Takeover, page 28
The Bush-Cheney legal team’s reinterpretation of the Convention Against Torture was the only real piece of information that came out of Gonzales’s confirmation hearings. Democrats complained that the White House counsel had evaded their questions and refused to provide information to which Congress was entitled, but their minority numbers rendered them powerless to do anything about it. On February 3, 2005, the Senate confirmed Gonzales to be attorney general by a vote of 60–36.
But the claim that the torture treaty didn’t apply to prisoners overseas was enough to set off one of the most dramatic fights over presidential power of the Bush-Cheney era—a fight that would be led by one of the most prominent Republicans in Congress, Senator John McCain of Arizona. A Vietnam War hero, McCain had survived torture himself as a seven-year prisoner of war at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” prison. Mc-Cain was also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he had been shown classified details of the detainee operations, including searing pictures from Abu Ghraib that never leaked to the public. He was aware of the allegations of abusive treatment of detainees at Guantánamo and Bagram Air Base—as well as several open homicide investigations for prisoners who died while in U.S. custody. McCain had the clout, the image, and the moral authority to push back against the administration, and he made it his mission that year to do so.
3.
Whether torture and other coercive interrogation techniques actually work is a separate question from whether the president has the power to authorize the harsh treatment of wartime prisoners in defiance of laws and treaties. But the stakes are so dramatic that it is worth briefly pausing to examine why the military’s professional interrogation experts, who after 9/11 were vastly outnumbered by untrained ad hoc interrogators, believed that the coercive interrogation policy unleashed by the Bush-Cheney legal team’s theories was incompetent and a terrible mistake. These experts were opposed to harsh interrogations not primarily because they felt such tactics were immoral and illegal. (Very few professional military interrogators are bleeding-heart liberals.) Instead, the skeptics were focused on pragmatic results: extracting useful information from captured jihadists. They knew that there is no scientific evidence that coercive techniques produce information that is better than, or even as good as, the information obtained by other approaches, as the government’s own Intelligence Science Board, a panel of experts established in August 2002 to advise the intelligence community, later concluded.11
In movies and shows such as Fox television’s 24, Hollywood has fostered a simplistic image of torture: Tough good guys beat up bad guys, and then the bad guys give up valuable information. When torture was debated in the United States after 9/11, this image was largely what sprang to mind among the public. But physical torture of this type is not what the Bush-Cheney administration signed off on. While some interrogations clearly got out of control, the official policy aimed at a far more subtle form of torture that left no physical scars.
The techniques approved after 9/11 included a range of disorienting and debilitating ordeals, including stripping prisoners naked; subjecting them to prolonged sleep disruption and deprivation; bombarding cells with loud music and grating sounds; leaving bright lights on in a cell twenty-four hours a day; keeping cells stifling hot or freezing cold; shackling prisoners in painful “stress” positions for many hours; exploiting phobias such as fierce dogs; and—in the case of the CIA—waterboarding. Accounts by detainees and former interrogators indicate that interrogators also sometimes pushed religious buttons, desecrating the Koran and tormenting them sexually. Typically, several techniques were piled atop one another in carefully planned sessions that sometimes lasted weeks or months. In addition, prisoners were isolated from any contact with the outside world in order to foster a relationship of complete “dependency and trust” with their interrogators, a psychological state that would set in “only after [a detainee] has perceived that help is not on the way,” as Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in a court filing explaining why Jose Padilla could not be allowed to see a defense lawyer. The rationale behind this approach was that if detainees were filled with exhaustion, fear, hopelessness, and confusion, then their sources of inner strength—their sense of personal identity, their ability to process what was happening to them, their religious fervor—would erode, and they would stop holding out on providing the critical information they were presumed to be harboring.
This coercive system of interrogation was put into widespread use following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Eyewitness accounts put it all over—at Guantánamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in CIA prisons, and, according to Padilla’s lawyers, in a military brig on U.S. soil. There were clearly hundreds of U.S. officials employing these techniques simultaneously around the globe. Yet before 9/11, the United States had no training program for teaching officials to interrogate prisoners in this way. What the nation instead had was a special program that trains troops at potential risk of being captured far behind enemy lines—primarily pilots, who might get shot down, and Special Forces—in how to “Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape.” SERE instructors put trainees through the types of torments described above in order to prepare them to resist brutal interrogations if they are captured by a foreign enemy who does not obey the Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, there was a sudden widespread need for interrogating detainees, and the president had declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terrorism. In that context, troops and agents who had been through SERE School began inflicting on prisoners the techniques they had experienced in a controlled training setting. And in some cases the military pulled in SERE School instructors—who were not real interrogators with advanced degrees in psychology and real-world experience in questioning prisoners from other cultures, but rather noncommissioned officers taught to portray interrogators in simulated scenarios involving American trainees—and put them to work as real interrogators. In a June 2004 press conference after the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example, General James T. Hill, then the head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversaw Guantánamo, remarked that prior to January 2002, his operation “never had to deal with this kind of strategic interrogation business.” As Guantánamo struggled to begin systematically interrogating hundreds of prisoners, Hill said, officials tapped the “SERE School and developed a list of techniques.” Hill added that he had been assured by the Pentagon that such techniques were “legally consistent with our laws.”12
Professional interrogation experts were aghast at this policy. Because of their expertise, they fully understood something that the Special Forces troops, the SERE instructors, and the top generals and policy makers did not understand: where SERE techniques came from, and what they were really for.
SERE School was a by-product of the Korean War. During the war, Communist forces began producing elaborate propaganda films of American pilots who had been shot down and captured “confessing” to such heinous crimes as deliberately targeting civilians with chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. government knew that the confessions were false and that they had been coerced, but the prisoners of war did not seem to have been physically abused before making the “confessions.” After the war, when the pilots were returned, they all told the same story: Chinese interrogators, working with the North Koreans, had put them through a series of sustained torments—the same list described above—until their minds had bent and they had made the false confessions.
This revelation about Communist “brainwashing” techniques had a series of consequences. In popular culture, it filtered into such movies as 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. In the intelligence community, the CIA spent millions studying the techniques to see whether it could make use of them; it concluded in a 1963 interrogation manual that the coercive approach was not very helpful outside the context of producing false propaganda because “under sufficient pressure subjects usually yield but their ability to recall and communicate information accurately is as impaired as the will to resist.”13 (The interrogation manual suggests that it might have one extremely limited application—getting a suspected KGB double agent to admit his identity—but it is silent on the critical question of how a questioner can tell whether the confession is true or false.) And in the military, the revelation prompted the creation, in 1955, of SERE School—a program whose sole purpose was to prepare American troops to resist such treatment so that they never again produced false-propaganda confessions. The program’s origins survive in its motto: “Return With Honor.”
Almost half a century passed between the establishment of SERE School and 9/11, which prompted the sudden application of SERE techniques as part of a widespread American interrogation program. Over time, a subtle but critical distinction had been lost by all but the true professionals who studied and conducted strategic interrogation for a living. Neither SERE trainers, who run scenarios by following the instructions in basic military manuals, nor their Special Forces trainees understood that the coercive techniques used in the program were designed to make prisoners lose touch with reality so that they will falsely confess to what their captors want to hear, not for extracting accurate and reliable information. “People who defend this say ‘we can make them talk,’ ” said Colonel Steve Kleinman, the former head of the air force’s strategic interrogation program. “Yes, but what are they saying? The key is that most of the training is to try to resist the attempts to make you comply and do things such as create propaganda, to make these statements in either written or videotaped form. But to get people to comply, to do what you want them to do, even though it’s not the truth—that is a whole different dynamic than getting people to provide accurate, useful intelligence.”14
Dr. Michael Gelles, the navy’s top forensic psychologist, who raised alarms about Guantánamo in December 2002, explained why coercive interrogations are bad policy. Abuse, Gelles said, inevitably introduces false information into the intelligence system because people will say anything to get relief from suffering and fear. Making matters worse, interrogators never know when to stop increasing the pressure because they don’t know what their prisoners know and don’t know; if a prisoner knows seven things but the interrogator believes he knows ten, then the interrogator will keep pushing until the prisoner has said ten things. And unless the prisoner is killed or locked up for life, eventually he will be released to tell the world what happened to him, undermining America’s moral authority. Finally, Gelles said, inflicting pain and humiliation on a prisoner destroys the opportunity to build rapport with him in order to persuade—or trick, browbeat, insult, confront, challenge, or cajole—him into saying what he knows, the technique that professional, trained interrogation experts overwhelmingly prefer.
Gelles said his skepticism about coercive interrogation tactics approved by Pentagon policy makers was quietly supported by many government specialists, including fellow psychologists, intelligence analysts, linguists, and interrogators who have experience extracting information from captured Islamist militants and other enemies. “We do not believe—not just myself, but others who have to remain unnamed—that coercive methods with this adversary are effective,” said Gelles. “If the goal is to get ‘information,’ then using coercive techniques may be effective. But if the goal is to get reliable and accurate information, looking at this adversary, rapport-building is the best approach.” Gelles added, “Why would you terrify them with a dog? So they’ll tell you anything to get the dog out of the room?”15
False confessions only exacerbate things, given how many prisoners are unlikely to be able to offer a true confession. For example, a Red Cross report in 2004 estimated that between 70 percent and 90 percent of military detainees in Iraq had been arrested by mistake in the confusion of the insurgency. That same year, the head of interrogations at Guantánamo said that the majority of the detainees there had no useful information. Hundreds of prisoners there were later released—including three British men who under duress had admitted to being in a video with Osama bin Laden but who were later cleared when the British government determined that they had been in England at the time the video was shot in Afghanistan. One of the three, Shafiq Rasul, later explained why he had falsely confessed: “Because of the previous five or six weeks of being held in isolation and being taken to interrogation for hours on end, short shackled and being treated in that way. I was going out of my mind and didn’t know what was going on. I was desperate for it to end and therefore eventually I just gave in and admitted to being in the video.”16
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is strong evidence that the violent interrogation tactics muddied American intelligence files with bad information. One of the worst examples was a Libyan trainer for Al Qaeda named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi. His CIA interrogators believed that he might have knowledge of Al Qaeda involvement with the Iraqi government under then-dictator Saddam Hussein. Libbi protested that he knew of no Iraq connection. According to ABC News, Libbi was then subjected to increasingly harsh abuse for several weeks. He finally broke after being water-boarded and then forced to stand naked in a cold cell all night and doused regularly with cold water. Seeking to please his interrogators, Libbi told them what they wanted to hear, admitting that Iraq had offered to train Al Qaeda operatives in chemical and biological weapons. Libbi’s statements became a key basis of the Bush-Cheney administration’s claim, in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s prewar United Nations Security Council presentation, that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda: “Al Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said. “… I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaida. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Libbi later recanted his statements, and the CIA determined that Libbi “had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment,”17 according to ABC News.
Another particularly troubling example is the case of Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, the Saudi who was captured in a suspected safe house in Pakistan in March 2002. Zubaydah was described in public by Bush the following month as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” But, as the investigative journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, CIA analysts came to the conclusion that Zubaydah was little more than a travel agent for the organization who was kept out of the inner circle and given no access to secret operational details. And there was a good reason Zubaydah had not risen higher in the organization, Suskind reported: He was schizophrenic. Zubaydah’s diary, seized at the time of his arrest, was written in the voice of three different people, each with a distinct personality.
Nonetheless, Zubaydah was water-boarded, beaten, threatened, subjected to mock executions, and bombarded with continuous deafening noise and harsh lighting. Under such duress, the already mentally ill prisoner said yes over and over again when asked if Al Qaeda was interested in bombing shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, and water systems, Suskind reported. After each vague affirmation, the “information” was quickly cabled back to Washington, where it ended up in the president’s daily briefing and in FBI warnings that invariably leaked to the media. Many of the breathless and panicked warnings of Al Qaeda plots that marked the Bush-Cheney administration’s first term, with its periodic orange alerts that came to nothing, came from Zubaydah’s interrogation.18
Gelles, Kleinman, and other interrogation experts tried to raise alarms internally about the dangers and ineffectiveness of the SERE-style coercive techniques, but they were ignored and threatened. Civilian decision makers inside the Bush-Cheney administration viewed such criticisms as an attack on its claims of presidential power. And they dismissed the complaints as nothing more than another example of the misguided worries of a “law enforcement” mind-set too focused on gathering evidence that could be used in a civilian courtroom to understand that different rules apply in wartime.
4.
On July 24, 2005, John McCain introduced an amendment to the annual bill in which Congress authorizes the Pentagon’s work. His amendment was cosponsored by Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, Republican of Virginia, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a reservist military lawyer. The amendment made clear that military interrogators could not exceed the limits set out in the Army Field Manual for the treatment of detainees—limits written specifically to comply with the Geneva Conventions—no matter what their superiors, leading up to the commander in chief, might purport to authorize. The amendment also made clear that all U.S. officials—including CIA agents—were prohibited from inflicting not just torture but all forms of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” on anyone in their custody, no matter where in the world the prisoner was held.
The text of McCain’s proposal came to be known as the McCain Amendment or the McCain Torture Ban, and it would be the subject of a fierce wrestling match between the senator and the White House for months to come. Alarmed, Cheney went to Congress to lobby against the measure, meeting privately with Warner and Graham, among others. At Cheney’s request, Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee pulled the Pentagon authorization bill from the floor to prevent the Senate from passing it with McCain’s language attached.
