[Clips] How to Interrogate Terrorists

[R.A. Hettinga]

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  Subject: [Clips] How to Interrogate Terrorists
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  <http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=1727>


  City Journal

  How to Interrogate Terrorists

  Don't believe the charges. American troops treat terrorists with
  Geneva-convention politeness-perhaps too much so.

  Heather Mac Donald

  Winter 2005

  It didn't take long for interrogators in the war on terror to realize that
  their part was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed over
  decades of cold-war planning, held that 95 percent of prisoners would break
  upon straightforward questioning. Interrogators in Afghanistan, and later
  in Cuba and Iraq, found just the opposite: virtually none of the terror
  detainees was giving up information-not in response to direct questioning,
  and not in response to army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of
  war.

  Debate erupted in detention centers across the globe about how to get
  detainees to talk. Were "stress techniques"-such as isolation or sleep
  deprivation to decrease a detainee's resistance to questioning-acceptable?
  Before the discussion concluded, however, the photos of prisoner abuse in
  Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison appeared. Though they showed the sadism of a
  prison out of control, they showed nothing about interrogation.

  Nevertheless, Bush-administration critics seized on the scandal as proof
  that prisoner "torture" had become routine. A master narrative-call it the
  "torture narrative"-sprang up: the government's 2002 decision to deny
  Geneva-convention status to al-Qaida fighters, it held, "led directly to
  the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq," to quote the Washington
  Post. In particular, torturous interrogation methods, developed at
  Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan in illegal disregard of Geneva protections,
  migrated to Abu Ghraib and were manifest in the abuse photos.

  This story's success depends on the reader's remaining ignorant of the
  actual interrogation techniques promulgated in the war on terror. Not only
  were they light years from real torture and hedged around with bureaucratic
  safeguards, but they had nothing to do with the Abu Ghraib anarchy.
  Moreover, the decision on the Geneva conventions was irrelevant to
  interrogation practices in Iraq.

  No matter. The Pentagon's reaction to the scandal was swift and sweeping.
  It stripped interrogators not just of stress options but of traditional
  techniques long regarded as uncontroversial as well. Red tape now entangles
  the interrogation process, and detainees know that their adversaries' hands
  are tied.

  The need for rethinking interrogation doctrine in the war on terror will
  not go away, however. The Islamist enemy is unlike any the military has
  encountered in the past. If current wisdom on the rules of war prohibits
  making any distinction between a terrorist and a lawful combatant, then
  that orthodoxy needs to change.

  The interrogation debate first broke out on the frigid plains of
  Afghanistan. Marines and other special forces would dump planeloads of
  al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners into a ramshackle detention facility outside
  the Kandahar airport; waiting interrogators were then supposed to extract
  information to be fed immediately back into the battlefield-whether a
  particular mountain pass was booby-trapped, say, or where an arms cache
  lay. That "tactical" debriefing accomplished, the Kandahar interrogation
  crew would determine which prisoners were significant enough to be shipped
  on to the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba for high-level interrogation.

  Army doctrine gives interrogators 16 "approaches" to induce prisoners of
  war to divulge critical information. Sporting names like "Pride and Ego
  Down" and "Fear Up Harsh," these approaches aim to exploit a detainee's
  self-love, allegiance to or resentment of comrades, or sense of futility.
  Applied in the right combination, they will work on nearly everyone, the
  intelligence soldiers had learned in their training.

  But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They
  divulged nothing. "Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost
  effortlessly," writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping
  account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners
  confounded their captors "not with clever cover stories but with simple
  refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember
  even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never
  really came."

  Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which
  taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question
  prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no
  penalties and certainly no risk of torture-a sign, gloated the manuals, of
  American weakness.

  Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention policies
  before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. "It became very
  clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to
  have them sit there," recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a pseudonym). "They
  realized: 'The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they'll draw lines on
  the floor showing us where to pray, we'll get three meals a day with fresh
  fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . . we can wait them out.' "

  Even more challenging was that these detainees bore little resemblance to
  traditional prisoners of war. The army's interrogation manual presumed
  adversaries who were essentially the mirror image of their captors,
  motivated by emotions that all soldiers share. A senior intelligence
  official who debriefed prisoners in the 1989 U.S. operation in Panama
  contrasts the battlefield then and now: "There were no martyrs down there,
  believe me," he chuckles. "The Panamanian forces were more understandable
  people for us. Interrogation was pretty straightforward: 'Love of Family'
  [an army-manual approach, promising, say, contact with wife or children in
  exchange for cooperation] or, 'Here's how you get out of here as fast as
  you can.' "

  "Love of family" often had little purchase among the terrorists, however-as
  did love of life. "The jihadists would tell you, 'I've divorced this life,
  I don't care about my family,' " recalls an interrogator at Guantanamo.
  "You couldn't shame them." The fierce hatred that the captives bore their
  captors heightened their resistance. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan
  reported in January 2002 that prisoners in Kandahar would "shout epithets
  at their captors, including threats against the female relatives of the
  soldiers guarding them, knee marines in the groin, and say that they will
  escape and kill 'more Americans and Jews.' " Such animosity continued in
  Guantanamo.

  Battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and intelligence officials in
  Washington kept pressing for information, however. The frustrated
  interrogators constantly discussed how to get it. The best hope, they
  agreed, was to re-create the "shock of capture"-that vulnerable mental
  state when a prisoner is most frightened, most uncertain, and most likely
  to respond to questioning. Uncertainty is an interrogator's most powerful
  ally; exploited wisely, it can lead the detainee to believe that the
  interrogator is in total control and holds the key to his future. The
  Kandahar detainees, however, learned almost immediately what their future
  held, no matter how egregious their behavior: nothing untoward.

  Many of the interrogators argued for a calibrated use of "stress
  techniques"-long interrogations that would cut into the detainees' sleep
  schedules, for example, or making a prisoner kneel or stand, or aggressive
  questioning that would put a detainee on edge.

  Joe Martin-a crack interrogator who discovered that a top al-Qaida leader,
  whom Pakistan claimed to have in custody, was still at large and directing
  the Afghani resistance-explains the psychological effect of stress: "Let's
  say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he's had resistance
  training. He knows that I'm completely handcuffed and that I can't do
  anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and
  walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He's been
  told: 'They won't physically touch you,' and now you have. The point is not
  to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn't
  know where your limit is." Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has
  had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual
  torture could have, Martin maintains. "The guy knows: You just broke your
  own rules, and that's scary. He might demand to talk to my supervisor. I'll
  respond: 'There are no supervisors here,' and give him a maniacal smile."

  The question was: Was such treatment consistent with the Geneva conventions?

  President Bush had declared in February 2002 that al-Qaida members fell
  wholly outside the conventions and that Taliban prisoners would not receive
  prisoner-of-war status-without which they, too, would not be covered by the
  Geneva rules. Bush ordered, however, that detainees be treated humanely and
  in accordance with Geneva principles, to the extent consistent with
  military necessity. This second pronouncement sank in: all of the war on
  terror's detention facilities chose to operate under Geneva rules. Contrary
  to the fulminations of rights advocates and the press, writes Chris Mackey,
  "Every signal we interrogators got from above from the colonels at [the
  Combined Forces Land Component Command] in Kuwait to the officers at
  Central Command back in Tampa-had been . . . to observe the Conventions,
  respect prisoners' rights, and never cut corners."

  What emerged was a hybrid and fluid set of detention practices. As
  interrogators tried to overcome the prisoners' resistance, their reference
  point remained Geneva and other humanitarian treaties. But the
  interrogators pushed into the outer limits of what they thought the law
  allowed, undoubtedly recognizing that the prisoners in their control
  violated everything the pacts stood for.

  The Geneva conventions embody the idea that even in as brutal an activity
  as war, civilized nations could obey humanitarian rules: no attacking
  civilians and no retaliation against enemy soldiers once they fall into
  your hands. Destruction would be limited as much as possible to
  professional soldiers on the battlefield. That rule required,
  unconditionally, that soldiers distinguish themselves from civilians by
  wearing uniforms and carrying arms openly.

  Obedience to Geneva rules rests on another bedrock moral principle:
  reciprocity. Nations will treat an enemy's soldiers humanely because they
  want and expect their adversaries to do the same. Terrorists flout every
  civilized norm animating the conventions. Their whole purpose is to kill
  noncombatants, to blend into civilian populations, and to conceal their
  weapons. They pay no heed whatever to the golden rule; anyone who falls
  into their hands will most certainly not enjoy commissary privileges and
  wages, per the Geneva mandates. He-or she-may even lose his head.

  Even so, terror interrogators tried to follow the spirit of the Geneva code
  for conventional, uniformed prisoners of war. That meant, as the code puts
  it, that the detainees could not be tortured or subjected to "any form of
  coercion" in order to secure information. They were to be "humanely"
  treated, protected against "unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any
  kind," and were entitled to "respect for their persons and their honour."

  The Kandahar interrogators reached the following rule of thumb, reports
  Mackey: if a type of behavior toward a prisoner was no worse than the way
  the army treated its own members, it could not be considered torture or a
  violation of the conventions. Thus, questioning a detainee past his bedtime
  was lawful as long as his interrogator stayed up with him. If the
  interrogator was missing exactly the same amount of sleep as the
  detainee-and no tag-teaming of interrogators would be allowed, the soldiers
  decided-then sleep deprivation could not be deemed torture. In fact,
  interrogators were routinely sleep-deprived, catnapping maybe one or two
  hours a night, even as the detainees were getting long beauty sleeps.
  Likewise, if a boot-camp drill sergeant can make a recruit kneel with his
  arms stretched out in front without violating the Convention Against
  Torture, an interrogator can use that tool against a recalcitrant terror
  suspect.

  Did the stress techniques work? Yes. "The harsher methods we used . . . the
  better information we got and the sooner we got it," writes Mackey, who
  emphasizes that the methods never contravened the conventions or crossed
  over into torture.

  Stress broke a young bomb maker, for instance. Six months into the war,
  special forces brought a young Afghan to the Kandahar facility, the likely
  accomplice of a Taliban explosives expert who had been blowing up aid
  workers. Joe Martin got the assignment.

  "Who's your friend the Americans are looking for?" the interrogation began.

  "I don't know."

  "You think this is a joke? What do you think I'll do?"

  "Torture me."

  So now I understand his fear, Martin recollects.

  The interrogation continued: "You'll stand here until you tell me your
friend."

  "No, sir, he's not my friend."

  Martin picked up a book and started reading. Several hours later, the young
  Taliban was losing his balance and was clearly terrified. Moreover, he's
  got two "big hillbilly guards staring at him who want to kill him," the
  interrogator recalls.

  "You think THIS is bad?!" the questioning starts up again.

  "No, sir."

  The prisoner starts to fall; the guards stand him back up. If he falls
  again, and can't get back up, Martin can do nothing further. "I have no
  rack," he says matter-of-factly. The interrogator's power is an illusion;
  if a detainee refuses to obey a stress order, an American interrogator has
  no recourse.

  Martin risks a final display of his imaginary authority. "I get in his
  face, 'What do you think I will do next?' " he barks. In the captive's
  mind, days have passed, and he has no idea what awaits him. He discloses
  where he planted bombs on a road and where to find his associate. "The
  price?" Martin asks. "I made a man stand up. Is this unlawful coercion?"

  Under a strict reading of the Geneva protections for prisoners of war,
  probably: the army forbids interrogators from even touching lawful
  combatants. But there is a huge gray area between the gold standard of POW
  treatment reserved for honorable opponents and torture, which consists of
  the intentional infliction of severe physical and mental pain. None of the
  stress techniques that the military has used in the war on terror comes
  remotely close to torture, despite the hysterical charges of administration
  critics. (The CIA's behavior remains a black box.) To declare non-torturous
  stress off-limits for an enemy who plays by no rules and accords no respect
  to Western prisoners is folly.

  The soldiers used stress techniques to reinforce the traditional
  psychological approaches. Jeff (a pseudonym), an interrogator in
  Afghanistan, had been assigned a cocky English Muslim, who justified the
  9/11 attacks because women had been working in the World Trade Center. The
  British citizen deflected all further questioning. Jeff questioned him for
  a day and a half, without letting him sleep and playing on his religious
  loyalties. "I broke him on his belief in Islam," Jeff recounts. "He
  realized he had messed up, because his Muslim brothers and sisters were
  also in the building." The Brit broke down and cried, then disclosed the
  mission that al-Qaida had put him on before capture. But once the prisoner
  was allowed to sleep for six hours, he again "clammed up."

  Halfway across the globe, an identical debate had broken out, among
  interrogators who were encountering the same obstacles as the Afghanistan
  intelligence team. The U.S. base at Guantanamo was supposed to be getting
  the Afghanistan war's worst of the worst: the al-Qaida Arabs and their high
  Taliban allies.

  Usama bin Ladin's driver and bodyguard were there, along with explosives
  experts, al-Qaida financiers and recruiters, would-be suicide recruits, and
  the architects of numerous attacks on civilian targets. They knew about
  al-Qaida's leadership structure, its communication methods, and its plans
  to attack the U.S. And they weren't talking. "They'd laugh at you; 'You've
  asked me this before,' they'd say contemptuously," reports Major General
  Michael Dunlavey, a former Guantanamo commanding officer. "Their resistance
  was tenacious. They'd already had 90 days in Afghanistan to get their cover
  stories together and to plan with their compatriots."

  Even more than Afghanistan, Guantanamo dissipated any uncertainty the
  detainees might have had about the consequences of noncooperation.
  Consistent with the president's call for humane treatment, prisoners
  received expert medical care, three culturally appropriate meals each day,
  and daily opportunities for prayer, showers, and exercise. They had mail
  privileges and reading materials. Their biggest annoyance was boredom,
  recalls one interrogator. Many prisoners disliked the move from Camp X-Ray,
  the first facility used at the base, to the more commodious Camp Delta,
  because it curtailed their opportunities for homosexual sex, says an
  intelligence analyst. The captives protested every perceived infringement
  of their rights but, as in Afghanistan, ignored any reciprocal obligation.
  They hurled excrement and urine at guards, used their blankets as garrotes,
  and created additional weapons out of anything they could get their hands
  on-including a sink wrenched off a wall. Guards who responded to the
  attacks-with pepper spray or a water hose, say-got punished and, in one
  case, court-martialed.

  Gitmo personnel disagreed sharply over what tools interrogators could
  legally use. The FBI took the most conservative position. When a bureau
  agent questioning Mohamedou Ould Slahi-a Mauritanian al-Qaida operative who
  had recruited two of the 9/11 pilots-was getting nothing of value, an army
  interrogator suggested, "Why don't you mention to him that conspiracy is a
  capital offense?" "That would be a violation of the Convention Against
  Torture," shot back the agent-on the theory that any covert threat inflicts
  "severe mental pain." Never mind that district attorneys and police
  detectives routinely invoke the possibility of harsh criminal penalties to
  get criminals to confess. Federal prosecutors in New York have even been
  known to remind suspects that they are more likely to keep their teeth and
  not end up as sex slaves by pleading to a federal offense, thus avoiding
  New York City's Rikers Island jail. Using such a method against an al-Qaida
  jihadist, by contrast, would be branded a serious humanitarian breach.

  Top military commanders often matched the FBI's restraint, however. "It was
  ridiculous the things we couldn't do," recalls an army interrogator. "One
  guy said he would talk if he could see the ocean. It wasn't approved,
  because it would be a change of scenery"-a privilege that discriminated in
  favor of a cooperating detainee, as opposed to being available to all,
  regardless of their behavior.

  Frustration with prisoner stonewalling reached a head with Mohamed
  al-Kahtani, a Saudi who had been fighting with Usama bin Ladin's bodyguards
  in Afghanistan in December 2001. By July 2002, analysts had figured out
  that Kahtani was the missing 20th hijacker. He had flown into Orlando
  International Airport from Dubai on August 4, 2001, but a sharp-eyed
  customs agent had denied him entry. Waiting for him at the other side of
  the gate was Mohamed Atta.

  Kahtani's resistance strategies were flawless. Around the first anniversary
  of 9/11, urgency to get information on al-Qaida grew. Finally, army
  officials at Guantanamo prepared a legal analysis of their interrogation
  options and requested permission from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
  use various stress techniques on Kahtani. Their memo, sent up the
  bureaucratic chain on October 11, 2002, triggered a fierce six-month
  struggle in Washington among military lawyers, administration officials,
  and Pentagon chiefs about interrogation in the war on terror.

  To read the techniques requested is to understand how restrained the
  military has been in its approach to terror detainees-and how utterly false
  the torture narrative has been. Here's what the interrogators assumed they
  could not do without clearance from the secretary of defense: yell at
  detainees (though never in their ears), use deception (such as posing as
  Saudi intelligence agents), and put detainees on MREs (meals ready to
  eat-vacuum-sealed food pouches eaten by millions of soldiers, as well as
  vacationing backpackers) instead of hot rations. The interrogators promised
  that this dangerous dietary measure would be used only in extremis, pending
  local approval and special training.

  The most controversial technique approved was "mild, non-injurious physical
  contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light
  pushing," to be reserved only for a "very small percentage of the most
  uncooperative detainees" believed to possess critical intelligence. A
  detainee could be poked only after review by Gitmo's commanding general of
  intelligence and the commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, and
  only pursuant to "careful coordination" and monitoring.

  None of this remotely approaches torture or cruel or degrading treatment.
  Nevertheless, fanatically cautious Pentagon lawyers revolted, claiming that
  the methods approved for Kahtani violated international law.
  Uncharacteristically irresolute, Rumsfeld rescinded the Guantanamo
  techniques in January 2003.

  Kahtani's interrogation hung fire for three months, while a Washington
  committee, with representatives from the undersecretary of defense, the
  Defense Intelligence Agency, the air force, army, navy, and marine corps,
  and attorneys from every branch of the military, considered how to approach
  the 20th hijacker.

  The outcome of this massive deliberation was more restrictive than the
  Geneva conventions themselves, even though they were to apply only to
  unlawful combatants, not conventional prisoners of war, and only to those
  held at Guantanamo Bay. It is worth scrutinizing the final 24 techniques
  Rumsfeld approved for terrorists at Gitmo in April 2003, since these are
  the techniques that the media presents as the source of "torture" at Abu
  Ghraib. The torture narrative holds that illegal methods used at Guantanamo
  migrated to Iraq and resulted in the abuse of prisoners there.

  So what were these cruel and degrading practices? For one, providing a
  detainee an incentive for cooperation-such as a cigarette or, especially
  favored in Cuba, a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie unless
  specifically approved by the secretary of defense. In other words, if an
  interrogator had learned that Usama bin Ladin's accountant loved Cadbury
  chocolate, and intended to enter the interrogation booth armed with a Dairy
  Milk Wafer to extract the name of a Saudi financier, he needed to
  "specifically determine that military necessity requires" the use of the
  Dairy Milk Wafer and send an alert to Secretary Rumsfeld that chocolate was
  to be deployed against an al-Qaida operative.

  Similar restrictions-a specific finding of military necessity and notice to
  Rumsfeld-applied to other tried-and-true army psychological techniques.
  These included "Pride and Ego Down"-attacking a detainee's pride to goad
  him into revealing critical information-as well as "Mutt and Jeff," the
  classic good cop-bad cop routine of countless police shows. Isolating a
  detainee from other prisoners to prevent collaboration and to increase his
  need to talk required not just notice and a finding of military necessity
  but "detailed implementation instructions [and] medical and psychological
  review."

  The only non-conventional "stress" techniques on the final Guantanamo list
  are such innocuous interventions as adjusting the temperature or
  introducing an unpleasant smell into the interrogation room, but only if
  the interrogator is present at all times; reversing a detainee's sleep
  cycles from night to day (call this the "Flying to Hong Kong" approach);
  and convincing a detainee that his interrogator is not from the U.S.

  Note that none of the treatments shown in the Abu Ghraib photos, such as
  nudity or the use of dogs, was included in the techniques certified for the
  unlawful combatants held in Cuba. And those mild techniques that were
  certified could only be used with extensive bureaucratic oversight and
  medical monitoring to ensure "humane," "safe," and "lawful" application.

  After Rumsfeld cleared the 24 methods, interrogators approached Kahtani
  once again. They relied almost exclusively on isolation and lengthy
  interrogations. They also used some "psy-ops" (psychological operations).
  Ten or so interrogators would gather and sing the Rolling Stones' "Time Is
  on My Side" outside Kahtani's cell. Sometimes they would play a recording
  of "Enter Sandman" by the heavy-metal group Metallica, which brought
  Kahtani to tears, because he thought (not implausibly) he was hearing the
  sound of Satan.

  Finally, at 4 am-after an 18-hour, occasionally loud, interrogation, during
  which Kahtani head-butted his interrogators-he started giving up
  information, convinced that he was being sold out by his buddies. The
  entire process had been conducted under the watchful eyes of a medic, a
  psychiatrist, and lawyers, to make sure that no harm was done. Kahtani
  provided detailed information on his meetings with Usama bin Ladin, on Jose
  Padilla and Richard Reid, and on Adnan El Shukrijumah, one of the FBI's
  most wanted terrorists, believed to be wandering between South and North
  America.

  Since then, according to Pentagon officials, none of the non-traditional
  techniques approved for Kahtani has been used on anyone else at Guantanamo
  Bay.

  The final strand in the "torture narrative" is the least grounded in actual
  practice, but it has had the most distorting effect on the public debate.
  In the summer of 2002, the CIA sought legal advice about permissible
  interrogation techniques for the recently apprehended Abu Zubaydah, Usama
  bin Ladin's chief recruiter in the 1990s. The Palestinian Zubaydah had
  already been sentenced to death in absentia in Jordan for an abortive plot
  to bomb hotels there during the millennium celebration; he had arranged to
  obliterate the Los Angeles airport on the same night. The CIA wanted to use
  techniques on Zubaydah that the military uses on marines and other elite
  fighters in Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape (SERE) school, which teaches how
  to withstand torture and other pressures to collaborate. The techniques are
  classified, but none allegedly involves physical contact. (Later, the CIA
  is said to have used "water-boarding"-temporarily submerging a detainee in
  water to induce the sensation of drowning-on Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the
  mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Water-boarding is the most extreme method
  the CIA has applied, according to a former Justice Department attorney, and
  arguably it crosses the line into torture.)

  In response to the CIA's request, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee
  produced a hair-raising memo that understandably caused widespread alarm.
  Bybee argued that a U.S. law ratifying the 1984 Convention Against
  Torture-covering all persons, whether lawful combatants or not-forbade only
  physical pain equivalent to that "accompanying serious physical injury,
  such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," or
  mental pain that resulted in "significant psychological harm of significant
  duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." More troubling still,
  Bybee concluded that the torture statute and international humanitarian
  treaties did not bind the executive branch in wartime.

  This infamous August "torture memo" represents the high (or low) point of
  the Bush administration's theory of untrammeled presidential war-making
  power. But note: it had nothing to do with the interrogation debates and
  experiments unfolding among Pentagon interrogators in Afghanistan and Cuba.
  These soldiers struggling with al-Qaida resistance were perfectly ignorant
  about executive-branch deliberations on the outer boundaries of pain and
  executive power (which, in any case, were prepared for and seen only by the
  CIA). "We had no idea what went on in Washington," said Chris Mackey in an
  interview. A Guantanamo lawyer involved in the Kahtani interrogation echoes
  Mackey: "We were not aware of the [Justice Department and White House]
  debates." Interrogators in Iraq were equally unaware of the Bybee memo.

  Nevertheless, when the Bybee analysis was released in June 2004, it became
  the capstone on the torture narrative, the most damning link between the
  president's decision that the Geneva conventions didn't apply to terrorists
  and the sadistic behavior of the military guards at Abu Ghraib. Seymour
  Hersh, the left-wing journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib story, claims that
  the Bybee torture memo was the "most suggestive document, in terms of what
  was really going on inside military prisons and detention centers."

  But not only is the Bybee memo irrelevant to what happened in Abu Ghraib;
  so, too, are the previous interrogation debates in Afghanistan and Cuba.
  The abuse at Abu Ghraib resulted from the Pentagon's failure to plan for
  any outcome of the Iraq invasion except the most rosy scenario, its failure
  to respond to the insurgency once it broke out, and its failure to keep
  military discipline from collapsing in the understaffed Abu Ghraib
  facility. Interrogation rules were beside the point.

  As the avalanche of prisoners taken in the street fighting overwhelmed the
  inadequate contingent of guards and officers at Abu Ghraib, order within
  the ranks broke down as thoroughly as order in the operation of the prison
  itself. Soldiers talked back to their superiors, refused to wear uniforms,
  operated prostitution and bootlegging rings, engaged in rampant and public
  sexual misbehavior, covered the facilities with graffiti, and indulged in
  drinking binges while on duty. No one knew who was in command. The guards'
  sadistic and sexualized treatment of prisoners was just an extension of the
  chaos they were already wallowing in with no restraint from above.
  Meanwhile, prisoners regularly rioted; insurgents shelled the compound
  almost daily; the army sent only rotten, bug-infested rations; and the
  Iraqi guards sold favors to the highest bidders among the insurgents.

  The idea that the abuse of the Iraqi detainees resulted from the
  president's decision on the applicability of the Geneva conventions to
  al-Qaida and Taliban detainees is absurd on several grounds. Everyone in
  the military chain of command emphasized repeatedly that the Iraq conflict
  would be governed by the conventions in their entirety. The interrogation
  rules that local officers developed for Iraq explicitly stated that they
  were promulgated under Geneva authority, and that the conventions applied.
  Moreover, almost all the behavior shown in the photographs occurred in the
  dead of night among military police, wholly separate from interrogations.
  Most abuse victims were not even scheduled to be interrogated, because they
  were of no intelligence value. Finally, except for the presence of dogs,
  none of the behavior shown in the photos was included in the interrogation
  rules promulgated in Iraq. Mandated masturbation, dog leashes, assault, and
  stacking naked prisoners in pyramids-none of these depredations was an
  approved (or even contemplated) interrogation practice, and no interrogator
  ordered the military guards to engage in them.

  It is the case that intelligence officers in Iraq and Afghanistan were
  making use of nudity and phobias about dogs at the time. Nudity was not
  officially sanctioned, and the official rule about dogs only allowed their
  "presence" in the interrogation booth, not their being sicced on naked
  detainees. The argument that such techniques contributed to a
  dehumanization of the detainees, which in turn led to their abuse, is not
  wholly implausible. Whether or not those two particular stressors are worth
  defending (and many interrogators say they are not), their abuse should not
  discredit the validity of other stress techniques that the military was
  cautiously experimenting with in the months before Abu Ghraib.

  That experiment is over. Reeling under the PR disaster of Abu Ghraib, the
  Pentagon shut down every stress technique but one-isolation-and that can be
  used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests
  permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his
  career in jeopardy. Even the traditional army psychological approaches have
  fallen under a deep cloud of suspicion: deflating a detainee's ego,
  aggressive but non-physical histrionics, and good cop-bad cop have been
  banished along with sleep deprivation.

  Timidity among officers prevents the energetic application of those
  techniques that remain. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all
  the way up through the Pentagon by officers who have never conducted an
  interrogation in their lives.

  In losing these techniques, interrogators have lost the ability to create
  the uncertainty vital to getting terrorist information. Since the Abu
  Ghraib scandal broke, the military has made public nearly every record of
  its internal interrogation debates, providing al-Qaida analysts with an
  encyclopedia of U.S. methods and constraints. Those constraints make
  perfectly clear that the interrogator is not in control. "In reassuring the
  world about our limits, we have destroyed our biggest asset: detainee
  doubt," a senior Pentagon intelligence official laments.

  Soldiers on the ground are noticing the consequences. "The Iraqis already
  know the game. They know how to play us," a marine chief warrant officer
  told the Wall Street Journal in August. "Unless you catch the Iraqis in the
  act, it is very hard to pin anything on anyone . . . . We can't even use
  basic police interrogation tactics."

  And now the rights advocates, energized by the Abu Ghraib debacle, are
  making one final push to halt interrogation altogether. In the New York
  Times's words, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is now
  condemning the thoroughly emasculated interrogation process at Guantanamo
  Bay as a "system devised to break the will of the prisoners [and] make them
  wholly dependent on their interrogators." In other words, the ICRC opposes
  traditional interrogation itself, since all interrogation is designed to
  "break the will of prisoners" and make them feel "dependent on their
  interrogators." But according to an ICRC report leaked to the Times, "the
  construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of
  intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of
  cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."

  But contrary to the fantasies of the international-law and human rights
  lobbies, a world in which all interrogation is illegal and rights are
  indiscriminately doled out is not a safer or more just world. Were the
  United States to announce that terrorists would be protected under the
  Geneva conventions, it would destroy any incentive our ruthless enemies
  have to comply with the laws of war. The Washington Post and the New York
  Times understood that truth in 1987, when they supported President Ronald
  Reagan's rejection of an amendment to the Geneva conventions that would
  have granted lawful-combatant status to terrorists. Today, however, those
  same opinion makers have done an about-face, though the most striking
  feature of their denunciations of the Bush administration's Geneva
  decisions is their failure to offer any explanation for how al-Qaida could
  possibly be covered under the plain meaning of the text.

  The Pentagon is revising the rules for interrogation. If we hope to succeed
  in the war on terror, the final product must allow interrogators to use
  stress techniques against unlawful combatants. Chris Mackey testifies to
  how "ineffective schoolhouse methods were in getting prisoners to talk." He
  warns that his team "failed to break prisoners who I have no doubt knew of
  terrorist plots or at least terrorist cells that may one day do us harm.
  Perhaps they would have talked if faced with harsher methods."

  The stress techniques that the military has used to date are not torture;
  the advocates can only be posturing in calling them such. On its website,
  Human Rights Watch lists the effects of real torture: "from pain and
  swelling to broken bones, irreparable neurological damage, and chronic
  painful musculoskeletal problems . . . [to] long-term depression,
  post-traumatic stress disorder, marked sleep disturbances and alterations
  in self-perceptions, not to mention feelings of powerlessness, of fear,
  guilt and shame." Though none of the techniques that Pentagon interrogators
  have employed against al-Qaida comes anywhere close to risking such
  effects, Human Rights Watch nevertheless follows up its list with an
  accusation of torture against the Bush administration.

  The pressure on the Pentagon to outlaw stress techniques won't abate, as
  the American Civil Liberties Union continues to release formerly classified
  government documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit
  concerning detention and interrogation. As of late December, the memos have
  merely confirmed that the FBI opposes stress methods, though the press
  breathlessly portrays them as confirming "torture."

  Human Rights Watch, the ICRC, Amnesty International, and the other
  self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth-to
  the real world in which torture means what the Nazis and the Japanese did
  in their concentration and POW camps in World War II; the world in which
  evil regimes, like those we fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, don't follow
  the Miranda rules or the Convention Against Torture but instead gas
  children, bury people alive, set wild animals on soccer players who lose,
  and hang adulterous women by truckloads before stadiums full of spectators;
  the world in which barbarous death cults behead female aid workers, bomb
  crowded railway stations, and fly planes filled with hundreds of innocent
  passengers into buildings filled with thousands of innocent and
  unsuspecting civilians. By definition, our terrorist enemies and their
  state supporters have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order
  and its humanitarian rules. In fighting them, we must of course hold
  ourselves to our own high moral standards without, however, succumbing to
  the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every
  precept of the Sermon on the Mount. It is the necessity of this fallen
  world that we must oppose evil with force; and we must use all the lawful
  means necessary to ensure that good, rather than evil, triumphs.


  --
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  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
  44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
  [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
  experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'