Sunday, August 05, 2007
Marty Lederman
In this week's New Yorker,
here's Jane Mayer's indispensable story on the CIA black sites and the unlawful torture and cruel treatment that has occurred there. This is the single best, and most important, article yet written on the torture scandal.
As we have tried to argue repeatedly in this space, it is the conduct at these black sites, and not so much Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that is at the heart of the scandal -- or, at the very least, it's at the CIA black sites that the problems began, and that's where the primary action is now, after Hamdan and the MCA. This is not a case, like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where the government simply insisted that interrogators obtain actionable intelligence, promised them legal cover, and then turned a blind eye so that unsupervised thugs could do their dirty work. That was bad enough. But as Jane explains, the CIA program is much more systematized, approved in every detail at the highest levels of government, by DOJ and by the Director of Central Intelligence, instigated and pushed by the Vice President, and supervised by psychologists hired to give it a patina of respectability and orderliness. It is an official, systematic torture regime, conducted entirely in secret, and without any accountability, let alone punishment for those who have violated clear legal norms -- including the Torture Act, the War Crimes Act, and the prohibition on cruel treatment and torture in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
I'll add more details about Jane's story shortly. In the meantime, it's a must-read.
UPDATE:
There are so many rich and remarkable details in Jane’s piece; no summary can do it justice. But here are some of the more important points:
-- In 2001, the CIA had no idea how to effectively interrogate suspects. Dentenion and interrogation were not traditional CIA functions, and so the agency solicited advice from, among others, . . . Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, nations notorious for torture. There was substantial internal resistance in the CIA to this fundamental change in the agency's agenda -- and to implementing a system of detention and coercive interrogation without having any experience in such matters.
-- "The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s
one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized.
People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"
<...>
-- I have repeatedly argued here that there is no justification for keeping secret what interrogation techniques the CIA is permitted to use. In particular,
it is absurd to "classify" something that is revealed to people outside the government who have no duty of confidentiality, i.e.,
to the detainees on whom the techniques are used. Those persons are free to disclose the information to others, as they have now done to Red Cross interviewers. Because of this, it becomes necessary to detain these persons, in isolation, presumably forever,
in order to impose a prior restraint on their speech concerning their knowledge of what our government has done to them. In a strange sort of circular logic, the interrogation becomes the justification for indefinite detention, even long after the interrogation ends. Thus, as Jane writes, "(t)he utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security,"
so that they cannot reveal what happened to them.
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