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

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

This one's a few days old, but you shouldn't miss Belle Waring at Crooked Timber having a blast with a few responses to "various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points." I second Unqualified Offerings' endorsement of this rule of thumb:

if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture. So, false execution: definitely torture. Also torture: long-time standing; exposure to extremes of heat and cold; forcing prisoners to kneel or stand in painful positions; putting prisoners in cells so small they cannot stand or lie down; keeping them awake for days at a time. These practices were the meat and drink of the NKVD, who preferred them to fingernail extraction for the same reason certain American torture advocates do: they can be made to seem as if they are not torture, even though they are, in fact, actually torture.

And then there's this, which I am also only too happy to endorse:

“Liberals don’t condemn terrorist atrocities in Iraq, such as the latest chlorine bomb attacks, because they think Arabs are sub-human scum from whom nothing better can be expected.” Um, who thinks Arabs are scum now? Moving on, I have a strong sense that my condemning such attacks is pointless (still, obviously, I read about such attacks with surprise and horror and regard them as evil). Give me a lever long enough and I will…er, scratch my ass with it in a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening! By contrast, since I am a citizen of a democratic state, my efforts to change US policy by criticizing, say, Yoo’s depraved torture justifications may actually have some effect, however small. Additionally, it’s true that qua terrorists (rather than qua Arabs), I don’t expect much better from Sunni ultras. On the other hand, I am a US patriot. This means I have a lot invested in our city on the hill image and don’t want to see my nation’s honor dragged through the mud by a bunch of incompetent authoritarian dillholes.

You see, it's not that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America than by the awfulness of more demonstrably awful countries, it's that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America when America claims a certain moral high ground and then acts awfully. It pisses us off when we look at our own society and say, "gee, that doesn't look like a very nice place, does it"?

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, liberty, terrorism, torture

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