The Stomach-Turning Truth About Bush's Torture Programs

In the space of a week, the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed. The Bush administration left office resting its case on the claim it did not torture. The gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, it had said, were the product of “a few bad apples” and not of government policy. But the release of a series of grim documents has laid waste to this defense. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report—adopted with the support of leading Republicans senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham—has demonstrated step by step how abuses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had their genesis in policy choices made at the pinnacle of the Bush administration. A set of four Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush era has provided a stomach-turning legal justification of the application of specific torture techniques, including waterboarding.

As public and Congressional calls for appointment of a prosecutor and the creation of a truth commission have proliferated, President Obama stepped in quickly to try to turn down the heat. A commission would not be helpful, he argues, and he has made plain his aversion to any form of criminal law accountability. Republicans, meanwhile, bristle with anger as they attempt to defend against the flood of new information. But, in the end, Obama’s assumption that the torture debate has run its course and that the country can now “move on,” as conservative pundit Peggy Noonan urged, may rest in some serious naïveté: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have different ideas. They’re convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.

The latest disclosures can best be grouped in terms of the destruction of a series of long-enduring myths and the emergence of some new truths.

The Broken Myths

1. Torture was connected to some “rotten apples,” mostly enlisted personnel from rural Appalachia who were improperly supervised.
   
   The Senate Armed Services Committee meticulously documents the abuses that were chronicled at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and other sites and links them directly to techniques that were approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials in the Bush administration. Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, it shows step-by-step how directions given by Rumsfeld that the harsh techniques he adopted for Guantánamo be imported to Iraq, specifically for use on high-value detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility. Among the 232-page report’s conclusions: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.
   
   
2. The torture techniques were derived as a last resort, only after other techniques had failed and that interrogators in the field pushed for their use.
   
   The report shows, however, that the effort to identify and seek authority to use harsh new techniques started shortly after 9/11—that is, in 2001, well before there were any prisoners on whom they could be used. It also shows that the effort had its origin in the White House, specifically in the office of Vice President Cheney and involved a series of persons who had Cheney’s confidence.
   
   Conversely, the report and other documents emerging since its release shows that interrogators in the field raised sharp objections to the use of the techniques and steadily questioned their efficacy. The team dealing with one prisoner, for instance, voiced the view that he had already furnished all the evidence he was likely to produce and that further waterboarding would be pointless. Nameless “higher-ups” overrode their judgment. That group might well include Cheney, who is known to have maintained a sharp interest in this particular detainee and kept on his desk a file marked “detainees” in which he collected data related to the use of torture. The Senate report documents a series of military officers who raised objections against the use of torture and insisted that their opposition be recorded. And today a further report has emerged from July 2002 (just as the OLC memos were being commissioned), in which the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) expressly referred to the techniques which were being reverse engineered from the SERE program (that JPRA oversaw) as “torture” and insisted that if used they would not produce reliable intelligence.
    
3. Bush lawyers may have made “honest mistakes” in their legal analysis owing to the extreme pressure that existed in the immediate wake of 9/11, in which they were pressed quickly to give opinions before matters could be fully evaluated.
   
   One of Bush’s OLC chiefs, Jack Goldsmith, makes the argument, now accepted as a mantra-like defense for the Bush-era torture lawyers, that tremendous pressure and short deadlines were to blame for their failure to properly assess the law. The torture memoranda gave seriously faulty analysis of the law, Goldsmith claims, because of this pressure-cooker environment. We should all be prepared to excuse their lapses for this reason. Goldsmith is not the most objective analyst of the question, and his adamant insistence that he was divorced from the process of giving a green light to torture appears less persuasive as time passes. But the writings of the torture memo writers, particularly of John Yoo, look suspiciously like their academic writing, in which they sought to expand presidential power and authority at the expense of the rights of the other branches. It seems more plausible to conclude just the opposite of Goldsmith’s claims, namely, that they seized upon the crisis that arose in the wake of 9/11 as an opportunity in which they could realize their ideas about limitless presidential powers in wartime.

The Emerging Reality

1. The impulse to torture had a clear motivation: Cheney and Rumsfeld were increasingly desperate to find evidence that would support their decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
   
   The push for application of torture techniques occurred as the Bush administration scrambled to come up with evidence to support its claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda or was pursuing the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Two major spikes in the use of the harshest techniques occurred in the weeks just before the Iraq invasion and the couple of months after the occupation of Iraq had begun. The first spike coincides with a period of difficulty with America’s principal ally, Britain, shortly following the famous Washington meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the latter expressed concern about the lack of evidence supporting claims about a WMD program. Blair had been informed by his attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, that the legal case for invading Iraq was exceedingly tenuous and badly needed to be bolstered with evidence showing an imminent threat coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also in this period, Vice President Cheney was doing his best to make this case by talking up evidence that proved specious—including reports of a meeting in Prague between an Al Qaeda figure and an Iraqi diplomat.
   
   The new documents make plain that interrogators using the new harsh techniques, including waterboarding, were pushing their subjects for information that would justify the Iraq War. For instance, Major Paul Burney, a medical professional attached to interrogation efforts at Guantánamo, told investigators that “we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link… there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.” Numerous other sources involved in the interrogation effort recorded the same intense pressure to secure “results” that would justify a decision that had already been taken in Washington to invade Iraq.
   
   In the end, Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The crown jewel of his evidentiary case turned on claims supplied by Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi that Saddam Hussein had trained Al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. Al-Libi had been tortured using the new techniques to secure this evidence. It was subsequently determined to be false—offered up by Al-Libi to escape the torments to which he was subjected with the full understanding that this was what his interrogators wanted to hear. By curious coincidence, as Powell delivered his speech to the UN Security Council, a Judiciary Committee hearing room emptied out, and the nominee then under consideration got a free pass to confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. His name was Jay Bybee, and more than a year later the public would learn that he had been a principal author of the torture memoranda.
   
   The new reports make clear that torture was used to secure information to justify the invasion of Iraq, but—just as experts from the military and the FBI warned—the information proved false. America’s credibility on the international stage was seriously damaged as a result.
   
   
2. The torture trail started and ended in the White House.
   
   

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   Scott Horton is a contributor to Harper's Magazine and writes No Comment for this website, www.harpers.org. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, (more...)
    

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