The United States Does Not Torture

Right???

RIGHT!?

NO!?

Dammit!

The Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency says otherwise.

That report is the focus of a plethora of media coverage at the start of this week, and the ensuing legal mess after it will occupy my mind for a long while. Some reporters are flipping out about this, but The New York and LA Times have the most neutral stories; NYT focuses on the decision to declassify the report, while the LAT details Attorneys General Eric Holder's plan for an investigation. The wording of "preliminary investigation" is always ominous, because it's clear the AG wants to eventually do a full investigation as to whether federal laws were violated by CIA agents, and whether it would warrant prosecution. In the NYT piece, meanwhile, Holder is quoted as saying, “As attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and to follow the law," yet makes a clear distinction that he's not trying to backtrack and pick apart everything that the Bush administration authorized, as President Obama said publicly.

He's only after what was legal and what was not, but why is he appointing a special prosecutor from a US Attorney's office in Connecticut, when he clearly doesn't want to go on a witch hunt of CIA interrogators that were authorized by the Bush administration to torture terrorist suspects?

Holder is perfectly okay with not being very popular within the Central Intelligence Agency, but is it really up to the Department of Justice to police the CIA? No, that's for the White House to dictate as of now. If the CIA is going to be ordered to turn over control of oversight of interrogation and detention of terrorist suspects, the AG has to just let the National Security Council, a direct arm of The White House, stay within the limits of the law. It's not the job of the Attorney General's Office to interfere with internal CIA discretion...but I'm perfectly OK with him stepping in when the legality of torture is in question.

Too often the CIA claimed its methods were in the interest of national security, and when Michigan's own Congressman Pete Hoekstra says review of interrogations has been "exhausted," I take issue with that. There are laws to be followed, and one example of when the law was not followed was with cases of rendition. Rendition is a loose policy for transporting suspected terrorists to countries that don't follow federal or international law, so that those prisoners can be abused to extract information. The President put a semi-stop to that this week, too, by reforming how renditions are exercised.

The CIA sidesteps federal law, but Attorneys General Holder has every right to order an investigation when a detainee is not being given his rights under international law. The Geneva Convention sometimes applies, also, but there are semantics as to who exactly is a Prisoner of War. And that's what led to the release of both the Justice Department report and the CIA Inspector General's report. Inter-agency communication -- or the lack therof recently -- led to intelligence mistakes. Holder is correcting those gaps by saying the information currently available renders a review of torture techniques. He MUST be careful and not go after CIA agents, but to just go after the *process* and what wasn't done to ensure the law was being followed. He's trying to find the source of who made the decisions, because there's documents detailing that these torture techniques were authorized by the Justice Department, who (previously) had legal oversight over the CIA.

In lamen's terms: Did the CIA infer too much as to what was authorized by our own government? And I suspect too that some questions will be directed at our former Vice President, Dick Cheney. The CIA can claim all it wants that these methods produced concrete information:

"One of the reports calls the program 'a crucial pillar of U.S. counterterrorism efforts' and describes how interrogations helped unravel a network headed by an Indonesian terrorist known as Hambali. The other report details information elicited from Kalid Shaykh Mohammed, chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying it “dramatically expanded our universe of knowledge on Al Qaeda’s plots.'”

But I want to know why the law wasn't followed, and that's what Prosecutor Durham's job will be. It's not good when the CIA themselves say their conduct in treatment of prisoners was "poor and inhumane."

At the top of the list is the use of waterboarding, but here's the problem: The Justice Department -- specifically former AG Alberto Gonzales -- authorized the use of waterboarding! Holder has to do two things: find out who (CIA agents that is) disobeyed what was allowed by the Justice Department, and find out which specific cases have legitimate claims to a prisoner's rights being violated by things that the Bush Administration authorized (legally or not).

When referring to waterboarding or water dousing, the CIA IG wrote:

"Such detailed guidelines reflected concern throughout the C.I.A. about the potential legal consequences for agency officers. Officers “expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action” and said “they feared that the agency would not stand behind them”

In a nutshell, that's what I think Holder is looking for: the officers that voluntarily violated the law and making sure the guidelines are changed and followed. Not finding out all the Bush officials who authorized the stuff in the first place...because it was the CIA that tried to cover up bad treatment of prisoners. The Bushies just didn't ask about it, that's not a crime.

It's important how he will describe these actions. He cannot stand there and say "well, the Bush administration accepted this policy, so we're going to prosecute them," because at the time it was the law; instead he has to say "The CIA broke the law in cases X, Y, and Z, and here's what we're doing to correct it so it doesn't happen again." Let the CIA handle reforming its practices, because their director, Leon Panetta, has said they will do so:


"The program had produced crucial intelligence...but harsh methods will remain a legitimate area of dispute.”
He's standing by his employees, but also recognizing that there has to be some examination.

The United States does not torture. Even John McCain wanted that to be a policy of this country. Sometimes following the law is more important than intimidating the crap out of a scared prisoner that just divulges false information to be spared of this:



The CIA IG report is mostly a blacked-out mess, but there are some pretty unsettling things. Just running down the table of contents, there is a section on techniques such as water dousing, use of smoke, pressure points, mock executions, hostile takedown (abuse), shackles, and stress positions. Then it explains the effectiveness of these techniques, and concludes that said effectiveness of capturing other terrorist suspects or preventing attacks "cannot easily be measured."

The Agency says they captured a big-name terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, and under pressure of preventing more terrorist attacks, sought to locate a facility where they could torture him. The details of his interrogation are blacked out, but they are careful to note that he was provided medical attention, and that they foresaw no legal issue, as they had followed all approved techniques.

There are specific cases of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" -- EITs -- on a number of suspects. They admit to waterboarding a suspect named Al-Nashiri, and Mr. Zubaydah, multiple times, and actually videotaped the procedure (part of the group of tapes that were destroyed by CIA or overwritten with blank recordings)...but they claim the waterboarding lasted no longer than "10 seconds" each time.

These same two men were subjected to further treatment. The details are slim, but it involves one of them being naked, hooded & shackled, while an Agency debriefer (interrogator) threatened to use a handgun and a power drill on them. The Agency officer denies this next part, but the IG claims they threatened to rape Al-Nashiri's mother in front of him, and when interrogating Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, they suggested they would kill his children.

The next 40 pages are blacked out, and the last few pages detail that these methods in turn lead to the capture of some other terrorists, and that any agents who exceeded authorized interrogative methods were given domestic assignments (such as one man who beat prisoners with the butt of a rifle). The only method I could find that was explicitly "not approved" is an instance where two debriefers, one claiming that he knew what he was doing, choked a man to the point of suffocation by strangling the carotid artery, and shook him awake when he was about to pass out. They then staged an execution of a fellow prisoner that was actually disguised guard, but deemed it "ineffective," but didn't report it.

The United States Does Not Torture.

Right?