[ torture just doesn't work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the
author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse. ]
Tortured Reasoning
http://www.truthout.org/122008Z
George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to
intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of
counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture
just doesn't work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author
exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.
By the last days of March 2002, more than six months after 9/11,
President George W. Bush's promise "to hunt down and to find those
folks who committed this act" was starting to sound a little hollow.
True, Afghanistan had been invaded and the Taliban toppled from
power.
But Osama bin Laden had vanished from the caves of Tora Bora, and
none
of his key al-Qaeda lieutenants were in U.S. captivity. Intelligence
about what the terrorists might be planning next was almost
nonexistent. "The panic in the executive branch was palpable,"
recalls
Mike Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official who set up and ran the
agency's Alec Station, the unit devoted to tracking bin Laden.
Early in the morning of March 28, in the moonlit police-barracks
yard in Faisalabad, Pakistan, hopes were high that this worrisome
intelligence deficit was about to be corrected. Some 300 armed
personnel waited in silence: 10 three-man teams of Americans, drawn
equally from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., together with much greater
numbers from Pakistan's police force and Inter-services Intelligence
(ISI). In order to maximize their chances of surprise, they planned
to
hit 10 addresses simultaneously. One of them, they believed, was a
safe house containing a man whose name had been familiar to U.S.
analysts for years: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, a 30-year-old
Saudi Arabian better known as Abu Zubaydah. "I'd followed him for a
decade," Scheuer says. "If there was one guy you could call a 'hub,'
he was it."
The plan called for the police to go in first, followed by the
Americans and ISI men, whose job would be to gather laptops,
documents, and other physical evidence. A few moments before three
a.m., the crackle of gunfire erupted. Abu Zubaydah had been shot and
wounded, but was alive and in custody. As those who had planned it
had
hoped, his capture was to prove an epochal event - but in ways they
had not envisaged.
Four months after Abu Zubaydah's capture, two lawyers from the
Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, delivered their
notorious memo on torture, which stated that coercive treatment that
fell short of causing suffering equivalent to the pain of organ
failure or death was not legally torture, an analysis that - as far
as
the U.S. government was concerned - sanctioned the abusive treatment
of detainees at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay.
But, as Jane Mayer writes in her recent book, The Dark Side
(Doubleday), Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to coercive
interrogation
techniques well before that, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in the
Global War on Terror to undergo waterboarding.
The case of Abu Zubaydah is a suitable place to begin answering
some pressing but little-considered questions. Putting aside all
legal
and ethical issues (not to mention the P.R. ramifications), does such
treatment - categorized unhesitatingly by the International Committee
of the Red Cross as torture - actually work, in the sense of
providing
reliable, actionable intelligence? Is it superior to other
interrogation methods, and if they had the choice, free of moral
qualms or the fear of prosecution, would interrogators use it freely?
President Bush has said it works extremely well, insisting it has
been a vital weapon in America's counterterrorist arsenal. Vice
President Dick Cheney and C.I.A. director Michael Hayden have made
similar assertions. In fact, time and again, Bush has been given
opportunities to distance his administration from the use of coercive
methods but has stood steadfastly by their use. His most detailed
exposition came in a White House announcement on September 6, 2006,
when he said such tactics had led to the capture of top al-Qaeda
operatives and had thwarted a number of planned attacks, including
plots to strike U.S. Marines in Djibouti, fly planes into office
towers in London, and detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb in America.
"Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes
that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching
another
attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about
terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has
saved
innocent lives."
Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous
counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the
Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive
methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence,
they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale
through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts
-
with Abu Zubaydah's case one of the most glaring examples.
Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did
was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also
providing some misleading "information" that boosted the
administration's argument for invading Iraq.
Everything that was to go wrong with the interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah flowed from a first, fatal misjudgment. Although his name
had
long been familiar to the C.I.A., that did not make him an
operational
terrorist planner or, as Bush put it in September 2006, "a senior
terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden."
Instead,
Scheuer says, he was "the main cog in the way they organized," a
point
of contact for Islamists from many parts of the globe seeking combat
training in the Afghan camps. However, only a tiny percentage would
ever be tapped for recruitment by al-Qaeda.
According to Scheuer, Abu Zubaydah "never swore bayat [al-Qaeda's
oath of allegiance] to bin Laden," and the enemy he focused on was
Israel, not the U.S. After Abu Zubaydah's capture, Dan Coleman, an
F.B.I. counterterrorist veteran, had the job of combing through Abu
Zubaydah's journals and other documents seized from his Faisalabad
safe house. He confirms Scheuer's assessment. "Abu Zubaydah was like
a
receptionist, like the guy at the front desk here," says Coleman,
gesturing toward the desk clerk in the lobby of the Virginia hotel
where we have met. "He takes their papers, he sends them out. It's an
important position, but he's not recruiting or planning." It was also
significant that he was not well versed in al-Qaeda's tight internal-
security methods: "That was why his name had been cropping up for
years."
Declassified reports of legal interviews with Abu Zubaydah at his
current residence, Guantánamo Bay, suggest that he lacked the
capacity
to do much more. In the early 1990s, fighting in the Afghan civil war
that followed the Soviet withdrawal, he was injured so badly that he
could not speak for almost two years. "I tried to become al-Qaeda,"
Abu Zubaydah told his lawyer, Brent Mickum, "but they said, 'No, you
are illiterate and can't even remember how to shoot.'" Coleman found
Abu Zubaydah's diary to be startlingly useless. "There's nothing in
there that refers to anything outside his head, not even when he saw
something on the news, not about any al-Qaeda attack, not even 9/11,"
he says. "All it does is reveal someone in torment. Based on what I
saw of his personality, he could not be what they say he was."
In May 2008, a report by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice
inspector general, stated that, as he recovered in the hospital from
the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah began
to cooperate with two F.B.I. agents. It was a promising start, but
"within a few days," wrote Fine, he was handed over to the C.I.A.,
whose agents soon reported that he was providing only "throw-away
information" and that, according to Fine, they "needed to diminish
his
capacity to resist." His new interrogators continued to question him
by very different means at so-called black-site prisons in Thailand
and Eastern Europe. They were determined to prove he was much more
important than the innkeeper of a safe house.
Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah's treatment in his 2006 announcement.
"As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received
training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an
alternative set of procedures..... The procedures were tough, and
they
were safe, and lawful, and necessary." Soon, Bush went on, Abu
Zubaydah "began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives,
including information that helped us find and capture more of those
responsible for the attacks on September 11." Among them, Bush said,
were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his
fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not
arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In
K.S.M.'s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25
million reward.
As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was
waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists,
beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he
provided "many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans."
K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave
up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A.
official,
who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., "90 percent of it
was total fucking bullshit." A former Pentagon analyst adds: "K.S.M.
produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how
stupid we were."
It is, perhaps, a little late, more than six years after
detainees
began to be interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and at the C.I.A.'s black-
site prisons, to be asking whether torture works. Yet according to
numerous C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials interviewed for this article, at
the time this question really mattered, in the months after 9/11, no
one seriously addressed it. Those who advocated a policy that would
lead America to deploy methods it had always previously abhorred
simply assumed they would be worthwhile. Non-governmental advocates
of
torture, such as the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, have
emphasized the "ticking bomb" scenario: the hypothetical circumstance
when only torture will make the captured terrorist reveal where he -
or his colleagues - has planted the timed nuclear device. Inside the
C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency's
internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of
coercive methods: "Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking
bomb. It's just a way of framing the debate for public consumption.
That is not an intelligence reality."
There is, alas, no shortage of evidence from earlier times that
torture produces bad intelligence. "It is incredible what people say
under the compulsion of torture," wrote the German Jesuit Friedrich
von Spee in 1631, "and how many lies they will tell about themselves
and about others; in the end, whatever the torturers want to be true,
is true."
The unreliability of intelligence acquired by torture was taken
as
a given in the early years of the C.I.A., whose 1963 kubark
interrogation manual stated: "Intense pain is quite likely to produce
false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A
time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and
the
admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee
can
pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more
complex 'admissions' that take still longer to disprove."
A 1957 study by Albert Biderman, an Air Force sociologist,
described how brainwashing had been achieved by depriving prisoners
of
sleep, exposing them to cold, and forcing them into agonizing "stress
positions" for long periods. In July 2008, The New York Times
reported
that Biderman's work formed the basis of a 2002 interrogators'
training class at Guantánamo Bay. That the methods it described had
once been used to generate Communist propaganda had apparently been
forgotten.
Experience derived from 1990s terrorism cases also casts doubt on
torture's value. For example, in March 1993, F.B.I. agents flew to
Cairo to take charge of an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima, who
would
be convicted for having bombed the World Trade Center a month
earlier.
Abouhalima had already been tortured by Egyptian intelligence agents
for 10 days, and had the wounds to prove it. As U.S. investigators
should have swiftly realized, his statements in Egypt were worthless,
among them claims that the bombing was sponsored by Iranian
businessmen, although, apparently, their sworn enemy, Iraq, had also
played a part.
In the fall of 2001, publications such as Newsweek, The
Washington
Post, and The Wall Street Journal ran articles suggesting torture
might be essential to prevent further attacks. All cited the case of
Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani terrorist in possession of explosives
arrested in the Philippines in January 1995, who was later convicted
in New York. According to Dershowitz, his coerced confessions about
the "Bojinka" plot, to blow up 11 airliners over the Pacific,
supported the claim that "torture sometimes does work and can
sometimes prevent major disasters."
Murad was certainly tortured. At his trial in 1996, transcripts
of
his interrogation by the Philippines National Police contained pauses
and gasps, which his lawyer claimed were the result of his enduring a
procedure much like waterboarding. But did it really pay intelligence
dividends? With Murad's arrest, the plot was blown. As Professor
Stephanie Athey of Lasell College noted in a 2007 article,
Dershowitz's claim that the torture prevented a major disaster is
false. A computer seized in Murad's apartment held details of the
flights he planned to attack, detonator-timer settings, and photos of
some of his co-conspirators, together with their aliases, so enabling
their subsequent arrest. It was this, Mike Scheuer says, not Murad's
interrogation, that provided more useful intelligence.
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