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Dark places

Dark places

Last updated on: August 14, 2007 at 9:01 pm by Fred Clark

Dark places 2007-08-14T21:01:43-04:00 Fred Clark

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Jane Mayer’s meticulously researched New Yorker report, “The Black Sites: A rare look inside the CIA’s secret interrogation program” sent me back to hilzoy’s earlier Obsidian Wings post on those Black Sites. Hilzoy’s conclusion provides a good introduction to Mayer’s longer report:

Whenever I write a post like this, someone pops up in comments to ask why I am so concerned about the fate of terrorists. In many cases, I don’t have to engage with this question: many of the people we have held and tortured are innocent. In the case of the program described in this report, however, I would assume that many, though not all, were terrorists. So it’s worth saying explicitly that this is not, for me, just about feeling badly for the people we have detained and abused. Sometimes I feel very badly for them, especially in the case of those who are, as best I can tell, completely innocent; but feeling badly for them is not essential. Because there’s another motivation at work, namely: concern for my country, and the desire that it be the best country it can be.

There are some things we, as individuals, should not do to other people. Often, we will also sympathize with those people, and that sympathy might prevent us from, say, torturing or raping them. Sometimes we feel no sympathy, however — the other person might be a person only a saint could sympathize with, like Jeffrey Dahmer. If our only reason for not torturing or raping people was sympathy, then when faced with such a person, we might have no reason not to do whatever we liked to him or her. But sympathy is not our only reason for not torturing and raping people. There’s also self-respect: the thought that whatever someone else might choose to be like, and even if that person has chosen to be Jeffrey Dahmer, there are certain things that I will not choose to do, because I do not want to be the sort of person who does them. …

I do not have a lot of sympathy for Osama bin Laden. But that fact has precisely nothing to do with my thinking that there are certain things I simply do not want my country to do, even to him.

Jane Mayer pulls together everything that can be learned about the off-the-record, off-the-books, classified detention and interrogation sites the Central Intelligence Agency has been operating around the world. She cites the European reports on the prisons, interviews former CIA and Defense officials and the lawyers of former Black Site detainees now held in Guantanamo Bay.

Mayer also cites Khaled el-Masri, “the German car salesman whom the CIA captured in 2003 and dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous intelligence; he was released in 2004. … Germany has confirmed that he has no connections to terrorism.” Masri’s eyewitness account informs Mayer’s examination of the Black Sites with his direct, firsthand knowledge from inside the cells, but she doesn’t dwell on his case as an innocent man detained and tortured by mistake. Mayer, like hilzoy, realizes that Masri’s case would be a way of not engaging the question. No one would argue that the CIA’s secret interrogation program is just, wise, moral, appropriate or productive in the case of this tragically abused car salesman. The real question is whether or not the program is any of those things in the case of the truly guilty — the terrorists who planned and carried out the murder of civilians in New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Bali, and who may be planning more murderous attacks elsewhere. That is the question Mayer wants to engage directly, so rather than deal with an innocent like Masri, she focuses on the case of the worst man she can find — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida strategist who boasts that he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z.”

Let me step back for a moment to point out that the subtitle of Mayer’s report is accurate, but somewhat misleading. The “secret interrogation program” is the CIA’s in that the agency operates the program. The interrogations and the torture methods she catalogues are conducted by CIA agents. But the conception, initiative and orders for this program did not originate with the agency. This isn’t some shadowy rogue mission. It is official Bush administration policy.

This policy arose following the 9/11 attacks. A “former CIA officer involved in fighting terrorism” said that in the wake of those attacks:

… 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!'”

That was, of course, absolutely what the White House should have been saying in the aftermath of 9/11. Anything else would have been a gross dereliction of duty — a fundamental failure to do it’s job. It is also, of course, what the White House should have been saying on Aug. 6, 2001, when President Bush received a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” (Again, we can’t know if a vigorous response to that briefing might have prevented or disrupted the 9/11 attacks, but Bush’s irresponsible non-response had no chance of doing so.)

The appropriately high-pressure, but inappropriately vague nature of the CIA’s marching orders — “Get information!” — led to a rapid start in a bad direction:

In the scramble, [the former CIA official] said, he searched the CIA’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, 97 percent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after Sept. 11, some CIA officials viewed the program as a useful model. A.B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the CIA from 2001 to 2004, said that the agency turned to “everyone we could, including our friends in Arab cultures,” for interrogation advice, among them those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, all of which the State Department regularly criticizes for human-rights abuses.

The CIA also turned to a full-fledged deranged mad scientist, the psychologist James Mitchell, who was apparently eager to see his theories about “learned helplessness” applied to break down the psyche of interrogation subjects:

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future — when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the KGB model. But the KGB used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The KGB wasn’t after intelligence.”

“It was the KGB model.”

That won’t do. It won’t do for all the reasons of morality and self-respect that hilzoy described. Such talk of morality strikes some as soft, or as mere finger-wagging. Any use of such “ought” language provokes the legitimate question: “Says who?” In this case, American law is who — the KGB model of physical and psychological torture is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, which are binding U.S. law. (And I ain’t no prophet, but if one were here she would surely also have an answer to the question “Says who?”.)

But this consideration of morality isn’t just a matter of ethical prescriptions and prohibitions. That’s the wrong way to think about it. A more helpful way of thinking about it is this: You can do anything you can do, but there are certain things you cannot do and still be a good person. I mean this in the broadest, most general sense. Apart from any religious or sectarian perspectives, apart from Mill or Kant or Rawls or any other attempt to reason out a system of right and wrong, we humans share a rough consensus about what it means to be a good person or a bad person. We could even consider this at one further step removed: There are certain things you cannot do and still be perceived as a good person — by others or even by yourself.

Moving from the actual to the perceived seems like it might lessen the significance of this moral consideration, but this so-called “war on terror” is a matter of international politics, which makes perception a very important thing. The United States cannot adopt “the KGB model” and still be perceived as a good nation. And if we are not perceived as, in some sense, a “good” nation, then we lose the war on terror. (By choosing to adopt the KGB model, in fact, we are also in danger of also losing the Cold War retroactively.) Abandoning the moral high ground in this “war” is just as harmful as losing any other kind of high ground in any other kind of war.

But Col. Kleinman raises another crucial error with the decision to adopt the KGB model in the CIA interrogation program: It doesn’t work. Or, rather, it is extremely effective, but it is only effective at doing what it was designed to do. “The KGB used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The KGB wasn’t after intelligence.” The CIA is “after intelligence,” but by turning to the KGB model and adopting methods designed and proven effective only for producing false confessions the CIA has rendered itself incapable of getting intelligence or, at the very least, unable to distinguish between actual intelligence and the fountain of falsehoods that these methods are, by design, guaranteed to produce.

This last point is the recurring motif that runs throughout Mayer’s report. The Black Site program, she reports, has produced a great deal of information, all of it suspect. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s myriad confessions include many things that are probably true and many things that are certainly false. Back in March, Wired blogger Noah Shachtman wondered if KSM wasn’t pulling a Wee-Bey — falsely confessing to crimes he didn’t commit in order to protect other criminals still at large. Mayer’s report shows that the same suspicion is held even by those conducting and overseeing his interrogation:

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony came to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the [Daniel] Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter and Pope John Paul II. …

When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “90 percent of the information was unreliable.” Cables carrying Mohammed’s interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that “the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.”

There is an opportunity cost here as well. The CIA has spent years running these detention centers and conducting interrogations to produce this mountain of suspect, unreliable information. Would those years have been more productive had they been spent pursuing something other than the KGB model? Might there have been a more productive and effective approach to fulfilling Cheney’s urgently vague command to “Get information”?

“Without more transparency,” Mayer writes, “the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate.” But she also quotes Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice’s former deputy, who provides the proper form of any such evaluation:

“The question would not be, Did you get information that proved useful? Instead it would be, Did you get information that could have been usefully gained only from these methods?”

Some of the information acquired from the KGB model may have proved, or may eventually prove, useful. CIA analysts may be able to locate the needles of useful intelligence from the haystacks their interrogators have produced. And some of that intelligence may, in fact, help to protect civilians in America and elsewhere from future attacks. But just as we cannot know enough about this secretive program to evaluate its effectiveness, neither does the CIA itself know enough about the methods it neglected to be able to answer Zelikow’s question. Assuming that some useful intelligence is produced, is any of it information that could have been usefully gained only from the KGB model? We don’t know and neither does the CIA.

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that “90 percent of the information was unreliable” and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model, we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”

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