Pressure Building for Torture Accountability

In the wake of the release by the Obama administration of the Bush Justice Department's torture memos, pressure is building for a more thorough investigation of the Bush administration's detainee interrogation program. Senators Leahy [1], Feinstein [2] and Whitehouse [3] are making noise about future prosecutions/impeachments. Firedoglake [4] and Think Progress [5] are circulating petitions calling for holding Bush officials accountable for the torture memos and the abominations they justified.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer comments [6] on a report [7] just released by Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin. The report examines the treatment of detainees such as Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah. Even if the infamous Bybee memo [8] indemnified interrogators after its issue on August 1, 2002, Mayer asks, "what about what happened to Zubaydah in the four months before?"

A report from McClatchy's Washington bureau reveals [9] that the CIA's adoption of harsh interrogation methods was driven by the Bush administration's desire to find operational links between al Qaida and Iraq.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

In essence, squeeze them until they give us the answer we want.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

The story is further confirmation of Bush's gut-based approach to making decisions, as if we needed any more. In such an environment, facts are unnecessary. Bush didn't want the truth. As Richard Clarke suggested, Bush already knew the answer he wanted. [10]

In a story on the CIA's decision to use torture on terror suspects, the New York Times reinforces [11] why a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. No one involved in the decision to torture terror suspects seemed aware of the origins of the techniques being proposed:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans

Officials briefed by CIA Director George Tenet did not realize that waterboarding had been prosecuted as a war crime by the United States after World War II, that it had been used in the Spanish Inquisition and by Pol Pot in Cambodia, nor that veteran military trainers had warned the proposed methods were ineffective.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

The administration of President George W. Bush in seven words.