Senate report being used to whitewash Obama’s rehabilitation of torture
The grizzly details of CIA
torture have, finally, been at least partly aired through the release this
Tuesday of the executive summary to a landmark Senate intelligence committee report.
The extent of the torture has been covered extensively across the media, and is
horrifying - unless you’re a FOX News pundit. But much of the media coverage of
this issue is missing the crucial bigger picture: the deliberate rehabilitation
of torture under the Obama administration, and its systematic use to
manufacture false intelligence to justify endless war.
Torture victims, who had been detained by
the US national security apparatus entirely outside any sort of recognizable
functioning system of due process, endured a litany of extreme abuses normally
associated with foreign dictatorships: 180 hour sleep deprivation, forced
‘rectal feeding’, rectal ‘examinations’ using ‘excessive force’, standing for
dozens of hours on broken limbs, water-boarding, being submerged in iced baths,
and on and on and on.
Yet for the most part, it has been assumed
that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation program’, originated under the Bush administration
after 9/11, was a major “aberration” from normal CIA practice – as one US
former military prosecutor put it in The
Guardian.
On BBC Newsnight, yesterday, presenter
Emily Maitlis asked former National Security Adviser under Carter, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, about the problem of “rogue elements in the CIA,” and whether this
was inevitable due to the need for secrecy in intelligence.
High-level
sanction
Media coverage of the Senate report has
largely whitewashed the extent to which torture has always been an integral and
systematic intelligence practice since the Second World War, continuing even
today under the careful recalibration of Obama and his senior military
intelligence officials. The key function of torture, largely overlooked by the
pundits, is its role in manufacturing nebulous threats that legitimize the
existence and expansion of the national security apparatus.
The CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was formally
approved
at the highest levels of the civilian administration. We have known for years
that torture was officially sanctioned by at least President Bush, Vice
President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA directors
George Tenet and Michael Hayden, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Yet the focus on the Bush administration
serves a useful purpose. While the UN has called for prosecutions of
Bush officials, Obama himself is excused on the pretext that he banned domestic
torture in 2009, and reiterated the ban
abroad this November.
Even Dan Froomklin of The Intercept
congratulated the November move as a “win” for the “good guys.” Indeed, with
the release of the Senate report, Obama’s declaration that he has ended “the
CIA’s detention and interrogation program” has been largely uncritically
reported by both mainstream and progressive media, reinforcing this narrative.
Rehabilitating
the torture regime
Yet Obama did not ban torture in 2009, and
has not rescinded it now. He instead rehabilitated
torture with a carefully crafted Executive Order that has received little
scrutiny. He demanded, for instance, that interrogation techniques be made to
fit the US Army Field Manual, which complies with the Geneva Convention and has
prohibited torture since 1956.
But in 2006, revisions were made to the
Army Field Manual, in particular through ‘Appendix M’, which contained
interrogation techniques that went far beyond the original Geneva-inspired
restrictions of the original version of the manual. This includes 19 methods of
interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition. As pointed out by US
psychologist Jeff Kaye who has worked extensively with torture victims, a new
UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) review
of the manual shows that a wide-range of torture techniques continue to be
deployed by the US government, including isolation, sensory deprivation, stress
positions, chemically-induced psychosis, adjustments of environmental and
dietary rules, among others.
Indeed, the revelations contained in the
Senate report are a mere fraction of the totality of torture techniques
deployed by the CIA and other agencies. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born
and raised in Germany who was detained in Guantanomo for five years, has for
instance charged
that he had been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, repeated
beatings, water-dunking, electric shock treatment, and suspension by his arms,
by US forces.
On January 22nd, 2009, retired
Admiral Dennis Blair, then Obama’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate
intelligence committee that the Army Field Manual would be amended to allow
new
forms of harsh interrogation, but that these changes would remain
classified:
“We have large amounts of unclassified doctrine for our troops to use, but we don’t
put anything in there that our enemies
can use against us. And we’ll figure it out for this manual… there will be some
sort of document that’s widely available
in an unclassified form, but the
specific techniques that can provide training value to adversaries, we will handle much more
carefully.”
Obama’s supposed banning of the CIA’s
secret rendition programs was also a misnomer. While White House officials
insisted that from now on, detainees would not be rendered to “any country that
engages in torture,” rendered detainees were already being sent to countries in
the EU that purportedly do not sanction torture – where they were then tortured
by the CIA.
Obama did not really ban the CIA’s use of
secret prisons either, permitting
indefinite detention of people without due process “on a short-term
transitory basis.
Half
a century of torture as a system
What we are seeing now is not the Obama
administration putting an end to torture, but rather putting an end to the open
acknowledgement of the use of torture as a routine intelligence practice.
But the ways of old illustrate that we
should not be shocked by the latest revelations. Declassified CIA training manuals
from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, prove that the CIA has consistently
practiced torture long before the Bush administration attempted to legitimize
the practice publicly.
In his seminal study of the subject, A Question of Torture, US historian Prof
Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison proves using official
documents and interviews with intelligence sources that the use of torture has
been a systematic practice of US and British intelligence agencies, sanctioned
at the highest levels, over “the past half century.” Since the Second World
War, he writes, a “distinctive US covert-warfare doctrine… in which
psychological torture has emerged as a central if clandestine facet of American
foreign policy.”
The psychological paradigm deployed the CIA
fused two methods in particular, “sensory disorientation” and so-called
“self-inflicted pain.” These methods were based on intensive “behavioural
research that made psychological torture NATO’s secret weapon against communism
and cognitive science the handmaiden of state security.”
“From 1950 to 1962,” found McCoy, “the CIA
became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with
psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached
a cost of a billion dollars annually.”
The pinnacle of this effort was the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation
handbook finalized in 1963, which determined the agency’s interrogation methods
around the world. In the ensuing decade, the agency trained over a million
police officers across 47 countries in torture. A later incarnation of the CIA
torture training doctrine emerged under Freedom of Information in the form of
the 1983 Human Resources
Training Exploitation Manual.
Power…
and propaganda
One of the critical findings of the Senate
report is that torture simply doesn’t work, and consistently fails to produce
meaningful intelligence. So why insist on its use? For McCoy, the addiction to
torture itself is a symptom of a deep-seated psychological disorder, rather
than a rational imperative: “In sum, the powerful often turn to torture in
times of crisis, not because it works but because it salves their fears and
insecurities with the psychic balm of empowerment.”
He is right, but in the post-9/11 era, there
is more to the national security apparatus’ chronic torture addiction than
this.
It is not a mere accident that torture
generates vacuous intelligence, but nevertheless continues to be used and
justified for intelligence purposes. For instance, the CIA claimed that its
torture of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) led to the discovery
and thwarting of a plot to hijack civilian planes at Heathrow and crash them
into the airport and buildings in Canary Wharf. The entire plot, however, was
an invention
provoked by torture that included waterboarding, “facial and abdominal slaps,
the facial grab, stress positions, standing sleep deprivation” and “rectal
rehydration.”
As one former senior CIA official who had read
all KSM’s interrogation reports told Vanity Fair,
“90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” Another ex-Pentagon analyst said
that torturing KSM had produced “no actionable intelligence.”
Torture also played a key role in the
much-hyped London ricin
plot. Algerian security services alerted British intelligence in January
2003 to the so-called plot after interrogating and torturing a ‘terrorist
suspect’, former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no
plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had
the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he
murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Former
British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has also blown the whistle on
how the CIA would render ‘terror suspects’ to the country to be tortured by
Uzbek secret police, including being boiled alive. The confessions generated
would be sent to the CIA and MI6 to be fed into ‘intelligence’ reports. Murray
described the reports as “bollocks,” replete with false information not worth
the “bloodstained paper” they are written on.
Many are unaware that the 9/11 Commission
report is exactly such a document. Nearly a third of the report’s footnotes reference
information obtained from detainees subject to ‘enhanced’ interrogation by the
CIA. In 2004, the commission demanded that the CIA conduct “new rounds of
interrogations” to get answers to its questions. As investigative reporter
Philip Shennon pointed out in Newsweek,
this has “troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final
report” and “its account of the 9/11 plot and al-Qaeda’s history.” Which is why
lawyers for the chief 9/11 mastermind suspects now say after the release of the
Senate report that the case for prosecution may well unravel.
Not surprising if a third of the report is merely ‘bollocks.’
That torture generates false information
has long been known to the intelligence community. Much of the CIA’s techniques
are derived from reverse engineering Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape
(SERE) training, where US troops are briefly exposed in controlled settings to
abusive interrogation techniques used by enemy forces, so that they can better
resist treatment they might face if they are captured. SERE training, however,
adopted tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the
Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda
purposes, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report
in 2009.
Torture:
core mechanism to legitimize threat projection
By deploying the same techniques against
‘terror suspects,’ the intelligence community was not seeking to identify real
threats: it was seeking to manufacture threats for the purpose of justifying
war. As David
Rose found after interviewing “numerous counterterrorist officials from
agencies on both sides of the Atlantic,” their unanimous verdict was that
“coercive methods” had squandered massive resources to manufacture “false
leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts.” Far from exposing any
deadly plots, torture led only to “more torture” of supposed accomplices of
‘terror suspects’ “while also providing some misleading ‘information’ that
boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.” But the Iraq War was
not about responding to terrorism. According to declassified British Foreign
Office files, it was about securing
control over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, and opening them up to
global markets to avert a portended energy crisis.
In other words, torture plays a pivotal role
in the Pentagon’s posture of permanent global war: generating spurious overblown
‘intelligence’ that can be fed-in to official security narratives of imminent
terrorist threats everywhere, in turn requiring evermore empowerment of the
security agencies, and legitimizing military expansionism in strategic regions.
The Obama administration is now exploiting
the new Senate report to convince the world that the intelligence community’s
systematic embroilment in torture was merely a Bush-era aberration that is now
safely in the past.
Do not be fooled. Obama has rehabilitated
and recalibrated the covert torture apparatus, and is attempting to leverage
the torture report’s damning findings to claim moral high ground his
administration doesn’t have. The torture regime is alive and well – but it has
been put back in the box of classified secrecy to continue without public
scrutiny.
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative
journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. Formerly of
The Guardian, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and
is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative
Journalism for his Guardian work. He is
the author of A User’s Guide to
the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi
thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His
work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism
officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest. If
you found this article useful, you can support Nafeez’s journalism via his
upcoming project, Insurge.