The Black Sites

Jane Mayer has an article published in The New Yorker which I would urge everyone to read. After reading this article it becomes almost impossible not to come to the conclusion that the US are actively engaging in torture - sanctioned at the highest levels of the Bush administration - with explicit pushing for it's implementation by the Vice President Dick Cheney.

It starts with Gonzales phoning the wife of Daniel Pearl to tell her that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks, had confessed to killing her husband.

The only problem was that she had been given this information in 2003 by Condaleezza Rice - information that she was told was secret.

Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him.

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.” She added, “I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”

The fact that KSM admitted to 31 criminal plots - an astonishing number even for such a high ranking figure - has led to an examination of the techniques that the CIA have been using.

What Mayer has found simply confirms what many of us had suspected, there has been a deliberate policy of torture carried out by the CIA, although they have stopped short of calling it torture.

The best proof of this is allegedly from a report made by The Red Cross. The Red Cross, in order to ensure access to prisoners, never make their reports public; they report only to the country whose methods they are investigating.

The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.

Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in this case. Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

Nor do the CIA officials involved have any faith, should this ever become public, that the Bush administration would not simply throw them to the dogs and claim that they had no knowledge about what was actually going on.

A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the agency’s detention and interrogation policies, said he worried that, if the full story of the C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel could face criminal prosecution. Within the agency, he said, there is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution” for the interrogation program. If congressional hearings begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. officers have taken out professional liability insurance, to help with potential legal fees.

Even George Tenet is trying to distance himself from approval of the programme although the Bush administration are insisting that he signed off on it. (First indication that they will throw people under buses if caught.)

Accurately or not, Bush Administration officials have described the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as the unauthorized actions of ill-trained personnel, eleven of whom have been convicted of crimes. By contrast, the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency’s director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, “Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was signed off by the C.I.A. director.”

So they are preparing Tenet to carry the can if they are ever caught. And who was behind all this really? Well, wouldn't you know it, the Vice President for Torture himself:

“It began right away, in Afghanistan, on the fly,” he recalled. “They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world.” The former officer said that the pressure from the White House, in particular from Vice-President Dick Cheney, was intense: “They were pushing us: ‘Get information! Do not let us get hit again!’ ” In the scramble, he said, he searched the C.I.A.’s archives, to see what interrogation techniques had worked in the past. He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model.

And how did they got round the tiresome detail that they were actually employing techniques used by countries who the USA had traditionally condemned for such practices? Easy... They employed psychologists:

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.”

There are people who come here and argue that there is insufficient proof that the US is engaging in torture and that I must be some sort of anti-American to argue that this is actually taking place.

I regard such people as enablers, as no better than the turds who hand alcoholics drinks. They are, by constantly insisting that the voluminous body of evidence emerging is insufficient proof, allowing the good name of the US to be dragged through the mud by an administration that most of the US have not only rejected, but which they regard as one of the most profound failures in the history of that great nation.

I really do urge everyone to read this article. This paragraph alone must make any sentient person sit up and take notice:

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.”

Any person who continues to deny that the US is torturing people must accept that their very denial potentially allows any such practice to continue - and makes them complicit in that practice.

When your country is accused of such crimes, there are only two stances that one can take. One can either demand an investigation and, if the practice is found to exist, insist that it be stopped. Or one can continue to think it inconceivable, and by doing so, implicitly allow it - if it is, indeed, happening -to continue.

There is no third path.

Click title for the article.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, torture, CIA, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed