“The Bush administration did what the American public wanted, and that was do whatever it takes to keep us safe,” declared the particularly incensed Andrea Tantaros. “The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she continued. “We’ve closed the book on [torture], and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome” — mainly because they “don’t like this country” and “want us to look bad.”
Our New Politics of Torture
It sounds like a tautology. They have to torture Abu Zubaydah so that he will reveal a “ticking time bomb,” and they need that revelation to justify the use of torture. And the use of torture is based on the fact that he hasn’t revealed any such plot.
.. Eventually, he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and waterboarded eighty-three times. It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed at the direct orders of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.
It’s an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is almost killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world for more suffering and more torture.
And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a “success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction, that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had nothing to do with him giving more information as he was waterboarded. The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety. And their anxiety was based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man actually was.
.. Our ignorance, our anxiety, our guilt, into their pain. It’s one reason why I think—looking much more broadly at policy—it was a grave error for President Bush not to replace people in the CIA after September 11. Because you had an agency that out of its guilt about having failed to prevent those attacks—guilt that extended from the director down—could think only of preventing another attack. And while preventing another attack was extremely important, it wasn’t the only thing. And I think here their hysteria caused them to operate in an irrational and counterproductive way.
.. Ali Soufan, in a recent piece in The Guardian, talks about how insane it was that they were talking about a ticking bomb, and then just left him alone, uninterrogated for forty-seven days, even after the FBI had gotten these other bits of information.
.. The CIA was actually misleading the Department of Justice. The report shows that the information given to the DOJ by the CIA in order for the DOJ to make its determination in the summer of 2002 that these techniques were legal—that information was misleading and wrong; notably, that the techniques were not applied as described but much more brutally, especially waterboarding. John Yoo, the author of the original torture memo, already told the Office of Professional Responsibility during their investigation that if waterboarding was performed as it was described in the press he would not have judged it legal. And the report shows that indeed the CIA performed the technique in a much more brutal manner than it admitted to the Department of Justice lawyers.
.. Though President Obama formally abolished torture with an executive order on his second day in office, his refusal to take other steps—to approve investigations, prosecutions, or at least a bipartisan commission—means that only his signature on that executive order stands between us and the possibility of more torture in the future.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the C.I.A.
On March 12, 2003, during a waterboarding session, so much water was forced into Mohammed that his “abdomen was somewhat distended and he expressed water when the abdomen was pressed,” the Senate report says, quoting from a C.I.A. cable. One of the medical officers present said that, even though Mohammed was vomiting during the sessions, his “gastric contents” had become so diluted that he was “not concerned about regurgitated gastric acid damaging KSM’s esophagus.” Instead, the medical officer said, he was worried that Mohammed had been filled with so much water that there was a danger that the electrolytes in his blood had become dangerously diluted; the officer requested that C.I.A. interrogators use salted water during the waterboarding sessions.
The Senate report, which drew almost entirely on the C.I.A.’s internal communications, makes a convincing case that while the interrogation of Mohammed produced some valuable information, the interrogators never got what they wanted. No information provided by Mohammed led directly to the capture of a terrorist or the disruption of a terrorist plot.
.. On September 27, 2001, a C.I.A. officer sent an e-mail to his colleagues about Asset X titled “Access to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad.” Asset X was willing to help, for a price, the e-mail said.
Then something went wrong. The C.I.A. agent who was meeting Asset X recommended that Asset X be paid a certain amount of money for his help, but the request was denied. Asset X disappeared. The Senate report says, “Over the next nine months, the CIA continued to believe that ASSET X had the potential to develop information about KSM and his location, and sought, but was unable to reestablish contact with ASSET X.”
The Unidentified Queen of Torture
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks.
..As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks.
.. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.