Rules Lay Out C.I.A.’s Tactics in Questioning

Glenn Greenwald this morning highlights the US condemnation of Russia's human rights abuses in a 2001 report. Amongst the condemnations are the following:

Article 21 of the Constitution prohibits torture, violence, and other brutal or humiliating treatment or punishment; however, there are credible reports that law enforcement personnel regularly use torture to coerce confessions from suspects and that the Government does not hold most of the torturers accountable for their actions.

There were credible reports that Government and separatist forces in Chechnya tortured detainees. There are also claims of abuse of psychiatry by authorities.

There is a terrible irony to Greenwald pointing out this report on the very day that the White House have given the CIA permission to resume its use of some severe interrogation methods for questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas.

It would appear that the CIA are now being given permission to engage in the very actions that the 2001 report routinely condemned.

A new executive order signed by President Bush does not authorize the full set of harsh interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. since the program began in 2002. But government officials said the rules would still allow some techniques more severe than those used in interrogations by military personnel in places like the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The White House order brought condemnation on Friday from human rights groups, which argued that it helped systematize a program of indefinite, incommunicado detention and used methods that violated international law. But in a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, defended the program as having been “irreplaceable,” though he said extraordinary techniques had been used on fewer than half of about 100 terrorism suspects.

Of course, we don't know the specifics of the techniques used as the details remain classified, but we are at least now promised that waterboarding is no longer to be admitted. And the order does now include a definition of “humiliating and degrading treatment” which accords with international law, an obvious victory for the state department.

But it is very clear that, although the banning of waterboarding is a victory of sorts, that the people who are defining whether or not what they do constitutes torture are a set of people with an incredibly lax approach towards their adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Not only has this administration refused to define waterboarding as torture, it has a Vice President who has gone as far as to describe waterboarding as "a dunk in the water".

So the problem remains that the Bush administration, who are so quick to point out what they consider torture when they are describing the acts of the Kremlin, refuse to even discuss the methods that they are using. Although they do precede their techniques with the word, "extraordinary" interrogation techniques.

Earlier this year, State Department officials rejected a draft of the executive order because they believed that the language was too permissive and could open the Bush administration to challenges from American allies that the White House was legalizing methods that approach torture. Some Bush administration officials, including members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, pushed for a more expansive interpretation of Geneva Convention language and for interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had not even requested.

According to one senior intelligence official, nearly half of the source material used in the recent National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorism threat to the United States came from C.I.A. interrogations of detainees.

Some human rights groups said they feared that the Bush administration was using creative legal reasoning to justify practices that close American allies have banned.

“This is an administration that won’t even publicly denounce waterboarding,” said John Sifton, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch. “It’s hard to believe that they will be interpreting these standards in a way that is true to the spirit of the Military Commissions Act.”

But other critics of the harsh C.I.A. interrogation practices of the past, including former top Bush administration officials, said that the executive order was a step in the right direction. “The U.S. government is continuing to move toward an approach to this vital area of human intelligence collection that is more sustainable — morally, politically, and legally,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until last year and who delivered a blistering lecture earlier this year denouncing the C.I.A.’s interrogation program as it was used in the past.

There can be no great surprise that there - at the forefront, demanding even more appalling techniques than the CIA had requested - is the Prince of Darkness himself, Dick Cheney. There are no words to describe the contempt in which I hold that draft dodging, war-mongering, scoundrel. And it is nice to know that some small victory has been achieved against this slug.

However, even Zelikow concedes that the US government are "continuing to move toward an approach to this vital area of human intelligence collection that is more sustainable — morally, politically, and legally". Please note that, according to Zelikow, a proper moral, legal and politically sustainable position is something that this administration are merely "moving towards", he does not claim that they are there yet. And, as John Sifton points out, we are still reliant on the opinions of an administration that refuses to condemn waterboarding as illegal, that what they are doing does not constitute torture.

What's interesting, and I really do suggest you read the report that Greenwald has come across, is that this administration - who condemned Russia for having equipment which enabled "the [Foreign Security Service] to monitor Internet traffic, telephone calls, and pagers without judicial approval" - has not, in so many areas, come up to the same set of standards that they demanded of Russia in 2001. I mean, it's simply a bad fucking joke to read the administration who today operate Guantanamo Bay deriding the Russian's because, "lengthy pretrial detention remained a serious problem".

This is an administration that has failed to live up to the standards it has set for others, so - whilst I'll welcome the banning of waterboarding - I won't take them at their word that they no longer torture, until they specify exactly which acts they consider torture and which acts they don't.

They've given themselves far too much rope on this issue in the past to be taken at their word now.

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Tags: Bush, Cheney, CIA, interrogation techniques, torture, waterboarding