Chapter Five

Torture and the Eclipse of Empires

In the wake of the attacks on September 11, the White House made torture its secret weapon in the war on terror. Although Washington mobilized its military for conventional operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the main challenge in this new kind of warfare would be “nonstate actors,” terrorists who moved elusively across the Muslim world from Morocco to Manila in what one CIA veteran called “ad hoc networks that dissolve as soon as the mission is accomplished.” With its countless Cold War victories, overthrowing enemies on five continents by coups and covert operations, the agency possessed an aura of invincibility that made it Washington’s chosen instrument against al-Qaeda. Yet the CIA’s reputation for clandestine derring-do had been grossly inflated and its qualifications for this new mission were few indeed.1

In the half century before 2001, the CIA had mounted a single security operation comparable to its pursuit of al-Qaeda, and the results of this earlier counterterror effort against communists in South Vietnam were decidedly mixed. In the new campaign against Islamic terrorists, the CIA soon found it had few, if any, covert assets inside militant Muslim circles, forcing the agency to revive the torture techniques it had developed for the Cold War.²

Facing a rival Soviet Empire that seemed to have cracked the code of human consciousness, Washington allied with Britain and Canada in 1951 for a massive mind-control effort whose budget reached a billion dollars annually.³ After a decade of secret research, the CIA developed a coercive interrogation doctrine that the White House could deploy at times of extraordinary crisis. Across the span of three continents and four decades, there is then a striking similarity in torture techniques used against the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the 1950s, in South Vietnam during the 1960s, Central America in the 1980s, and Iraq after 2003.

At a deeper level, this recurring reliance on torture was a manifestation of America’s long, largely forgotten history of involvement in coercive interrogation. During its rise to empire, Washington has encountered major mass revolutions just three times and responded with torture to all of them. In its conquest of the Philippines, the army used the “water cure” to extract information from Filipino peasants about omnipresent yet invisible guerrillas, sparking protests back home and courts-martial for military perpetrators. Confronting a similar form of guerrilla resistance during the Vietnam War, the CIA tried to pacify the countryside with a centralized torture-assassination apparatus called the Phoenix Program that, when revealed domestically, helped discredit the war effort. After the terror attacks of September 2001, the Bush administration revived CIA torture techniques developed for the Cold War and used them to pursue al-Qaeda’s terrorist network.

Empire is the defining context that lends some larger meaning to these moments. After their triumphal entry into Manila in 1898 and Baghdad in 2003, US troops soon plunged into the pacification of societies with tight kinship ties that defied their superior firepower, prompting a reliance on torture for supposedly actionable intelligence. Yet if torture expresses a will to dominance for an empire on the rise, it also reveals a more complex pathology amid imperial retreat or defeat, involving as it does an unsettling mixture of arrogance and insecurity, a sense of superiority and savagery, as well as a legalistic mentality and an inescapable criminality. The repeated use of torture, despite the legal complications involved, seems more comprehensible when understood as an artifact of empire.

In their recourse to torture at times of crisis, three imperial powers—Britain, France, and the United States—moved through parallel phases with some revealing similarities. Each initially granted its security services a legal exemption, through formal procedures, for the use of extreme measures against restive populations on remote imperial frontiers. They all then suffered divisive, demoralizing controversy when journalists back home exposed the torture in all its savagery. Finally, each of them engaged in a protracted process of impunity, exempting both the perpetrators and the powerful from the consequences of their crimes. More ominously for the future of Washington’s global hegemony, the use of torture by dying empires, and the moral damage that comes with it, seems like both a manifestation of and a causal factor for imperial decline.

A Short History of Psychological Torture

The roots of the continuing controversy over the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantánamo prison in Cuba lie, most immediately, in the long history of the CIA’s use of psychological torture. To counter Soviet advances in mind control at the start of the Cold War, the agency mounted a “Special Interrogation Program” whose working hypothesis was stated in a 1952 memo: “Medical science, particularly psychiatry and psychotherapy, has developed various techniques by means of which some external control can be imposed on the mind or will of an individual, such as drugs, hypnosis, electric shock and neurosurgery.”4

The CIA tested all of these novel techniques covertly during the 1950s under a top-secret program, codenamed Project Artichoke, that aimed at the “development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge.” When none of these exotic methods actually proved capable of breaking potential enemies or obtaining reliable information, the agency then collaborated with British and Canadian scientists on more conventional, and successful, academic research into “methods concerned in psychological coercion.”⁵

This secret behavioral research produced two discoveries central to the CIA’s emerging psychological paradigm for torture. Through classified experiments in collaboration with the agency from 1951 to 1954, renowned Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he could produce a state akin to drug-induced hallucinations and psychosis in just forty-eight hours without drugs, hypnosis, or electric shock. For two days student volunteers at McGill University simply sat in a comfortable cubicle deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and earmuffs.⁶ “It scared the hell out of us,” Hebb said later, “to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support.” This discovery, soon confirmed by hundreds of scientific papers, led to the development of a torture technique called “sensory deprivation.”⁷

During the 1950s as well, two researchers at Cornell University Medical Center, working under CIA contract, found that the most devastating form of torture used by the Soviet secret police, the KGB, was to force a victim to stand motionless for days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, and hallucinations began. Later American versions of such a procedure came to be euphemistically called “stress positions.”⁸

Four years into this secret research, American prisoners in North Korea suffered what was then called “brainwashing,” prompting a sudden surge of interest in using such mind-control methods defensively. In August 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any soldier at risk of capture must be given “specific training and instruction designed to … withstand all enemy efforts against him.” Consequently, the air force developed a program it dubbed SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to train pilots in resisting psychological torture.9 In this way, the United States soon developed two intertwined strands of mind-control research: aggressive techniques for breaking enemy agents and defensive methods for training Americans to resist enemy inquisitors.

In 1963, the CIA distilled this decade of research into the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual, which stated that sensory deprivation was effective because it made “the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father figure … strengthening … the subject’s tendencies toward compliance.”¹⁰ Refined through years of practice on human beings, the CIA’s psychological paradigm came to rely on a mix of sensory overload and sensory deprivation via seemingly banal procedures—heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine—meant to attack six basic sensory pathways into the human mind.

After codifying such methods in that manual, the CIA spent the next thirty years promoting them within the US intelligence community and among anticommunist allies worldwide. Along the global arc of containment that defined the Cold War, the CIA trained allied agencies in Iran, South Vietnam, and Latin America. During the war in Vietnam, the CIA’s Phoenix Program deployed systematic torture and often brutal methods to dismantle communist networks in the countryside, producing 46,776 extrajudicial executions but little actionable intelligence. From 1966 to 1991, Military Intelligence also ran “Project X” to transmit these counterinsurgency tactics to Latin America via Spanish language training manuals, an elaborate interrogation curriculum, and field training programs.¹¹

Training the Honduran military in psychological torture during the 1980s, for instance, the CIA taught local interrogators that they should “manipulate the subject’s environment … to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception”—in short, assault the basic sensory pathways into human consciousness.¹² Significantly, the techniques described in this “Human Resources Exploitation Manual—1983” seem remarkably similar to those outlined twenty years earlier in the KUBARK report and those used twenty years later at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

As torture proliferated during the Cold War, a countervailing movement, led by Amnesty International and like-minded organizations, gradually mobilized a civil society coalition that proved effective in publicizing and protesting these abuses. In December 1984, after years of such global, grassroots agitation, the UN General Assembly finally adopted the Convention Against Torture (CAT), defining this crime broadly, under Article I, as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purpose as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.”13 Approved by a unanimous UN vote, the CAT created enormous international pressure for compliance. As a result, President Ronald Reagan sent the convention to Congress in 1988 with a ringing endorsement invoking “our desire to bring an end to the abhorrent practice of torture.” Simultaneously, however, the administration proposed a record nineteen reservations that stalled its ratification in the Senate for the next six years.¹⁴

In 1994, four years after the close of the Cold War, Washington finally ratified the convention, seemingly resolving the tension between its anti-torture principles and the CIA’s torture practices.¹⁵ Yet when President Bill Clinton sent it to Congress, he included four little noticed diplomatic “reservations,” drafted six years before by the Reagan administration, that were focused on just one word in the treaty’s twenty-six printed pages: “mental.” These reservations narrowed the definition of mental torture (just for the United States) to ban only four specific acts (physical pain, drugs, death threats, threats to harm another), thereby permitting methods such as sensory deprivation and so-called self-inflicted pain. Significantly, these were the very techniques the CIA had developed and propagated for the previous forty years. This exculpatory definition was later reproduced verbatim in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and the War Crimes Act of 1996.¹⁶

Through all this legal legerdemain, Washington managed to ban physical abuse while exempting the CIA from the UN’s prohibition on psychological torture. This exemption, buried like a landmine, would detonate with phenomenal force just ten years later at Abu Ghraib. Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush turned to his staff and gave them secret orders for torture, insisting emphatically, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”¹⁷

After months of recondite legal research, administration attorneys translated the president’s eloquent but unlawful command into policy through three controversial, neoconservative legal findings: first, the president is above the law; next, torture is a legally acceptable exercise of presidential power; and, finally, the US Navy base at Guantánamo in Cuba is not US territory. These separate findings rested on a broader constitutional doctrine of overarching presidential power. In times of war, they argued, the president should be able to set aside all domestic laws or international treaties to defend the nation, correcting what Vice President Dick Cheney condemned as “the unwise compromises … over the last 30 to 35 years” that had eroded “the powers … of the president of the United States to do his job.”18 More fundamentally, administration attorneys argued that the presidency—what they called “the unitary executive”—was the preeminent branch of government, challenging the constitutional principle that the presidency is one of three coequal branches. John Yoo, a University of California law professor serving in the Bush Justice Department, asserted that “the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action.”¹⁹

Drawing on the advice of his neoconservative legal advisers, President Bush decided, in February 2002, that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world,” thereby removing any requirements for “minimum standards for humane treatment.”²⁰ Much like the French had done in Algeria or the British in Kenya, the White House had, through formal procedures, exempted the CIA from legal restraints on torture.

By then, however, the agency no longer had any personnel experienced in coercive interrogation. Following a prisoner’s death in custody in the mid-1980s, the CIA had purged torture techniques from its interrogation canon, concluding that they were counterproductive. After decades of training Latin American militaries in such techniques, the Defense Department under then Secretary Dick Cheney in the early 1990s recalled all copies of extant manuals that detailed these illegal methods.²¹

Twelve years later when the Bush administration opted for torture, the sole institutional memory of the CIA’s psychological methods lay in the military’s SERE training. Under a contract with the CIA, two retired military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, reverse-engineered this defensive doctrine for offensive use on al-Qaeda captives. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses,” one Bush administration official told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. “It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.” Inside CIA headquarters, officials felt a “high level of anxiety” about possible future prosecutions for methods defined as torture under international law. The presence of hired outside psychologists was considered a “way for CIA officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture.”²²

In a dramatic break with past policy, the White House also allowed the CIA to operate its own global network of prisons. Terror suspects would then be seized worldwide, subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” and incarcerated endlessly inside a supranational agency gulag of eight secret “black sites” from Thailand to Poland and allied prisons and torture chambers from Morocco to Egypt to Uzbekistan.23 The Bush administration also approved ten “enhanced” interrogation methods designed by the CIA’s psychologists, including “waterboarding.”²⁴ This use of cold water to block breathing triggers the “mammalian diving reflex,” imprinted in the human brain to save infants from drowning, and thereby induces an unimaginable terror of impending death. Instead of simply outsourcing the abuse to allies as they had during the Cold War, CIA employees would now dirty their own hands with waterboarding and “wall slamming.”

In response to White House inquiries about the legality of these techniques, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his subordinate John Yoo found grounds in a now notorious August 2002 memo for exculpating any CIA interrogator who tortured but later claimed his intention was to obtain information and not inflict pain. By parsing the definition of torture in Section 2340 of the Federal Code stating the physical or mental pain must be “severe,” Bybee concluded that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure,” effectively allowing torture right up to the point of death. “For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, it must result in significant psychological harm … lasting for months or even years”—a truly permissive standard that drew upon the elusive character of psychological torture.²⁵

Not only were the Bush Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy of torture, they meticulously laid the legal groundwork for a future impunity. In a memo for the CIA in August 2002, Bybee cited the SERE training, which subjected US troops to a carefully controlled form of waterboarding, to advise the CIA that “the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering.” He found all ten of the agency’s “enhanced techniques” legal because, under his convoluted interpretation of the Federal Code’s Section 2340, “an individual must have the specific intent to cause prolonged mental harm in order to have the specific intent to inflict severe mental pain.”²⁶

In three detailed torture memos dated May 2005, drafted long after the worst abuse was over and apparently aimed at providing legal cover for Bush’s counselors as they left office, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury repeatedly cited the original American diplomatic “reservations” to the UN Convention, replicated verbatim in Section 2340, to argue that waterboarding was perfectly legal since the “technique is not physically painful.”27 All the enhanced techniques were, Bradbury counseled confidently, “unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry.”²⁸ Six months later in November 2005, the CIA, in a complementary move to conceal evidence of earlier abuse, destroyed ninety-two videotapes documenting the interrogation of top al-Qaeda suspects inside the agency black site in Thailand.²⁹

From these same Justice Department memos, we now know that the CIA refined its psychological paradigm significantly under Bush. As described in a classified 2004 report titled “Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques,” each detainee was transported to a black site while “deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods.” Once inside the prison, he was to be reduced to “a baseline, dependent state” through conditioning by “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling …) and dietary manipulation.” For “more physical and psychological stress,” CIA interrogators were greenlighted to employ coercive measures such as “an insult slap or abdominal slap” and then “walling,” that is, slamming the detainee’s head against a cell wall.³⁰ If all these failed to produce the results being sought, interrogators escalated to waterboarding, as was done to Abu Zubaydah “at least 83 times during August 2002” and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.³¹ Attorney General John Ashcroft approved “expanded use” of these techniques at meetings with CIA director George Tenet in July and September 2003, even when “informed that the waterboard had been used 119 times on an individual.”³²

In a parallel process at the Pentagon in late 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved fifteen aggressive interrogation techniques for the military prison at Guantánamo, authorizing harsh stress positions in a handwritten note reading: “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”³³ Significantly, the Defense Department, like other Bush administration agencies, was careful to assure impunity for those who used its aggressive methods, even in the frenzied first months of the war on terror. In developing its expansive protocol, the Pentagon relied on the senior counsel at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, who reportedly echoed the Bybee-Yoo August 2002 memo by advising that the legal definition of torture was “written vaguely” and “is basically subject to perception” by the perpetrator. He concluded that US law had no real restraints on interrogation, saying, “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”³⁴

Simultaneously, Rumsfeld gave General Geoffrey Miller command of the new American military prison at Guantánamo Bay with ample authority to transform it into an ad hoc psychology lab. There so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of military psychologists probed detainees at Guantánamo for individual phobias such as fear of the dark. Interrogators strengthened the psychological assault by exploiting what they saw as Arab cultural sensitivities about sex and dogs.35 In their three-phase attack on the senses, culture, and the individual psyche, Guantánamo interrogators perfected the CIA’s psychological paradigm. After regular inspections of the facility from 2002 to 2004, the International Red Cross reported: “The construction of such a system … cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”³⁶

After General Miller brought those methods to Iraq in September 2003, the US commander there, General Ricardo Sanchez, ordered Guantánamo-style abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. My own review of the 1,600 still-classified photos taken by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison, and later leaked to Australian reporters, reveals not random, idiosyncratic acts by individual “bad apples” but the repeated use of three core techniques in the CIA’s psychological paradigm: hooding for sensory deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted pain, and nudity and dogs to exploit Arab cultural sensitivities. This was, for instance, why Private Lynndie England was so infamously photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.³⁷

According to the New York Times, these techniques escalated virally at five special operations field interrogation centers across Iraq where detainees were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric shock, and waterboarding. Among the thousand soldiers serving in these units, thirty-four were later convicted of abuses and many more escaped prosecution only because records were officially “lost.”³⁸

As often happens in imperial wars, this attempt at pacification through harsh measures, mass incarceration, and systemic abuse simply intensified Iraqi resistance. Meeting in Kuwait in 2006, top US diplomats working on counterterrorism in the Middle East reported, “Detainee debriefs and intelligence reporting indicate that US treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is the single most important motivating factor for T/FFs [foreign jihadists] travelling to Iraq.” Looking back on his combat service there, General Stanley McChrystal concluded: “In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action.”³⁹

Indeed, the largest of American prisons, Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, became the training ground for the most radical of the jihadists, the future leaders of the Islamic State, or ISIS. By the time that prison closed in 2009, some hundred thousand detainees had passed through its barbed wire, including the main founders of the Islamic State—notably its head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, detained there for five years, and the nine members of his top command.40 “We had so much time to sit and plan,” a senior member of the Islamic State recalled. “It was the perfect environment. We all agreed to get together when we got out. The way to reconnect was easy. We wrote each other’s details on the elastic of our boxer shorts.” Released in 2009 and soon reunited, the Islamic State leaders expanded their movement steadily until 2013 when their militant followers attacked Abu Ghraib prison, fostering a mass breakout of five hundred inmates, including “senior jihadists.” As the Islamic State seized cities and towns across northern Iraq in early 2014, the Baghdad government estimated that seventeen of its top twenty-five leaders had spent time in US military prisons.⁴¹

A History of Impunity

Even as they exercise extraordinary power over others, perpetrators of torture around the world are assiduous in their pursuit of impunity, constructing recondite legal justifications, destroying records of actual torture, and enacting legislation that will facilitate exoneration. Not only were the Bush administration’s Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy of torture, they were meticulous from the start in laying the legal groundwork for later impunity.

Consequently, when Vice President Cheney presided over the drafting of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he included clauses, buried in these thirty-eight pages of dense print, defining “serious physical pain” as “significant loss or impairment of … a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty”—a striking paraphrase of John Yoo’s infamous August 2002 definition.⁴² Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected the CIA’s use of psychological torture by repeating verbatim the exculpatory language found in those Clinton-era, Reagan-created reservations to the UN Convention and still embedded in Section 2340 of the Federal Code. To make doubly sure of impunity, the 2006 Commissions Act made these definitions retrospective to November 1997, giving CIA interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under the Expanded War Crimes Act of 1997, which punished serious violations with life imprisonment or death.⁴³

In June 2008, Major General Antonio Taguba, who had conducted the military’s most thorough investigation of the abuse at Abu Ghraib, looked back on the past five years of “disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations.” At this point, the general concluded, “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”44

In the transition from Bush to Obama, the dynamics of partisan wrangling over CIA interrogation produced a surprising bipartisan move toward impunity for past human rights abuse. Following the televised broadcast of photos from Abu Ghraib by the CBS News show 60 Minutes in 2004, the United States had started moving, almost imperceptibly, through a five-step process of impunity quite similar to those experienced earlier by England and France. Through a process spun out over eight years, General Taguba’s question would be answered decisively in the negative: none of those who ordered the tortures would be held accountable.

Step one toward impunity was a bipartisan effort. For a year after the 2004 Abu Ghraib exposé, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s Pentagon claimed that the abuse was “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military.” Similarly, while announcing his refusal to release more torture photos in May 2009, President Obama echoed Rumsfeld, asserting that the abuse shown in these images “was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”⁴⁵

In early 2009, Republicans took the nation deep into the second stage with former vice president Cheney’s televised statements that the CIA’s methods “prevented the violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people.” The Obama administration did not dispute this claim.⁴⁶

On April 16, 2009, President Obama brought us to the third stage in the process when he released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture techniques while insisting, “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”⁴⁷ During a visit to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no prosecutions of its employees. “We’ve made some mistakes,” he admitted; but he urged Americans to “acknowledge them and then move forward.” In the furor surrounding the release of those memos, the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy called for an independent commission on interrogation. Even the House Minority Leader, Republican John Boehner, seemed open to such a course of action. But the White House press secretary announced, “The president determined the concept didn’t seem altogether workable” because such an inquiry “might just become a political back and forth.” The president’s position was in such blatant defiance of international law that the chief UN official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington was legally obliged to investigate any violations of the Convention Against Torture.48

After the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, neoconservatives moved the nation to the next stage of impunity by forming an a cappella media chorus to claim, without any factual basis, that torture had led Washington to bin Laden. Within weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder ended the investigation of alleged CIA abuse, including the actual killing of prisoners, without a criminal indictment, exonerating both the interrogators and their superiors.⁴⁹

In the months surrounding the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the United States took the fifth and final step in the process of impunity: vindication before the bar of history. By censoring a critical memoir by a veteran FBI interrogator, while simultaneously facilitating laudatory accounts by former vice president Dick Cheney, CIA official Jose Rodriguez, and the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty, the agency fostered the creation of a historical record suggesting that torture had been a significant and successful weapon in the war on terror.⁵⁰ In effect, the agency’s defenders had won this political battle with the interrogation videos destroyed, a critical book censored, laudatory books launched, indictments quashed, lawsuits dismissed, imagined intelligence coups celebrated, medals awarded, bonuses paid, and promotions secured.

However, in December 2014, just when impunity seemed the order of the day, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a detailed, meticulously documented report that served as a powerful corrective to years of CIA disinformation. Instead of steely guardians willing to break laws, trample treaties, and dedicate their lives to the defense of America, this report reveals agency perpetrators as mendacious careerists willing to twist any truth to win a promotion or secure a lucrative contract.⁵¹

This report’s executive summary, the only portion so far declassified, will likely remain an important historical document, defining these extraordinary events for years to come. At its most visceral level, the report’s 524 pages of dense, disconcerting detail take us into a Dante-like hell of waterboard vomit, rectal feeding, midnight-dark cells, endless overhead chaining, sleep deprivation, death threats, humiliating nudity, savage beatings, and crippling cold. With its mix of capricious cruelty and systemic abuse, the CIA’s Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan can now, for instance, join that long list of iconic cesspits for human suffering that would include Devil’s Island, Château d’If, Côn Sơn Island, Montjuïc Castle, and Robben Island.52 If nothing else, these details helped to purge that awkward euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” from our polite public lexicon. Now everyone, senator and citizen alike, can just say “torture.”

In its most important contribution, the Senate report sifted through some six million pages of classified documents to rebut the CIA’s claim that torture produced all-important intelligence. All the agency’s assertions that torture stopped terrorist plots or led us to Osama bin Laden were false, and sometimes knowingly so. Instead of such spurious claims, CIA director John Brennan was finally forced to admit that any link between torture and actionable intelligence was, at best, “unknowable.”⁵³

The Senate committee’s exhaustive review shattered the agency’s myth of derring-do infallibility and exposed the bumbling mismanagement of its two main missions in the war on terror: incarceration and intelligence. Every profession has its B team, every bureaucracy has its bumblers. Instead of sending James Bond, Langley dispatched Mr. Bean and Maxwell Smart—in the persons of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. In a 2003 assessment, the CIA office supervising them criticized their “arrogance and narcissism” and their “blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues.” In perhaps the single most damning detail of the Senate report, it was revealed that the CIA had paid those two Air Force retirees $81 million to create sophisticated enhanced interrogation techniques after they had spent their careers doing little more than administering the SERE torture-resistance curriculum—a mundane job tailor-made for mediocrities of modern psychology.⁵⁴

For all its many strengths, the Senate report is not without serious limitations. Mired in detail, the committee’s analysis of this rich data is often cursory or convoluted, obscuring its import for even the most discerning reader. This limitation is most apparent in the report’s close case study of Abu Zubaydah, the detainee whose torture at a Thai black site in 2002 proved seminal, convincing the CIA that its enhanced techniques worked and giving these psychologists effective control over the agency’s interrogation program for the next six years.⁵⁵ To its credit, the Senate report debunked both CIA claims that Abu Zubaydah was “bin Laden’s senior lieutenant” and President Bush’s 2006 statement that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained.” In fact, the Senate reported, such claims “significantly overstated Abu Zubaydah’s role in al-Qa’ida and the information he was likely to possess.” The CIA itself reported, in 2006, that al-Qaeda had rejected his membership application back in 1993 and his training camp had no connection to bin Laden.56

The Senate’s mass of information about this incident is good as far as it goes, but a more extensive analysis in this critical section of the report might have yielded far more. Among countless thousands of interrogations during the war on terror, conservatives have repeatedly cited Abu Zubaydah’s to defend the CIA’s methods. In his memoirs, published on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney claimed the CIA’s methods had turned this hardened terrorist into a “fount of information” and thus saved “thousands of lives.”⁵⁷ But just two weeks later, Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterror agent fluent in Arabic, published his own book claiming he gained “important actionable intelligence” by using very different non-coercive, empathetic methods to interrogate Abu Zubaydah.⁵⁸

If we juxtapose the many CIA-censored pages of Ali Soufan’s memoir with his earlier, unexpurgated congressional testimony, this interrogation becomes an extraordinary four-stage scientific experiment in comparing the effectiveness of CIA coercion versus the FBI’s empathic approach.⁵⁹

Stage One. As soon as Abu Zubaydah was captured in 2002, FBI agent Ali Soufan flew to Bangkok where he built rapport with him in Arabic to gain the first intelligence about “the role of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.” Angered by the FBI’s success, CIA director George Tenet pounded the table and dispatched his contract psychologist James Mitchell, who stripped Zubaydah naked and subjected him to “low-level sleep deprivation.”

Stage Two. After the CIA’s harsh methods got “no information,” FBI agents resumed their questioning of Abu Zubaydah to learn “the details of José Padilla, the so-called ‘dirty bomber.’” Then the CIA team again took over and moved up the coercive continuum to loud noise, temperature manipulation, and forty-eight hours of sleep deprivation.

Stage Three. When this tough CIA approach again failed, FBI agents were brought back for a third time, using empathetic techniques that produced more details on the Padilla bomb plot.

Stage Four. When the CIA ratcheted up the abuse to outright and clear torture, the FBI ordered Ali Soufan home. With the CIA psychologist now in sole control, Abu Zubaydah was subjected to weeks of sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, forced nudity, and waterboarding. But he gave no further information. Yet in a stunning bit of illogic, Mitchell claimed this negative result was, in fact, positive since these enhanced techniques showed that the subject had no more secrets to hide. Amazingly, the CIA bought this bit of flimflam.

Examined closely, the results of this ad hoc experiment were blindingly clear: FBI empathy was effective, while CIA coercion proved consistently counterproductive. But this fundamental yet fragile truth was obscured by repeated CIA claims of good intelligence from the torture of Abu Zubaydah and by its heavy-handed censorship of 181 pages in Ali Soufan’s memoir that reduced his account to a maze of blackened lines that no ordinary reader can readily understand.

More broadly, the Senate committee’s report also fails to ask or answer a critical question: If the intelligence yield from torture was so consistently low, why was the CIA so determined to persist in these brutal but unproductive practices for so long? Among the many possibilities the Senate failed to explore is a default bureaucratic response by an empowered security service flailing about in fear when confronted with an unknown threat. “When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power,” reported a CIA analysis of the Cold War Kremlin that couldn’t be more applicable to the post-9/11 White House, “they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures upon the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy ‘confession,’ and brutality may become widespread.”60

Moreover, the Senate report’s rigorously pseudonymous format denies it the key element in any historical narrative, the actor, thereby making much of its text almost incomprehensible. Understanding the power of narrative, the CIA sedulously cultivated the makers of the feature film Zero Dark Thirty, encouraging the story of a heroic female operative whose single-minded pursuit of the facts, through the most brutal of tortures, supposedly led the navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden. While the CIA has destroyed videotapes of its interrogations and censored Ali Soufan’s critical account, Langley gave that film’s scriptwriter Mark Boal liberal access to classified sources.⁶¹ The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, walked out of the resulting film after just twenty minutes, calling it “so false.”⁶²

Instead of a photogenic leading lady, the Senate report offers only opaque snippets about an anonymous female analyst who played a pivotal role in one of the CIA’s biggest blunders—snatching an innocent German national, Khaled el-Masri, and subjecting him to four months of abuse in the Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan. That same operative later defended torture by telling the CIA’s inspector general that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had extracted the name of terrorist Majid Khan—when, in fact, Khan was already in CIA custody. Hinting at something badly wrong inside the agency, the author of these derelictions was promoted to a high post in its Counterterrorism Center.

By quickly filling in the blanks, journalists have shed light on the real story of this operative that the Senate suppressed and Hollywood glorified with the CIA’s eager collusion. This “torture queen,” as Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker just days after the Senate report’s release, “dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; … gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; … misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.”63

After all that, this agent, whom journalist Glenn Greenwald identified as Alfreda Bikowsky, was rewarded with a high CIA salary that, reports an activist website, allowed her to buy a luxury home in Reston, Virginia, for $875,000.⁶⁴ In short, adding names and narrative reveals a consistent pattern of CIA incompetence, the corrupting influence of intelligence gleaned from torture, and the agency’s perpetrators as self-aggrandizing incompetents.

Despite its rich trove of hard-won detail, the Senate report has, at best, produced a neutral outcome, a draw in this political contest over impunity. Even in the face of the Senate’s sobering revelations, the allure of torture has refused to fade. In the long 2016 presidential race, Republican Party candidate Donald Trump stoked his insurgent campaign with fiery calls for waterboarding, saying he would approve it “in a heartbeat” because “only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.” As his campaign gained momentum in early 2016, so did his repeated insistence, “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works.”⁶⁵ After he suggested in March that the best way to stop terrorists would be to murder their families, a chorus of criticism arose from former national security officials, notably ex-CIA director Michael Hayden who said “the American armed forces would refuse to act” if given such illegal orders. He added Trump should “bring his own bucket” if he wanted to revive waterboarding.⁶⁶ Even after winning his party’s nomination in July, Trump persisted in his torture advocacy, telling a press conference that the Geneva Conventions were outdated, adding: “I am a person that believes in enhanced interrogation, yes. And by the way, it works.”⁶⁷

With torture once again dominating political discourse, the New York Times invested scarce reportorial resources to publish, in October 2016, a searching review of Bush administration torture, crisscrossing three continents to track down dozens of former detainees once held in CIA black sites or at Guantánamo. The paper found “a disturbingly high number of these men were innocent,” and that despite Bush administration assurances that enhanced interrogation would have “no negative long-term effects,” years later many still suffered “flashbacks, nightmares and debilitating panic attacks.”68 In short, enhanced interrogation was clearly brutal torture, illegal under US law and the UN convention.

Right after his upset win in November 2016, Trump picked Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman known for vocal advocacy of torture, as his nominee for CIA director. Two years earlier, Pompeo had forcibly rejected the Senate’s report on CIA torture, insisting that the agency’s harsh methods were “within the law, within the constitution” and charging that this inquiry had “put American lives at risk” because “our friends and allies” in the fight against Islamic jihad now know Washington will not honor its commitments. He blasted Obama for “ending our interrogation program,” saying the intelligence officials who ran it “are not torturers, they are patriots.” Trump’s choice for attorney general, former senator Jeff Sessions, was a passionate defender of waterboarding, and his first choice for national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, was on record favoring use of enhanced interrogation, a euphemism for torture.⁶⁹

With most of his national security team open to using coercive interrogation, the Trump administration discussed, during its first week in office, a policy review that would allow the CIA to reopen its “black site” prisons and to resume use of harsh techniques. Asked in a television interview whether he favored waterboarding, President Trump said, “Absolutely, I feel it works,” though he added he would heed the counsel of top officials. Should he ultimately opt for torture, Trump faced certain opposition in Congress, where Republican senator John McCain, backed by a 2015 law requiring that all interrogation comply with restraints in the army field manual, said: “I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do.… We will not waterboard. We will not torture.”⁷⁰

While Trump’s transition team was endorsing harsh interrogation, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced a formal finding that “as part of approved interrogation techniques … members of the CIA appear to have subjected at least 27 detained persons to torture” in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008.⁷¹ With his national security team unanimous on the issue, the Trump administration would, should the need arise, likely use techniques deemed torture under international law, damaging America’s stature as a moral leader in the community of nations.

In the past forty years, there have been a half-dozen similar scandals over CIA torture or the agency’s torture techniques in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), Latin America (1997), and, most recently, its black sites and Guantánamo (2014). Each has followed a familiar cycle—revelation, momentary sensation, vigorous rebuttal, official inaction, and then oblivion. Why, we might well ask, have there been so many revelations with so little that we might call reform? A comparison with the experiences of imperial Britain and France offers insight into this troubling question.

Torture and Empire

In the long wind-down of their global empires, both Britain and France used torture against anticolonial resistance movements, producing divisive public controversies. In the aftermath of those media exposés, both London and Paris proved reluctant to punish their perpetrators, instead conducting formal inquiries that either sanctioned torture or facilitated impunity. Nonetheless, both the revelations and their inadequate resolutions served, over the longer term, to delegitimate imperial rule among their foreign subjects and damage the quality of democracy at home.

Facing a national revolution in its Algerian colony from 1954 to 1962, the French resorted to systematic torture that, as historian Marnia Lazreg reports in Torture and the Twilight of Empire, “normalized terror to forestall the collapse of the empire in an age of decolonization.”72 In a vain attempt to crush a nationalist movement with raw repression, France launched a massive pacification program that resulted in the forcible relocation of two million Algerians, the deaths of three hundred thousand more, and the brutal torture of thousands of suspected rebels and their sympathizers.

By branding the guerrillas “outlaws” and denying them the Geneva protections due lawful combatants, the French made such brutality quite legal throughout the seven years of war. In 1955, Interior Minister François Mitterand ordered his inspector-general Roger Wuillaume to investigate allegations of abuse. To contain the political damage, Wuillaume’s report, foreshadowing the Bush administration’s rhetorical devices, used clinical euphemisms (“procedures”) to avoid the term torture, cited compliant experts to minimize the pain of the methods used, and asserted that these measures were unavoidably necessary to fight the insurgency.73 In this way, the report excused the army’s systematic torture of Algerian rebels, saying: “The water and electricity methods, provided they are carefully used, are said to produce a shock which is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty.” Forcing water down a victim’s throat to simulate drowning, a technique then favored by the French Army and later used by the CIA, was, the report insisted, acceptable. “According to certain medical opinion, the water-pipe method,” Wuillaume wrote, “involves no risk to the health of the victim.”⁷⁴

When the Front de Libération National (FLN) launched an urban uprising in the city of Algiers in 1956, the French military already had ample legal cover to apply torture without restraint. In the twisting streets of the old city’s Casbah, the 10th Paratroop Division under Colonel Jacques Massu employed the water pipe, electric shock, beating, and burning to get information that would allow his men to track down Algerian guerrillas. Almost all the rebel suspects taken to the army’s Villa des Tourelles safe house for interrogation under cover of darkness were dead by dawn, their bodies dumped in shallow graves outside the city. These “summary executions,” which one senior officer called “an inseparable part of the task associated with keeping law and order,” were so relentless that 3,024 of those arrested in Algiers went “missing”—a momentary setback for the FLN.⁷⁵

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” observed British historian Sir Alistair Horne, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”⁷⁶ Indeed, the French Army’s campaign proved counterproductive as the revolt spread, thoroughly delegitimating their rule in the eyes of Algerians and transforming the FLN from a group of small cells into a mass party. Of equal import, France itself recoiled against the war’s costs, both moral and material. The editor of an Algiers newspaper, Henri Alleg, who was tortured by the 10th Paratroop during the battle, wrote a moving memoir describing the pain of the army’s water-pipe method as “a terrible agony, that of death itself.” With an angry introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, the book’s publication in 1958 became a cause célèbre when the French government banned it, making it an underground bestseller in Paris.⁷⁷

“The French army won an uncontested military victory,” argued the French historian of the Algerian war, Benjamin Stora. “But in fact the political victory was far from being won because the use of torture heightened awareness among the French public. The society went through a serious moral crisis.” As the fighting ground on without end, the Paris press focused on the army’s torture activities; and public support for the war effort, once nearly unanimous, slowly eroded until France finally quit Algeria in 1962, after 130 years of colonial rule. In the painful aftermath—as Pierre Vidal-Naquet explained in his study of the Algerian war, Torture: Cancer of Democracy—an underlying public indifference to such systemic abuse had the effect of eroding civil liberties and weakening the quality of French democracy.78

In its long imperial recessional, Great Britain also used torture—sporadically in Malaya, systematically in Aden and Kenya, and scandalously in Northern Ireland and other places—finding in each case that exposés by journalists and in Parliament weakened the moral legitimacy of its cause. As part of its collaborative mind-control research with the United States and Canada, Britain conducted tests in 1957 on human subjects at Lancaster Moor Hospital, a mental institution. The tests replicated every detail of Dr. Donald Hebb’s findings about sensory deprivation, providing British intelligence ample evidence of its efficacy. In the early 1960s, Britain’s military began training its elite forces in these psychological methods, offensively for counterinsurgency and defensively to survive the stress of capture.⁷⁹

In the violent eclipse of the empire, these harsh interrogation techniques, as a later official inquiry reported, “played an important part in counter insurgency operations … in the British Cameroons (1960–61), Brunei (1963), British Guiana (1964), Aden (1964–67), [and] Borneo/Malaysia (1965–66).” Determined to defeat Kenya’s Mau-Mau rebels, for example, British officials burned homesteads housing a million people and opened fifty camps where many of the seventy thousand detainees were subjected to “electric shocks, burnings, near-drownings, mutilations, and sexual abuse.” At the most notorious of these camps at Hola, a mass murder was covered up by awarding its superintendent a knighthood. In February 1965, after allegations of such brutality by its forces, Britain adopted a “joint directive on military interrogation” that cited the Geneva Conventions to bar any “violence to life and person” or “outrages upon personal dignity.” Explaining the logic of these prohibitions, the directive stated that “torture and physical cruelty of all kinds are professionally unrewarding since a suspect so treated may be persuaded to talk but not to tell the truth.”⁸⁰

After further allegations of “cruelty and torture” at the British Army’s Interrogation Centre in Aden during a 1966 Arab terror campaign, an official inquiry by Roderic Bowen, QC, added some specific requirements for external supervision during interrogation.⁸¹ Despite these legal restrictions, British intelligence evidently preserved the special psychological practices that were, under these tighter guidelines, at the cusp of illegality.

When 304 bombs erupted across Northern Ireland between January and June 1971, London employed extreme interrogation techniques against the underground Irish Republican Army (IRA). Like France had done in Algeria and America would do in Iraq, Britain felt compelled to fight terror with torture. In April of that year, the English Intelligence Centre gave Belfast’s police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a top-secret training course in what were called the “five techniques” for “interrogation in depth.” Although all instruction was done “orally” and no orders were “committed to writing or authorized in any official document,” the British government later admitted that these abusive methods had been approved at a “high level.” After investing its security forces with special powers of summary arrest and limitless internment, Belfast unleashed Operation Demetrius on August 9, quickly “sweeping up” some eight hundred suspected IRA terrorists.82

Among the hundreds of suspects arrested, fourteen were selected for a secret program to test the efficacy of psychological torture under actual field conditions. In the words of a later finding by the European Court of Human Rights, these fourteen subjects were taken to “unidentified centres” where they were subjected to “five particular techniques” that were “sometimes termed ‘disorientation’ or ‘sensory deprivation’ techniques.” Showing the influence of Dr. Hebb’s experiments and the CIA’s methods, these, in the court’s words, involved: self-inflicted pain—forcing detainees to remain immobile for hours while “spreadeagled against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body mainly on the fingers”; and sensory deprivation—“putting a black or navy coloured bag over the detainees’ heads and … keeping it there all the time except during interrogation.”⁸³

Within weeks, press reports detailing these harsh measures forced Britain’s Conservative government to appoint a committee of inquiry, chaired by Sir Edmund Compton, to look into allegations of “physical brutality.” In October 1971 while the committee was still investigating, the Times of London sparked a bitter debate in Parliament with an exposé of torture in Northern Ireland. Home Secretary Reginald Maudling defended the security forces, arguing that tough tactics were imperative since “intelligence is of enormous importance in defeating gunmen.” But a member from Northern Ireland, Frank McManus, shot back that the case was going before Europe’s Court of Human Rights and the government was “in serious danger of coming into serious international disrepute.”84

When released to the public four weeks later, the Compton Committee’s report further stoked such partisan fires with its contorted justifications for each of the “five techniques.” Wall-standing for up to forty-three hours was said to provide “security for detainees and guards,” and the hood served a necessary “security” function. Such tough tactics were, Compton insisted, needed against terrorists since “information must be sought while it is still fresh … and thereby save the lives of members of the security forces and of the civil population.” Although wall-standing did constitute “physical ill-treatment,” the report maintained that there was “no evidence at all of a major trauma” from it. This extraordinary whitewash prompted a special parliamentary session, with the government justifying interrogation that “yielded information of great value … about individuals concerned in the IRA campaign, … about the location of arms dumps and weapons.”⁸⁵ Responding to Compton and his defenders, Amnesty International explained, “The purpose and effects of these techniques is to disorientate and break down the mind by sensory deprivation,” making them “as grave an assault on … the human person as more traditional techniques of physical torture.”⁸⁶

The Irish Republic later complained formally to the European Human Rights Commission, which in 1976 released an 8,400-page report finding that “the combined use of the five techniques … shows a clear resemblance to those methods of systematic torture which have been known over the ages.” The commission ruled unanimously that the techniques were “a modern system of torture.” In February 1977, the case advanced to the European Court of Human Rights, which would later find Britain guilty of “inhuman and degrading treatment” but not torture—a distinction, the judges said, that derived “principally from a difference in the intensity of the suffering inflicted.” Nonetheless, Britain’s attorney general had to appear before the court and offer an “unqualified undertaking that the ‘five techniques’ will not in any circumstances be reintroduced as an aid to interrogation.”⁸⁷

After sanctioning torture to secure their empires, both Britain and France found that the inevitable revelations of abuse not only intensified resistance among subject populations and discredited the military effort among their own citizenry but also damaged their international standing. The systemic use of torture is both the sign of a dying empire and a cause of imperial retreat, and that obviously applies to the United States as well.

By focusing its might and majesty on breaking hapless individuals through torture, any empire—whether British, French, or American—reveals the gross power imbalance otherwise concealed within the daily exercise of dominion. After centuries of cruel scourges by autocrats and absolute monarchs, Europe’s Enlightenment had repudiated the practice, making the abolition of torture a sign of civilization and its use a mark of barbarism. Just as any modern government loses legitimacy among its citizens for such abuse, so an empire sacrifices its hard-won cultural suasion among both allies and subjects when it demeans its moral stature by torture.

Looking back on the occupation of Iraq a half century hence, historians may well find that the Abu Ghraib scandal was emblematic of the decline of US imperial power. From the perspective of informed opinion in Berlin, Beijing, Brasilia, Cairo, London, Mumbai, or Tokyo, America could not and cannot, now or in the future, simultaneously claim both moral leadership of the international community and the sovereign prerogative to torture at will in defiance of international law.