Rogue

So the U.S. Senate report on torture shows that it was far worse than I imagined, or I imagine anybody imagined.  We’ve known about the torture for years, of course, but now we know just how depraved and disgusting and totally without merit it was.

Consider this: numbers are a little vague, but it appears there were 119 captives in the program.  Of these, 26 were innocent.

We tortured innocent people, including “Abu Hudhaifa, who was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be.”  Some were cases of mistaken identity, some were people being held in order to intimidate friends or family, some were “mentally challenged,” some were denounced by people who were being tortured and who turned out just to be inventing stuff.  All were held long after they were known to be innocent.

Some were CIA informants— people who voluntarily offered information to the CIA, and then were tortured just in case they knew something they hadn’t revealed.

The torture was done by amateurs.  The torture was contracted out to two psychologists who lacked “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.”  Neither had ever interrogated anyone in their lives.

One email from a CIA staff psychologist said “no professional in the field would credit” their judgments. Another said their “arrogance and narcissism” led to unnecessary conflicts in the field. The director of interrogations for the CIA called their program a “train wreck” and complained that they were blending the roles of doctor and interrogator inappropriately.

John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel who met with the psychologists, wrote in his book, “Company Man,” that he found some of what Mitchell and Jessen were recommending “sadistic and terrifying.” One technique, he wrote, was “so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it.”

Torture was the first option.  “Instead, in many cases the most aggressive techniques were used immediately, in combination and nonstop,” according to the summary of the declassified and heavily censored document. “Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.”

Detainees were walked around naked and shackled, and at other times naked detainees were “hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.”

The amateurs were allowed to evaluate their own program.  Not surprisingly, they reported that their own program was very effective.  “…the same individuals applied an (enhanced interrogation technique) which only they were approved to employ, judged both its effectiveness and detainee resilience, and implicitly proposed continued use of the technique – at a daily compensation reported to be $1,800/day.”

The amateurs had a financial interest in torture.  The psychologists formed their own company to which the torture was outsourced, and signed a contract worth $180 million.  They’d been paid $81 million when the program was terminated in 2009.

In addition, CIA agreed to indemnify the company in the event of legal action against the company or its employes. ‘The CIA spent $1.1 million on legal expenses for the men between 2007 and 2012. “Under the CIA’s indemnification contract,” the report says, “the CIA is obligated to pay Company Y’s legal expenses through 2021.”’

The torture was sickening, sadistic, and degrading.  It included forcing victims to stand on broken feet for many hours, ice baths (as practiced by Josef Mengele), threats against family members, and of course rape, newly rechristened “anal feeding.”  (I ask you, can you ever unhear that?)

The torture was completely useless.   “The committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of purported counterterrorism ‘successes’ that the CIA has attributed to the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the intelligence panel, said in a statement Tuesday. “Each of those examples was found to be wrong in fundamental respects.”

In some instances, the study finds, the information acquired proved irrelevant to stopping terror threats. In others, the use of the techniques resulted in detainees providing fabricated or inaccurate information, and in still other cases, the information obtained through interrogating the detainees had already been acquired through other techniques.

The CIA and administration lied their asses off.   In 2007, Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “all of those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgment and maturity.”

In fact, the Senate report concludes, no such vetting took place. The interrogation teams included people with “notable derogatory information” in their records, including one with “workplace anger management issues” and another who “had reportedly admitted to sexual assault.”

The CIA spied on the committee who were writing the report.  Which they couldn’t manage without giving themselves away.

There’s a lot more, and you’re invited to read the actual report, which bear in mind is only a 500-page redaction of a 6700-page original.

And it’s not like the CIA was unified in all this.  Some of the most cogent criticism of the program came from CIA professionals.  “I am concerned at what appears to be a lack of resolve at headquarters to deploy to the field the brightest and most qualified officers,” wrote a C.I.A. officer running one of the secret prisons in 2005. “More than a few are basically incompetent.”

He added: “We see no evidence that thought is being given to deploying an ‘A team.’ The result, quite naturally, is the production of mediocre or, I dare say, useless intelligence.”

The torture program is still defended in a 100-page report issued by the CIA (it’s almost as if they knew what was in the Senate report!) and by the likes of Dick Cheney, though why anyone should care what that bloated bag of toxic gas has to say, I can’t imagine.  These disgusting and shameful acts didn’t come out of nowhere: they came out of the brutal, psychotic, cowardly atmosphere floating through the White House.  Cheney, Bush, Tenant, and the others are revealed as war criminals.

Now I’ve mentioned what the program did to its victims, but what did it do to us?  Torture is as morally degrading and corrupting for those who practice it as for those receiving it.  (As it seems to have corrupted everyone connected with the torture program, from the interrogators who earned millions of dollars to the officials who committed perjury before Congress.)

So we need to consider whether we are a rogue nation, unaccountable to any law of God or man.  What distinguishes us from the people we’re trying to fight?  Al-Qaeda and ISIS merely kill people.  We torture, which is— as everyone involved in the program surely knew— illegal, both under American and international law.  We’ve lost the moral right to call anyone else barbaric.

Now according to the UN Convention on Torture, which the U.S. has signed, we are legally obliged to arrest and try war criminals found in our country, or deport them to another place (such as the Hague) for trial.  Anyone want to bet how Obama will move on this, a signal moral issue of his presidency?

Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.

I would like to end with the signing statement of the president who signed the UN Convention on Torture.

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of [this] Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

“The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution . . . “

The signer?  Ronald Reagan.  The year?  1988.

What a difference thirty-odd years makes.