No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.
—President George W. Bush, January 20041
“We do not torture,” President Bush said in exasperation during a press conference in Panama at the end of a disastrous, riot-riddled Latin American tour. It was November 2005, and Bush was being harassed about his torture policies everywhere he went. So the president tried a technique that had served him so well in the runup to the invasion of Iraq: Tell a big lie often enough, and people will start to believe it.
Problem was, Bush’s “Vice President for Torture,” as Dick Cheney was dubbed by the Washington Post,2 was working overtime at that very moment trying to strong-arm the Senate into giving the CIA permission to torture. In spite of a 90–9 vote in favor of a bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain that would ban the “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners, Cheney desperately wanted an exemption for the CIA that would keep them unfettered by squeamish restrictions.
The juxtaposition of the two leaders trying to pull off a carefully staged con job—with Cheney championing torture in the back rooms, while Bush smiled and denied it in front of the cameras—was farcical, were it not for the macabre story line. Throw in White House flak Scott McClellan trying to dance his way around the issue, and we were now in the realm of theater— a theater of war.
Indeed, a movie had already been made about this subject—in 1966. One of the most influential political films of all time, The Battle of Algiers, by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly depicts the Algerian struggle for independence against the French occupation in the 1950s and early ’60s. There are striking parallels between the French use of torture against resistance fighters of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and the U.S. abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
The Battle of Algiers again made the news in 2003 after the Pentagon showed a screening of the film just months after Bush prematurely declared the Iraq War officially over. A flyer promoting the Pentagon screening stated: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”3
Democracy Now! contrasted how the Bush administration talks about torture today with how the French talked about it in the 1960s. In this scene from The Battle of Algiers, the ruthless leader of the French paratroopers, Colonel Mathieu, holds a news conference with reporters:
REPORTER: Colonel, there’s been talk recently of the paras’ [the French paratroopers in Algeria] successes and of the methods they are said to use. Could you say something on this?
COLONEL MATHIEU: The successes result from these methods. The one presupposes the other.
REPORTER: I feel that being excessively careful, my colleagues keep asking roundabout questions to which you can only reply in a roundabout way. It would be better to call a spade a spade. If it’s torture, let’s speak of torture.
MATHIEU: I understand. You have no questions?
REPORTER: The questions have been asked. We would like the answers.
MATHIEU: Let us be exact. The word “torture” does not appear in our orders. We ask questions as in any police operation against an unknown gang. The FLN asks its members to keep silent for twenty-four hours if they are captured. Then they can talk. That’s the time required to render any information useless. How should we question suspects? Like the courts and take a few months over it? The legal way has its drawbacks. Is it legal to blow up public places? . . .
Our duty is to win; thus, to be quite clear, I’ll ask you a question myself: Must France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, you must accept all that this entails.4
Fast forward a half century to a news conference at the White House on November 8, 2005. President Bush’s Press Secretary Scott McClellan was questioned by the tenacious veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas. On this day, Thomas was pressing McClellan about why the White House was asking for an exemption for the CIA from the proposed McCain amendment that would ban the “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners:
THOMAS: I’m asking: Is the administration asking for an exemption?
MCCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The president has made it very clear that we are going to do—
THOMAS: You’re not answering. Yes or no?
MCCLELLAN: No, you don’t want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen. And I’m going to tell them the facts.
THOMAS: [inaudible] the American people every day. I’m asking you: yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?
MCCLELLAN: And let me respond. You’ve had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I’m going to respond to it.
THOMAS: If you could answer in a straight way.
MCCLELLAN: And I’m going to answer it, just like the president—I just did. And the president has answered it numerous times.
THOMAS: Yes or no?
MCCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology and intent on killing innocent men, women, and children.
THOMAS: Did we ask for an exemption?
MCCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.
THOMAS: Is that the answer?
MCCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The president directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.
THOMAS: Are you denying we asked for an exemption?
MCCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we’re asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.
THOMAS: We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple. This is a very simple question.
MCCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The president answered it last week.
DAVID GREGORY, NBC NEWS: What are we asking for? Would you characterize what we’re asking for?
MCCLELLAN: We’re asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that’s what we do.
GREGORY: Why does the CIA need an exemption . . . ?
MCCLELLAN: David, let’s talk about people that you’re talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You’re talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.
REPORTER [UNIDENTIFIED]: I’m asking you—
MCCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you’re talking about.
REPORTER: Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?
MCCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only—
REPORTER: What does that mean?
MCCLELLAN: That’s what I’m telling you right now. Not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place.5
This news conference was not fictional. Only the answers coming out of the White House were.
It turns out that the dramatic Oval Office handshake staged between President Bush and Sen. John McCain on December 15, 2005, was another fiction. President Bush declared that day that the legislation he was signing—after fighting it for months—made it “clear to the world that this government does not torture.” But the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment) had been almost completely eviscerated by that point. At the insistence of Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, with the acquiescence of Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the bill stripped Guantánamo detainees of the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts, thereby reversing a landmark Supreme Court decision that explicitly affirmed these rights for the detainees. So while the act bans torture, Guantánamo detainees— who UN investigators, among others, confirm are being tortured by their American captors—have no way to enforce the law. If John McCain were still a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a law such as this would have elicited a hearty chuckle from his torturers, who then could have continued their brutality uninterrupted.
For the Bush administration, even this amount of legal oversight was too much. Two weeks later, at his Crawford estate, after signing a defense bill that included the McCain amendment, Bush issued a “signing statement.” It was Friday evening, December 30, 2005, carefully timed to minimize attention from the press and the public. The statement declared: “The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president . . . as commander in chief.”
In other words, Bush would do as he damn well pleased, because he’s president.
The Justice Department got right to work—denying justice to torture victims. On January 3, 2006, the Justice Department, citing this new law, informed federal judges that it was seeking the immediate dismissal of all 160 habeas corpus cases already filed for 300 Guantánamo detainees. The solicitor general, citing the same new law, was close behind, informing the Supreme Court on January 12 that it no longer had jurisdiction over Guantánamo and asking the justices to dismiss Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, another potential landmark case involving “enemy combatants.” As Professor Alfred McCoy summarized these events, “Then, putting the cherry atop the administration’s many-layered legal confection, on January 24 the Army changed its standing orders to allow military executions at Guantánamo, thus keeping the U.S. courts from intervening in any drum-head death sentences for detainees.”6
Bush’s torture chambers, far from being dismantled, were getting a fresh coat of paint, and even some window blinds.
The Interrogator
America’s interrogation dungeons have lately been spilling their secrets. As more soldiers are pressed into duty as tormentors, and more victims are telling their horrific tales of abuse at the hands of U.S. captors, we are learning daily the details about America’s descent into the world of torture.
What we aren’t hearing is that the United States has gained any useful intelligence from its medieval interrogation techniques.
Specialist Tony Lagouranis was in the U.S. Army from 2001 to 2005. He served a year in Iraq as an interrogator starting in January 2004. He first worked at Abu Ghraib months after the infamous torture photos taken at the prison had sparked international outrage. Then he was assigned to a mobile interrogation team that visited detention facilities around Iraq.
Lagouranis reluctantly went public with his allegations of torture. Moments before his live interview began on Democracy Now! on November 15, 2005, he said he didn’t want to do it. At the last second, he agreed to speak.
Lagouranis explained that he joined the Army in May 2001 because he was looking for a way to pay off his student loans. He was also interested in learning Arabic; another ex-interrogator told him that the Army had taught him to speak Russian and German. “It just seemed like an attractive deal to me,” said the earnest-looking young vet.
Lagouranis talked about some of the interrogation techniques that he used or witnessed in Iraq. His interrogations began innocuously, but he quickly learned that other interrogators were pushing the limits. “We would just talk to them, ask them questions, maybe, you know, use some psychological approaches, but nothing too serious. But I knew that some interrogators there were still, in January of 2004, using a little bit harsher techniques. Like, if a prisoner wasn’t cooperating, they could adjust his diet. People were in deep, deep isolation for months there, which I believe is illegal, according to Army doctrine. [Interrogators] would also take their clothes and their mattress so they would be cold in their cells if they weren’t cooperating.
“When the Navy SEALS would interrogate people, they were using ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner and they would take his rectal temperature in order to make sure that he didn’t die.”
Military interrogators discovered that using dogs was particularly effective in terrifying prisoners. At a detention facility at the Mosul airport, “We would put the prisoner in a shipping container. We would keep him up all night with music and strobe lights, stress positions, and then we would bring in dogs. . . . The dog would be barking and jumping on the prisoner, and the prisoner wouldn’t really understand what was going on.
“I knew that we were really walking the line,” said Lagouranis. “I was going through the interrogation rules of engagement that were given to me by the unit that we were working with up there, trying to figure out what was legal and what wasn’t legal. According to these interrogation rules of engagement, that was legal. So, when they ordered me to do it, I had to do it. You know, as far as whether I thought it was a good interrogation practice, I didn’t think so at all, actually. We never produced any intelligence.”
On April 28, 2004, the CBS show 60 Minutes II aired the now iconic images of Iraqi detainees being tortured by their American captors at Abu Ghraib prison. Lagouranis recalled, “My initial reaction was that these were bad apples, like the White House line. But you know, it’s funny, I didn’t really tie it to what we were doing up there. We were using some pretty harsh methods on the prisoners. I had seen other units that were using, like, really severe methods. But I didn’t tie it to the scandal.”
Lagouranis said he began to question the interrogation techniques, but only to a point. “I was sort of pushing to back away from the harsh tactics, but at the same time I was—in a way, I sort of wanted to push, because we were frustrated by not getting intel. So I was on both sides of the fence. . . . I was still under the impression that we were getting prisoners who had intel to give us, and I still thought that these were bad guys. . . . Later it became clear to me that they were picking up just farmers. Like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel. And it just made what we were doing seem even more cruel.”
The exposure of what was happening at Abu Ghraib merely shifted the abuse from the prisons into the communities. From August to October of 2004, Lagouranis worked with a Marine reconnaissance unit in North Babel, just south of Baghdad. “They would go out and do a raid and stay in the detainees’ homes, and torture them there,” he said. “They were far worse than anything that I ever saw in a prison. They were breaking bones. They were smashing people’s feet with the back of an axe head. They burned people.
“Every time Force Recon [Marines] went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by the Force Recon Marines. . . . One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe of a Humvee. . . . He had a giant blister, third-degree burn on the back of his leg.”
Lagouranis determined “that like 98 percent of these guys had not done anything. I mean, they were picking up people for the stupidest things. Like, there’s one guy they picked up, they stopped him at a checkpoint, just a routine stop, and he had a shovel in his trunk, and he had a cell phone in his pocket. They said, ‘Well, you can use the shovel to bury an IED [improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb], you can use the cell phone to detonate it.’ He didn’t have any explosives in his car. He had no weapons. Nothing. They had no reason to believe that he was setting IEDs other than the shovel and cell phone. That was the kind of prisoner they were bringing us.”
A war based on fiction must continually conjure even greater fictions to perpetuate itself. So the fate of everyone that the Marines brought in was foreordained: “Basically everybody who came to the prison, they determined they were a terrorist, they were guilty, and they would send them to Abu Ghraib. When I would say they were innocent in my interrogation reports, they would send the prisoner up to Abu Ghraib without my interrogation report.”
The young man who hoped to learn foreign languages and serve his country was revolted by the sadism and fraudulence that had become the central features of his mission. He began to make his objections known. “At that point, I was like so pissed at the military for what they were doing. And you know, I was yelling at the chief warrant officer Marine who was in charge of the defense facility. I was making an issue about it to the major of the Marines, and the lieutenant colonel who was the JAG guy [a military lawyer from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps] who was in charge of release, who organized keeping the prisoners. But they just wouldn’t listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of terrorists apprehended . . . so they could brief that to the general.”
Lagouranis filed abuse reports with the military. All of them mysteriously disappeared. It was only after he first spoke publicly about his experience on PBS Frontline that he was contacted by military investigators—who were investigating him about why he never reported the abuse.
At one point when Tony Lagouranis was deployed in Fallujah, he was tasked with bringing corpses back to a warehouse, and then searching their pockets to identify them and glean intel. He estimates that he searched 500 dead bodies. The military hadn’t figured out what to do with the corpses, so they were just stacked up. At night, he slept in the warehouse alongside the dead bodies.
He explained about the body searches, “Initially, the reason that we were doing this was they were trying to prove that there were a lot of foreign fighters in Fallujah. So, mainly, that’s what we were going for. . . . Maybe half of them had I.D.s. Very few of them had foreign I.D.s. There were people working with me who would, in an effort to sort of cook the books, you know, they would find a Koran on the guy and the Koran was printed in Algeria, and they would mark him down as an Algerian. Or you know guys would come in with a black shirt and khaki pants and they would say, ‘Well, this is the Hezbollah uniform,’ and they would mark him down as a Lebanese, which was ridiculous, but—you know.” Of the 500 bodies Lagouranis searched—including many dead women and children—“about 20 percent of them actually had weapons on them.”
For guidance on how to handle their mission, Lagouranis and his fellow soldiers followed the lead of their commander in chief, George W. Bush: In the absence of real evidence, just fake it. The grunts already knew the answers—Donald Rumsfeld had declared that foreign fighters were the cause of Iraq’s problems—so their job was to manufacture some proof.
Interrogation sessions were largely unproductive. Lagouranis recounted, “I did more than three hundred interrogations in Iraq, and I’m guessing like twenty people I got any like real intel out of. And when I did it was when I would sort of form a rapport with the person and get them to trust me. Nothing ever came out of the harsh interrogation sessions.”
On Democracy Now!, Tony Lagouranis spoke about what he wished he had done in Iraq. “We were trained to do interrogations according to the Geneva Conventions with enemy prisoners of war. . . . We weren’t allowed to cross any lines. So, I don’t know why I allowed the Army to order me to go against my training, and against my better judgment and against my own moral judgment. But I did. I should have just said no.”
Lagouranis says that responsibility for encouraging and tolerating torture “obviously goes right up to the Pentagon, because they were issuing the interrogation rules of engagement [which] are not in accordance with the Army field manual and not in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.” Prosecuting the abuse “should have gone all the way up the chain.”
The Army interrogator reflects, “I think that using torture is the worst possible thing we could do. You cannot win a war against terrorism with bombs and force. It doesn’t work. You have to win hearts and minds and we’re really failing. Using torture is absolutely the wrong way to go. And we’re not getting any intel out of it, either. How many people did we get intel out of in Guantánamo? A small handful. And in Abu Ghraib . . . they got nothing. They got no intel out of that place.”
Lagouranis decided to speak out about what he saw. “I feel like that’s what my duty is right now.
“I’d like to apologize to Iraq, honestly, because I think we have done so many things wrong over there. I think the military guys wanted to go over there and really liberate Iraq, and we have just really screwed it up. That’s terrible. But to the military guys in Iraq, I would say, follow your conscience. And don’t do what everybody else is doing just because it seems like that’s the right thing to do. It’s not.”
“The Cruel Science of Pain”
Far from being the work of a few “bad apples,” as the White House has insisted, the American style of torture used at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere has been secretly and systematically developed. For decades, the CIA has been perfecting its interrogation methods and exporting them around the world. The famous Abu Ghraib torture photos of hooded detainees and naked men being sexually humiliated depict the culmination of a half-century of American research into torture.
Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan, 2006). He explained on Democracy Now! the madness behind the methods.7
“If you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib—of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms—in that photograph you can see the entire fifty-year history of CIA torture,” McCoy noted. “It’s very simple: He’s hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. Those are the two very simple fundamental CIA techniques, developed at enormous cost.
“From 1950 to 1962, the CIA ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. They tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs. They tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentothal. None of it worked.
“What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and McGill. The first breakthrough came at McGill. . . . Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the CIA in this research. And he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within forty-eight hours. It didn’t take electroshock, truth serum, beating, or pain. All he did was he had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves, and headphones so that they were cut off from their senses. And within forty-eight hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer—first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.”
The Abu Ghraib images are simply a snapshot of the CIA method: “They show people with bags over their heads. If you look at the photographs of the Guantánamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.”
McCoy continued, “The second major breakthrough that the CIA had came in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the CIA studied Soviet KGB torture techniques. They found that the most effective KGB technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand—you’re not beating them, they have no resentment—you tell them, ‘You’re doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.’ As they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.”
Through a process of trial and error, the CIA refined its methods by experimenting with a variety of torture techniques, from beating, to secretly giving American soldiers hallucinogenic drugs. “LSD certainly didn’t work—you scramble the brain. You got unreliable information,” said McCoy. “But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.”
The CIA codified its findings in 1963 in the KUBARK Counter-intelligence Manual (which can be found online). McCoy noted that KUBARK presented “a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries—psychological torture. . . . It’s proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.”
It is a mistake to consider psychological torture—sometimes referred to as “torture lite”—to be the lesser of evils. “People who are involved in treatment tell us [that psychological torture] is far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche, than does physical torture,” insisted McCoy. Even Sen. John McCain stated when he was advocating his torture prohibition in 2005 that he would rather be beaten than psychologically tortured.
The Abu Ghraib photographs provided important details on how the United States inflicts psychological torture. The key, said McCoy, is to attack “universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time. That’s why all of the detainees describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music. That’s sensory deprivation, or sensory assault. That was sort of the Phase One of the CIA research.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was determined to adapt psychological torture techniques to be used in the war on terror. His torture point person was Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, appointed in 2002 to be head of the Guantánamo Bay detention center—a.k.a., Gitmo. “General Miller turned Guantánamo into a de facto . . . torture research laboratory,” explained McCoy. “Under General Miller at Guantánamo, [the U.S. military] perfected the CIA torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.
“And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called BSCT (Biscuit) teams—behavioral science consultation teams—and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation. And these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother. And by the time we’re done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantánamo had perfected . . . a [multifaceted] assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.”
American-style torture, fine-tuned in offshore jails, was now ready to be unleashed on a larger stage. In mid-2003, Rumsfeld sent General Miller to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Miller famously promised to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib. He carried through on his promise.
The insurgency was just beginning to take root in Iraq in mid-2003, and the Bush administration, believing its own propaganda that American troops “would be greeted as liberators,” was completely unprepared. The response of the U.S. military to the insurgency was to round up thousands of Iraqi men and dump them in Saddam Hussein’s notorious torture center, Abu Ghraib prison. General Miller arrived in August 2003 bearing a CD and a manual of his interrogation techniques. He distributed these to the military police and military intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib, and also gave copies to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq. Within a month, General Sanchez issued detailed new orders for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army field manual.
The new methods bore the hallmarks of the CIA’s signature torture techniques. “It was a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions, and sensory disorientation,” Professor McCoy observed. “If you look at the 1963 CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 CIA interrogation training manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez’s 2003 orders, there’s a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both of the general principles: this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, and the . . . way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.”
Rumsfeld, not content to leave the details to the grunts, has been an enthusiastic micro-manager of torture. Newsweek reported that when he read a report in November 2002 about new interrogation techniques at Guantánamo that called for standing for four hours straight, Rumsfeld scribbled in the margin, “Why is standing limited to 4 hours? . . . I stand for 8 hours a day.” Perhaps if he were standing naked, with loud music blasting, bright lights shining, attack dogs lunging, and guards softening him up, Rumsfeld would understand why limits, even flimsy ones, were needed.
Nothing appears to diminish Rumsfeld’s lust for torture. According to a December 2005 report by the Army inspector general obtained by Salon.com reporters Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin, Rumsfeld “was personally involved” in the interrogation in late 2002 of Mohammed al-Kahtani, an al Qaeda detainee who was dubbed “the 20th hijacker.” Rumsfeld communicated weekly with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller about the interrogation sessions.8
According to Salon.com, al-Kahtani “suffered from what Army investigators have called ‘degrading and abusive’ treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women’s underwear and to perform ‘dog tricks’ on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.”
Rumsfeld later “expressed puzzlement” at the charge that his policies led to abuses at Guantánamo. Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in 2005 about the case, recounted Rumsfeld saying, “My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy’s head?”9
The defense secretary—with the strong backing of President Bush, who had declared that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to “terrorists”—was signaling to the troops: Take off the gloves. Break the law. Torture.
The torture demons, once unleashed, do not easily retreat to their dungeons. “There’s an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason: Torture taps into the deepest, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist,” reflected Professor McCoy. “It has a powerful perverse appeal. Once it starts—both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them let it spread—it spreads out of control.
“So, when the Bush administration gave those orders for techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be limited to top al Qaeda suspects. But within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul. And a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos . . . how once it starts, it becomes this Dante-esque hell, this kind of play palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness.
“That’s why it’s necessary to maintain an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture—that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with—that’s impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.”
The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to give the appearance of legal cover to its torture policies. When top Justice Department lawyers warned that new interrogation rules violated international law, the White House found midlevel attorneys at the department, such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to draft memos (some of which the administration has been forced to rescind) arguing that torture was legal.
Then there was the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the so-called McCain amendment. What began as an attempt to stop the United States from torturing detainees has ended up giving torturers legal immunity. As Professor McCoy explained, the McCain amendment put into law several key principles that torture advocates coveted:
“In his signing statement [of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005] on December 30, President Bush said . . . ‘I reserve the right, as commander in chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America.’ Okay, that was the first thing. The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a CIA operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that’s a defense. So they got the second principle—defense for CIA torturers. The third principle is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay is not on U.S. territory.”
McCoy concluded, “They have, in fact, used [the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005] to quash legal oversight of their actions.”
When the eulogy for American democracy is written, this will stand out as a signal achievement: how an American president and vice president championed torture, how Congress acquiesced, how the courts provided legal cover for the sadists, all while sage media pundits politely debated the merits of our descent into barbarism.