last October. I’ve transcribed the part of the brief that describes Padilla’s treatment below the fold, along with some further remarks.

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by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and helped organize the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, retired from the military on Monday, Pentagon officials said. (…)

At his retirement ceremony Monday, General Miller received the Distinguished Service Medal, which is awarded for exceptionally commendable service in a position of great responsibility, Army officials said.”

From the Code of Federal Regulations:

“The Distinguished Service Medal, established by Act of Congress on July 9, 1918, is awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity with the Army of the United States, shall have distinguished himself or herself by exceptionally meritorious service to the Government in a duty of great responsibility (Fig. 1). The performance must be such as to merit recognition for service which is clearly exceptional. Superior performance of normal duty will not alone justify an award of this decoration.”

From Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, on the corruption of the principle of monarchy, which is honour:

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by Katherine

(second in a series. Previous posts: 1)

Mohabet Khan’s CSRT begins on page 14 of set 32 of the transcripts.  Khan is Afghan. He was arrested on December 11, 2002, at a place called the Samoud compound, which was run by some sort of opponent of the US or the Karzai government–maybe a Taliban supporter, maybe just some nasty local warlord–the transcript is not clear on this point. He was 18 at the time of his CSRT, so he would have been about 16 years old at the time of his arrest.

He told the tribunal that

I didn’t go to the Samoud compound on my own will. Someone took me by force; he broke my arm and he beat on me until he took me to the compound. I didn’t go on my own will….

we like the Americans, we were working with the Americans and this is what I want to say. We are poor people but they took me by force. We are happy that the Americans came because we know that they are building our country. We do not want to fight against them because we are not crazy….At the time of the Taliban, they put me in jail for three months. They beat on me, they hurt me, they broke my arm and they beat on my back. The Taliban oppressed us, beat on us, and we lost our dignity to them. They mostly oppressed the whole village.

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by Katherine

(first of a series)

I have been doing a research project which involved skimming through thousands of pages of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals ("CSRTs") that the U.S. military holds for prisoners in Guantanamo. One thing I’ve been struck by is the number of prisoners who allege that they were previously imprisoned, tortured, or had family members killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan or (in a few cases) Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

This should not have actually been all that surprising. I knew we had picked up and were still holding a number of ordinary Afghans along with actual Taliban and al Qaeda members, and of course I knew that the Taliban did awful things to a lot of people in Afghanistan. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t put these two things together until I started reading through the transcripts. I’ve compiled some of the excerpts from these prisoners’ hearings, which I’m going to post in a short series.

This is not exhaustive, since I only started taking notes on these cases about halfway through, but I’m going to err on the side of including cases. I thought these were stories worth telling. Obviously, I can’t be certain of their accuracy. I found most of them quite credible, and in some cases there’s multiple sources telling the same story, but you’ll have to judge for yourself.

If you’re okay with whatever the United States does to prisoners as long as you can tell yourself, "hey, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were worse," you may find these descriptions reassuring (I would hope they’d at least make people think twice about "Club Gitmo" bumper stickers, but of course the people who buy those bumper stickers would not read this site or a CSRT transcript in a million years). These detainees are in an excellent position to compare the prisons of the United States and its enemies, and they definitely prefer ours.

Needless to say, I don’t find that very reassuring. I don’t think that’s the proper standard of judgment, and God knows President Bush doesn’t go around justifying his foreign policy by arguing that "our prisons aren’t quite as bad as the Taliban’s or Saddam Hussein’s." He says things like this:

This is going to be freedom’s century.

There are a handful of men sitting in cells in Cuba tonight for whom those words, if they could hear or understand them, would sound like a cruel joke.

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by Katherine

Today’s New York Times has a front page article about torture by a special forces unit called Task Force 6-26 at a secret prison near the Baghdad airport. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but here are some notable excerpts:

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

….

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit’s precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force’s name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

…..

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

And one final excerpt:

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy’s Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit’s operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein’s bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

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by hilzoy

Jane Mayer has an extraordinary article in the New Yorker today. It’s on the efforts of Alberto J. Mora, then the general counsel of the Navy, to work against the interrogation policies detailed in the various ‘torture memos’. It’s worth reading in its entirety, and I won’t try to summarize it. I will, however, highlight a few themes below the fold.

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by hilzoy

John Winthrop (wonderful original spelling here):

“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. (…) For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

(…) “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”

Sydney Morning Herald:

“MORE photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. (…)

Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.”

One is below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Via Marty Lederman at Balkinization: On Friday, the President signed the law including the McCain and Graham Amendments. However, he did so with several large caveats. I’m going to put most of this post below the fold, since it’s long. However, here’s Marty Lederman’s short version:

“I reserve the constitutional right to waterboard when it will “assist” in protecting the American people from terrorist attacks.”

And my even shorter, Cartmanesque version:

“Respect Mah Authoritah!!!!!”

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by hilzoy

There’s a new story about rendition in the Washington Post. Specifically, it’s about cases in which we kidnapped people, held them incommunicado, and in some cases transferred them to the intelligence services to be tortured, because we thought they were terrorists — but oops! we were wrong:

“The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials. One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.”

I had always thought that the possible consequences of giving someone a bad grade didn’t go beyond minor unpleasantness*. Apparently, I need to think again.

Here’s how it happened:

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by hilzoy

From ABC (h/t Katherine):

“Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors.

They say they are revealing specific details of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corrobrated by public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General’s report. (…)

The CIA sources described a list of six “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda’s toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

“The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.”

Great. And, as others have said before, it doesn’t even work:

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