According to a 2004 CIA memo, "An HVD [high value detainee] may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or 20 to 30 times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question." There were, of course, some restraints. For instance, the Justice Department refused to approve a CIA proposal to bury people alive.
And, as Danner points out, none of these grotesque methods produced any important information. The claim that torture saved "thousands of lives" is simply a lie.
There was a certain Alice in Wonderland quality about the whole thing. Zubaydah was designated a "high official" in Al Qaeda, the number three or four man in the organization. In reality he was not even a member, as the Justice Department finally admitted in 2009. However, because he was considered a high-up in the Al Qaeda, it was assumed he must know about future attacks. If he professed that he knew nothing, this was proof that he did, and so he had to tortured more. "It is a closed circle, self-sufficient, impervious to disobedient facts," says Danner.
The logic of the Red Queen.
The Obama administration has also conjured up some interpretations of language that seem straight out of Lewis Carroll. In defending his use of drone strikes in a 2014 speech at West Point, the President said he only uses them "when we face a continuing, imminent threat." But "imminent" means "likely to occur at any moment" and is the opposite of "continuing." A leaked Justice Department memo addresses the incongruity by arguing, "Imminent does not require the U.S. to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future."
Apparently the administration has now added, "elongated" to "imminent," so that "a president doesn't have to deem the country under immediate threat to attack before acting on his or her own." As Humpty Dumpty says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean."
Danner turns the phrase "American exceptionalism" on its head. The U.S. is not "exceptional" because of its democratic institutions and moral codes, but because it has exempted itself from international law. "Americans, believing themselves to stand proudly for the rule of law and human rights, have become for the rest of the world a symbol of something quite opposite: a society that imprisons people indefinitely without trial, kills thousands without due process, and leaves unpunished lawbreaking approved by its highest officials."
The war has also undermined basic constitutional restrictions on the right of intelligence agencies and law enforcement to vacuum up emails and cell phone calls, and has created an extra-legal court system to try insurgents whose oversight and appeal process is shrouded in secrecy.
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