TORTURE REPORT WAS “AWESOME”

The much awaited Senate Torture Report was announced last week amidst the customary partisan storm. Nothing anymore is what it is, it is always something else. So let it be with the Torture Report which became known as the Enhanced Interrogation Technique, (EIT), Report. As Alice said in “Through The Looking Glass” things mean what I say the mean. Or as Shakespeare more elegantly put, “ What’ s in a name. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Thus giving prisoners enemas with pureed food, keeping them without sleep and or leaving them naked in the cold for days on end, keeping them bundled up in diapers hanging from the ceiling, threatening to rape them, their wives and their children, smacking them in the face or hitting them in the stomach, stuffing them into small containers for extended periods of time, depriving them of food, waterboarding them, for example, are all designated as conversation stimulants, not torture. 

Generally speaking there was ambivalence to what the CIA perpetrated with opinions ranging from unashamed support, (Cheney) through outright rejection (McCain) with the general consensus that America was “awesome.”  With regard to the “awesome” part, Jay H. Ell believes they are right for the wrong reasons.

CHENEY - ATILLA THE HUN

Now there were several responses to the heavily redacted 600 page summary of over a million pages of CIA reports. There was an argument that it was “one sided”. Jay H. Ell is unsure what that means. Hazarding a guess it means that just detailing all of these techniques means that you condemn them without giving the other point of view. The other point of view was as follows: To quote George Bush 43, in 2007, “We do not Torture” or his Vice President, Dick Cheney, “We didn’t torture we just did what was necessary”. 

So no-one is arguing that these abominations happened but they were EIT and or the post 9/11 times justified them. Cheney stands out because he is the only “other point of view” that wasn’t uncomfortable with what had happened and had no second thoughts. Even worse he was pure Cheney, as he explained to Chuck Todd of NBC - the hummus, pasta, sauces and nuts that were pureed and rectally administered was given for “medical reasons and wasn’t torture because it wasn’t part of the program’, the other techniques like endlessly boxing some one in a small coffin or hanging them from a ceiling was, “Just short of torture”, as to torturing over 20 percent of the innocent detainees, Cheney had no problem as long as “We achieved our objective to get the guys who did 9/11 and prevented another attack”.

AMERICA — THE “AWESOME”

The Fox political commentator Andrea Tantaros on the Fox News Show, “Outnumbered,” exploded and provided Late Night Comedy shows with their lead in video on the subject:

She blurted passionately, ”The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome. We’ve closed the book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome. They apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again.”

As ridiculous as Tantaros sounded, and she is on YouTube for all to see, she probably summed up how six out of ten Americans felt. Even though they support the CIA they don’t want to hear about it and it is the President and the Democrats who want to embarrass our “awesome” country. The fact that Obama and his administration tried to stop the report and Obama himself was very careful not to criticize the CIA, having stopped these practices almost the moment he came into office, he and his fellow travelers are supposedly to blame. 

DIRECTOR BRENNAN CONTRITE ON THE CIA TORTURE SHAMBLES

The current CIA director John Brennan conceded that the CIA had been unprepared to run the torture program. There were no trained interrogators, there was not any experience in “housing” detainees he maintained as mitigating factors. He countered the criticism that no reliable intelligence was obtained from the process by maintaining that no one really knew. He came across well in maintaining that one had to look at the CIA as a whole that, “ Did a lot of things right to keep this country strong and secure”. He assidiously stuck to the mantra that these were enhanced interrogation techniques and not torture basically pleading for the detractors to lay off.  

He did not deal with the shambles in detail that lead to a program that the government paid $80,000,000 to the designers alone. The two psychologists, Drs. James Mitchell and  Bruce Jessen did not have the slightest idea of what they were doing. When you realize that twenty six of the one hundred and nineteen tortured were totally innocent, that one of the detainees died and another couldn’t be charged in court because it could have been alleged that they obtained evidence by torture one wonders what lunatics were running this asylum. No -one knew whether they were getting anywhere with these techniques so they called in the same psychologists to evaluate the success of their program. Not surprisingly they concluded that their program achieved what it set out to do. In fact when after 2 months of harsh interrogation of Al Nashari, a suspect allegedly implicated in several terrorist events, the CIA interrogators concluded that he was telling the truth and in this and in other similar circumstances with detainees, the psychologists argued with the interrogators accusing them of being soft and exhorting them to continue.

The psychologists involvement created a division among the American Psychological Association’s, (APA), membership, as the APA, unlike the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, do not prohibit their members form participating in torture. Mitchell who participated in some of the waterboarding experiments defended his participation by arguing that the abuse of prisoners was preferable to Obama’s ongoing drone war. 

This has created quite a storm in the APA as detailed in James Risen’s book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. It appears that senior staff members of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychologists, colluded with national security psychologists from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House to adapt APA ethics policy to suit the needs of the psychologist-interrogators. Now, the APA, has agreed to an independent investigation to be conducted by David Hoffman, a former inspector general and federal prosecutor.

DEBATE WITHIN THE CIA AND BUSH'S ADMINISTRATION ON TORTURE

Bearing in mind that the CIA had in 1989, concluded in a report sent to Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers,” it was not surprising that they were to come to the same conclusion pretty soon into the Al Quada interrogations

The Senate report revealed, that the CIA interrogators came to the identical denouement, In January 2003, 10 months into the secret prison program. The agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a “train wreck waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

Jane Mayer in her book on torture in the Bush years, “The Dark Side”, chronicles several other instances of internal opposition. This included the CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s serious and influential internal investigation. This led the Justice Department to “ask the CIA to suspend the torture program”—at least “until it could be reconciled with the law.”  Another quoted was Alberto Mora the general counsel of the Navy in 2004. Jane Mayer wrote that he tried to stop the torture program. He told his superiors at the Pentagon that the Bush torture policy violated the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” There were others such as Sergeant Joe Darby and Captain Ian Fishback and Phillip Zelikow, an advisor to Condoleezza Rice who submitted an “anti torture” report.  

There were obviously opponents of these practices higher up in the Bush administration as the injunction to keep this away from Colin Powell or “He would blow his stack”, would indicate. Attorney General Ashcroft was said to be against it. It was also reported that Bush when he was finally informed showed discomfort.

MC CAIN SPLITS GOP RANKS

In a nearly 15-minute speech from the Senate floor, Senator John McCain, in what was arguably the most robust defense so far of the report's release, referencing his term as a tortured prisoner of  war in Vietnam, rebuked his Republican colleagues and endorsed the Senate study's findings.

McCain praised Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for a “thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose … but actually damaged our security interests. The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless,” McCain said.

AT THE END OF THE DAY

The myth that torture has proven value is just that - a myth. The fact that this degrading program saw the light of day with not even the dignity of any proven merit and was under the control of two sadistic psychologists who had one objective in mind to justify the colossal amount of taxpayer fees that they were generating, is outrageous,

The lame rationalization that this was not torture insults the intelligence of all concerned. This was torture contrary to the US Federal Torture Act and the Geneva Convention that the US is a signatory to. The US has prosecuted enemy combatants for less in years gone by.

It would have been far more genuine to admit that post 9/11 one lost one’s head and in the aftermath anxiety and fear one desperately did anything. 

The ethical dilemma of any non humane behavior in war is faced everyday. One has to weigh up what one is fighting for. If striving for values and morality is in the mix then obviously one does not want to be accused of the very immorality one is waging war against. If one is guilty then one is on the slippery slope to hell. Our modern day enemies justify killing children, mutilating women and barbarism to further their aims. What if our two psychologists believed that doing that to them was the only way to conquer them? Would these tactics by our soldiers be justified?

Torture will be front and center in the next Presidential elections, Hillary who hasn't said much of anything as yet has called for legislation banning it. 

Ali Soufan, a CIA interrogator lead a very public battle against torture and maintained, "Imagine if we didn't go down that road. Imagine. We played into the enemy's hand. Now we have American hostages in orange jumpsuits because we put people in orange jumpsuits.”

Where America is “awesome” is that we are having this debate at all and this painful issue has not been hidden behind layers and layers of Official Secret Rulings that is the modus operandi in so many other countries. This is no thanks however to both the respective administrations involved. Bush, under whose watch this happened, tried to stop the report and Obama in his desire to cozy up to his Administration is not smelling like Shakespeare’s rose either.