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Tortured Logic
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by Susan Jones | August 10, 2007 at 06:35 pm
629 views | 10 Recommendations | 20 comments
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An eye opener.
How the CIA stumbled into torture after 9-11.
Published: August 10, 2007
TheTyee.ca
Anyone with the slightest interest in how torture became a
systematized, regulated and endemic part of the CIA's response to 9-11
needs to read Jane Mayer's devastating report in this week's New Yorker.
At over 8,000 words, it's no short read. But trust me, you won't
regret it. So if it's too long to get through on the screen, print it
out. Or if you're a high roller, you can even buy the actual magazine.
What emerges from Mayer's report is a portrait of an agency in a
panicked scramble after the attacks six years ago. With little
expertise in interrogation and less in detention, the CIA was
unprepared for the new responsibilities thrown at it in the rush to
take down terrorists.
Lacking in-house specialists ... the agency hired a
group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques
that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence
community described as "a 'Clockwork Orange' kind of approach." The
experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were
in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they
ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE -- an
acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape -- was created at
the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture,
including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation,
isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces,
bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual
humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against
torture regimes, but the C.I.A.'s new team used its expertise to help
interrogators inflict abuse. "They were very arrogant, and
pro-torture," a European official knowledgeable about the program said.
"They sought to render the detainees vulnerable -- to break down all of
their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand
these rupturing experiences."
The explicit purpose of the program was to utterly shatter the
psyches of those being interrogated, to reduce them to what one
architect of the program calls "learned helplessness." And unlike the
abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which Bush officials claim were
unauthorized, the CIA methods were "directly and repeatedly approved by
[the] president."
The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers,
and supervised by the agency's director and his subordinates at the
Counterterrorism Center. ...according to a former agency official,
"Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for
approval to the highest possible level -- meaning the director of the
C.I.A. Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain
treatment was added -- was signed off by the C.I.A. director."
Once you've finished Mayer's story, go buy Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers.
Weschler, himself a New Yorker writer for 20 years, chronicled the
torturous legacies of the military governments in Uruguay and Brazil in
the 1970s and '80s in his book, originally published in 1990.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (20)
at 06:00 on August 11th, 2007
yeah i'm really worried about how we treat terrorists they have families too, they aren't that bad, if a terrorist has information that might save my families life i think the U.S. should send Dr. Phil I'm sure he can get the info we need.
at 06:12 on August 11th, 2007
Nice piece. We may hate the terrorists, but we loose any claim to the moral highground when we use these tactics, and I suspect the founding fathers would find it reprehensible, not worthy of the freedoms and liberties they fought for. -> Good stuff.
at 06:17 on August 11th, 2007
the moral highground? yes I think the Americans who had to jump out of the World Trade Center 110th floor were worried about the "moral "highground" too.
at 06:25 on August 11th, 2007
No one is arguing that 9/11 wasn't tragic. No one is arguing that we shouldn't try to bring the terrorists who plotted it to justice. But before we return wholesale to the dark ages of secret arrests, detainment without charge or trial, and torture...all things we used to complain about in countries like the Soviet Union, perhaps we should ask ourselves if this is the type of society we want.
Put me down in favour of the rule of law, where the power of the state his held in check by a constitution.
at 06:40 on August 11th, 2007
terrorists are not protected under the constitution we are not the soviet union we need to treat savages as savages or more of us will be jumping out of windows and being beheaded. the terrorists count on your attitude to defeat our will and lose our freedoms. If a the terrorists hit us harder than 9/11 we will see how many people would be worried about their "rule of law".
at 06:47 on August 11th, 2007
When the rule of law goes... you will have neither security nor liberty.
No you're not the Soviet Union. They never had liberty and freedom to squander away.
at 06:55 on August 11th, 2007
if the terrorsists destroy a city we won't have time to squander jack. has anyone thought what would happen to our freedoms if we are hit with a dirty bomb and we have to evacuate a whole city? Do you think I would worry more about waterboarding a terrorist that might thwart the plan or about his human rights and hope for the best. I'm glad your not making that decision.
at 07:00 on August 11th, 2007
" happen to our freedoms" Pleasse explain to me what these Freedoms are ??? I regard America as having a highly structured Society, no scratch Society Reagan sold that, Economy and I dont see any freedom in the USA unless you mean that US citizens are free to be ruled by the Ruling Class ??/
at 07:03 on August 11th, 2007
Then you are really no better than any other state employing the same methods... and that's a sad thing.
at 07:04 on August 11th, 2007
pacific when you find a better place let me know so i can go to your utopia.
at 22:37 on August 11th, 2007
America has almost become a third world country. The poverty lack of health care and oppressive minimum wage makes many many countries far better to live in. The school system is tantamount to child abuse, so I would say most developed countries would be like utopia compared to the USA.
I find it very sad that you actually believe your own BS. maybe you should do some travelling.
at 07:05 on August 11th, 2007
Firstly The CIA no longer Torture, they handed that over to the FBI, the new torure prisons are in the Horn of Africa, where they imprison Children as young as five without charge and ofcourse without hope of release, any poor souls who escape this Drag Net are driven into Darfur, where the US backed Janja Weed finish them off. These Toddlers of terror are probably the only targets the FBI feel tough enough to torture, as going after people like Bin Laden would be to frietening for there Patriotic hearts.
Whatch out for those terrorist toddlers they want to drive Americans into the Sea !!!
at 07:08 on August 11th, 2007
sometimes the real world is sad.
at 07:13 on August 11th, 2007
pacific i think insulting people you do not know and who risk their lives dealing with savages who teach hatred and arm and hide behind children is not fair.
at 07:21 on August 11th, 2007
rick we may disagree but I respect your view.
at 07:31 on August 11th, 2007
And i respect your desire to protect your country and family. I just find the methods disturbing.
at 07:47 on August 11th, 2007
I admit I will do anything to protect them even if they are disturbing to me also.
at 23:32 on August 11th, 2007
So throwing out the Geneva Convention is a good thing, I am sure this will help you protect them. I can also assume from this statement you would support the bombing of Miami, where most of the worlds terrorists reside. How far will you go, Throwing jews into gas chambers ? Launching a Nuclear Strike against some semi-stone age country ?? We all know where this kind of talk leads.
"Before you embark on a Journey of revenge, dig two graves" Confucious.
at 08:12 on August 11th, 2007
The problem with torture, as I've mentioned before, is that the results are useless. On an episode of 24, Jack Bauer can bust out the torture kit and get enough info to maek it to the next episode, but in real life things work differently: the torturer's motivation is to get answers. The person being tortured has a different motivation: to stop getting tortured! To achieve this end, one will tell the torturer whatever one thinks the torturer wants to hear in order to stop the torture. Note that the truth in not involved in this equation, only the perception of truth.
That's why the "plotters" are getting released from custody (they were rounded up before there was even any real evidence of a plot) Now we queue to dump our liquids (into an uncovered plastic bin, which is silly; another story for another day)- the iPod/liquid bomb threat has been derided as bogus, and it's info that was gathered via torture, as well as the proximity of the plot: days away? Most of the suspects didn't have passports- good luck getting a UK passport within two months, never mind a few days; point is that the info obtained under torture was completely unreliable.
Oh, yeah, and the human-rights thing: just calling someone a terrorist does not make it so: arrest without evidence is always justified by "national security"; whenever China does it, the West freaks out.
at 08:34 on August 11th, 2007
I have no idea what will or what will not work it might work sometimes it might not. We have to rely on the experts or those in the field. We as citizens will not be there to oversee the events. What do we do if waterboarding has worked half the time? I don't see too many Islamist terror attacks in China. I don't think the terrorists want to pick a fight with them.