Harsh Interrogations and the CIA

A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known. By the time of the meeting, the CIA already had used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on at least one terrorism suspect and was holding high-level al-Qaeda detainees in secret prisons overseas -- actions that Bush administration lawyers had approved.

Waterboarding Continues Under George Bush

George W Bush said today that he

vetoed legislation that would ban the Central Intelligence Agency from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.

"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it."

Investigating Waterboarding

The Justice Department revealed Friday that its internal ethics office was investigating the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and was likely to make public an unclassified version of its report.

The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.

The cloak of secrecy that long concealed the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program and its legal underpinnings has gradually broken down.

Senate Moves to Prohibit Waterboarding and Other Forms of Torture

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

The House had approved the measure in December. Wednesday's Senate vote set up a confrontation with the White House, where Bush has promised to veto any bill that restricts CIA questioning.

Arguing for such restrictions, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the use of harsh tactics would boomerang on the United States.

"Retaliation is the way of the world. What we do to others, they will do to us _ but worse," Rockefeller said. "This debate is about more than legality. It is also about morality, the way we see ourselves ... and what we represent to the world."

Mr.Rockefeller says it well here. I think I've heard this somewhere before. Let's see: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What do you know; it's the 'golden rule.'

Taxi To The Dark Side

Extraordinary Rendition: Detention in Europe

The European Parliament's inquiry into CIA operations in Europe started in January, following media reports that U.S. intelligence officers interrogated al-Qaida suspects at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and transported some to locations further afield on secret flights that passed through Europe following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

New York-based Human Rights Watch also identified Romania and Poland as possible hosts of secret U.S.-run detention facilities.

Clandestine detention centers and the secret transfer of terrorist suspects via Europe to countries where they could face torture — a process known in intelligence jargon as "extraordinary rendition" — would breach the continent's human rights treaties.

Source: Houston Chronicle

Torture Disguised as Good

The temptation in regards to using torture is to fall into a false belief that torture is an effective, necessary evil. In actuality, torture is disguised as a means to a good end; sometimes being presented as the only means to that good end. Torture is neither effective nor necessary; torture is only a horrific evil disguised as good.

The Truth About Torture? Albert Mohler

Christian ethics and torture...an essay by Albert Mohler, of which the following is an excerpt:

McCain wants a categorical ban, but accepts that exceptions may, under extreme situations, be made. Krauthammer wants to define the exceptions so that a policy may be more coherent and, in his view, honest. Others, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, suggest that specific processes be put into place that would allow for the authorization of such techniques of coercion, going so far as to suggest something like a "warrant" for torture "to be required as a precondition to the infliction of any type of torture under any circumstances. "

This appears to be neither practical nor prudent, for the circumstances in which such a use of coercion might be conceived would often not allow time for such a warrant to be issued. The War on Terror is not fought on convenient terms. Furthermore, institutionalizing torture under such a procedure would almost surely lead to a continual renegotiation of the rules and constant flexing of the definitions.

We are simply not capable, I would argue, of constructing a set of principles and rules for torture that could adequately envision the real-life scenarios under which the pressure and temptation to use extreme coercion would be seriously contemplated.

Instead, I would suggest that Senator McCain is correct in arguing that a categorical ban should be adopted as state policy for the U.S., its military, and its agents. At the same time, I would admit that such a policy, like others, has limitations that, under extreme circumstances, may be transcended by other moral claims. The key point is this� at all times and in all cases the use of torture is understood to be morally suspect in the extreme, and generally unjustified.

My humble, oh so humble, thoughts on torture: As for waterboarding, this is a simulation of drowning as I understand it. The person only feels like he or she is drowning... A matter of degree, in other words.

Slapping is not punching. So is a slap not an act of torture? Does it not come down to the perception of the person being "tortured?" Each individual has his or her own strengths and weaknesses... for one person, a slap across the face may be so humiliating that it could be defined as torture for that individual. For another, it would take a broken rib.

The intention is also of importance: Is the intent to harm the person? Can any valuable information be obtained via torture? Evidence that I have read most recently indicates that torture is highly ineffective. Therefore, the intent must be to humiliate, harm, destroy that person.

In which case, torture is NEVER justified...

Waterboarding is Torture

ACLU Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition

Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition (12/6/2005)

Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where -- in the CIA's view -- federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone. Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism have been transported to detention and interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere. In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt."

More on Extraordinary Rendition

David Ignatius of THE WASHINGTON POST wrote, in 2005:

Before you make an easy judgment about rendition, you have to answer the disturbing question put to me by a former CIA official: Suppose the FBI had captured Mohamed Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Under U.S. legal rules at the time, the man who plotted the airplane suicide attacks probably could not have been held or interrogated in the United States. Would it have made sense to "render" Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11? That's not a simple question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that torture is always and everywhere wrong.

NOTE: According to other sources, this is not true. Atta could have been rendered to "a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11"

However, Mr. Ignatius also points out that most, if not all, interrogators recognize that torture does not work. Their reasoning for use of rendition is "emotional leverage," using the person's homeland, family to influence...