A Pilgrim’s Digression

If you don’t subscribe to the email version of the FactCheck.org Special Report, you ought to sign up today. Since the election ended, the Fact Check reports have become rarer and broader in scope, but they are still excellent sources of unbiased information.

Yesterday, Fact Check published its report on the issue of torture, A Tortured History, which offers an outline of the debate about treatment of enemy combatants from its origins immediately after 9/11 to the present.

Much of what the report contains is nothing new to those who have followed the issue. However, to see the issue presented in a bare bones, chronological way—just the facts, as the police officer would say—does help reorient us to what’s at stake. Having a fact sheet at hand also helps us make proper judgements. Seen in that way, “A Tortured History” is a keeper for us who will continue to write about this subject.

Here are some highlights:

Five days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney said the US would need to operate on the “dark side” and “use any means at our disposal” to combat terrorism. In an interview with NBC’s Tim Russert on September 16, 2001, Cheney said:

Cheney: We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side , if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

By February 2002, the President had decided that members of Al Qaeda would not be accorded Prisoner of War status, and thus would not be protected by the Geneva Convention prohibition against torture.

Meanwhile, some legal experts within the administration were arguing that the US interrogators might legally inflict pain short of “an extreme level,” defined in graphic terms. A memo sent from the Justice Department to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales on August 1, 2002 – which became known as the “Gonzales memo” because he requested it – laid out a permissive standard:

“Gonzales memo”: We conclude that for an act to constitute torture . . . it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying severe physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death .

The Gonzales memo went on to imply, if not explicitly argue, that even with this loose prohibitive definition to guide him, the President could still order the torture of a prisoner to gain intelligence information if he felt the nation was in immediate danger. When the Gonzales memo become public in 2004 prior to his assuming his duties as Attorney General, Gonzales dismissed his own report as “abstract legal theory.”

At this same time, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. We don’t need to rehash all that was done, but it is worth noting for those who saw the events that happened there as little more serious than fraternity hazing, that former Army Reserve Specialist and Abu Ghraib guard Charles Graner testified before a military tribunal that “I nearly beat an MI [Military Intelligence] detainee to death with MI there.” If true, the presence of MI can be construed as a contradiction of the official story that Abu Ghraib was an aberration perpetrated by bored, low-ranking soldiers.

I am skipping over the Fact Check account of abuse at Guantanamo because I think we know so little that goes on there, there is no way to make a judgement based solely on “news reports, interviews conducted by Amnesty International with former prisoners, and notes taken by lawyers representing prisoners.” Fact Check merely reports what prisoners and their lawyers have said, which unfortunately is not strong enough evidence, in my opinion.

Evidence is stronger about what goes on in the “secret prisons” (which aren’t so secret anymore) in Eastern Europe. Here is where I learned a few things. You might remember a couple weeks ago when Condi Rice visited Germany, she apologized for the mistaken kidnapping of a German man, Khaled al-Masri (see German Seeks Apology from CIA). She did not elaborate beyond the fact that his abduction and detention for five months was a mistake. Al-Masri has been a little more detailed about what he alleges the CIA did to him.

From his legal brief in his suit against the United States Government:

He was beaten severely from all sides with fists and what felt like a thick stick. His clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife, . . . his underwear was forcibly removed. He heard the sound of pictures being taken. He was thrown to the floor. His hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus.

. . . One of the men placed him in a diaper . . . [He] was marched to a waiting plane, with the shackles cutting into his ankles. Once inside, he was thrown to the floor face down and his legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the plane. He felt an injection in his shoulder, and became lightheaded. He felt a second injection that rendered him unconscious.

He spent the next five months in an Afghan prison, isolated, starving, and without contact with the outside world; he was finally, without explanation, flown to Albania and released along a rural road in May of 2004.

I suppose Alberto Gonzales could argue, in the CIA’s defense, that since Mr. Al Masri’s pain did not amount to “severe physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” therefore he was not tortured. Maybe Gonzales could argue that some people even pay others to tie them up, step on their back with a boot, and place a firm object up their anus. I suspect that might be the defense Rush Limbaugh offers, if he ever discusses this incident. I can hear him now, “Come on, Folks, you people gotta understand, some men pay women to do stuff like this to ‘em. How do we know he didn’t enjoy it?”

You can read the remainder of the Fact Check article for yourself. By the time you get to the end of it, you start to see what Dick Cheney meant when he stated that “we also have to work…sort of the dark side.”