Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future

The recent, mysterious death of yet another captive in the Guantanamo concentration camp opens yet another door into the blood-caked labyrinth of the American gulag, where despite all the soaring rhetoric about "restoring the rule of law," torture is still very much the order of the day.

Scott Horton at Harper's provides this telling quote from an AP story on the death of Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, which gulag officials have classified as an "apparent suicide":

A Guantanamo Bay detainee who left his cell to meet with military commanders as prisoner representative never returned, and was instead sent to a psychiatric ward where he died five months later, a former detainee recalled...

The U.S. military has refused to say how Saleh allegedly killed himself in the closely watched ward. But the former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, said it wasn't like him to commit suicide. "He was patient and encouraged others to be the same," Mohamed said. "He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair." Even if it was suicide, Mohamed still classifies the death as "murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it," saying that the U.S. had caused Saleh to lose hope by locking him up indefinitely without charges.

The techniques do not comply with the international standards for actual force-feeding, established in the World Medical Association's Malta Declaration of 1991. Instead they have a darker and more distressing progeny. From the use of restraint chairs down to the specific brand of commercial diet supplement used by the doctors, the force-feeding techniques now in use at Guantanamo replicate the methods used by the CIA at black sites under Bush. At the black sites, those methods were not part of any medical regime. Instead, they were a part of a carefully designed torture regime, the very same regime that Obama claims to have abolished in his first executive order.

Pentagon spokespersons righteously defend the "force-feeding" program at Guantanamo as medically necessary to save lives. That's a farce. In fact, this program is the last residue of the Bush-era torture system. Did it just claim another life on June 1? That's a question that some apparently don't want to have to answer. And two weeks later, the public continues to await a serious explanation of this death. The passage of time will not make the ultimate explanations more credible.

If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years....

Then, on April 16th, President Obama ... released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting: "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no prosecutions of Agency employees. "We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but urged Americans simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law that the U.N.'s chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington was actually obliged to investigate possible violations of the Convention Against Torture.

This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global torture policy that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly advocating human rights while covertly outsourcing torture to allied governments and their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment." Showing the quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell.

To my amazement, I was told that the CIA renewed its rich contract with James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in February 2009-in other words, after Obama took office. What is so astounding about this is that these two former military psychologists have been described to me and others as the original designers of the torture techniques. They were there at the creation when waterboarding was used 183 times on Abu Zubaydah. Waterboarding, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, is torture. Torture is a felony, sometimes treated as a capital crime. Yet despite all of this, the CIA renewed their contract this year. The only thing that finally cut their revenue stream off was the passage of a new law curbing the CIA from using contractors in interrogations. This past spring, after that law passed, Leon Panetta fired their firm. But it seems that for seven years they have been on the public dole. If the CIA had any qualms about using the cruel techniques these two contractors designed, it certainly wasn't reflected by February 2009. [For more on dynamic duo of Mitchell and Jesson, see here and here.]