OPINION
12 Obiter Dicta
CIA Torture
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detainees who were subject to extreme abuse, and yet
produced no or false information. Muhammad Rahim,
despite excessively harsh treatment - including 138.5
hours of continuous sleep deprivation while being
shackled upright - provided no intelligence information, and was eventually transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay. Arsala Khan was subjected
to torture and sleep deprivation sufficient to cause
hallucinations and paranoia; he was determined by
CIA headquarters to be uninvolved with any terrorist activity and was recommended released to his village “with a cash payment.” Despite this recognition
of his innocence, the CIA field officers transferred him
to military custody for a further four years. Hanbali
was determined by CIA officers themselves to have
provided false information in order to reduce the
‘pressure’ on him, and “to give an account that was
consistent with what [Hanbali] assessed the questioners wanted to hear.”
One well-known detainee was Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad, who was reportedly waterboarded 183
times while in CIA custody, and who subsequently
confessed to numerous crimes, including masterminding the September 11 attacks, the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Centre, and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing. His military trial has been denounced
by the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay,
who resigned in protest over a process he described
as being tainted by suspect information obtained
through torture. Interrogators described Khalid
Sheikh Mohammad as being recalcitrant, as providing
false information, and as only being able to confirm
information that was obtained through the enhanced
interrogations of other detainees when it was directly
presented to him by interrogators, but they attributed
this to his moral failings rather than to the expected
effects of the torture itself. Many of the waterboarding sessions were conducted to obtain confirming evidence of a suspected Al-Qaeda plot to recruit and use
African-Americans to conduct terror attacks inside
the United States. These interrogations produced
little in the way of new and valuable information, and
instead reconfirmed interrogators’ views of a morally
bereft and racialized enemy.
In the above cases, it was the CIA interrogators
themselves who concluded that the enhanced interrogations were not effective in eliciting actionable
intelligence, or that the detainee provided false information under pressure. The Report has also found that
the CIA did not adequately evaluate the effectiveness
of its interrogation program, and either failed to keep
or deliberately destroyed records and information;
one official admitted that it would have been impossible to evaluate the program without violating prohibitions against human experimentation – policies
that were first put in place after the abuses committed
by Nazi physicians during World War II. The Senate
Select Committee obtained an internal review of the
detainee program prepared at the behest of then-CIA
director Leon Panetta that also describes the program as being ineffective, but could not discuss it in
its Report as the Panetta Review remains classified.
Mark Mazzetti reports that those who have read the
Panetta Review describe its criticisms of enhanced
interrogations as “scorching,” and confirms that these
tactics provided “little intelligence of any value.”
On the other hand, the Senate Report found that
the program spent over $300 million dollars in nonpersonnel costs, including $81 million dollars in
ê Photo credit: nydailynews.com
payments to a private company formed by the two
psychologists who had originally designed the program, as well as “millions of dollars in cash payments
to foreign government officials” in order to “encourage governments to clandestinely host CIA detention
sites, or to increase support for existing sites.” One
study by Gronke et al found that Americans’ support for torture has grown since October 2001, and
by 2009, a majority of respondents began to favour
the use of torture. An opinion poll conducted after
the release of the Senate Report found that a majority of respondents - by about two to one - thought
that CIA torture was justified, and produced actionable intelligence that saved lives. This is despite the
fact that CIA director John Brennan admitted upon
the release of the Senate Report that the relationship
between enhanced interrogation and any information subsequently provided by detainees was probably “unknowable”. Surprisingly, while 54% found
that the CIA had deliberately misled Congress and the
public, similar numbers found that the Report was
unfair to the CIA, and thought it was wrong to have
publicly released the Report. In the end, only 20%
of respondents thought that torture was never justified, whereas 76% thought that it could be, and might
support its future use. Marc Thiessen is likely correct when he states that critics of torture have lost the
debate, and that the idea of torture has experienced
a signal rehabilitation in the minds of the American
public. In this, the CIA torture was remarkably successful. In advancing an ample slush fund to enrich
well-connected insiders, it was remarkably successful. In reinforcing among the American public the
worldview constructed by the CIA interrogators, and
in progressively dehumanizing a racially-constructed
enemy ‘other,’ it was remarkably successful. All of
this should help us to advance a decisive answer to the
question, “Was it worth it?” u
Selected Sources
Alan Dershowitz, “Torture Could be Justified” CNN
Access (4 March 2003), available at: http://edition.
cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/03/cnna.Dershowitz/
For a full list of the sources used in this article, please
contact the Obiter at [email protected].
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