June 12, 2005
Interrogating Ourselves
By JOSEPH LELYVELD
I. The Silence After Abu Ghraib
In order to get to the nub of the question of what we as citizens really expect and require of American interrogators facing supposed terrorists -- how far we're prepared to allow those asking the questions to venture into the dark realm of brutalization and coercion -- let's for argument's sake put aside the most horrific, shameful cases, those of detainees who died under interrogation: that of Manadel al-Jamadi, for instance, whose body was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice when it was carried out of an Abu Ghraib prison shower room a year and a half ago, where he'd been handcuffed to a wall; or Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who, elsewhere in Iraq, appears to have been thrust headfirst into a sleeping bag, manhandled there and then, finally, suffocated. By anyone's definition of torture -- even that of the Bush administration, which originally propounded (and later withdrew) a strikingly narrow definition holding that torture occurs only when the pain is ''of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure'' -- these cases answer the question of whether torture has been committed by our side in what's called the global war on terror. No one steps forward to condone what's plainly illegal under United States and international law. And although we've seen no indication that blame will attach to any official or command officer at any level for these killings, there are small signs that conclusions have been drawn somewhere between the Pentagon and White House, signs of an overdue housecleaning, or maybe just a tidying up. By the coldest cost-benefit calculation, a dead detainee is a disaster: he cannot be a source of ''actionable intelligence,'' only fury. So there's now a new policy, ''Procedures for Investigations Into the Death of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the U.S.,'' that was duly conveyed last month to the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations body, in a subsection of a longer report. The subsection's heading even carried a whiff of contrition. It was ''Lessons Learned and Policy Reforms.'' Also, the Pentagon has let it be known that it's preparing a new manual for interrogators that prohibits physical and psychological humiliation of detainees. What interrogation techniques it does allow are listed in a classified annex as, presumably, are any hints of what can happen when those techniques fail to produce the desired results. Can the detainee then be handed over to another agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, that may not be constrained by the new directives? Or to units of a foreign government like the counterterrorism units now being financed and coordinated in Iraq by the United States?
In other words, if there has been a housecleaning, to how much of the shadowy counterterrorism edifice constructed since Sept. 11 does it now apply? The cases we know about, after all, are mostly old cases, even if we recently learned about them. We've been told little about what's now going on in interrogation rooms at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib -- what the limits are now supposed to be. While Defense Department investigators are still kept busy looking into detainees' complaints of abuse in Iraq, it has to be acknowledged that we've yet to hear of any fatalities under interrogation in 2004 or 2005.
It has been more than a year now since we (and, of course, the region in which we presume to be crusading for freedom) were shown a selection of snapshots from Abu Ghraib with their depraved staging of hooded figures, snarling dogs and stacked naked bodies. For all the genuine outrage in predictable places over what was soon being called a ''torture scandal'' -- in legal forums, editorial pages, letters columns -- the usual democratic cleansing cycle never really got going. However strong the outcry, it wasn't enough to yield political results in the form of a determined Congressional investigation, let alone an independent commission of inquiry; the Pentagon's own inquiries, which exonerated its civilian and political leadership, told us a good deal more than most Americans, so it would appear, felt they needed to know. Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. ''You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,'' Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ''I think they want it blurry.''
One result is that we've insulated ourselves from the really pertinent, really difficult question: How do we feel about coercive techniques that are commonly, if somewhat cavalierly, held to fall short of torture? These methods are variously known as C.I.D. (for ''cruel, inhuman and degrading'' treatment) or H.C.I. (for ''highly coercive interrogation''); or, in blander Pentagon-speak, ''counterresistance strategies'' (ranked in order of severity in two groups, Class II and Class III); or ''professional interrogation techniques,'' to use the postmodern gloss recently offered by the director of Central Intelligence, Porter J. Goss, to describe ''waterboarding'' (a refinement of the ancient practice of water torture, with which American troops first experimented a hundred years ago on Philippine insurgents). All these terms are sometimes loosely subsumed in opinion articles under the heading ''torture lite'' (though you might wonder what's so ''lite'' about waterboarding). None of them would be remotely legal in an investigation of an American on American soil.
the other 90% of this article:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504E0DD1238F931A25755C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
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