HOME / jurisprudence: The law, lawyers, and the court.

The Birth of a Torture ProgramJane Mayer reveals how government torture programs come to be.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 7:24 PM ET

Alberto GonzalesThere are two ways to think about the Bush administration's willingness to torture prisoners in the wake of 9/11. One is the story we were sold after we learned about Abu Ghraib: A few "bad apples" at the lowest levels of the military went a little crazy and tortured some prisoners on their own initiative, for which (some) were duly punished. The second is confirmed in a new and devastating piece of investigating by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer: A systematic and rigorous program of highly abusive interrogation was approved at the highest levels of government at so-called "black sites" around the world. This second version of the national torture story reveals not so much the bad apples as a profoundly diseased tree.

RSS

Mayer's piece is important enough to warrant reading in its entirety. President Bush's recent executive order purported to lay out the boundaries of legal detention and interrogation but in fact left enormous gaps as to what is defined as permissible, making questions about who can do what to extract information from whom less than academic. What is devastating about Mayer's report is the sense that everyone along the way was willing to sign off on this program of state-sanctioned abuse, without evidence of its efficacy, either because the White House was bearing down and demanding more information, or because nobody could come up with a better torture system on short notice.

Mayer describes a Red Cross report on the black sites that has been kept quiet (the Red Cross is afraid of forfeiting access to other prisoners). The report evidently characterized the "agency's detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture" and found that "American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes." The most striking aspect of Mayer's report is the extent to which the interrogators who invented the torture program at these black sites did so almost wholly on the fly: While the abuse itself may have been rigorous and systematic, apparently no rigorous or systematic thought was given to the larger program, which seems to have been cobbled together from the greatest hits albums of torture regimes past and present. According to Mayer, since the CIA had almost no trained interrogators, they simply mined Vietnam-era torture programs; practices borrowed from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program that had been created during the Korean War. That the SERE was designed to teach American captives to resist torture, not as a system of interrogation in itself, was apparently immaterial.

Another contrast between the abuse at the black sites and at Abu Ghraib? The cold, precise way in which this rigid system was administered. In one striking passage, Mayer quotes an outside expert familiar with the interrogation protocol saying that "at every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process." A system ostensibly designed to elicit information seems to have become a program designed merely to break detainees. Mayer details cavity searches, caging, nakedness, prolonged sensory deprivation, suspension from one's arms, waterboarding, and sleep deprivation as part of the larger program. One of the most haunting images is of desperate prisoners driven to attempt suicide and repeatedly being stitched up by doctors in order to be abused some more.

The governing CIA objective here, "learned helplessness," required that prisoners be humiliated and disoriented and broken. As Mayer points out, this was goal of the KGB model. But the purpose of the KGB was to obtain false confessions, she adds, not good intelligence. Where was the evidence that systematically breaking down and degrading prisoners leads to accurate information?

The most damning part of this damning article comes at its conclusion, when Mayer explains that, following years of brutal interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, it remains entirely unclear which parts of his voluminous confessions are true and which were fabricated—either to end his abuse or to inflate his ego. According to Mayer, "cables carrying Mohammed's interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that "the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead." In Mayer's hands, the story of our torture program becomes the story of interrogators driven to do anything to elicit information—be it truthful or not—and the doctors, lawyers, and scientists who signed off without question on the banal day-to-day abuses that were put into practice to achieve that end.

In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, President Bush expressed horror at what he characterized as the "abhorrent" practices there; promising the world that, "those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice." The question Bush, Cheney, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, and others must now be pressed to answer is how the "abhorrent" practices at Abu Ghraib differed from those that allegedly happened at the black sites and whether the only difference between abusive and permissible interrogation is the existence of a formal government program.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Photograph of Alberto Gonzales by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

At the most extreme end of war the United States dropped not one, but two atomic bombs on Japan. Why? The most widely accepted answer is that it saved thousands, possibly tens of thousands of American war casualties that surely would have been a reality in an invasion of Japan.

What does this have to do with torture you ask? It has nothing to do with torture and everything to do with the brutality of war. Nobody in their right mind desires to wage war against other human beings. But many evil minded dictators and despots throughout history have stepped outside, far outside, of their "right mind" to initiate war against those they felt like conquering in the name of their sick and twisted ideology.

It is completely understandable that some people, in their right mind, not wanting to wage war, can't understand the brutality of war. On the other hand, some people can understand using brutal measures, (torture in this case) to gain critical information from people whose implied and expressed intent is to kill otherwise peaceful people. By gaining such information, it may mean reducing or ending the brutal loss of life that evil minds perpetrate.

In the end, torture does not happen in a vacuum. When you ask the average "right minded" and peaceful person what they think about torture most are rightly repulsed by the thought. Unfortunately, as Americans and peaceful world citizens we cannot afford the luxury of allowing evil minded people with completely irrational intents to fly airplanes into our buildings while we invite them to the conference table and rationally ask them to stop acting that way. Torture doesn't seem rational by any standard until it is put in the context of the brutality initiated by evil minded people that cannot be reasoned with at any level.

If someone wants to destroy my family, my friends and my peaceful way of life in order to establish their sick and twisted ideology, I will measure my response carefully, but it will be swift and brutal. That is the reality of war and dealing with wickedness in evil minded people whether I like or not. I'm glad we have warriors who are willing to make this psychological sacrifice so that I can rest in my recliner and enjoy the fruits of my labor in the greatest country in the history of the world, America!

--gturner07

(To reply, click here.)

The really perplexing thing about the torture/blackops stuff from the Cheney administration is how ineffective it is, and more amazingly, how little focus these criminals had on actually producing verifiable high quality intelligence.

No, the focus was on all these violations of human values specifically for the ability to say that they had the authority to do it. It was the authority they craved, the very proof that if they wanted to, they could abduct someone, spirit them across the world, break them, and parade them through the streets as criminals. Obviously, the long years of revelation and disavowal in the late 70's and 80's really stung these guys. They have been waiting for decades to say "See? We can do these things!"

What is not surprising is how much these crimes emulate all the regimes and cultures that American long ago decided it didn't want to be like - the USSR, South American dictatorships, the Nazis, etc. Obviously, Cheney has always wanted to say "Well, we need these methods to fight back against these bad guys."

So this "violation for violation's sake" is really about authoritarianism - an assertion of the unaccountable exercise of exercise of government power over the individual, for the sole purpose of reinforcing that strong authority. How satisfying it must be for Cheney to see himself as vindicated after all these years.

And how satisfying it will be to see him die in prison.

--Certainly

(To reply, click here.)

A long time ago, I was a psychology major. I first came across learned helplessness while we were studying operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner).

You put rats on a metal grid, with each half of the grid connected to a separate electrical power supply. You provide a stimulus (e.g. a buzzer or light), and a couple of seconds later you electrify half the grid. The rats quickly learn to run to the safe side of the grid to avoid the shock (this type of avoidance is technically called negative reinforcement).

Take another group of rats, but instead of just half, electrify the whole grid after the stimulus. The stimulus indicates a shock is coming, but the rats quickly learn that there is no escape, and simply sit there helplessly taking the painful shocks. Even if you later change the rules and electrify only half the grid, rats which have "learned helplessness" just sit there and take the shocks.

I clearly remember how just reading about this being done to rats disturbed me deeply. Leaving aside the unimaginable moral depravity of doing this to human beings, it is difficult to see how information obtained using this technique would represent anything like good intelligence.

--Widespread

(To reply, click here.)

(8/8)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES