We Do Not Torture

The President, in Panama, today has said that the US' treatment of prisoners of the War on Terror is completely legal and necessary, and that "we do not torture" prisoners in it.

Simultaneously, the "embattled" Vice President has undertaken a near-crusade to ensure that the CIA operatives are exempted from John McCain's vow to ensure that nobody is tortured under the American flag. One president says "We Do Not Torture" at exactly the same time that the other president works so that we are legally allowed to torture. Dick Cheney, you see, wants to ensure that the recently uncovered Cold War era secret prisons that the CIA operates do not have to abide by amendments solidifying Geneva protections for every prisoner.

As usual, Dick Cheney insisted on doing business behind closed doors. Last Tuesday, Senate Republicans were winding up their weekly luncheon in the Capitol when the vice president rose to speak. Staffers were quickly ordered out of the room—what Cheney had to say was for senators only. Normally taciturn, Cheney was uncharacteristically impassioned, according to two GOP senators who did not want to be on the record about a private meeting. He was very upset over the Senate's overwhelming passage of an amendment that prohibits inhumane treatment of terrorist detainees. Cheney said the law would tie the president's hands and end up costing "thousands of lives." He dramatized the point, conjuring up a scenario in which a captured Qaeda operative, another Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, refuses to give his interrogators details about an imminent attack.

"We have to be able to do what is necessary," the vice president said, according to one of the senators who was present. The lawmakers listened, but they weren't moved to act. Sen. John McCain, who authored the anti-torture amendment, spoke up. "This is killing us around the world," he said. The House, which will likely vote on the measure soon, is also expected to pass it by a large margin.

[Recently, Amnesty International was taken to task by many right-wingers for calling Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times." They were determined to have undermined their credibility by comparing the Guantanamo prison to secret Russian prison-camps. And yet it turns out the CIA has, this whole time, been using, literally, former gulag prisons. ]

Does the threat of a vicious US force enable better intelligence? If we capture prisoners in the field with potentially viable information about upcoming terror strikes, does the sheer possibility that they may be dragged to a secret prison in a Soviet outlier state and waterboarded, mock drowned, fed to dogs, desecrated, and humiliated; does this actually produce positive results that the US must have in order to attain the [thus far indeterminate] goals of the Global War on Terror?

Or, perhaps, do these instances produce dissatisfactory results of intelligence which often are manipulated by various interested parties to produce completely misleading information?

Judging by our own history with Cheney's pressure on the CIA, torture, and Ideologues going to war, this is a much more likely scenerio.

You see, the whole intelligence case to go to war in Iraq depended on a small handful of intelligence from individuals and often-deeply-interested Iraqi defectors. People like Ahmed Chalabi, whose post-invasion offices the US actually raided, and who has had at least 2 serious indictments on his head since the institution of a new government; or the mysterious "Curveball," whose codename is appropriate given the quality of information gleaned from him. These guys all wanted the US to take over Iraq in order for their installation and benefit after the toppling of Saddam.

But the US' fate in Iraq was not determined on questionable influence from Iraqis- it was determined by questionable influence from American Ideologues. The case for war was bracketed in the war on terror, and this is where it remains in The Administration's estimate. The more closely the US could tie Iraq to an imminent terroristic threat, the more likely they were to gain support of Americans and other countries to invade.

And so they attached it to 9/11. This was how everything went down- pin it to 9/11. And then, as a result of the war in Afghanistan [the apparent war on actual terror], the US got it's best case ever: An Al-Qaeda operative says that Saddam is training suidice bombers and Al Qaeda figthers in Iraq's borders, and funding operations worldwide.

Along comes Al-Libi:

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

And so we went to war. Aluminum Tubes. Training Camps. WMDs. Ready to gas. Pull out the UN investigators, they've found nothing. Al-Libi, [an actual Al Qaeda, mommy! look at him!] has divulged the deepest, darkest secrets about Saddam and Osama- despite all other appearances of despising one another. They are bosom buddies, and they are both ready to attack America.

Except this: Bush's statement comes in October of 2002, and al-Libi continues to be a vital source for justifying this war. But in February of 2002 The Administration knew that al-Libi was an information fabricator and that he was completely unreliable.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

february... march... april... may... june... july... august... september...

Seven months. At this point in time this is clearly information misdirection- there is no other useful way to examine this discrepancy. The entire goal here is willful misdirection using information you know to be unreliable.

Back to the initial question of this post: Does torture produce valuable results which can lead to meaningful action?

With al-Libi, too, the initial approach was to read him his rights like any arrestee, one former member of the FBI team told NEWSWEEK. "He was basically cooperating with us." But this was post-9/11; President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods. The CIA, says the FBI source, was "fighting with us tooth and nail."

The handling of al-Libi touched off a long-running battle over interrogation tactics inside the administration. It is a struggle that continued right up until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April—and it extended into the White House, with Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council pitted against lawyers for the White House counsel and the vice president. Indeed, one reason the prison abuse scandal won't go away—two months after gruesome photos were published worldwide—is that a long paper trail of memos and directives from inside the administration has emerged, often leaked by those who disagreed with rougher means of questioning.

...
Al-Libi's capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government's internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi's interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency's hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight." (A CIA official said he had no comment.)

What happened in Cairo is unknown, though al-Libi is making clear statements that he was brutally and dangerously tortured there. It's also likely that al-Libi had fabricated the information he'd provided the government with in regards to Saddam's involvement with Al Qaeda is likely to have been produced after this period [anybody have a clear timeline here...? I can't find one].

So the answer to the first part of the question, does torture produce positive results, is evidently: No.

The answer to the second part, that responses from torture victims produce meaningful action, is a very clear It Depends. Because, you see, torture ends up telling us more about the culture of the torturers than the torturees. The information that's put to use is always the information that the torturer wants to hear.

So something's happened in America because of, potentially, torturous interrogation- we went to war. And we did so on fabricated information- but we did so because The Administration, this whole time, simply put, has wanted to go to war. Torture provides them with justifications for that war.

Those justifcations have now run completely out.