THE TORTURE PAPERS - The Road to Abu Ghraib

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Sun, 13 Feb 2005 06:46:11 -0500

THE TORTURE PAPERS - The Road to Abu Ghraib

 

 

 

 

 

" They (repugnant photos) have become a potent propaganda tool for

terrorists, and at the same time, they remain so repellant and

perverse that they have served to bolster the " few bad apples "

argument - the suggestion not only that the photographed abuses were

perpetrated by " a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift, " in one

investigator's words, but also that the larger problem was confined,

as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on

their own... " The Torture Papers, " the new compendium of government

memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its

aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the

book provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected

bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in

decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration "

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/books/08kaku.html?fta=y

 

February 8, 2005

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE TORTURE PAPERS'

Following a Paper Trail to the Roots of Torture

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

 

THE TORTURE PAPERS

The Road to Abu Ghraib

 

Edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel. Introduction by

Anthony Lewis.

Illustrated. 1249 pages. Cambridge University Press. $50.

 

As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison - the

pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the

hooded man with outstretched arms - hit the airwaves and newspaper

stands, they became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong

with the war and postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the

Muslim world, the very embodiment of their worst fears about American

hegemony.

 

They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the

same time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served

to bolster the " few bad apples " argument - the suggestion not only

that the photographed abuses were perpetrated by " a kind of 'Animal

House' on the night shift, " in one investigator's words, but also that

the larger problem was confined, as the Bush administration has

asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own.

 

" The Torture Papers, " the new compendium of government memos and

reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath,

definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book

provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected

bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in

decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration -

decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery

slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide

by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.

 

Many of the documents here have been published before (most notably in

Mark Danner's incisive 2004 volume " Torture and Truth " ), but " The

Torture Papers " contains some material not collected in earlier books.

More important, the minutely detailed chronological narrative embodied

in this volume, which has appeared piecemeal in other publications,

possesses an awful and powerful cumulative weight. As one of its

editors. Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law

and Security at the New York University School of Law, observes, it

leaves the reader with " a clear sense of the systematic decision to

alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of

accepted and legal norms. "

 

The book is necessary, if grueling, reading for anyone interested in

understanding the back story to those terrible photos from Saddam

Hussein's former prison, and abuses at other American detention

facilities.

 

As this book makes clear, one of the premises that would inform many

of the administration's decisions was an amped-up view of executive

power - the notion, as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo

put it shortly after 9/11 - that " the power of the president is at its

zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military

operations of the armed forces, " and that he has the authority " to

take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to

terrorist threats from new quarters " whether or not such entities can

be " demonstrably linked to the September 11 incidents. " Indeed,

Justice Department memos suggested that in a war like the present one,

presidential power can override both congressional laws and " customary

international law " : in short, that the president can choose to suspend

America's obligation to comply with the Geneva Conventions if he

wishes, authorize torture or detain prisoners without a hearing.

 

On Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush signed an order that would have all

manner of unreckoned consequences: " I accept the legal conclusion of

the Department of Justice and determine that none of the provisions of

Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere

throughout the world. " Instead, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were to be

designated " unlawful combatants, " who fell under rules that the

administration itself would determine. That included all Qaeda

suspects and Taliban detainees, who President Bush said were not

entitled to prisoner of war status, but should instead be treated

" humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military

necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva. " In

September 2002, a secret C.I.A. study raised questions about the

significance of the Guantánamo detainees, reportedly suggesting that

many of them might be low-level recruits or even innocents swept up in

the fog of war.

 

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld would later approve the use of

special interrogation techniques for key terrorist suspects.

Eventually techniques designed to be used on hard-core al Qaeda

suspects at Guantánamo migrated to Iraq, where military intelligence

officers told the Red Cross an estimated 70 percent to 90 percent of

the detainees had been arrested by mistake.

 

A second seminal premise embraced by the administration was that the

global war on terrorism represents " a new paradigm, " and that this new

sort of war required new sorts of tools. In an interview on Sept. 16,

2001, Vice President Dick Cheney reworked the means-and-ends equation,

asserting that the United States was going to have to work " sort of

the dark side " and that " it's going to be vital for us to use any

means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. " Alberto

R. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, was more specific;

he argued that the " new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict

limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners. "

 

There were some dissenting voices. In January 2002, Secretary of State

Colin L. Powell argued that withholding prisoner of war status across

the board (instead of case by case) to al Qaeda and Taliban suspects

would " reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice, " " undermine

the protections of the law of war for our troops, " have " a high cost

in terms of negative international reaction " and " undermine public

support among critical allies. " His warnings were not heeded.

 

Instead, more and more attention was focused on articulating a narrow

definition of torture and proposing strategies to avoid prosecution of

American interrogators. Justice Department and Defense Department

memos on this subject make for chilling reading, and they transport

the reader from the sunlit world of " democracy " and " freedom " and

" human rights " frequently invoked by the president to a dark place

located somewhere in the nether latitudes between Orwell's " Animal

Farm, " the " Godfather " movies and one of Joseph Heller's or Kurt

Vonnegut's black comedies.

 

Here, lawyerly language is used to draw excruciatingly fine

distinctions between " torture " and " cruel, inhuman, or degrading

treatment. " Bureaucratic charts are drawn up, detailing 35 types of

interrogation techniques, their " utility " and their ranking vis-à-vis

various torture conventions and American domestic law. And exacting

efforts are made to define torture in the very narrowest of terms: in

an August 2002 memo, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee wrote

that a victim must experience the sort of pain and suffering

" associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ

failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body

function will likely result. "

 

There are discussions about " the lowest boundary of what constitutes

torture, " a " risk benefit analysis " of interrogation techniques and

references to " exceptional techniques " - phrases reminiscent of the

sort of language used during the Vietnam War, like " eliminating

assets, " " interdictional nonsuccumbers " and " effective delivery of

ordnance. "

 

In addition to such semantic manipulation and parsing of the law,

government lawyers struggled to come up with possible defense

strategies. In a 2002 memo, Mr. Bybee wrote: " Certain justification

defenses might be available that would potentially eliminate criminal

liability. Standard criminal law defenses of necessity and

self-defense could justify interrogation methods needed to elicit

information to prevent a direct and imminent threat to the United

States and its citizens. "

 

A 2003 Pentagon working group report on detainee interrogations

suggested that " lawfulness will depend in significant part on

procedural protections that demonstrate a legitimate purpose and that

there was no intent to inflict significant mental or physical pain. "

 

Not surprisingly, the official investigations into the Abu Ghraib

scandal provide a decidedly less panoramic view of the overall

situation than this book does as a whole. As Mr. Danner has pointed

out, the investigations tended to focus on particular aspects of the

scandal - the Taguba Report on the military police, the Fay-Jones

Report on military intelligence, for instance - and they also exhibit

a reluctance to connect all the dots and explicate the implications of

their findings.

 

For instance, the Schlesinger Report on Pentagon detention operations

concluded that " abuses of varying severity " were " widespread. " " There

is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels, "

the report went on, noting that a lack of resources and failures in

postwar planning helped create serious shortages in " manning levels "

and a resulting atmosphere of confusion at Abu Ghraib. Direct

responsibility, however, is focused on men and women on the ground:

some incidents of abuse are attributed to " individual criminal

misconduct; " others to " misinterpretations of law or policy or

confusion about what interrogation techniques were permitted. "

 

Only vague aspersions are cast on the Pentagon's civilian leadership.

The report chirpily concludes that " while any abuse is too much, we

see signs that the Department of Defense is now on the path to dealing

with the personal and professional failures and remedying the

underlying causes of these abuses. "

 

What happened to higher-up architects and consultants on

administration policy? Mr. Rumsfeld revealed last week that he twice

offered to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal and was twice turned

down by President Bush. Mr. Bybee, who defined torture as pain

equivalent to " organ failure, " was nominated by Mr. Bush to the Ninth

Circuit Court of Appeals and took his seat there in 2003. Michael

Chertoff, who in his capacity as head of the Justice Department's

criminal division advised the C.I.A. on the legality of coercive

interrogation methods, was selected by President Bush to be the new

secretary of homeland security. William J. Haynes II, the Department

of Defense's chief legal officer, who helped oversee Pentagon studies

on the interrogation of detainees, was twice nominated by President

Bush to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Mr. Gonzales, who

used the words " obsolete " and " quaint " in reference to the Geneva

Conventions, was confirmed last week as attorney general, the nation's

top legal post.

 

 

 

 

" And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their

names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible,

having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute

to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened! " --

From the fourth leaflet of the White Rose Resistance in Germany, 1942.

Five students and a professor who wrote and distributed the leaflets

were executed in 1943.