The lead story in today’s Washington
Post, headlined “How a Detainee Became
An Asset,” provides a one-sided and distorted
account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh
Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the urgent need
for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create
a comprehensive and authoritative narrative
of the eight years of misgovernment of the Bush
administration.
The prosecution of low-level CIA officials
and government contractors for resorting to
torture and abuse beyond the sordid guidelines
of the Justice Department will allow the major
players of the Bush administration as well as
the lawyers of the Justice Department to escape
retribution and judgment. Since President George
W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would
never be held accountable, the entire nation
would be better served by a full understanding
of the war crimes that they authorized in our
name.
Today’s article argues that the techniques
of torture and abuse turned KSM into the CIA’s
“preeminent source” on al-Qaeda.
Citing an intelligence assessment by the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center, which was presumably
prepared for Vice President Cheney, the Post
article argues that waterboarding was the key
to breaking KSM’s spirit and eliciting
valuable intelligence on the “inner workings
of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology,
and operatives.”
This view contradicts the findings of the authoritative
2004 report on detainees and interrogations
of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
as well as the personal views of the Inspector
General (IG) himself.
As the Post acknowledges, John Helgerson, the
former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said
that the work of the OIG did not permit “definitive
conclusions about the effectiveness of particular
interrogation methods.” Helgerson acknowledged
that waterboarding and sleep deprivation “elicited
a lot of information,” but the OIG didn’t
“do a careful, systematic analysis of
the use of particular techniques with particular
individuals and independently confirm the quality
of the information that came out.”
As a result, Helgerson recommended (but the
Post article chose to omit) the creation of
an independent panel of experts to “systematically
evaluate the quality of the intelligence gained
as related to the specific techniques used,
or not used, in particular cases. This would
clarify the value of the information and the
utility of various approaches.” This recommendation
was one of ten recommendations in the 2004 IG
report; unfortunately, the Justice Deparment
(presumably due to the importuning of the CIA)
chose to redact all ten IG recommendations from
the declassified report.
There is ample testimony to challenge the view
that torture and abuse worked. There were FBI
agents at the site where KSM was held who testified
that torture and abuse didn’t lead to
eliciting valuable intelligence. And a CIA operative
has noted that KSM was willing to talk before
being tortured, noting that “tea and crumpets”
were all that was needed. The former head of
U.S. Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, remarked
in 2006 that “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 more recently, several veteran FBI and military
interrogators called for an investigation of
so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques
(EIT),” because of their concerns about
the legality, morality, and effectiveness of
EITs.
It is important to remember that the 2004 IG
report emphatically stated that the information
elicited by torture and abuse “did not
uncover any evidence that [any] plots were imminent.”
Other CIA memoranda stated that information
gained from detainees led to “arrests
[that] disrupted attack plans in progress,”
but did not attribute this information to the
use of torture and abuse.
The IG study could not even determine if the
83 waterboardings given to Abu Zubaydah were
the reason for his increased willingness to
talk. The study noted, moreover, that torture
was contrary to the Eighth Amendment against
“cruel and unusual punishments;”
the 1984 UN Torture Convention, which the United
States took the lead in drafting and ratifying;
and domestic law.
Finally, it is more important to remember that
torture and abuse are evil. Illegal, immoral,
counter-productive, but most importantly evil.
George Bush told a press conference in 2005
that “this country does not believe in
torture,” but the fact is we conducted
torture on those who were guilty and those who
were innocent.
And Dick Cheney, who has fanatically been waging
his own personal jihad in defense of torture
and abuse, told Fox News in an interview that
will air tomorrow that CIA interrogators were
justified in exceeding even the broad authorizations
provided by the Justice Department, suggesting
that the ends justify the means. Perhaps the
Washington Post could give front-page coverage
to the 18-page memorandum that the CIA gave
to the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in
2004, which provides extraordinary details of
the interrogations in plain, but sordid and
sadistic, language.
Two years ago, then CIA director Michael Hayden
released a collection of long-secret documents
compiled in 1974 that detailed domestic spying,
assassination plots, and other CIA misdeeds
in the 1960s and early 1970s. In releasing the
documents, known as the “family jewels,”
Hayden told a group of historians who had been
pressing for greater disclosure from the Agency,
that the documents provided a “glimpse
of a very different time and a very different
agency.” He also stated that, when the
government withholds information, myth and misinformation
“fill the vacuum like a gas.”
In order to prevent the Washington Post and
others from adding to the myths and misinformation
of torture and abuse, it is time to appoint
a blue ribbon commission to study all aspects
of the CIA’s detentions and interrogations
policies.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
