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Admin Behind Torture Marc Danner.com | February 1, 2005
His books include Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travel’s Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recoun t(2004) and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books . He is also Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley , where he directs the Goldman Forum , and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights, Democracy and Journalism at Bard College. NY Times | January 6, 2005 At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety. When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they have never really stopped. However much these words have about them the ring of accusation, they must by now be accepted as fact. From Red Cross reports, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R. Schlesinger's Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other government and independent investigations, we have in our possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment - to use a phrase of the Red Cross - "tantamount to torture." So far as we know, American intelligence officers, determined after Sept. 11 to "take the gloves off," began by torturing Qaeda prisoners. They used a number of techniques: "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is stripped, shackled and submerged in water until he begins to lose consciousness, and other forms of near suffocation; sleep and sensory deprivation; heat and light and dietary manipulation; and "stress positions." Eventually, these practices "migrated," in the words of the Schlesinger report, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where for a time last spring the marvel of digital technology allowed Americans to see what their soldiers were doing to prisoners in their name. "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more...When I asked the M.P.'s what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion...the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." This is a fairly mild example when judged against the accounts of the "abuses" that have entered the public record. I put quotation marks around the word "abuses" because most of these acts - as the F.B.I. agent acknowledged ("the interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment") - were in fact procedures, which would not have been possible without policies that had been approved by administration officials. In the next few days we are likely to hear how Mr. Gonzales recommended strongly, against the arguments of the secretary of state and military lawyers, that prisoners in Afghanistan be denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions. We are also likely to hear how, under Mr. Gonzales's urging, lawyers in the Department of Justice contrived - when confronted with the obstacle that the United States had undertaken, by treaty and statute, to make torture illegal - simply to redefine the word to mean procedures that would produce pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure." By this act of verbal legerdemain, interrogation techniques like water-boarding that plainly constituted torture suddenly became something less than that. But what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand. On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Mr. Gonzales be confirmed. The system of torture has, after all, survived its disclosure. We have entered a new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture." And there the story ends. At present, our government, controlled largely by one party only intermittently harried by a timorous opposition, is unable to mete out punishment or change policy, let alone adequately investigate its own war crimes. And, as administration officials clearly expect, and senators of both parties well understand, most Americans - the Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a repellent subject - are generally content to take the president at his word. The general's concerns are understandable. The war in Iraq and the war on terrorism are ultimately political in character. Victory depends in the end not on technology or on overwhelming force but on political persuasion. By using torture, the country relinquishes the very ideological advantage - the promotion of democracy, freedom and human rights - that the president has so persistently claimed is America's most powerful weapon in defeating Islamic extremism. One does not reach democracy, or freedom, through torture. By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us. True, that miserable man who pulled out his hair as he lay on the floor at Guantánamo may eventually tell his interrogators what he knows, or what they want to hear. But for America, torture is self-defeating; for a strong country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. After Mr. Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order and propriety - will be very long. Torture will belong to us all. New York Review of Books | October 7, 2004 Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (The Schlesinger Report) AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade —President George W. Bush, —Sheik Mohammed Bashir, They have long since taken their place in the gallery of branded images, as readily recognizable in much of the world as Marilyn struggling with her billowing dress or Michael dunking his basketball: Hooded Man, a dark-caped figure tottering on a box, supplicant arms outstretched, wires trailing from his fingers; and Leashed Man, face convulsed in humiliation above his leather collar, naked body twisted at the feet of the American female in camouflage pants who gazes down at him without expression, holding the leash casually in hand. The ubiquity of these images in much of the world suggests not only their potency but their usefulness and their adaptability. For the first of the many realities illuminated by the Global War on Terror— or the GWOT, as the authors of the latest reports listed here designate it—is the indisputable fact that much of the world sees America rather differently from the way Americans see themselves. Out of the interlocking scandals and controversies symbolized by Hooded Man and Leashed Man, the pyramids of naked bodies, the snarling dogs, and all the rest, and known to the world by the collective name of Abu Ghraib, one can extract two "master narratives," both dependent on the power and mutability of the images themselves. The first is that of President Bush, who presented the photographs as depicting "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops, who dishonored our country and disregarded our values"—behavior that, the President insisted, "does not represent America." And the aberrant, outlandish character of what the photographs show—the nudity, the sadism, the pornographic imagery—seemed to support this "few bad apples" argument, long the classic defense of states accused of torture. The facts, however, almost from day one, did not: the Red Cross report, the Army's own Taguba report, even the photographs themselves, some of which depicted military intelligence soldiers assisting in abuses they supposedly knew nothing about—all strongly suggested that the images were the brutal public face of behavior that involved many more people than the seven military police who were quickly charged. The new reports not only decisively prove what was long known, widening the circle of direct blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib to nearly fifty people, including military intelligence soldiers and officers—although subsequent disclosures suggest the number is at least twice that. More important, the reports suggest how procedures that "violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws" in fact had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation rooms in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and ultimately in decisions made by high officials in Washington. As General George R. Fay writes, in a section of his report that was classified and kept from the public, According to General Fay, these "policies and practices" included, among others, "removing clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation." What we know as "the Abu Ghraib scandal" has in fact become an increasingly complex story about how Americans in Afghanistan and Cuba and Iraq came to commit acts, with the apparent approval of the highest officials, that clearly constitute torture. The images themselves, however, having helped force open the door to broader questions of how the Bush administration has treated prisoners in the War on Terror, are now helping as well to block that door; for the images, by virtue of their inherent grotesque power, strongly encourage the view that "acts of brutality and purposeless sadism," which clearly did occur, lay at the heart of Abu Ghraib. Even public officials charged with investigating the scandal—these are the fourth and fifth full reports on the matter, with at least four more to come—at the same time seek to contain it by promoting the view that Abu Ghraib in its essence was about individual misbehavior and sadism: "Animal House on the night shift," as former secretary of defense James Schlesinger characterized it, even as his own report showed in detail that it was a great deal more. The second "master narrative" of Abu Ghraib is that of the Muslim preacher Sheik Mohammed Bashir, quoted above, and many other Arabs and Muslims who point to the scandal's images as perfect symbols of the subjugation and degradation that the American occupiers have inflicted on Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. In this sense the Hooded Man and the Leashed Man fill a need, serving as powerful brand images advertising a preexisting product. Imagine, for a moment, an Islamic fundamentalist trying to build a transnational movement by arguing that today "nations are attacking Muslims like people attacking a plate of food," and by exhorting young Muslims to rise up and follow the Prophet's words: For such an Islamic fundamentalist, quoting these words to give legitimacy to his call for jihad against the United States—as Osama bin Laden did in his famous 1998 fatwa "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" [2] —what better image of Arab ill-treatment and oppression could be devised than that of a naked Arab man lying at the feet of a short-haired American woman in camouflage garb, who stares immodestly at her Arab pet while holding him by the throat with a leash? Had bin Laden sought to create a powerful trademark image for his international product of global jihad, he could scarcely have done better hiring the cleverest advertising firm on Madison Avenue. And not only are these photographs perfect masterpieces of propaganda; they have, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, the considerable advantage of being true. Or, to put it another way: if the Hooded Man and the Leashed Man and the naked human pyramids and the rest shocked Americans because of their perverse undermining of the normal, they shocked Iraqis and other Arabs because the images seemed to confirm so vividly and precisely a reality that many had suspected and feared but had tried not to believe.
1. On first setting eyes on the Hooded Man in April, I thought instantly of this joke, which I'd heard in a Baghdad street six months before. At that moment, the insurgency, wholly unanticipated by American officers on the ground and stubbornly denied by their political masters in Washington, had been gaining strength for months. [3] Enormous suicide bombings had killed hundreds, had driven the United Nations, the Red Cross, and many other international organizations from the country, and had turned Baghdad into a city of stone, its public buildings and hotels and many of its roads encircled by massive concrete blast barriers and its American occupation government wholly inaccessible behind the barbed-wire and machine-gun nests of the grim fortress called the Green Zone. The only Americans most Iraqis saw were the sunglasses-wearing machine-gunners atop the up-armored Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles that barreled through traffic several times a day. These patrols were coming under increasingly frequent attack, usually from the ubiquitous "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs, which insurgents concealed in garbage cans or behind telephone poles. By November the number of attacks against Americans had doubled, to nearly forty a day. In May 2003, the month President Bush declared that "major combat" was over, forty-one Americans died in Iraq; in November, six months later, 110 died. And by and large, as was clear in Iraq at the time, and as these reports amply confirm, the American officers had very little idea who was killing their troops and had become increasingly desperate to find out. General Fay writes in his report that Representatives of the Red Cross, who visited Abu Graib nearly thirty times in this period, offered a more vivid account of "cordon and capture": In this way the Americans arrested thousands of Iraqis—or, as Schlesinger puts it, "they reverted to rounding up any and all suspicious-looking persons —all too often including women and children. The flood of incoming detainees contrasted sharply with the trickle of released individuals." Soon the population of the US military's detention system approached ten thousand and very few Iraqis did not have some family member or friend who had gained intimate familiarity with American "cordon and capture." When Sheik Bashir complained to the Sunni faithful at the Um al-Oura mosque that Friday in June of the occupying soldiers "abusing women, children, men, and the old men and women whom they arrested randomly and without any guilt," he had no need to point to photographs. In Baghdad and Falluja eight months before, I had heard the same bitter complaints, not only about the brutality of the tactics but about the obvious randomness of the arrests, which General Fay now confirms: Among the many disadvantages of these nighttime sweeps as a tactic for fighting an insurgency was that prisoners scooped up in this way soon flooded the system, inundating the very prisons where detainees were meant to be "exploited for actionable intelligence." And having filled Abu Ghraib largely with Iraqis of "no intelligence value"—whose families in most cases had no way to confirm where they were—the overwhelmed American command could not devise a way to get them out again, especially when faced with the strong opposition of those who had arrested them in the first place: Major General Fast, the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, described the attitude of the combat commanders as, "We wouldn't have detained them if we wanted them released." A sensible attitude, one might think, but as General Fay points out, the combat soldiers, in their zeal to apprehend Iraqis who might conceivably be supporting those shadowy figures attacking American troops, neglected to filter out those who clearly didn't belong in prison. The capturing soldiers The system was self-defeating and, not surprisingly, "interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib suffered from the effects of a broken detention operations system." Indeed, these reports are full of "broken systems" and "under-resourced" commands, from Abu Ghraib itself, a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms, and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of seventy-five to one, all the way up to the command staff of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which lacked, among other vital resources, two thirds of its assigned officers. In Iraq, as the Schlesinger report puts it bluntly, "there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations." And though they don't say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops—admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public—decided to "tough it out," at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to "liberate." All told, the reports offer a vivid and damning picture of a war that is understaffed, undersupplied, underresourced, and, above all, undermanned. In this sense Abu Ghraib is at once a microcosm of the Iraq war in all its failures and the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, warning of what is to come. In fighting a guerrilla war, the essential weapon is not tanks or helicopters but intelligence, and the single essential tool to obtain it is reliable political support among the population. In such a war, arresting and imprisoning thousands of civilians in murkily defined "cordon and capture" raids is a blatantly self-defeating tactic, and an occupying army's resort to it means not only that the occupier lacks the political support necessary to find and destroy the insurgents but that it has been forced by the insurgents to adopt tactics that will further lessen that support and create still more insurgents. It is, in short, a strategy of desperation and, in the end, a strategy of weakness. By late summer 2003—a time when Bush administration officials had expected to start "drawing down" American forces "in theater" until a stabilization force of no more than 30,000 Americans remained in Iraq—the US military, even with 130,000 troops, was losing the initiative to an insurgency that seemed to have come out of nowhere and, after carrying out its increasingly bloody IED attacks and suicide bombings, regularly managed to disappear back into the same place. Officials in Washington were growing worried and impatient, and intelligence officers in Iraq were feeling the pressure. In mid-August, a captain in military intelligence (MI) sent his colleagues an e-mail—recently shown to me—in which, clearly responding to an earlier request from interrogators, he sought to define "unlawful combatants," distinguishing them from "lawful combatants [who] receive protections of the Geneva Convention and gain combat immunity for their warlike acts." After promising to provide "an ROE"— rules of engagement—"that addresses the treatment of enemy combatants, specifically, unprivileged belligerents," the captain asks the interrogators for "input...concerning what their special interrogation knowledge base is and more importantly, what techniques would they feel would be effective techniques." Then, reminding the intelligence people to "provide Interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03," the captain signs off this way: On August 31 Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the US detention camp in Guantánamo, would arrive, ordered to Iraq "to review current Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence." He and his team would bring with them news and advice drawn from the American government's and the US military's latest thinking on interrogation. For those at Abu Ghraib charged with "breaking" prisoners, help was on the way.
2. "In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown." [5] -The New York Times , May 13, 2004 In the matter of Americans' use of torture there are, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the things we know, the things we know we don't know, and the things we don't know we don't know. We know, for example, that much of the 9/11 Commission report's meticulous account of the unfolding of the World Trade Center plot comes from secret interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other "high value detainees." We know we don't know where he and his score or so fellows are being held—and neither, reportedly, does President Bush, who "informed the CIA that he did not want to know where they are" [6] — though it is likely that the CIA is holding them at a secret military base somewhere in Asia, perhaps in Afghanistan, Thailand, or even Jordan. We know we don't know specifically what "graduated levels of force" means, though we have a general idea: We do know, finally, what "water-boarding" is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958: The Latin American version, called el submarino , uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks linking the two, so that when the interrogators lift the table, the prisoner's head is submerged. Here is the account of Irina Martinez, an A rgentine student activist, who was arrested at her parents' house in Buenos Aires in 1977, during the Dirty War: Water-boarding, as those Americans who used the metho d on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other "high value detainees" surely know, is very effective in inducing fear; as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, "There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe." It is most effective, as these examples show, when combined with other techniques, including stress positions, sensory and sleep deprivation, and direct "physical coercion," or beatings. We don't know precisely when the officers of the CIA began applying such "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the agency calls them, to their "high-value detainees," but we can see signs of the trend toward using these techniques very soon after the attacks of September 11, and also signs of strong interest in learning immediately the results of interrogation coming from high up in the security bureaucracies, including from the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. As early as October 2001, after the capture of John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer interrogating Lindh that "the secretary of defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted." [10] Lindh's interrogators stripped the young American, who had been shot in the foot, taped him to a stretcher, propped it up against a shipping container in the cold open air of Afghanistan, and proceeded to interrogate him in marathon sessions that went on for days. According to documents that were leaked to a Los Angeles Times reporter, Lindh's responses during these interrogation sessions were cabled back to the Defense Department as often as every hour. During the coming months and years, as the United States gradually built a network of secret and semisecret prisons in Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan; Guantánamo, Cuba; Qatar and Diego Garcia, as well as Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper, Iraq, this direct attention from senior officials in Washington has remained constant. As Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the head of the Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba in December 2003, "Sir, I was told a couple times...that some of the reporting was getting read by Rumsfeld, folks out of Langley [CIA headquarters], some very senior folks." For Jordan, that meant a lot of pressure to produce. It also meant that what went on at Abu Ghraib and other interrogation centers was very much the focus of the most senior officials in Washington.
3. In an earlier article in these pages, [11] I wrote about the case of an Iraqi man who had spent time in Abu Ghraib and had given a sworn statement, after his release, to investigators of the US Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). This statement had been leaked, along with those of twelve other detainees, to The Washington Post , which posted them on its Web site. Here now is General Fay's full account of what happened to the anonymous prisoner, and his analysis of who was responsible: What is interesting here is not simply that General Fay confirms the account of Detainee-07 but the strange Kabuki dance the general performs when he comes to the point of assigning responsibility. During a period of about two months, military police beat the detainee savagely into unconsciousness, ripped his ear, urinated on him, "high-cuffed" him to the bars of his cell for hours so that the skin of his hand split and oozed pus, and sodomized him with a police baton—to give only a brief summary of what, in the detainee's statement, is an exhaustive and exhausting catalog of imaginative and extremely disgusting tortures carried out over many days. Now during this time, as General Fay meticulously confirms, military intelligence soldiers interrogated Detainee-07 on at least six occasions, as befits a prisoner judged of "potentially high value." General Fay, however, finds here only a "circumstantial connection to MI," concluding that the intelligence officers "should have been aware of what was being done to this detainee." The problem here is that it is quite obvious from the report that military intelligence officers were "aware of what was being done to the detainee" —indeed, that they ordered it. Throughout the general's patient recounting of his forty-four "serious incidents"— his careful sifting of them into categories ("Nudity/Humiliation," "Assault," "Sexual Assault," "Use of Dogs," "The 'Hole,'" and "Other"), his determination to classify them according to responsibility ("MI," "MP," "MI/MP," or "UNK," for unknown), and his dogged effort to separate what he calls "violent/sexual abuse incidents" (which is to say those, generally speaking, committed by military police, which were not a matter of policy) from "misinterpretation/confusion incidents" (those committed by military intelligence soldiers, who, however, were "confused" about what was permitted at Abu Ghraib as a matter of policy)—throughout all this runs a tone of faintly hysterical absurdity. T hroughout we see distinctions that are not distinctions at all, and that recall nothing so much as the darkest passages of Catch-22 ; for example, this passage, on "sleep adjustment": Abu Ghraib was a mess; training was deficient; the chain of command was dysfunctional. But that military intelligence soldiers would have had no idea what was being done to prisoners whom they spent hours and hours each day interrogating is simply not credible. What is credible, or at least comprehensible, is the subtle bureaucratic strategy that has been adopted in these reports, and which has been visible, indeed obvious, from the moment the story of Abu Ghraib broke. For at that moment, in late April, a bureaucratic and political war erupted over torture and its implications, and over Abu Ghraib and how broad-reaching and damaging the scandal that bore its name was going to be. On one side were those within the administration, many of whom had opposed the use of "enhanced interrogation tactics" from the beginning, including many in the judge advocate generals' offices of the various military services and career lawyers in the Justice Department, who for the last four months have been leaking a veritable flood of documents detailing legally questionable and politically damaging administration decisions about torture and interrogation. On the other side are those at the highest political levels of the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the White House who have struggled, so far successfully, to keep Abu Ghraib from becoming what it early on threatened to be: a scandal that could bring down many senior officials in the Department of Defense, and perhaps the administration itself. With no fear of a full, top-to-bottom investigation from a Congress that is firmly in Republican hands, administration officials, and particularly those at the Department of Defense, have managed to orchestrate a slowly unfolding series of inquiries, almost all of them carried out within the military by officers who by definition can only direct their gaze down the chain of command, not up it, and who are each empowered to examine only a limited and precisely defined number of links in the chain that connects the highest levels of the government to what happened on the ground in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the war on terror. Thus General Taguba investigated the military police, General Paul Mikolashek, as the Army's inspector general, reported on detention procedures, General Fay on military intelligence, and so on. Beyond the reports themselves, the key strategy of the defense is both to focus on the photographs and to isolate the acts they depict—which, if not the most serious, are those with the most political effect—from any inference that they might have resulted, either directly or indirectly, from policy. Thus the dogged effort to isolate these acts as "violence/sexual abuse incidents" that originated wholly in the minds of sadistic military police during the wee hours, and that, above all, had nothing whatever to do with what was done "to set the conditions" for interrogation—even though this division is quite artificial and many of the latter activities, as vividly demonstrated by the sufferings of Detainee-07, were conducted by precisely the same people and were equally, or more, disgusting, sadistic, and abusive. Only against this background can one properly appreciate the opening paragraph of former secretary Schlesinger's report, five powerfully peculiar sentences, in which the bureaucratic priorities of this political containment effort have thoroughly corrupted the language: Mr. Schlesinger and his fellow commissioners begin by defining all the events at Abu Ghraib as "acts of brutality and purposeless sadism," though they admit, in the next sentence, that they in fact occurred "at the hands of both military police and military intelligence." The next sentence abruptly and arbitrarily narrows the subject from "the events...on the night shift" to "the pictured abuses"—that is, those in the photographs—which the writers say were not "even directed at intelligence targets." These "represent deviant behavior"—except for the fact, as they go on to concede in the fifth sentence (where perhaps counsel intervened), that "some of the egregious abuses...which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions." It is a strange tangle of self-contradictory and oddly qualified sentences which seems designed to allow Mr. Schlesinger and others in the administration to contend that their report proved decisively that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were nothing more than the photographs—an argument that in fact the report that follows decisively disproves. The "celebrity abuses"—those known through the photographs—are segregated firmly within the realm of "acts of brutality and purposeless sadism," as Mr. Schlesinger calls them —"Animal House on the night shift" —and thereby sealed off entirely from the responsibility of policymakers. Even now seven hapless MPs are being prosecuted—two have already pleaded guilty—but only, in effect, for taking pictures; that is, only for those acts which can be said to have taken place outside the realm of interrogation or of acts "setting the conditions for interrogation." On the other hand, acts of brutality that can't be attributed entirely to sadistic military police, and which clearly involved military intelligence and the process of interrogation —those, that is, that risk implicating policymakers, who in the end are responsible for deciding what the interrogators can and cannot do—are ascribed in the reports to "misinterpretation/confusion" on the part of the intelligence people about what interrogation techniques could and could not be used at Abu Ghraib. These actions, after all, are where the political danger lies; for knowledge about "interrogation techniques" leads to knowledge about the official doctrine that allowed those techniques, doctrine leads to policy, and policy leads to power.
4. The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions...." In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it "would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war." For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military's prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush's decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in "violent/sexual abuse incidents," like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in "misinterpretation/confusion incidents." A central figure in all this is Major General Geoffrey Miller, who when last we saw him, in late August 2003, was on his way from Guantánamo, where he commanded the detention facility, to Abu Ghraib, where he had been ordered "to review current Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence." General Miller's report, which remains secret but was made available to me, recommends, among other things, that those in charge of Abu Ghraib should "dedicate and train a detention guard force subordinate to [the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center] that sets conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees. This action," he adds, "is now in progress." The MPs, in other words, should be working for the interrogators and spending significant time "softening up" prisoners, by keeping them awake, "making sure this one has a bad night," etc.—doing, that is, precisely what the accused military police, no doubt self-servingly, claimed they were doing in at least some of those dreadful photographs. Before he left Iraq, General Miller also "left behind a whole series of [Standard Operating Procedures] that could be used as a start point for [Abu Ghraib] interrogation operations." After returning to Guantánamo, the general dispatched to Iraq a follow-up team who, according to General Fay, brought with it the secretary of defense's letter of April 16, 2003, "outlining the techniques authorized for use with the GTMO detainees." Various parts of the bureaucracy, both inside and outside the Department of Defense, had been fighting over these interrogation techniques since the previous December. On December 2, Secretary Rumsfeld had approved, among other techniques, yelling at detainees, use of stress positions, use of isolation, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, use of hoods, use of twenty-hour interrogation, removal of clothing, use of mild physical contact, and "use of detainees' individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress." Six weeks later, reportedly after vigorous opposition from lawyers in the Department of the Navy, among others, Rumsfeld rescinded these instructions and convened a working group to recommend suitable methods for Guantánamo. Though the derivation of interrogation techniques eventually adopted for Iraq is almost Talmudic in its intricacy, and though the list of methods permitted changed at least three times during the critical fall of 2003, Fay makes it clear in his report that Lieutenant General Sanchez's command in Iraq "relied heavily on the series of SOPs [standard operating procedures] which MG G. Miller provided to develop not only the structure, but also the interrogation policies for detainee operations." Other sources include, according to a classified section of Fay's report made available to me, the interrogation policy of the shadowy, elite unit Joint Task Force-121, which spent its time searching for "high value targets" in Iraq. "At some point," Fay says, the leading military intelligence battalion at Abu Ghraib "came to possess the JTF-121 interrogation policy" and the first set of interrogation rules used by this unit "were derived almost verbatim from JTF-121 policy," which On September 14, Lieutenant General Sanchez signed a policy that included elements of the JTF-121 procedures and elements drawn from General Miller's GTMO policy, including the use of dogs, stress positions, yelling, loud music, light control, and isolation, among other techniques. The policy at Abu Ghraib would change at least twice more but what is critical here is Fay's point, included in a still-secret section of the report, that "policies and practices developed and approved for use on Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions, now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Conventions' protections." Sanchez later tried to define, unilaterally, some of his detainees as "unlawful combatants" —and the e-mail I quoted earlier, sent in August 2003 by a captain in military intelligence, suggests that interrogators feeling the pressure to produce results were eager that this be done. But in fact, as Schlesinger points out, Sanchez had no authority to make such a determination. This confusion over doctrine supposedly allowed some of the more gruesome practices that are so patiently set out in General Fay's report, including sensory deprivation, routine nudity and humiliation, "exploiting the Arab fear of dogs," and prolonged isolation of a particularly revolting kin d: Detainee-14 was one of eight detainees to whom General Sanchez denied the Red Cross access. The fact is that countless details in these reports give the lie to any supposed rigid division between the "violent/sexual acts incidents" and the "misinterpretation/confusion incidents," not only because in many cases military police really were setting "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees," as Major General Miller recommended they should, but because general practices, like the extensive use of nudity, "likely contributed," as General Fay wrote in his report, to "an escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses to occur." There simply was no clear dividing line, no point where sadistic abuses became instances of "misinterpretation/confusion"—where, that is, an interrogator simply erred in applying a technique that while permitted in Afghanistan or Guantánamo, constituted a violation in Iraq of the Geneva Conventions. How isolated could the so-called "Animal House on the night shift" abuses of the military police have been from military intelligence when, as we learn in the Fay report, one of the most notorious images, that of "several naked detainees stackedin a 'pyramid,'" served as a "screen saver" on one of the computers in the military intelligence office?
5. —News conference, Sea Island, Georgia, June 10, 2004 As I write, four months have passed since a series of bizarre photographs were broadcast on American television and entered the consciousness of the world. Seven military police, those "few bad apples," have been indicted and two have pled guilty. According to the military's latest account, reported in The New York Times, thirteen service members have been discharged, and fifty-four have suffered some form of "lesser disciplinary action," while fifty-seven others have been "referred to court-martial proceedings"—although it is impossible to know how many such "proceedings" will result in actual charges and trials, and it seems unlikely that any would before the election. What has been on trial, thus far, however is the acts depicted in the photographs and these acts, while no doubt constituting abuse, have been carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, US policy—a policy that permits torture. Thus far, in the United States at least, there has been relatively little discussion about torture and whether the agents of the US government should be practicing it. The twenty-seven military intelligence officers and soldiers implicated in General Fay's report, meanwhile, have so far escaped indictment. A number of them have claimed the equivalent of Fifth Amendment protection and military prosecutors have so far declined to bring cases against them. Until they do, or offer grants of immunity for their testimony, it will be difficult to prosecute successfully the remaining military policemen, who include those men and women accused of the most serious photographed crimes. On the other hand, at least some of the military intelligence officers may be in a position to implicate officials above them. Such a threat, however implicit, might be a powerful lever to dissuade the administration from prosecution, at least before the election. As for Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of GTMO, he is now in command of Abu Ghraib. It is unclear precisely who ordered Major General Miller to make his "assessment visit" to Abu Ghraib late last summer, and if it is true, as seems likely and as many believe, that these orders originated at the top levels of the Pentagon—perhaps even from the office of the county's leading "intelligence junkie," Donald Rumsfeld —then no proof of this has emerged. Nor, at this point, would such proof, or anything short of evidence linking Rumsfeld to what was shown in the photographs, make a decisive difference. The fact that the legal trail at Abu Ghraib has been directed toward the abuses that appear in the photographs means that the question of policy—of whether the United States should be torturing prisoners, of what the political and moral costs of this will finally be, and of what responsibility those who ultimately direct that policy really bear—has hardly been seriously debated, whether in Congress or anywhere else. Only now, more than four months after the photographs were broadcast to the world, and after eight prominent retired generals and admirals wrote to President Bush publicly demanding a truly independent and far-reaching investigation, has there been some small sign that the administration, perhaps finally pressed by a reluctant Republican Senate, might be forced to go beyond the piecemeal and dilatory efforts it has so far grudgingly made. If that does happen, it will have been long in coming—and again, almost certainly, and critically for the administration, no results could be known until after the election. So far, officials of the Bush administration, who counted on the fact that the public, and much of the press, could be persuaded to focus on the photographs—the garish signboards of the scandal and not the scandal itself—have been proved right. This makes Abu Ghraib a peculiarly contemporary kind of scandal, with most of its plotlines exposed to view—but with few willing to follow them and fewer still to do much about them. As with other controversies over the Iraq war, the revelations have been made, the behavior exposed, but the moral will to act, or even to debate what action might be warranted, seems mostly lacking. Meantime the Hooded Man has taken his place among the symbols calling forth, in some parts of the world, a certain image of the United States and what it stands for. Sheik Bashir, who said of the occupying soldiers that "no one can punish them, whether in our country or their country," has thus far been proved right. Only those at the lowest rung of the ladder have so far been punished and the matter of what was actually happening within the interrogation rooms of Abu Ghraib, not to mention in the secret detention centers of the CIA, has hardly been debated. The Iraqis know this, even if many Americans do not. Meanwhile the political damage to US interests in the world has been very great. As the military strategist Anthony Cordesman put it, There is no weighing such ongoing damage against the intelligence that these techniques may have gained. How can such things as the se be quantified? According to the Schlesinger report, The words are blunt, though a writer less fond of euphemism might have put the matter even more plainly: "American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death." And from what we know, Mr. Schlesinger's figures, if anything, substantially understate the case. It has become a cliché of the Global War on Terror—the GWOT, as these reports style it—that at a certain point, if the United States betrays its fundamental principles in the cause of fighting terror, then "the terrorists will have won." The image of the Hooded Man, now known the world over, raises a stark question: Is it possible that that moment of defeat could come and go, and we will never know it? Torture and Gonzales: An Exchange NY Review of Books | February 10, 2005 In response to Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (October 7, 2004 ) To the Editors : Mark Danner's article exposing the Bush administration's "piecemeal and dilatory" investigations into the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal was excellent ["Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story," NYR , October 7, 2004]. The responsibility for "enhanced interrogation techniques" gone awry will, some day, most likely be traced all the way up to the top. Although he referred to the President's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, as hav-ing considered the Geneva Conventions "quaint," I do wish that Mr. Danner had also reminded NYR readers of other outrageous memos authored by highly placed administration lawyers. In them, President Bush's lawyers provided (supposedly) legal justifications for torture of suspected terrorists. Probably the most shocking memo was dated August 1, 2002, and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the "conscience" of the Justice Department. "As commander in chief, the president has the constitutional authority to order interrogations of enemy combatants," Bybee wrote. Further, the president of the United States, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, can lawfully order torture, without regard to federal criminal laws or international law. Any measure "that interferes with the president's direction of such core war matters as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants would thus be unconstitutional." Even Congress lacks the power to limit presidential prerogatives, Bybee opined. Americans should not be permitted to forget where Mr. Bybee is now. He is now a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge. Bush nominated him and the Senate confirmed him without first having insisted on copies of his Justice Department memos. Judge Bybee will now be deciding constitutional rights cases arising in the western United States for the rest of his working life. Another Bush nomination to a federal appeals court, that of William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, has been stopped in its tracks—due to his role in endorsing the Bybee viewpoint and pushing it on resistant career military lawyers. Having learned of Haynes's role in advocating harsh interrogating guidelines, Democrats have held up the Haynes confirmation. Of course, in the wake of the scandal, the Justice Department rescinded the Bybee memo, which, it said, was being "revised." The most frightening thing about the Bush lawyers' memos is the totalitarian mindset that they reveal. In Nazi Germany, torture of "normal" defendants was considered to be unlawful. With "enemies of the state," however, it was a different story. According to Gestapo Chief Counsel Werner Best, "So long as the police force carries out the will of the country's leadership, it acts legally." [*] What is the difference between the Gestapo lawyer's comment about the police force carrying out the "will of the country's leadership"—to justify torture, and Mr. Bybee's comment about the president's power to order any measure pursuant to his "core authority" as commander in chief—to justify torture? Robert S. Rivkin To the Editors : I read the sorry story by Mark Danner about torture in Abu Ghraib with understandable indignation. It is sad that we have to admit that torture seems to be one of the nasty sides of human nature. Many others, all civilized nations, have done the same thing, always approved or condoned by the highest authorities: the French in Algiers, the Germans during the war, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, and we ourselves, the Dutch, during our colonial wars, and many others. Everybody has his black page in his history. However, what is particularly revolting in what is happening in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Iraq is the incompetent and dilettantish way in which the Americans go about it and all the gratuitous cruelty they inflict. In the first place, they torture the wrong people, secondly they torture too many, and thirdly for too long. It is useless to ask everybody everything you would like to know. On the whole, people know little, and certainly not the details you are after. When a fellow does not know anything he cannot tell you anything. This you can find out in five minutes. It means that you caught the wrong fellow and you send him home. Torture is very difficult to endure. In the resistance under the German occupation (Mr. Bush would call me a terrorist) we knew it and accepted it. (Stories of people who let themselves be tortured to death rather than give up their secrets are schoolboys' adventure stories.) We protected ourselves with small cells and rapid communications so that we were warned when some- body who knew our address was caught. If then, by a lucky strike, you catch a member of the resistance, he usually knows very little, a few addresses, an arms cache, the way they fight which you know already. No names because they can be invented and cannot be checked. High-level strategy or the command structure? Don't make me laugh. The system is mostly too decentralized than that you can get more than a few snippets even from a relatively high commander. In each case you get what you want in a few days and do not need to torture people for weeks on end. Anyway, the persons you want you won't catch by picking up suspicious-looking men in the street. Besides, suspicious to whom? To an honest marine from the Middle West who has not seen anything but his own village? The same applies to the prisoners at Guantánamo. These were front-line soldiers of the Taliban picked up after they had lost the battle. What could they possibly know about al-Qaeda? It has been all so unintelligent and such a waste of effort and everything else. They shoot with cannons at sparrows, a lot of brawn and little brain, and lots of unnecessary cruelty. G. Jan Ligthart Mark Danner replies: Between the publication of my article, "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story," and the receipt of these letters, and mainly thanks to the President's nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general and the hearings that followed, we have had a public discussion of the "outrageous memos authored by highly placed administration lawyers" to which Mr. Rivkin refers. (The memos, and a great many other documents associated with administration policy on interrogation, were leaked in the wake of the broadcast of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, presumably by government officials who opposed administration policy. They are published in full, along with the photographs and many other critical documents, in my current book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror .) As White House counsel Mr. Gonzales served as "point man" directing the administration's policies on interrogation, and presided in particular over two major decisions. First, he strongly advised the President to withhold Geneva Convention protection from prisoners taken in Afghan- istan, an unprecedented position that the Bush administration, after considerable debate, adopted. Second, he solicited a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice that, as Mr. Rivkin says, declares that the president, under his war powers as commander in chief, can "legally" order torture to be applied. The memo, which is dated August 2002, also "redefines" the meaning of the word "torture" as it appeared in domestic statutes and international treaties which commit the United States to prohibit its use. By defining torture very narrowly—as an activity that causes pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"—this memo, by a kind of repellent verbal sleight of hand, makes it possible to treat many practices that plainly are torture, and are so recognized throughout the world, as something less than that. Thus "waterboarding," for example—the practice of stripping prisoners and submerging them until they have nearly drowned— which is a favorite of torturers around the world and which, as I discussed in my article, Americans have used on al-Qaeda prisoners, could be considered under this memorandum to be a legal practice. According to a report in The New York Times on January 13, subsequent and still- secret memorandums explicitly approved the use of waterboarding as one of twenty additional "interrogation practices" that intelligence officers were permitted to use. Though these memos were apparently intended to guide the CIA, at least some of their content—in particular, entire paragraphs drawn verbatim from the Bybee memorandum of August 2002—was incorporated into the Pentagon's Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terror of April 2003. Our picture of discussions within the administration remains incomplete, a jigsaw puzzle still missing many pieces; but it is no longer tenable to claim, as administration officials up to and including Mr. Gonzales repeatedly have done, that these were "advisory" opinions which had no direct effect on how detainees were treated. What these policymakers decided and wrote had a direct effect on how detainees were treated. President Bush's decision to nominate the man instrumental in making torture "legal" to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States offered the occasion for a full public debate of these issues. Though a number of Democratic senators, and at least one Republican, pressed Mr. Gonzales for answers, the result was mostly obfuscations and, occasionally, downright lies. Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, described the August 2002 memo and asked the nominee bluntly, "Did you agree with that conclusion?" This is a shocking answer. Though the administration had distanced itself from the so-called "torture memorandum" soon after it was leaked last June, and had quietly issued, a week before Gonzales was scheduled to appear before Congress, a more restrictive memorandum to replace it, Mr. Gonzales declined to dissociate himself from it. Instead, he implied that in the matter of interpreting and defining torture, and in making it possible for the government to apply it broadly, his hands were essentially tied: it was "the responsibility of the department [of justice] to tell us what the law means"—though common sense suggests, and reports in The New York Times and elsewhere confirm, that the White House, and Mr. Gonzales himself, were instrumental in seeing that the Justice Department lawyers delivered the conclusions that the President wanted. That Mr. Gonzales could state, after the revelations from Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and elsewhere, that he still does not "have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department"—conclusions that subsequently formed part of a Defense Department Working Group Report on torture, and, through this and other channels, had a direct effect in setting interrogation rules that allowed torture and, so far as we know, still do allow it—is frankly appalling. But appalling to whom? In answering as he did, Mr. Gonzales demonstrated a cynicism about Americans' fundamental lack of concern about these matters that was more than borne out in the response, or rather the lack of it, to what he said. The hearings offered Congress yet another chance to perform a critical duty it has so far scarcely begun—to investigate fully how it came to pass that Americans tortured prisoners; to identify those officials, from the mid-level of the military chain of command up to the highest levels of the American government, who were responsible for approving its use; and to open the way for appropriate punishment. Yet the hearings themselves, before a Republican Senate in what has become essentially a one-party government, accomplished no such thing. Chances are very good that Mr. Gonzales will be duly confirmed, a step that will send a strong signal to the rest of the world that the policies he presided over retain the approval of the United States government and the American people. During the hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pointed out that these policies "put our troops at jeopardy" and damage the country by causing it to "lose the high ground" in the war on terror. But though Senator Graham, a conservative and a former military lawyer, was almost alone in mentioning the fact, it is "on the ground" that the effects of the decision to use torture can be most clearly seen. Though we still lack many details of what American interrogators did at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, and other prisons, and what they are still doing there, it seems clear that at Abu Ghraib Americans imprisoned many Iraqis who should never have been arrested. As early as October 2003, US military intelligence officers told representatives of the Red Cross "that in their estimate between 70 and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." In his report on Abu Ghraib last summer, General Fay quoted a sergeant assigned to the Abu Ghraib Detainee Assessment Board —the body responsible for deciding whether prisoners should be released—as estimating that "85–90 percent of the detainees were of no intelligence value." It is no mystery why this is so. The Americans' bewilderment in the face of the growing insurgency during the summer and fall of 2003, and their increasingly desperate need for "actionable intelligence" to confront it, led American combat troops, in the words of General Fay, "to round up large quantities of Iraqi personnel [that is, civilians] in the general vicinity of a specified target." This so-called "cordon and capture technique" quickly filled Abu Ghraib with Iraqis who knew nothing whatever of the insurgency. And though it quickly became clear that these prisoners "had no intelligence value," they stayed in prison, for American combat commanders "did not concur with the release of any detainees for fear that a bad one may be released with the good ones." Mr. Ligthart quite rightly observes that "it is useless to ask everyone everything you would like to know," but the fact is that the great majority of these prisoners were never interrogated at all. Among this group seem to fall at least some of those in the notorious photographs, who were being "punished" for rioting and other violations of the rules within Abu Ghraib. Others shown in the photographs, however, and many not depicted there, seem indeed to have been legitimate "intelligence targets" and though Generals Taguba and Fay and other investigators of the Abu Ghraib scandal have described in detail some of the torture inflicted to "soften up" these prisoners before interrogation, we still know relatively little about what intelligence soldiers and officers did to them during the interrogation sessions themselves. On December 4, Eric Schmitt of The New York Times , citing the still-unpublished report compiled by the naval inspector general, Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, writes that "at least 20 substantiated cases of abuse occurred during interrogations, contrary to the Pentagon's original claims." Mr. Ligthart, drawing on his experience in the Dutch resistance during World War II, notes that guerrilla organizations protect themselves "with small cells and rapid communications so that [they are] warned when somebody...[is] caught," with the result that if "by a lucky strike, you catch a member of the resistance, he usually knows very little, a few addresses, an arms cache, the way they fight which you already know." American intelligence officers are doubtless perfectly aware of this fact, and have relied on the painstaking collection and collation of small bits of information, hoping to construct thereby a useful picture of the broader insurgency. Many readers will remember the vivid description of this process by the fictional French Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers , in which Mathieu, standing before his paratroopers, chalk in hand, demonstrates the pyramidal structure of the FLN insurgency by carefully sketching out a spreading system of self-contained cells. John F. Burns of The New York Times , writing from a Marine command center near the Iraqi town of Iskandariya on November 28, has shown us the contemporary equivalent: While Mr. Ligthart is quite right to point out that any given prisoner will know little about the broader organization of the insurgency, the path to understanding that structure nonetheless runs partly through the interrogation of those prisoners and the careful assembly of what information can be gained from them. The question is not whether captured insurgents should be interrogated but how it should be done not only to adhere to the law but to maximize the intelligence gained while minimizing the political damage done in what is, at bottom, a political war—a war that depends for its success on Iraqis' trust in the American occupiers and their willingness to supply US troops with information which will lead to successful operations against the insurgents. All evidence suggests that that trust is now very low, in part because of the enormous damage done to the reputation of the Americans by the Abu Ghraib scandal itself. All evidence suggests, in other words, that the Americans' use of torture, among other things, has been a great boon to the insurgents, and to al-Qaeda as well. Thus Mr. Ligthart's broader point, that Americans "torture the wrong people, torture too many, and for too long." It is hard not to believe that, in the case of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo—where, all evidence suggests, many prisoners, "front-line soldiers of the Taliban," have little useful to tell interrogators—any gain in intelligence is very likely far overwhelmed by the political damage done, not only to the war in Iraq but to the broader "war on terror." As I pointed out in an earlier article, it falls to our political leaders not only to ensure that the law is followed but to weigh the damage such violations of it might do to the broader interests of the country. It has become increasingly clear that these leaders are incapable of carrying out either responsibility. In this the Gonzales hearings will be seen as a watershed. The documents that have been revealed have brought no cleansing; in effect their publication has made all Americans party to the decisions they recount. We have had the revelations. What we have not had, and what we can clearly not expect anytime soon, is a full investigation into how torture became American policy and who was responsible. These officials remain where they are and all Americans now bear the burden of the decisions they have made. The scandal is not what is to be revealed but what we already know. —January 13, 2005
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