Decline and Fall

Spencer Ackerman has a written really interesting piece in the Washington Independent about the CIA's lack of experience in interrogations. Counter to what most of us assumed, they haven't been doing it that long, and they aren't the "experts" in interrogation most have assumed.

Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.

The article suggests that the CIA consulted with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel--all countries who we already knew tortured--to develop its interrogation program. Nut I doubt that their use torture as an interrogation technique was as influenced by their consultation with Egypt, et al as this article suggests. The fact is that everyone who has ever seen a movie where the interrogator "does what has to be done" thinks they know what they're doing. I've been an interrogator for almost 15 years, and I would say that a good 50% of the people I meet who learn that about me imagine they know how I do my job. I've seen many, many completely untrained people go into the booth or offer their two cents, and that advice is always, EVERY TIME, to get vicious. These CIA agents were given the green light to do anything they wanted, and they licked their lips at the opportunity to play vigilante. They knew they could do some research into best methods, but that isn't nearly as fun as shaking your head as you lament that "desperate times call for desperate measures," is it?

So the problem isn't just that the CIA didn't have any sort of real interrogation program (I can't independently verify that, but it doesn't surprise me in the least), it's that everyone thinks they know how to interrogate, so when interrogators were needed, people volunteered themselves. The fact that there was no real oversight just confirms what Ron Suskind, Seymour Hirsch and others have been saying.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

Staying humane vs. staying alive.

I'm a couple of days late to this, but Matt Yglesias makes an obvious but crucial point regarding the futility of our adventure in Iraq:

The crux of the matter is that soldiers in ambiguous situations understandably tend to err on the side of their own personal safety and that of their fellow soldiers. Likewise, officers faced with ambiguous situations tend to err on the side of giving the soldiers under their command the benefit of the doubt. And courts-martial, likewise, err on the side of taking a favorable view of American soldiers.

All of which is fine. Unless you happen to be an Iraqi. Which is precisely why people tend not to enjoy being under foreign military occupation.

The reality of the matter is that to succeed, our troops would need to behave the way police officers do. But they're not cops, they're soldiers. And there's a good reason that soldiers act the way soldiers do. There's no way that it would be politically feasible -- or even appropriate -- for the US military to start treating Iraqi lives as more important than American lives. But that would be the only way to actually pull off what they've been asked to pull off. It's an impossible situation, and not one we should be putting people in.

The impossible situation isn't just limited to Iraq, however. This is a question I have wrestled with for a long time: can this war actually be conducted while maintaining the ideals of freedom and human rights that Americans and the West hold dear? I wanted to believe it was possible, but I don't really see it. It is always easy to talk about preserving the rights of those you fight against, but it's much more difficult to tell soldiers whose friends are dying before their eyes to respect the human rights of the people doing the shooting. (I can attest to this from personal experience: the only time I have actually wished someone dead was when he was shooting at me.)

The problem only gets worse when you start talking about assymmetrical warfare in which the enemy doesn't just look like a regular citizen, he is a regular citizen (or at least a subset of the regular citizenry that is indistinguishable from the rest of them). Given the choice between self-protection and large geopolitical goals (not that I'm convinced we have any), the Iraqis are going to lose every time.

So what do we do about this? We can't legitimately tell our brave sons and daughters and their families to go out there and take one for the team, but the more vigorously they protect themselves, the more innocent Iraqis die, and the further from our goal of establishing a peaceful rule-of-law democracy we get.

The result has been a mishmash of lofty rhetoric at the strategic level ("we do not torture") and hard-as-nails pragmatism at the tactical level (we torture). Soldiers are told that their safety is priority number one, then sent out into the battlespace with rules of engagement that ensure the enemy will get off a few shots before our guys have time to react. To say that this situation is untenable is to understate the case by quite a bit: it's a situation in which the soldiers are scarcely able to act without either breaking the rules or putting themselves at extra risk.

This is why being the "shining city on the hill" pretty much precludes preemptive war, leaping into battle without a coherent strategy and/or ill-defined objectives, overthrowing dictators who pose no threat to our nation's security, and occupation of foreign lands: everything we do in the interest of these things is either done counter to our values as a nation or at an especially great risk to our soldiers. Essentially we're telling our soldiers that they must find a balance between dying with honor or living with ignominy. That they tend to find ways to muddle through this with their consciences intact is a testament to their resilience, but they should have never been put in that position in the first place.

Yet another reason why "supporting the troops" doesn't mean supporting the way the President uses them, it means opposing the Presidents who would capriciously send them into needless, poorly planned and unwinnable wars.

Labels: interrogation, military

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, fundamentalism, GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, Islam, OOIBC, personal, politics, terrorism

In Bush's brave new world, whistleblowers are repaid with jail time and interrogated at Camp Cropper:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

''It was a Wal-Mart for guns,'' he says. ''It was all illegal and everyone knew it.''

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics ''reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.''

This is what happens when the supposed need for "security" is allowed to trump all rights, even for American citizens. This is what happens when you're "either with us or with the terrorists." Even when you are demonstrably not with the terrorists. Because the definitions of "patriot," "traitor" and "enemy combatant" are entirely subject to the arbitrary will of the king.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, liberty

Per Dave W's suggestion in the comment thread to this post, let me be absolutely clear about something--Interrogators don't actually have the authority to turn any prisoner over to Iraqi police or military units that will, often, abuse them. Those transfers are made way above the head of the interrogator.

Having said that, it's in the interest of the interrogator (and the detainee, actually) to make the detainee believe that this is in the interrogator's power. It's an approach technique: make the detainee believe that the interrogator has the power to control what happens to him.

The fact remains that it is illegal and contrary to U.S. policy to send anyone to a place where American forces have reason to believe that he will be abused. But since the transfer of authority in June 2004, we're technically guests in their country. America doesn't make the rules there, even though we exercise wide influence over the internal laws of that country. In point of fact, everyone arrrested by us or by the Iraqis is subject to Iraqi law and goes before an Iraqi judge. It's their system, and we can't tell them, "no, you can't have custody of your own prisoner." We don't send them so much as they take them.

Large, continual efforts have been made to train Iraqi forces to treat detainees humanely, and there have even been cases where Americans have rescued Iraqi prisoners from Iraqi prisons where they were being mistreated. But the abuse most likely continues, and legally our hands are tied to stop it, except in cases like the one I just linked to. This is one of the many legal gray areas that results froom a battlefield that is also a population center, where there is no "front line" and the streets are patrolled by both the military and the civil police. It's a horrible situation to be in, but it's where we are in Iraq. That's just how things are in assymetrical wars.

One way to curb the abuse would be to aggressively pursue and punish abusers, be they American or Iraqi. So far I haven't seen a lot of evidence that this is happening, but I do know that the commanders over there are very, very afraid of another abuse scandal happening on their watch, so the message has gotten across to some extent. The real change in U.S. practices won't come until those at the top (Rumsfeld, Cheney and General Miller, for instance) are prosecuted for their role in the grotesque abuses of prisoners and the flagrant violations of international law that they authorized. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, torture

Jim Henley has an interesting post up at Unqualified Offerings about torture and its long-term ramifications. It's centered on a passage in Mark Bowden's Atlantic cover story on the events leading up to the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi where the interrogator tells an important detainee: "You don't want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade." Byron York at The Corner believes this to have been a reference to the detainee's belief that torture is still practiced at Abu Ghraib prison, and both Henley and Eric Martin agree that's what it means, while coming to different conclusions about it.

I'm not so sure though. In my experience, Iraqi detainees were less afraid of Abu Ghraib because of those photos than they were afraid because of the spartan conditions, danger (it was one of the most frequently attacked places in Iraq and many of those attacks were targeted at the detainees themselves), disruption in their lives, uncertainty about their future, and the very real and widely-understood possibility that they would disappear down a bureaucratic black hole from which they might take years to escape. Abu Ghraib is a prison, and being in prison sucks, whether you're being tortured for information or ignored altogether.

Actually, detainees were far more fearful of going to an Iraqi-run prison. They knew that the Iraqi Police and Army were only too willing to beat, electrocute, cut, twist, or otherwise harm their prisoners, and they had no desire to be subjected to that. Keeping them in American custody was often an incentive, given their alternatives.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq

I saw another documentary this week: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. As a veteran of that place, I must say that the film-makers got a lot right, and I am glad their film came out. (Can I just interject a general thankfulness here for the fact that it's still OK to shine a critical spotlight on the government in this country? I can? Well gee, thanks!) Unfortunately, they got some things wrong too.

The most egregious example of missing the point has to do with their general theme of painting the Military Policemen in the photos as the poor little fall guys for a vast government conspiracy. Was there a vast government conspiracy to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of War? Yes. Did Rumsfeld and others take proactive measures to blur the legal lines between acceptable military practices in interrogation and detainee abuse? Undeniably. Should the officers and administration officials be held responsible for their blatant violations of human rights? Absolutely. Were the likes of Charles Granger and Lynndie England hung out to dry in an effort to deflect criticism from the administration's close involvement in the circumvention of laws of war, the strict adherence to which America was once the examplar? Yes they were.

But that doesn't mean they were simply unwitting victims. They were allowed and encouraged to engage in despicable acts that have no basis in American policy. But as much as I am glad that they have been punished, the failure to punish those who ordered and condoned their behavior is unconscionable.

The administration's line that those photos were the result of a few bad apples who rejoiced in sadism was, like most lies, true to certain extent. Look at their smiles. There can be no denying the sadism of the people in those photos. The role that some unscrupulous interrogators played in that abuse is certainly significant. But to assert that the Army taught them to mimic electrocution and drag detainees nude from one end of the hall to another is a lie. I know this because I am a graduate of the Army Interrogator course and have taught interrogation at the Army Intelligence School, and I know from both first-hand experience and a thorough understanding of the relevant manuals that physical coercion has not been taught at least since 1992, when the version of the relevant Field Manual (34-52, since updated and re-numbered 2-22.3) that I learned from was published.

I remember well the admonitions of my instructors that physical coercion is both wrong and useless--we've all heard that people will say anything to get you to stop hurting them. The long-standing policy is that if a student violates the Geneva Conventions in the course of a practice interrogation in the schoolhouse, they fail the interrogation and are counseled. Too many counselings and they simply don't graduate, and are sent to an MOS where they won't have so much opportunity to break those particular laws. Interrogators are not merely not taught how to abuse detainees, they are discouraged in substantial ways at every turn from countenancing such behavior.

Unfortunately, there's no way for the schoolhouse to police the training in units once their students have graduated from the course. My guess, and I can't claim to know this for certain, is that the abuses recorded at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere were the result of bad--nay, wicked--training by morally unconscious NCOs after their soldiers had already graduated, and in direct contradiction to standard practice. Well, that and the active encouragement by sinister people such as the former Defense Secretary to "remove the gloves." Those interrogators knew better, because they were not trained in the uses of physical coercion by the Army Intelligence School.

One of the other things I learned as a student-interrogator also bears on this question. We were often told that "everybody thinks they know how to interogate." I've seen this in action: I once stood and smiled as an officer with no interrogation training tried to instruct me in the way to "get to" a detainee. He assumed, as so many people do, that interrogation is all about making the detainee miserable. It is not. One of the most effective tools I have used was the befriending and advocacy of the detainee. As the one official who the detainee talked to on a regular basis, I was in the unique position of actually knowing this person as another human being. Emphasizing that connection is a powerful, effective and humane tool for the collection of information that can and does save lives and shorten wars. Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo and General Miller are not graduates of the interrogation course, but they, as so many others, think they know how to do the job. They do not. So I wish there had been a bit more balance in the film's treatment of the policies that led to the behavior that we have all heard about.

Overall, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib got the story right. But the film-makers' zeal to indict those at the top of the chain of command and the military intelligence community obscures the fact that these practices are not part of military doctrine for interrogators. A simple interview with a representative of the Army Interrogation Course could have addressed this, but it wouldn't have fit into their grand narrative. This is unfortunate, because we were never taught to behave dishonorably, except when those who don't know what they are doing attempted to intervene.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

The Eric Fair article is one of the most linked-to pieces this weekend, but it has surprisingly been missed by most of the right-wing blogosphere. Why is that, I wonder? Is The Corner too busy to bother with such an inconsequential story? Jonah? JPod? K-Lo? Don't any of you have an opinion on this? Apparently not. An example of the "he's just a whining pansy" meme is over at Jules Crittenden's blog. I hope he's proud of himself. But it's been mostly silent on the right, as seen in the lack of coverage at the Jawa Report, TCS and Pajamas Media, who managed to post just one tiny little article, garnering a typically brutish response.

But not nearly as brutish as the left-wing Brendan Skwire of Brendancalling, who wrote an Open Letter to Eric T. Fair, in which he tells Eric:

Your words are empty and hollow. I do not accept a single one of them. But let me offer you a suggestion if you want to do the honorable thing: kill yourself. Leave a note. Name names.

He is joined by his amen chorus of commenters in what I can only think of as a despicable example of the left being anything but liberal. Note that Skwire wants to have his cake and eat it too: Fair should "name names," but only in his suicide note; the suicide being what Skwire focuses his hopes and dreams on. Personally, I'd be horrified if Fair killed himself, but I'd love to see more names come out, particularly the names of those who ordered this abuse. But that's just me. I guess I'm a softy.

Brendancalling doesn't represent the vast majority of the lefty blogs, though. Many have credited him for his courage in speaking the truth to power. Some of the better ones I've seen were at Firedog Lake, Atrios, Welcome to Pottersville, and Catzmaw's Commentary.

America's North Shore Journal (not a lefty) helpfully pointed to a mention of previous articles by Fair, discussing Fair's evolution:

What had happened to Fair since last November? He doesn’t mention his earlier writing today, but this probably explains it: “While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues [in Iraq] , I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.”

In fact, today’s step seems to have been a long time coming: A Web search turns up a rough draft of that earlier column posted in January 2006 at a veterans group's site.

Pardon My Paradox found an article by a survivor of Soviet torture, Vladimir Bukovsky, which is worth quoting at length:

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists.

Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

Which points to the worst part about this whole ordeal: the human cost to everyone involved. Eric Fair has shown us that to descend into the dark hole of torture has long-lasting effects for those who go there. Unless they're sociopaths. Digby may have said it best:

I'm sure there are those who have no such self-awareness, or who truly believe that such sadistic treatment was warrented and correct. But it will blow back on them too, in some way, somewhere. Because it is a simple truth that when you treat human beings like animals, you become one yourself. And on some level, there is a part of every person that howls in protest against such debasement whether they are the perpetrator or the victim.

This man knows what he did and is speaking out as a way to redeem himself. Others will likely use far less positive means to exorcize themselves of this pain and degradation. And everyone will pay the price.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

I was remiss in not mentioning the Stanford Prison Experiment along with the Milgram Experiments in my post yesterday. (But Dakota Feinstein caught it.)

In the summer of 2004, we watched this video in the prison where I worked, followed by a discussion. Distressingly few of my colleagues took it seriously. That was one of the first examples of the disturbing reactions I alluded to below.

It should not be so difficult to get people to acknowledge that evil acts committed in the name of something good are still evil.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

Tyler Drumheller, former CIA Chief of European Operations, has made it very clear in this Der Spiegel interview who was responsible for the CIA's extraordinary renditions program:

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Notice what he identifies as the approach of the administration: to "turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences." Unfortunately it's worse than that, because the administration specifically authorized those illegal programs and interrogation techniques. So they didn't just turn everybody loose, they set everybody up to fail and then let them twist in the wind when the failure inevitably happened.

Further down in the interview, Drumheller mentions his surprise to discover that intelligence he knew to be dubious, which he had specifically caveated as such, was used as the centerpiece of Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech laying out the argument for going to war with Iraq:

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

It seems to me that this goes a long way toward answering the question of what the Bush Administration knew and when it knew it.

A commenter at A Tiny Revolution sees the Stalin parallel in an interview with Slavoj Žižek:

From the top, you received an order, say, "Cossacks should be liquidated as a class." It was not stated clearly what this order meant - dispossess them, kill them etc. That ambiguity was part of Stalin's logic. Being afraid of being denounced as too soft, local cadres went to extremes, and then, the interesting irony is that the only positive concrete intervention of Stalin was his famous dizziness with success. Here, he would say, "No, comrades, we should respect legalities." Stalin's obscenity was that he put in this kind of abstract, superego injunction which threw you into a panic, and then he appeared as a moderate.

Just remember, they hate us for our freedom.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, interrogation, torture

A former interrogator in Iraq has said in public what I have known to be the case since I was over there: prior to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American interrogators was systematic and officially sanctioned, the interrogators themselves knew better, and they did nothing.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency.

I have heard this whispered in back corners, accompanied by winks and nudges from people who were there at the time and knew what was going on.

I know this because I too was an interrogator there. I arrived the week the scandal did, and spent my year-plus as an American interrogator in the post-scandal atmosphere of, "don't let the next scandal happen on my watch." My attitude was always that I didn't want to be the person who made the mistake, and I reported every claim of abuse that I heard.

There were many claims. A lot of them were false, as evidenced by what I have referred to as "waves" of abuse reports: we would go months without hearing anything, we'd hear a dozen reports per day for a few days, and it would quiet down again. People were so scared of another scandal that they would halt the interrogation to report the claim. The detainees figured this out pretty quickly, so word would get out and all of a sudden everybody had a tale of abuse to tell. Our policy was to document the claim and forward it to the proper authorities (who were also eager to make sure the next scandal didn't happen as a reult of their inaction) but not to allow the claim to interfere with intelligence collection. This tended to put the brakes on the waves of abuse claims, and put the question of whether the claim was accurate or not in the hands of others, which we were only too happy to do. I do not believe, however, that every report I heard was a fabrication. There were too many of them, humans have a tendency to go along with whatever horrors are de rigeur, and far too many people believe that the end justifies the means.

I never witnessed any violations of the Geneva Conventions. Again, I got there when the Geneva Conventions were all the rage. But who among my colleagues did, and failed to act? Who participated in cover-ups? Who secretly pined for the "good old days" when you could do a lot more to squeeze information out of an unwilling detainee? I don't know the answer to this question, and I frankly don't want to know. But the story must get out. Not to demonize those who participated in it, Milgram Experiment-style, but to have a full reckoning. To do whatever we can to ensure that this never happens again.

I am thankful that I didn't witness what Eric Fair witnessed. His story of sleepless nights resonates with me, because I have no doubt that I would be in the same boat were I witness to, and participant in, the horrors that he saw. I am also thankful that the timeline of my employment in Iraq shields me from suspicion on that count, if only a bit. It's a question I always have to answer whenever people find out what I do for a living.

What continues to disturb me, however, is the fact that I often get a very disturbing reaction: they're all a bunch of terrorists so they don't have any rights, and "they would do it to us, so why is it wrong for us to do it to them?" As if our yardstick for ethical behavior is Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, personal, torture