New York Review contributor Mark Danner has been writing about the use of torture by the US government since the first years after September 11. Following the release this month of the Senate’s report on the CIA torture program, Hugh Eakin spoke to Danner about some of the most startling findings of the investigation and what it reveals about the continued political debate surrounding the program.
Hugh Eakin: Nearly six years ago, you published the secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the CIA’s torture of more than a dozen “high value” detainees. And now we have the Senate’s extensive investigation of the torture program itself. What are some of the most revealing findings of the Senate report?
Mark Danner: There is a lot in the executive summary that we already knew but that is now told in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen before. The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques; the totality of their effect when taken together—walling, close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things—is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.
What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.
The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, life-saving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating.
This was a central question the Senate investigation was looking at, wasn’t it? The issue of whether actual intelligence was gained from torture. In essence, “Was it worth it?”
From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers, raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture—that is the word used—if it was used to stop imminent attacks. This was the so-called “necessity defense,” which, as the CIA lawyers put it, could be invoked to protect from prosecution “US officials who tortured to obtain information that saved many lives.” This idea was there right from the inception of the program.
So the CIA is already using the word “torture” in the earliest documents the Senate committee looked at?
This is before the program even began, in the weeks after September 11, when CIA lawyers and other officials are talking about using “torture.” And they use the word.
And there aren’t any detainees at this point.
There really aren’t. This is near the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, and they didn’t have anyone, certainly not anyone considered “high value.”
Do we get any closer in the report to an original decision by the Bush administration or the CIA to use torture? (...)
The White House, including the offices of the president and the vice-president, and the National Security Council—these three vital areas of decision-making still have not been examined. And there’s a reason for that. The Republicans refused to sign on to the Senate investigation unless these areas were put beyond the committee’s ken. The original vote by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to pursue the CIA investigation in 2009 was 14-1, and they got the Republicans on board by agreeing not to look at the executive. As it was, most of the Republicans jumped ship and abandoned the report anyway. Now, in their own 167-page summary of their “minority views,” they attack the report for “faulty analysis, serious inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fact” and argue that the program was essential to gaining vital intelligence that saved many lives. But they present no convincing evidence. (...)
So the CIA is already talking about torture before they have a suspect in mind, and then when they do finally have a suspect, a few months later, and this is Abu Zubaydah, this radical course seems to be projected onto him.
Abu Zubaydah is the key case. He was captured in March 2002 in Pakistan. He was immediately interrogated by two experienced FBI interrogators using traditional “rapport-building” techniques and he did yield up a good deal of information. He had been badly wounded and had to be hospitalized, but he was compliant and cooperative in the view of the FBI interrogators. The information he gave during those initial weeks of talking to the FBI is the very information that is cited by the CIA to bolster their claim that they got information through torture from Abu Zubaydah. These are the key pieces of intelligence he gave up—that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka “Mukhtar”) was the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, and the identity of Jose Padilla, the so-called aspiring dirty bomber—to the FBI in the spring of 2002.
The FBI interrogators were fluent Arabic speakers and deeply knowledgeable about al-Qaeda. And they got Abu Zubaydah to talk through traditional interrogation methods?
These were the standard FBI protocols—excluding torture—that had long been used, but the FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was not only experienced with al-Qaeda, he was by many accounts the best interrogator in the government. He had interrogated al-Qaeda suspects in the USS Cole bombing.
Abu Zubaydah had been captured by the CIA. How was it that the FBI interrogated him first?
It’s interesting. He was the CIA’s prisoner. He was taken to a black site in Thailand run by the CIA. Initially, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center didn’t send anyone to interrogate him because, according to Soufan, they didn’t believe it was Abu Zubaydah. So there was this initial delay, which allowed the FBI to start on the job of the interrogation. And only when the CIA realized it was really Abu Zubaydah did they start to send their own people. And these are the military psychologists Mitchell and Jessen, who actually came personally, and actually conducted that interrogation and were eventually paid $81 million for their efforts. There was this period that they overlapped with the FBI, and Ali Soufan, who recognized them as rank amateurs, objected strenuously. The FBI eventually pulled out of the interrogation entirely. And this is another reason the program was such a disaster. Because of it you have the people in the government who know the most about interrogating al-Qaeda members not even taking part.
And when the decision to start using torture is made, the Bush administration is on some level directly involved in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?
Right after they got Abu Zubaydah, Bush talked about him publicly, at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut. And already in Newsweek, in April 2002, there was an article about whether Abu Zubaydah was cooperating or not. And though they are all blind quotes you can pretty much pick out which are from the CIA and which from the FBI. There’s this amazing bureaucratic tug of war going on in the press. Here’s this guy at this black site in Thailand, and meanwhile, both bureaucracies are fighting it out about whether he should be tortured in Newsweek. It still is astonishing. He’s there, in the hospital, and officials from the two agencies are being quoted, the FBI saying they’re getting a lot from the prisoner and the CIA saying they’re not getting anything.
But what is fascinating is what seems to have led the CIA to resort to this improvised, amateurish program—this physical abuse put together by two psychologists who had no idea what they were doing. It was the utterly mistaken conviction that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about attacks that would have killed thousands of people. So here we come back to the same theme of actionable intelligence, needing to use these techniques to find out about plots that would threaten thousands of people. So we are back to the raison d’être of the program itself.
It sounds like a tautology. They have to torture Abu Zubaydah so that he will reveal a “ticking time bomb,” and they need that revelation to justify the use of torture. And the use of torture is based on the fact that he hasn’t revealed any such plot.
All came from the conviction that Abu Zubaydah has knowledge of plots to kill thousands of people, and that conviction stems from an absolutely mistaken idea of who Abu Zubaydah is. The CIA officers are convinced that Abu Zubaydah is the third or fourth man in al-Qaeda, which he is not; they are convinced he is this very important guy that would have this information most vital information on current planning. But he’s not. He’s not even a member of al-Qaeda. In fact, he was something like a travel agent for al-Qaeda, which meant of course he had a lot of useful information. But because the CIA was convinced that he was at the pinnacle of the organization, they thought that even though he seemed to be cooperating with these FBI interrogators, he was actively withholding what they really needed: information about an impending “threat.”
Eventually, as I’ve described in The New York Review, he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and waterboarded eighty-three times. It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed at the direct orders of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.
It’s an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world for more suffering and more torture.
And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a “success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction, that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had nothing to do with him giving more information as he was waterboarded. The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety. And their anxiety was based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man actually was.
Hugh Eakin: Nearly six years ago, you published the secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the CIA’s torture of more than a dozen “high value” detainees. And now we have the Senate’s extensive investigation of the torture program itself. What are some of the most revealing findings of the Senate report?Mark Danner: There is a lot in the executive summary that we already knew but that is now told in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen before. The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques; the totality of their effect when taken together—walling, close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things—is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.
What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.
The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, life-saving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating.
This was a central question the Senate investigation was looking at, wasn’t it? The issue of whether actual intelligence was gained from torture. In essence, “Was it worth it?”
From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers, raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture—that is the word used—if it was used to stop imminent attacks. This was the so-called “necessity defense,” which, as the CIA lawyers put it, could be invoked to protect from prosecution “US officials who tortured to obtain information that saved many lives.” This idea was there right from the inception of the program.
So the CIA is already using the word “torture” in the earliest documents the Senate committee looked at?
This is before the program even began, in the weeks after September 11, when CIA lawyers and other officials are talking about using “torture.” And they use the word.
And there aren’t any detainees at this point.
There really aren’t. This is near the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, and they didn’t have anyone, certainly not anyone considered “high value.”
Do we get any closer in the report to an original decision by the Bush administration or the CIA to use torture? (...)
The White House, including the offices of the president and the vice-president, and the National Security Council—these three vital areas of decision-making still have not been examined. And there’s a reason for that. The Republicans refused to sign on to the Senate investigation unless these areas were put beyond the committee’s ken. The original vote by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to pursue the CIA investigation in 2009 was 14-1, and they got the Republicans on board by agreeing not to look at the executive. As it was, most of the Republicans jumped ship and abandoned the report anyway. Now, in their own 167-page summary of their “minority views,” they attack the report for “faulty analysis, serious inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fact” and argue that the program was essential to gaining vital intelligence that saved many lives. But they present no convincing evidence. (...)
So the CIA is already talking about torture before they have a suspect in mind, and then when they do finally have a suspect, a few months later, and this is Abu Zubaydah, this radical course seems to be projected onto him.
Abu Zubaydah is the key case. He was captured in March 2002 in Pakistan. He was immediately interrogated by two experienced FBI interrogators using traditional “rapport-building” techniques and he did yield up a good deal of information. He had been badly wounded and had to be hospitalized, but he was compliant and cooperative in the view of the FBI interrogators. The information he gave during those initial weeks of talking to the FBI is the very information that is cited by the CIA to bolster their claim that they got information through torture from Abu Zubaydah. These are the key pieces of intelligence he gave up—that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka “Mukhtar”) was the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, and the identity of Jose Padilla, the so-called aspiring dirty bomber—to the FBI in the spring of 2002.
The FBI interrogators were fluent Arabic speakers and deeply knowledgeable about al-Qaeda. And they got Abu Zubaydah to talk through traditional interrogation methods?
These were the standard FBI protocols—excluding torture—that had long been used, but the FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was not only experienced with al-Qaeda, he was by many accounts the best interrogator in the government. He had interrogated al-Qaeda suspects in the USS Cole bombing.
Abu Zubaydah had been captured by the CIA. How was it that the FBI interrogated him first?
It’s interesting. He was the CIA’s prisoner. He was taken to a black site in Thailand run by the CIA. Initially, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center didn’t send anyone to interrogate him because, according to Soufan, they didn’t believe it was Abu Zubaydah. So there was this initial delay, which allowed the FBI to start on the job of the interrogation. And only when the CIA realized it was really Abu Zubaydah did they start to send their own people. And these are the military psychologists Mitchell and Jessen, who actually came personally, and actually conducted that interrogation and were eventually paid $81 million for their efforts. There was this period that they overlapped with the FBI, and Ali Soufan, who recognized them as rank amateurs, objected strenuously. The FBI eventually pulled out of the interrogation entirely. And this is another reason the program was such a disaster. Because of it you have the people in the government who know the most about interrogating al-Qaeda members not even taking part.
And when the decision to start using torture is made, the Bush administration is on some level directly involved in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?
Right after they got Abu Zubaydah, Bush talked about him publicly, at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut. And already in Newsweek, in April 2002, there was an article about whether Abu Zubaydah was cooperating or not. And though they are all blind quotes you can pretty much pick out which are from the CIA and which from the FBI. There’s this amazing bureaucratic tug of war going on in the press. Here’s this guy at this black site in Thailand, and meanwhile, both bureaucracies are fighting it out about whether he should be tortured in Newsweek. It still is astonishing. He’s there, in the hospital, and officials from the two agencies are being quoted, the FBI saying they’re getting a lot from the prisoner and the CIA saying they’re not getting anything.
But what is fascinating is what seems to have led the CIA to resort to this improvised, amateurish program—this physical abuse put together by two psychologists who had no idea what they were doing. It was the utterly mistaken conviction that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about attacks that would have killed thousands of people. So here we come back to the same theme of actionable intelligence, needing to use these techniques to find out about plots that would threaten thousands of people. So we are back to the raison d’être of the program itself.
It sounds like a tautology. They have to torture Abu Zubaydah so that he will reveal a “ticking time bomb,” and they need that revelation to justify the use of torture. And the use of torture is based on the fact that he hasn’t revealed any such plot.
All came from the conviction that Abu Zubaydah has knowledge of plots to kill thousands of people, and that conviction stems from an absolutely mistaken idea of who Abu Zubaydah is. The CIA officers are convinced that Abu Zubaydah is the third or fourth man in al-Qaeda, which he is not; they are convinced he is this very important guy that would have this information most vital information on current planning. But he’s not. He’s not even a member of al-Qaeda. In fact, he was something like a travel agent for al-Qaeda, which meant of course he had a lot of useful information. But because the CIA was convinced that he was at the pinnacle of the organization, they thought that even though he seemed to be cooperating with these FBI interrogators, he was actively withholding what they really needed: information about an impending “threat.”
Eventually, as I’ve described in The New York Review, he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and waterboarded eighty-three times. It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed at the direct orders of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.
It’s an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world for more suffering and more torture.
And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a “success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction, that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had nothing to do with him giving more information as he was waterboarded. The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety. And their anxiety was based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man actually was.
by Mark Danner interviewed by Hugh Eakin, NY Reveiw of Books | Read more:
Image: DigitalGlobe/ScapeWare3d/Getty Images
