A Legacy of Torture

Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

The headline of the top story in Sunday's New York Times story was promising: "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy."

But in the lead paragraph, Steven Lee Myers pulled his punches: "President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques."

I'll be a little more blunt: The legacy that Bush affirmed with Saturday's veto was one of torture.

By refusing to impose on the CIA the same anti-torture prohibitions mandated by the Army Field Manual-- prohibitions against such tactics as waterboarding, prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, mock executions, the use of attack dogs, the application of electric shocks and the withholding of food, water and medical care -- Bush cast his lot with the world's torturers and against the global human rights movement that was until recently the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

And by making the claim that the country would have been attacked again after 9/11 were it not for the CIA's interrogation program -- a claim allowed to go unrefuted in most media coverage -- Bush has further damaged his credibility among those who are paying attention.

Bush's Torture Canards

Bush announced the veto in his Saturday radio address. "The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror -- the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives," he said.

His supporting evidence? In an almost word-for-word repeat from his October 23 speech on the same issue, Bush said: "This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks. The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. And it has helped us understand al Qaida's structure and financing and communications and logistics. Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland."

Here's the unusually blistering response from Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, via TPM Muckraker: "As Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack. And I have heard nothing that makes me think the information obtained from these techniques could not have been obtained through traditional interrogation methods used by military and law enforcement interrogators. On the other hand, I do know that coercive interrogations can lead detainees to provide false information in order to make the interrogation stop."

As for Bush's four allegedly thwarted plots, let's start with the only domestic one, the Library Tower plot. As I wrote in Friday's column, it's been widely debunked. There's no reason to believe it was much more than a fantasy. And as I reported in October on NiemanWatchdog.org (where I am deputy editor), the three alleged international plots are also quite possibly figments of tortured detainees' imaginations as well.

Why much of the media repeatedly quotes Bush's unsubstantiated assertions without offering readers any context is beyond me.

No More

The Washington Monthly is out with a special issue: "No More." The editors explain why they commissioned 37 short essays on the same theme: "In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly -- despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib -- we remain one...

"The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop."

Peter Bergen writes in one of the essays about detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh: "What is perhaps most astonishing of all is that the mistreatment of KSM and bin al-Shibh was entirely unnecessary. Before they were captured, they had explained the details of the 9/11 attacks in an April 2002 interview with Yosri Fouda, an Al Jazeera correspondent. Fouda's interviews resolved key questions that investigators still had about the plot -- for instance, that United 93 was on its way to destroy the Capitol when it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, and that al-Qaeda had once contemplated crashing planes into American nuclear facilities. KSM and bin al-Shibh explained how they kept Osama bin Laden, then living in Afghanistan, informed about the timing of the attack, and they laid out the coded correspondence they had conducted with the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohammed Atta.

"The CIA provided summaries of the interrogations of KSM and bin al-Shibh to the 9/11 Commission. There is little or no difference between the account that KSM and bin al-Shibh freely volunteered to Fouda in the spring of 2002 and the version the commission published in its 2004 report. Nor was Fouda's reporting difficult to find: he hosted a one-hour documentary on Al Jazeera, wrote a long piece in London's Sunday Times, and coauthored a book, Masterminds of Terror, about KSM and bin al-Shibh. By the time CIA officials captured the pair, a full account of their operations was only a Google search away.

"Obviously, then, it was unnecessary to waterboard KSM to find out what he knew about the 9/11 plot. What, though, of the administration's assertion that coercive interrogation techniques have saved American lives? To assess that claim, we must examine the details of other terrorist plots that KSM gave up after his capture, presented in a document the government released in 2006: 'KSM launched several plots targeting the US Homeland, including a plot in late 2001 to have . . . suicide operatives hijack a plane over the Pacific and crash it into a skyscraper on the US West Coast; a plan in early 2002 to send al-Qa'ida operatives to conduct attacks in the U.S.; and a plot in early 2003 to employ a network of Pakistanis . . . to smuggle explosives into New York and to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and a bridge in New York.'

"It all sounds very frightening, except that there is no indication that these plots were ever more than talk. The one exception is the plan by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who worked for KSM, who researched the feasibility of bringing down the Brooklyn Bridge with a pair of gas cutters in 2002, an enterprise akin to demolishing the Empire State Building with a firecracker. If that is all we could discover by waterboarding the most senior al-Qaeda member in our custody, it's thin stuff indeed. . . .

"Nothing better illustrates this point than KSM's claim that he killed the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. According to a Western official who was deeply involved in the Pearl investigation, there is simply no evidence that KSM killed him."

Jimmy Carter writes in an essay: "Until recent years the United States has been in the forefront of condemning torture and indefinite detention without trial as fundamental violations of human rights. . . .

"A burgeoning global human rights movement was, slowly but surely, taking root by the end of the twentieth century, as more and more nations sought to turn principles of human decency into the practice of greater justice for all. Tragically, the tolerance of torture by our own government is today threatening to undermine the cause of human rights and the work of those who defend these principles in the face of growing dangers."

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel writes: "We are in a war of ideas against a radical extremist ideology. Effective and aggressive intelligence operations are essential to our security. But in our effort to protect the nation, we must remember our greatest strength: the principles of human rights that we have upheld throughout our country's wars and conflicts. It is vital that the world can trust what we say and have confidence in what we do. There must be no doubt that this great nation does not torture."

Lawrence B. Wilkerson writes: "The worst horrors of our war have yet to be revealed--but they will be. Secret prisons, renditions, homicides, torture, and innocents swept up in a vast network of detention--all will be revealed. It is the nature of our openness that it be so. We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exorcise them from our souls and make amends."

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