King of Pain

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 18 September 2006

We know that the world would see this action as a U.S. repudiation of the rules that bind civilized nations. We also know that an extraordinary lineup of former military and intelligence leaders, including Colin Powell, have spoken out against the Bush plan, warning that it would further damage America's faltering moral standing, and end up endangering U.S. troops.

But I haven't seen much discussion of the underlying question: why is Mr. Bush so determined to engage in torture?

Let's be clear what we're talking about here. According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to "stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours"; the "cold cell," in which prisoners are forced "to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees," while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which "the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet," then "cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him," inducing "a terrifying fear of drowning."

And bear in mind that the "few bad apples" excuse doesn't apply; these were officially approved tactics - and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use.

I'm ashamed that my government does this sort of thing. I'd be ashamed even if I were sure that only genuine terrorists were being tortured - and I'm not. Remember that the Bush administration has imprisoned a number of innocent men at Guantánamo, and in some cases continues to imprison them even though it knows they are innocent.

Is torture a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world? No. People with actual knowledge of intelligence work tell us that reality isn't like TV dramas, in which the good guys have to torture the bad guy to find out where he planted the ticking time bomb.

What torture produces in practice is misinformation, as its victims, desperate to end the pain, tell interrogators whatever they want to hear. Thus Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi - who ABC News says was subjected to both the cold cell and water boarding - told his questioners that Saddam Hussein's regime had trained members of Al Qaeda in the use of biochemical weapons. This "confession" became a key part of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq - but it was pure invention.

So why is the Bush administration so determined to torture people?

To show that it can.

The central drive of the Bush administration - more fundamental than any particular policy - has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the president's power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it's a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they're asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.

And many of our politicians are willing to go along. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is poised to vote in favor of the administration's plan to, in effect, declare torture legal. Most Republican senators are equally willing to go along, although a few, to their credit, have stood with the Democrats in opposing the administration.

Mr. Bush would have us believe that the difference between him and those opposing him on this issue is that he's willing to do what's necessary to protect America, and they aren't. But the record says otherwise.

The fact is that for all his talk of being a "war president," Mr. Bush has been conspicuously unwilling to ask Americans to make sacrifices on behalf of the cause - even when, in the days after 9/11, the nation longed to be called to a higher purpose. His admirers looked at him and thought they saw Winston Churchill. But instead of offering us blood, toil, tears and sweat, he told us to go shopping and promised tax cuts.

Only now, five years after 9/11, has Mr. Bush finally found some things he wants us to sacrifice. And those things turn out to be our principles and our self-respect.



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Prisoners
By George Packer
The New Yorker

18 September 2006 Issue

If only political jujitsu were a useful weapon in the war on terror, the President's speech last Wednesday, in the East Room of the White House, would have struck a powerful blow on behalf of what he called "the cause of humanity, against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world." In just thirty-seven minutes, he changed the subject from Iraq to terrorism, flummoxing a newly confident opposition; he basked in the applause of an audience that included September 11th families as he vowed to put Al Qaeda leaders on trial at Guantánamo, where, he announced, they had just been moved from the C.I.A.'s secret overseas prisons; he reassured the world that the United States doesn't torture prisoners in these "black sites," while essentially reserving the right to continue to do so. He simultaneously played the good cop and the bad cop, the principled advocate of the Geneva conventions and the hardboiled defender of "an alternative set of procedures" (which went unspecified). And he forced the Democrats into an agonizingly familiar position: the preëlection defensive crouch. A bill that the White House sent to Congress last week presented members with the choice of voting for the President's military tribunals, which would allow the use of evidence gained by coercion and deprive defendants of the right to hear all the evidence against them, or trying to rebut election-eve commercials that accuse them of wanting to see the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed go unpunished.

It was the kind of performance-part inspirational, part fear-purveying, part bullying-that used to be this President's signature. Its deftness and its timing were reminiscent of his successful effort in the weeks before the last midterm elections, in 2002, to force his opponents into rushed and politically difficult votes on the Homeland Security bill and the Iraq-war resolution. In Washington last week, the political class shook its head in admiration-you can't count him out yet! Within hours of the speech, the Republican leadership in Congress, which had been making unhappy noises at the smell of its own potential demise, reverted to its coöperative role and promised to bring the White House bill up for a vote in a matter of weeks, or even days. Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, whose alternative proposal would ban the tribunals from admitting coerced or secret evidence, will either stand up to their party leaders or find a way to declare technical victory while caving in. After five years, justice for Al Qaeda is suddenly so urgent that it has to be guaranteed before, say, November 7th. The Democrats hit back, but you could hear the quaver-not again!

Whether or not the public mood shifts to the President in time for the midterms, the recovery of his political skills will be of no help in the long struggle against radical Islam. In fact, it will be harmful. Everything about the speech that sparkled with tactical cleverness in terms of domestic politics contributed to an ongoing strategic disaster around the world. "The United States does not torture," the President said. "I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it." This was a lie, and most of the world knows it. The lie, and the reality that the phrase "an alternative set of procedures" is meant to conceal-simulated drowning, sleep and sensory deprivation, induced hypothermia, beatings, and other forms of torture that are responsible for some of the dozens of detainee deaths considered to be homicides-have done more to embolden America's enemies and estrange its friends than anything Osama bin Laden might say or do.

The speech was full of distortions: for example, the President's statement that the prisoners at Guantánamo are hard-core terrorists and that "we have in place a rigorous process to insure those held at Guantánamo Bay belong at Guantánamo" (innocent men have languished there for years); and his implication that the C.I.A.'s harsh interrogation methods led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (he was arrested on the basis of a tip that the C.I.A. received from an Al Qaeda walk-in willing to help the American side). Abu Zubaydah, the terrorist subject of most of the President's assertions, was described by some C.I.A. sources as a mentally ill Al Qaeda factotum. The President asked the public to accept on faith his assertions that terrorist plots were foiled and other terrorists seized thanks to the harsh methods. Perhaps, in some of these cases, Bush is telling the truth, but there's no compelling reason to think so.

By now, the President's relentless exploitation of September 11th has made even non-partisan Americans skeptical of his claims. In the Administration's current public-relations blitz, Bush has invoked Hitler, Lenin, and wars for civilization, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared Iraq-war critics to Nazi appeasers circa 1938. The purpose of the rhetoric is not to persuade-if the Administration believed in argument on the merits, Bush would have to defend torture-but to make reasoned debate impossible. With one half of the country whipped into a state of fear and the other half sunk in cynicism, Americans can scarcely think or talk clearly about whether, five years on, we need a profound change in strategy.

At almost exactly the same hour last week that the President was speaking in the East Room, Lieutenant General John (Jeff) Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was briefing reporters at the Pentagon on the military's new field manual for "human intelligence collector operations." The manual spells out which interrogation techniques will be forbidden. "Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner," General Kimmons said, in exactly the specific language that the President refuses to use. "They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain, any form of physical pain. They may not use water boarding." When the General was asked whether he thought it was a mistake not to classify the list of permitted techniques, he showed that some members of the government and the military have learned from the mistakes of the past few years: the need for transparency, for working with allies, he said, is greater than the need for secrecy. And when a reporter asked whether some of the now forbidden forms of torture might have been useful in gaining information, General Kimmons directly contradicted what his Commander-in-Chief was saying at the White House:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been-in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral, and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there.

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.



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Timeline of Wartime Detention Systems
The Associated Press

Sunday 17 September 2006

The evolution of the U.S. wartime detention system:

2001

Oct. 7 - Afghanistan war begins.

2002

Jan. 16 - Al-Qaida and Taliban suspects arrive at U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Feb. 7 - President Bush signs order declaring Geneva Convention rights don't apply to Afghanistan detainees.

Nov. 27 - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issues order allowing harsh techniques at Guantanamo including forced nakedness, stress positions, use of dogs.

Dec. 26 - Washington Post first reports abusive interrogations in secret CIA prisons.

2003

March 20 - Iraq war begins.

September - Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizes interrogation plan including use of dogs and stress positions.

Nov. 1 - Associated Press reports humiliating, abusive treatment and deaths of U.S. detainees in Iraq, based on interviews with freed prisoners.

Nov. 8 - Now-infamous abuses are photographed at Abu Ghraib including forcing prisoners to perform or simulate sex acts.

2004

Jan. 13 - Abu Ghraib military policeman Joseph Darby tips Army investigators to abuse.

March 3 - Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, special investigator, forwards classified report to U.S. Baghdad command citing ''sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses'' at Abu Ghraib.

March 20 - First charges are announced against six Abu Ghraib soldiers.

April 28-30 - CBS News and New Yorker magazine report on Abu Ghraib. Photos prompt global outrage.

June 22 - Justice Department announces it is withdrawing 2002 memos narrowly defining torture.

Oct. 14 - Army investigation implicates 28 soldiers in 2002 deaths of two Afghan detainees.

2005

Jan. 14 - Spc. Charles Graner Jr. is sentenced to 10 years in prison, stiffest sentence in Abu Ghraib scandal.

2006

June 29 - U.S. Supreme Court strikes down military tribunals planned for terror suspects. It also holds that Geneva's ban on degrading treatment applies to U.S. detainees.

July 11 - White House says it will rescind section of Bush 2002 executive order saying terror suspects have no Geneva Convention protections.

Sept. 6 - Pentagon issues new interrogation manual banning abusive techniques. Bush announces secret CIA prisons were emptied of 14 terror suspects, who are moved to Guantanamo.