Torture the Dark Side

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Two articles by Professor Danner:

1. Tales from Torture's Dark World
2. Torture and Truth

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15 March 2009

ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody


Tales from Torture's Dark World

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

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Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be 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.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

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Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

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Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•
Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

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2004 Article:


Torture and Truth

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.


Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the “Ramadan Offensive”—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge. I inquired of a young man there why the people of that city were attacking Americans more frequently each day. How many of the attacks, I wanted to know, were carried out by foreign fighters? How many by local Islamists? And how many by what US officers called “FRL’s”— former regime loyalists?[1]

The young man—I’ll call him Salih —listened, answered patiently in his limited but eloquent English, but soon became impatient with what he plainly saw as my American obsession with categories and particulars. Finally he interrupted my litany of questions, pushed his face close to mine, and spoke to me slowly and emphatically:

For Fallujans it is a shame to have foreigners break down their doors. It is a shame for them to have foreigners stop and search their women. It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over their heads, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe on his neck. This is a great shame, you understand? This is a great shame for the whole tribe.
It is the duty of that man, and of that tribe, to get revenge on this soldier—to kill that man. Their duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain, a dirty thing; they have to wash it. No sleep—we cannot sleep until we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers.
He leaned back and looked at me, then tried one more time. “The Americans,” he said, “provoke the people. They don’t respect the people.”


I thought of Salih and his impatience as I paged through the reports of General Taguba and the Red Cross, for they treat not just of “abuses” or “atrocities” but the entire American “liberation” of Iraq and how it has gone wrong; they are dispatches from the scene of a political disaster. Salih came strongly to mind as I read one of the less lurid sections of the Red Cross report, entitled “Treatment During Arrest,” in which the anonymous authors tell how Iraqis they’d interviewed described “a fairly consistent pattern… of brutality by members of the [Coalition Forces] arresting them”:

Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles.
Of course, this is war; those soldiers had intelligence to gather, insurgents to find, a rebellion to put down. However frightening such nighttime arrests might be, Iraqis could at least expect that these soldiers were accountable, that they had commanding officers and a clear chain of command, that there were bases to which one could go and complain. These were, after all, Americans. And yet:

In almost all instances…, arresting authorities provided no in formation about who they were, where their base was located, nor did they explain the cause of arrest. Similarly, they rarely informed the arrestee or his family where he was being taken and for how long, resulting in the de facto “disappearance” of the arrestee…. Many [families] were left without news for months, often fearing that their relatives were dead.
We might pass over with a shiver the word “disappearance,” with its unfortunate associations, and say to ourselves, once again, that this was war: insurgents were busy killing American soldiers and had to be rooted out, even if it meant one or two innocent civilians were sucked up into the system. And then one comes upon this quiet little sentence:

Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. [emphasis added]
Abu Ghraib contained within its walls last fall—as the war heated up and American soldiers, desperate for “actionable intelligence,” spent many an autumn evening swooping down on Iraqi homes, kicking in doors, and carrying away hooded prisoners into the night—well over eight thousand Iraqis. Could it be that “between 70 percent and 90 percent” of them were “arrested by mistake”? And if so, which of the naked, twisted bodies that television viewers and news paper readers around the world have been gazing at these last weeks were among them? Perhaps the seven bodies piled up in that great coil, buttocks and genitals exposed to the camera? Or the bodies bound one against another on the cellblock floor? Or the body up against the bars, clenched before the teeth of barking police dogs?

Consider the naked body wearing only the black hood, hands clasped above its head: Pfc Lynndie England, she of the famous leash, frames the body like a car salesman displaying next year’s model, grinning back at the camera, pointing to its genitals with her right hand, flashing a thumbs-up with her left. This body belongs to Hayder Sabbar Abd, a thirty-four-year-old Shiite from Nasi riya, also known as Abu Ghraib Prisoner Number 13077. Last June, at a military checkpoint in the south, according to The New York Times, Mr. Abd “tried to leave the taxi he was riding in.” Suspicious behavior, rendered more suspicious by the fact that Mr. Abd had served eighteen years in the Iraqi army, part of that time in the Republican Guard. The Americans took him to a detention center at Baghdad airport, and from there to the big military prison at Um Qasr, and finally, after three months, to Abu Ghraib. A strange odyssey through Occupied Iraq, made stranger by the fact that during that time, Mr. Abd says, “he was never interrogated, and never charged with a crime.” “The truth is,” he told Ian Fisher of The New York Times, “we were not terrorists. We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this.”

As I write, we know nothing of what “American intelligence knew”—apart from a hint here or there, this critical fact is wholly absent from both reports, as it has been from the public hearings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other officials. General Taguba, following his orders, concentrates instead on the activities of the military police, hapless amateurs who were “tasked” to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses” and whose work, thanks to digital photography, has now been displayed so vividly to the citizens of the world. It is this photography that has let us visualize something of what happened to Mr. Abd one night in early November, following a fight among prisoners, when he and six other men were brought to what was known as “the hard site” at Abu Ghraib, the wing for the most dangerous prisoners:

The seven men were all placed in hoods, he said, and the beating began. “They beat our heads on the walls and the doors,” he said. “I don’t really know: I couldn’t see.” He said his jaw had been broken, badly enough that he still has trouble eating. In all, he said, he believes that he received about 50 blows over about two hours.
“Then the interpreter told us to strip,” he said. “We told him: ‘You are Egyptian, and you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims we can’t do that.’ When we refused to take off our clothes, they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade.”
It was at this moment in the interview…that several pages of the photographs made public last week were produced…. He quickly and unemotionally pointed out all his friends—Hussein, Ah med, Hashim—naked, hooded, twisted around each other.
He also saw himself, as degraded as possible: naked, his hand on his genitals, a female soldier, identified in another report as Pvt. Lynndie England, pointing and smiling with a cigarette in her mouth. Mr. Abd said one of the soldiers had removed his hood, and the translator ordered him to masturbate while looking at Private England….
“She was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts,” Mr. Abd said. “Of course, I couldn’t do it. I told them that I couldn’t, so they beat me in the stomach, and I fell to the ground. The translator said, ‘Do it! Do it! It’s better than being beaten.’ I said, ‘How can I do it?’ So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending.”
All the while, he said, the flash of the camera kept illuminating the dim room that once held prisoners of Mr. Hussein….[2]
Such scenes, President Bush tells us, “do not represent America.” But for Iraqis, what does? To Salih and other Iraqis they represent the logical extension of treatment they have seen every day under a military occupation that began harshly and has grown, under the stress of the insurgency, more brutal. As another young Iraqi man told me in November,

The attacks on the soldiers have made the army close down. You go outside and there’s a guy on a Humvee pointing a machine gun at you. You learn to raise your hands, to turn around. You come to hate the Americans.
This of course is a prime goal of the insurgents; they cannot defeat the Americans militarily but they can defeat them politically. For the insurgents, the path to such victory lies in provoking the American occupiers to do their political work for them; the insurgents ambush American convoys with “improvised explosive devices” placed in city neighborhoods so the Americans will respond by wounding and killing civilians, or by imprisoning them in places like Abu Ghraib.[3] The insurgents want to place the outnumbered, overworked American troops under constant fear and stress so they will mistreat Iraqis on a broad scale and succeed in making themselves hated.

In this project, as these reports make clear, the methods used at Abu Ghraib played a critical part. For if Americans are learning about these “abuses” for the first time, news about what has been happening at Abu Ghraib and other prisons has been spreading throughout Iraq for many months. And if the Iraqis, with their extensive experience of Abu Ghraib and the purposes it served in the national imagination, do not regard such methods as “abuses,” neither do the investigators of the Red Cross:

These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of co-operation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an “intelligence value.” [emphasis added]
What, according to the Red Cross, were these “methods of physical and psychological coercion”?

• Hooding, used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. One or sometimes two bags, sometimes with an elastic blindfold over the eyes which, when slipped down, further impeded proper breathing. Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come. The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity. Hooding could last for periods from a few hours to up to two to four consecutive days…;
• Handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, which were sometimes made so tight and used for such extended periods that they caused skin lesions and long-term after-effects on the hands (nerve damage), as observed by the ICRC;
• Beatings with hard objects (including pistols and rifles), slapping, punching, kicking with knees or feet on various parts of the body (legs, sides, lower back, groin)...;
• Being paraded naked outside cells in front of other persons deprived of their liberty, and guards, sometimes hooded or with women’s underwear over the head…;
• Being attached repeatedly over several days…with handcuffs to the bars of their cell door in humiliating (i.e. naked or in underwear) and/or uncomfortable position causing physical pain;
• Exposure while hooded to loud noise or music, prolonged exposure while hooded to the sun over several hours, including during the hottest time of the day when temperatures could reach…122 degrees Fahrenheit…or higher;
• Being forced to remain for prolonged periods in stress positions such as squatting or standing with or without the arms lifted.
The authors of the Red Cross report note that when they visited the “isolation section” of Abu Ghraib in mid-October 2003, they “directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation” of prisoners, among them “the practice of keeping [prisoners] completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness….” When the Red Cross delegates “requested an explanation from the authorities…the military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was ‘part of the process.’”

The ICRC medical delegate examined persons…presenting signs of concentration difficulties, memory problems, verbal expression difficulties, incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions, abnormal behavior and suicidal tendencies. These symptoms appeared to have been caused by the methods and duration of interrogation.
This “process” is not new; indeed, like so many of the news stories presented as “revelation” during these last few months, it has appeared before in the American press. After the arrest in Pakistan more than a year ago of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operations chief, “senior American officials” told The New York Times that “physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed’:

They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.
American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were with held from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.[4]

In the same article, published more than a year ago, a number of American officials discussed the “methods and techniques” applied in interrogations at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, at Guantanamo, and at other secret prisons now holding the thousands who have been arrested and confined by American and allied forces since the attacks of September 11:

Routine techniques include covering suspects’ heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat…. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men….
Disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life. To that end, the building—an unremarkable hangar—is lighted twenty-four hours a day, making sleep almost impossible, said Mu hammad Shah, an Afghan farmer who was held there for eighteen days.
Colonel King said it was legitimate to use lights, noise and vision restriction, and to alter, without warning, the time between meals, to blur a detainee’s sense of time. He said sleep deprivation was “probably within the lexicon….”
Two former prisoners said they had been forced to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled in the isolation cells.
The “methods of physical and psychological coercion” that the Red Cross delegates witnessed at Abu Ghraib were indeed, as the “military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation” told them frankly, “part of” a “process” that has been deployed by American interrogators in the various American-run secret prisons throughout the world since September 11. What separates Abu Ghraib from the rest is not the “methods of physical and psychological coercion used” but the fact that, under the increasing stress of the war, the pressing need for intelligence, and the shortage of available troops and other resources in Iraq, military policemen like Pfc England, who had little or no training, were pressed into service to “soften up” the prisoners and, as the Taguba report puts it, set “the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.” And so when Specialist Sabrina Harman was asked about the prisoner who was placed on a box with electric wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis, in an image now famous throughout the world, she replied that “her job was to keep detainees awake,” that “MI [military intelligence] wanted to get them to talk,” and that it was the job of her and her colleagues “to do things for MI and OGA [Other Government Agencies, a euphemism for the CIA] to get these people to talk.” The military police, who, General Taguba notes, had “no training in interrogation,” were told, in the words of Sergeant Javal S. Davis, to “loosen this guy up for us.” “Make sure he has a bad night.” “Make sure he gets the treatment.”

As for the unusual methods used—”breaking of chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees,” “using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees,” “beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair,” “threatening male detainees with rape,” “sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick,” and the rest of the sad litany General Taguba patiently sets out Sergeant Davis told investigators that he “assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Many of the young Americans smiling back at us in the photographs will soon be on trial. It is unlikely that those who ran “the process” and issued the orders will face the same tribunals. Iraqis will be well aware of this, even if Americans are not. The question is whether Americans have traveled far enough from the events of September 11 to go beyond the photographs, which show nothing more than the amateur stooges of “the process,” and look squarely at the process itself, the process that goes on daily at Abu Ghraib, Guant�namo, Bagram, and other secret prisons in Iraq and around the world.

To date the true actors in those lurid scenes, who are professionals and no doubt embarrassed by the garish brutality of their apprentices in the military police, have remained offstage. None has testified. The question we must ask in coming days, as Specialist Jeremy Sivits and other young Americans face public courts-martial in Baghdad, is whether or not we as Americans can face a true revelation. We must look squarely at the photographs and ask: Is what has changed only what we know, or what we are willing to accept?

—May 12, 2004

markdanner.com


Notes
[1] See my “Delusions in Baghdad,” The New York Review, December 18, 2003.

[2] See “Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by US Troops,” The New York Times, May 5, 2004, p. A1.

[3] See my “Iraq: The New War,” The New York Review, September 25, 2003.

[4] See Don Van Natta Jr., “Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World,” The New York Times, March 9, 2003.

see also:

ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE (The Taguba Report)
by Major General Antonio M. Taguba.

REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS (ICRC) ON THE TREATMENT BY THE COALITION FORCES OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND OTHER PERSONS PROTECTED BY THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS IN IRAQ DURING ARREST, INTERNMENT AND INTERROGATION
by Delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, February 2004

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Devil's Own

David Addington described as ruthless and corrupt warlord.

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Cheney's Right-hand Man

He's barely known outside Washington's corridors of power, but David Addington is the most powerful man you've never heard of.

Here's why:

One week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush briefly turned his gaze away from the unfolding crisis to an important but far less pressing moment in the nation's history. The president signed legislation creating a commission to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling desegregating public schools. In a brief statement, Bush invited the various educational groups listed in the legislation to suggest the names of potential commissioners and also urged members of Congress to weigh in, as a "matter of comity." But in a little-noted aside, Bush said that any such suggestions would be just that--because under the appointments clause of the Constitution, it was his job, and his alone, to make those kinds of decisions.

This was what is known, in the cloistered world of constitutional lawyers and scholars, as a "signing statement." Such statements, in the years before President Bush and his aides moved into the White House, were rare. A signing statement is a legal memorandum in which the president and his lawyers take legislation sent over by Congress and put their stamp on it by saying what they believe the measure does and doesn't allow. Consumed by the 9/11 attacks, Americans for the most part didn't realize that the signing statement accompanying the announcement of the Brown v. Board commission would signal one of the most controversial hallmarks of the Bush presidency: a historic shift in the balance of power away from the legislative branch of government to the executive. The shift began soon after Bush took office and reached its apogee after 9/11, with Bush's authorization of military tribunals for terrorism suspects, secret detentions and aggressive interrogations of "unlawful enemy combatants," and warrantless electronic surveillance of terrorism suspects on U.S. soil, including American citizens.

The "invisible hand."

Much of the criticism that has been directed at these measures has focused on Vice President Dick Cheney. In fact, however, it is a largely anonymous government lawyer, who now serves as Cheney's chief of staff, who has served as the ramrod driving the Bush administration's most secretive and controversial counterterrorism measures through the bureaucracy. David Addington was a key advocate of the Brown v. Board and more than 750 other signing statements the administration has issued since taking office--a record that far outstrips that of any other president.

The signing statements are just one tool that Addington and a small cadre of ultraconservative lawyers at the heart of the Bush administration are employing to prosecute the war on terrorism. Little known outside the West Wing and the inner sanctums of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, Addington is a genial colleague who also possesses an explosive temper that he does not hesitate to direct at those who oppose him. Addington, says an admiring former White House official, is "the most powerful person no one has never heard of."

Name one significant action taken by the Bush White House after 9/11, and chances are better than even that Addington had a role in it. So ubiquitous is he that one Justice Department lawyer calls Addington "Adam Smith's invisible hand" in national security matters. The White House assertion--later proved false--that Saddam Hussein tried to buy nuclear precursors from Niger to advance a banned weapons program? Addington helped vet that. The effort to discredit a former ambassador who publicly dismissed the Niger claim as baseless, by disclosing the name of his wife, a covert CIA officer? Addington was right in the middle of that, too, though he has not been accused of wrongdoing.

In national security circles, Addington is viewed as such a force of nature that one former government lawyer nicknamed him "Keyser Soze," after the ruthless crime boss in the thriller The Usual Suspects. "He seems to have his hand in everything," says a former Justice Department official, "and he has these incredible powers, energy, reserves in an obsessive, zealot's kind of way." Addington declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.

Addington's admirers say he is being demonized unfairly. "This is a new war, an unconventional war," says an informal Cheney adviser, Mary Matalin. "When you are making new policy to meet new challenges, you are going to get vicious opposition."

Few would have predicted that Addington, 49, would become such a lightning rod. Tall, bearded, and imposing, Addington has the look, says former White House associate counsel Bradford Berenson, of "a rumpled bureaucrat crossed with a CIA spook." The son of a career military official, Addington was born and raised in the nation's capital and was in the eighth or ninth grade when he read Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787.

"The next battlefield."

Thus began a lifelong love affair with the U.S. Constitution. Even today, Addington carries a copy in his pocket and doesn't hesitate to wield it to back up his arguments. "The joke around here," says a senior congressional staffer with a chuckle, "is that Addington looks at the Constitution and sees only Article II, the power of the presidency." Berenson, Bush's former associate counsel, says that's because Addington is so intensely security minded: "He's absolutely convinced of the threat we face. And he believes that the executive branch is the only part of the government capable of securing the public against external threats." Addington, Berenson adds, is a national security conservative with a twist. "He's not the intellectual legal conservative of the Federalist Society type," Berenson says, referring to the group of conservative lawyers esteemed by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, "for whom judicial restraint is the holy grail. He's much more of a Cold War conservative who has moved on to the next battlefield."

Addington began his government career 25 years ago, after graduating summa cum laude from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and with honors from the Duke University Law School. He started out as an assistant general counsel at the CIA and soon moved to Capitol Hill and served as the minority's counsel and chief counsel on the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees. There, he began his long association with Cheney, then a Wyoming congressman and member of the intelligence panel. Addington and Cheney--who served as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff--shared the same grim worldview: Watergate, Vietnam, and later, the Iran-contra scandal during President Reagan's second term had all dangerously eroded the powers of the presidency. "Addington believes that through sloppy lawyering as much as through politics," says former National Security Council deputy legal adviser Bryan Cunningham, "the executive branch has acquiesced to encroachment of its constitutional authority by Congress."

When Cheney became ranking Republican on the House select committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, Addington helped write the strongly worded minority report that said the law barring aid to the Nicaraguan contras was unconstitutional because it improperly impinged on the president's power. The argument would become the cornerstone of the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies.

A second critical article of faith for Addington has to do with the presidential chain of command. "He believes there should be the shortest possible distance from the president to his cabinet secretaries, and he does not like staffers or coordinating bodies in that chain of command," says Cunningham, who worked closely with Addington and also was a Clinton administration lawyer.

Guide stars.

Addington is a strong adherent of the so-called unitary executive theory, which is cited frequently and prominently in many of Bush's legislative signing statements. The theory holds that the president is solely in charge of the executive branch and that Congress, therefore, can't tell him how to carry out his executive functions, whom to pick for what jobs, or through whom he must report to Congress. Executive power, separation of power, a tight chain of command, and protecting the unitary executive--those became the guide stars of Addington's legal universe.

Addington spent two years in the Reagan White House in a variety of positions. When George H.W. Bush was elected president, Addington moved to the Pentagon to help with the confirmation hearings for Bush's nominee for defense secretary, former Texas Sen. John Tower. Cheney, meanwhile, had just been named the new Republican whip in the House and hired Addington as his new counsel. Addington switched jobs, but within weeks, the Senate rejected the Tower nomination, and Bush tapped Cheney to be his new nominee for defense secretary.

Addington dug in, helped Cheney prepare for his confirmation hearings, and subsequently became his special assistant. Addington, says one of Cheney's closest friends and colleagues, David Gribbin, "became the most powerful staffer in the Pentagon" because he processed virtually all the position papers flowing to and from the secretary and deputy secretary. Still, Gribbin says he never viewed Addington as a gatekeeper, but many others did. "If David and I ever tangled," says one former senior Pentagon official, "it was because I may have thought a time or two that he was overzealous in his defense of the prerogatives of the secretary."

Those prerogatives, however, were sacrosanct to Addington. If a staffer submitted a draft memo for President Bush that copied Cheney and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Addington would cross out the latter. "He would say, the president talks to the secretary, and the secretary can do what he wants," says the former Pentagon official. Oddly, Addington "abhorred" the use of Latin phrases in memos, this official says, and would slash them out with his infamous red pen.

It wasn't long before Addington became the military's top lawyer. As the Pentagon general counsel, Addington soon alienated the armed forces' judge advocate generals by authoring a memo ordering the proudly independent corps of career military attorneys to report to the general counsel of each service. "He wanted the military services to be not so independent," says a retired Navy JAG, Rear Adm. Don Guter. "It came under the rubric of civilian control of the military. It's centralization. It's control."

The JAG officers fought back and, with Congress's support, remained independent. But Addington, typically, found another way to prevail. He wrote a memo decreeing that only the general counsel of each service--not the JAGs--could issue final legal opinions. After George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 (Addington sat out the Clinton years, in private practice), Guter warned his colleagues: "I said, 'Stand by, these same people are coming back. And you remember what they tried to do last time.'" After the 9/11 attacks, the JAG officers were marginalized from the decision making on military tribunals and detainee treatment policies. They became among President Bush's most vocal critics within the military.

By then, the odds were tilted overwhelmingly in Addington's favor. In January 2001, he became Cheney's legal counsel and, according to former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the vice president's "eyes, ears, and voice." Cheney implicitly trusts Addington on judgment calls because they are, in the words of adviser Matalin, "the same kind of person--Addington was always the first among equals when the vice president sought advice. And he has always been the final voice and analysis on what we were discussing." Cheney and his aide are so close, says Nancy Dorn, an Addington colleague from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush years, that they "hardly even have to communicate with words."

Addington, his colleagues say, is modest, courtly, and family oriented. He commutes to the White House by Metro when he could easily command a government car, usually eats at the staff table at the White House mess, and spends weekends cheering at his daughters' soccer games. "There are a lot of transactional people in Washington," says Matalin. "He's not one of them. He's a good soul."

According to critics, the reason Addington is such an effective bureaucratic infighter is that he's an intellectual bully. "David can be less than civilized," one official says. "He can be extremely unpleasant." Others say it's because Addington is a superb lawyer and a skilled debater who arms himself with a mind-numbing command of the facts and the law. Still others attribute Addington's power to the outsize influence of Cheney. "Addington does a very good job," says a former justice official who has observed him, "of harnessing the power of the vice president."

But it's a subtle kind of harnessing. Addington, according to current and former colleagues, rarely if ever invokes Cheney's name. An administration official says that it's sometimes unclear whether Addington is even consulting the vice president. But Cheney is always the elephant in the room. "People perceive that this is the real power center," says attorney Scott Horton, who has written two major studies on interrogation of terrorism suspects for the New York City Bar Association, "and if you cross them, they will destroy you."

"Grab bag."

If he can dish out the lumps inside the bureaucracy, Addington has also taken a share of his own--in court. Many of the post-9/11 policies--of which Addington was the central architect--have been questioned by federal judges and repudiated by even some of the administration's advocates, including indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without access to legal recourse, creation of military commissions, and aggressive interrogation tactics. "They've inflicted wounds unnecessarily," says a former Justice Department lawyer. "They treated the post-9/11 situation as a grab bag and gave the administration a bad name."

Win or lose, those who know him say Addington simply outworks his adversaries. Even when lightning caused a fire that nearly destroyed his home, Addington missed just a day of work. His office piled high with paperwork, eschewing a secretary, Addington is impossible to reach by phone, but he E-mails colleagues at all hours of the day and night about urgent government business and, sometimes, his own arcane intellectual pursuits, like British high court decisions and Australian Supreme Court rulings. "It's clear," says a former White House official, "that he has a wellspring of information to back up that wellspring of opinion." Addington's capacity to absorb complex information is legendary. "My joke about David Addington is this is a guy who can throw the U.S. budget in the air," says Gribbin, "and before it hits the ground, mark it with up with his red pen."

A voracious consumer of information, Addington keeps tabs on judicial selections, U.S. attorney nominations, and political polls. He is, says his former colleague Nancy Dorn, "granular" and "microscopic," adding: "There was no issue too small, his eyes would catch it. It used to drive me crazy. But that's what you need."

Addington's position in Cheney's office--at "the sausage end of the sausage-making machine," as one former Justice official describes it--allows him to wield enormous influence because he is typically the second-to-last lawyer to vet documents be-fore they land on the president's desk. "David was exceptionally good," says Cunningham, the former deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council, "at keeping his powder dry until the last minute." Addington's bottom line, those who know him say, is ensuring that even if the administration loses on a policy issue, the principle of executive power is protected. "He was very disciplined about knowing and articulating the difference," says Cunningham, "between constitutional legal issues and policy issues."

That became evident when Addington began his first big legal battle, in early 2001, after Cheney refused to release documents relating to a controversial energy task force that he headed. Two private watchdog groups and Congress sued to find out whether energy industry lobbyists improperly sat on the task force and influenced administration policy. In a series of letters to David Walker, the comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, Addington argued that neither Congress nor the courts could "intrude into the heart of executive deliberations," because it would inhibit the "candor" necessary to "effective government." Addington argued strenuously that no matter what the political or policy outcomes, protecting the information sought by the task force was the right thing to do. "They gave up short-term political expediency," Berenson says, "for the larger constitutional principle." More than three years later, Addington's judgment was vindicated by the Supreme Court, which refused to order the Bush administration to release the documents.

Tough guys.

The 9/11 attacks became the crucible for the administration's commitment to restoring presidential power and prerogative. In the national security arena, the expansive view is that the president, as commander in chief, has the inherent authority to exercise vast powers to secure the nation from external threats.

But even some pro-presidential lawyers in the administration argued in favor of exercising caution with that approach. "My advice was that we need to take the least aggressive position consistent with what we need to do," says a former Justice Department official. "It lets you build on it, and it doesn't make you look so extreme." That was the crux of the post-9/11 debate.

In the months after the attacks, the White House made three crucial decisions: to keep Congress out of the loop on major policy decisions like the creation of military commissions, to interpret laws as narrowly as possible, and to confine decision making to a small, trusted circle. "They've been so reluctant to seek out different views," says one former official. "It's not just Addington. It's how this administration works. It's a very narrow, tight group."

That core group consisted of Bush's counsel and now attorney general, Alberto Gonzales; his deputies, Timothy Flanigan and David Leitch; the Pentagon's influential general counsel, William Haynes; and a young attorney named John Yoo, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Whether or not he became the de facto leader of the group, as some administration officials say, Addington's involvement made for a formidable team. "You put Addington, Yoo, and Gonzales in a room, and there was a race to see who was tougher than the rest and how expansive they could be with respect to presidential power," says a former Justice Department official. "If you suggested anything less, you were considered a wimp." Others say Addington and Flanigan influenced Gonzales, who lacked their national security background.

Addington had close ties to Yoo, Haynes, and Flanigan. Yoo was Addington's protege and Hayne's squash buddy. Haynes, whose friendship with Addington dates back nearly two decades, was backed by Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputies Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz. Addington and Flanigan had also become close, having experienced 9/11 from an extraordinary vantage point--Flanigan from the White House Situation Room, Addington by Cheney's side at the President's Emergency Operations Center in a bunker underneath the complex. In the weeks and months after the attacks, says a former White House official, the two men would often take secret trips to undisclosed locations together, including the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, where the Pentagon began holding hundreds of detainees. One time, they even showed up together on a nuclear submarine.

Addington, clearly, was a force behind the scenes in the legal skirmishing within the administration. "There'd be lurches in policy; we wouldn't know what was going on," says Admiral Guter. "Haynes would have meetings at the White House with Gonzales and Addington, and he'd come back and give the next iteration of what we were doing, and we'd scratch our heads and say, 'Where did that come from?'"

One of Addington's most important allies in asserting presidential power was the OLC's Yoo. Traditionally, OLC staffers tend to be longtime career lawyers who ensure that the tenor of the legal opinions rendered is devoid of political overtones. After 9/11, however, OLC lawyers drafted a series of opinions that many career Justice Department attorneys viewed as having traduced the office's heritage of nuanced, almost scholarly, legal analysis. Addington, according to several Justice Department officials, helped Yoo shape some of the most controversial OLC memos.

The administration's first goal was winning passage of a congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force. The Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted Congress to define the conflict narrowly and authorize the use of force against al Qaeda and its confederates, as well as the Taliban. "It has a good impact on morale to have a conflict that's narrowly defined and easily winnable," says attorney Horton. But Addington and Cheney, according to Horton, "really wanted it [defined more broadly], because it provided the trigger for this radical redefinition of presidential power."

In an Addington-influenced OLC opinion issued shortly after 9/11, Yoo wrote that Congress can't "place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response."

A second critically important issue was what to do with those captured on the field of battle. The State Department's ambassador at large for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, headed an interagency group within the administration and began exploring ideas. National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger was a key member of the group, which discussed options ranging from military tribunals to prosecutions in federal court. The discussions were short-circuited, several former administration officials say, when Flanigan, one of Gonzales's two top aides, wrested away the group's work product on military commissions. With Berenson's and Addington's assistance, Flanigan wrote a draft order for the White House, based on an OLC memo arguing that the president had the legal authority to authorize military commissions--period.

That led Bush, on November 13, to authorize the secretary of defense to create military commissions to deal with "unlawful enemy combatants." The Pentagon's entire corps of JAG officers was kept in the dark, as were Ambassador Prosper, Bellinger, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Bush issued the executive order, a furious Bellinger confronted Gonzales in his office, administration sources say, to protest what he viewed as an end run. Gonzales and Bellinger would have many similar heated discussions about Addington's policy influence.

"Optics."

Prosper felt the military commissions order was workable but believed the commissions' rules would make or break the order's credibility. He, Bellinger, and others believed that the administration ought to have an independent review component, perhaps even a civilian one, to allay the distrust of European governments toward all things military. "It's important that sometimes you put in a rule we may not end up using," says Prosper, "but the optics are good for public opinion." But Addington, Flanigan, Gonzales, and especially Haynes remained adamantly against the civilian review idea, current and former officials say.

On military commissions and other issues, Addington's frequent sparring partner was Bellinger, administration officials say, because Addington viewed Bellinger--who had begun to voice deep concerns about the secrecy and the lack of interagency coordination and input--as "weak kneed."

Tensions between Addington and others in the administration would flare again and again. One vexing issue, for instance, was whether to treat members of the Taliban captured in Afghanistan as prisoners of war. Addington's colleague, Yoo, called Afghanistan a "failed state" and argued that Taliban fighters therefore didn't constitute a real army but were more of a "militant terrorist-like group." A draft memorandum, dated Jan. 25, 2002, signed by Gonzales and written, sources say, by Flanigan with Addington's input, called Yoo's opinion "definitive." The war on terrorism, Gonzales extrapolated, is a "new paradigm" that "renders obsolete" the "strict limitations" the Geneva Conventions place on interrogations and "renders quaint" the protections it affords prisoners. Some government lawyers believed Bush could have announced his decision without endorsing the controversial "failed state" theory. "It's the least you need to say to get the president what he wants," says a former Justice official. "They go beyond where they need to go."

If the question of incarceration was vexing, the question of how to extract information from those incarcerated was positively inflammatory. In August 2002, the head of OLC, Jay Bybee, signed a memo interpreting the U.S. law prohibiting torture and implementing the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Addington helped shape the Bybee memo, which was authored by Yoo. Once again, the State Department--which has the lead role in monitoring implementation of the treaty--was left out of the discussions.

Bybee, Yoo, and Addington saw the torture statute, unsurprisingly, as an unwarranted infringement on executive-branch power. Their goal was to interpret it as narrowly as possible, and their memo, consequently, explored the outer limits of the interrogation methods the statute allowed. The three lawyers agreed that the president could override or ignore the statute, as needed, to protect national security. And they concluded that those who engaged in conduct that might violate the law might nevertheless have an appropriate legal defense based on "self-defense" or "necessity."

The Bybee memo caused a storm of protest in the legal community, including among many conservative lawyers inside the Justice Department. "From the beginning, no one has ever said we would violate the torture statute," says a former Justice Department official. "So why would you write a memo writing all the ways we could violate the statute? It's just dumb."

In October 2003, Bybee's replacement as the head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing all the "war on terror" memos the office had generated and later told the Pentagon not to use the Bybee memo. Deputy Attorney General James Comey soon ordered the memo withdrawn, and another OLC attorney, Daniel Levin, then wrote a more limited opinion that scrapped whole sections of the Bybee memo. Unlike Bybee, Levin circulated his draft memo widely and made revisions, according to Justice Department officials, after lawyers at the State Department and other agencies had commented on it.

As with the incarceration and interrogation issues, President Bush's decision, within days of the 9/11 attacks, to authorize the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States, without review by the secret Justice Department intelligence court, had David Addington's handwriting all over it. Bush, Addington and others in the small coterie of conservative administration lawyers argued, had the authority to order the secret surveillance under his constitutional authority as commander in chief and by the authority granted to him by Congress's use-of-force resolution before the invasion of Afghanistan. Goldsmith and Patrick Philbin weren't so sure. In March 2004, the two Justice Department lawyers expressed their doubts about the program to Comey, the deputy attorney general. Like Addington, Goldsmith and Philbin are extremely conservative and pro-presidential power. But according to former Justice Department attorneys who know both men, they are also careful lawyers who found Addington and Yoo's legal analysis and opinions to be sloppy and overreaching. By reviewing all the "war on terror" memos, says a former Justice Department attorney, "part of what Jack was doing was returning OLC more to its traditional role." Addington excoriated Goldsmith over what he viewed as his betrayal, administration officials say, and his response, several individuals who know him say, was entirely in keeping with his character. People in the front lines of the war on terrorism "were relying on these memos," says one former Justice Department official.

"People felt like you're changing the rules on us; you're running for the hills." That, says Cheney adviser Matalin, is antithetical to Addington's makeup: "Once he's disaggregated the problem and reaggregated the solution," Matalin says, "he can stand his ground."

"Angels."

In recent months, the battle over executive power has pitted Addington and Cheney against Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who spearheaded an amendment banning the use of torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of detainees. The administration wanted McCain to include presidential discretion to shield interrogators from prosecution and immunity for officials who approved acts of abuse. Cheney's office was deeply engaged in pushing the changes--and in trying to scotch the McCain legislation. "It was coming from Addington," says Horton, "time and time again."

Bush threatened to veto the McCain legislation, and Cheney personally joined the fray, urging Republican senators to exempt the CIA from the provisions. In the end, Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, met with McCain to negotiate a compromise when it became clear that McCain had rolled up veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate.

The McCain amendment requires the government to set out uniform standards for detainee interrogations in an updated field manual. The manual was last revised after the 1992 Gulf War and ceased to have legal force in 2002. A new manual has not been reissued. "Addington has been the principal reason there has been no manual," Horton says. "It's his refusal to accept Geneva Conventions on any terms. We know this for a fact."

As legal scholars continue to examine the government's 9/11 policies, David Addington's singular presence looms larger than ever. What is unclear, at this juncture anyway, is how history will regard him: as a legal path setter who devised innovative means to help a president defeat an unconventional enemy or as a dangerous advocate who, in pushing the envelope legally to help prosecute the war on terrorism, set U.S. foreign policy, and America's image in the world, back by decades. Even his toughest critics in the administration say Addington believes utterly that he is acting in good faith. "He thinks he's on the side of the angels," says a former Justice Department official. "And that's what makes it so scary."

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Latest: November, 3 2005

Cheney's new chief of staff controversial

Addington has been at the center of administration's biggest fights

Lewis “Scooter” Libby was the most influential advisor to a vice president in history — powerful, but clearly not irreplaceable.
After his indictment, Libby resigned and Cheney named another one of his most trusted advisors to be his new chief of staff.
His name is David Addington. Next to Libby, he may be the most discrete staffer in all of the White House.
He is “very bright, loyal, discrete” said David Gribben, who has worked with Addington and is one of the vice president's oldest friends.
Like Libby, Addington is a man very much in Cheney's image and also a controversial figure.

According to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment, Addington was one of the officials that Libby spoke with about Valerie Plame before her covert CIA status was revealed.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said, “We all know Vice President's office was the nerve center of an operation to sell the war and discredit those who challenged it.”
Today Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded it’s time that Cheney clean house.
"For a Vice President's office that needs a fresh start this team seems to be a stale move to hunker down and get in the bunker," said Democrat Charles Schumer.
But that's not likely to happen.
In fact, Cheney's decision to name Addington was also one more signal this Vice President has no plans to change his ways.
Addington has been at the center of some of the administration's fiercest fights: As the vice president's lawyer, he advocated enlarging presidential powers; He kept Cheney's meetings with corporations over energy policy a secret; He was the primary author of an August 2002 opinion from the Justice Department that said torture might be justified in some cases.
He's currently fighting to exempt the CIA from a proposal by Senator John McCain to ban cruel and inhuman treatment of enemy combatants.

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David Addington, a Bureaucratic Master

Nov. 1, 2005 - Shortly after he became defense secretary in 1989, Cheney installed in the office next door to his own suite a young special assistant named David S. Addington. That move displaced a uniformed officer and rankled the military, but it did not slow Mr. Addington's path to power.
Smart, secretive and direct, Mr. Addington is a man very much in Mr. Cheney's image. Now, at 48, he is at Mr. Cheney's right hand again, succeeding Lewis Libby as the vice president's chief of staff. But while Mr. Addington has spent much of his career in proximity to Mr. Cheney, his admirers and detractors alike say his success is rooted in his mastery of the skills of bureaucratic combat.
"He's regarded within all the parts of government that have come into contact with the vice president's office as a force of nature in his own right," said Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer who worked with Mr. Addington in the Bush White House, as an associate counsel. "He tends to accomplish more operating as a lone wolf than do others who are backed by entire government departments."
"There are some people in government who are diplomats and others in government who are warriors," Mr. Berenson said, "and Addington certainly falls on the warrior side of that line." As Mr. Cheney's counsel since 2001, Mr. Addington has been at the center of some of the administration's fiercest fights, advocating expansive presidential powers and limited rights for terror suspects. By most accounts, he has more than held his own, in some cases overshadowing Alberto R. Gonzalez, when Mr. Gonzalez was White House counsel, and shaping the White House view in debates with the Departments of Justice, State and Defense.
"He's always been eager to put forth a very strong and unyielding agenda, which says the president and war powers über alles," said Bruce Fein, a Washington lawyer who worked with Mr. Addington as a fellow Republican counsel on theIran-contra committee in the 1980's.
Mr. Addington entered government straight out of the Duke University law school in 1981, as a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency. By the time he reached the Pentagon, he had already made stops in Congress, on the House Intelligence and Iran-contra committees and in the White House, as a deputy assistant to President Reagon, for legislative affairs.
During eight years out of government, under President Bill Clinton, Mr. Addington practiced law and headed a political action committee, the Alliance for American Leadership, set up in large part to explore a possible presidential candidacy for Mr. Cheney.
But some Democrats who have worked with him say they do not regard him as particularly partisan; Jeffrey H. Smith, who ran the transition effort at the Pentagon before Mr. Clinton took office, says Mr. Addington is "tough, to be sure, but he's also very direct, and I've found him to be very professional and very honest."
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Addington has been one of the most important architects of the administration's new legal structure for the detention and interrogation of terror suspects.
According to current and former officials who worked with him closely, he was a primary author of the Nov. 13, 2001, presidential order that established the military's sweeping powers to detain terror suspects and try them before military commissions. Mr. Addington has also played a central role in efforts to expand the legal authority of clandestine intelligence officers to detain and interrogate suspects in terrorism investigations, those officials said. Among other efforts, they said, he helped to shape an August 2002 opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that said torture might be justified in some cases. In an unusual step, the White House formally repudiated the memorandum after it became public last year.
Allies and opponents of Mr. Addington often describe him as a kind of legend within the bureaucracy, a man of formidable intelligence, passionate, conservative views and a frequently eviscerating style toward those who openly disagree with him.
He has cast a particularly long shadow at the Pentagon, where many senior military lawyers remain suspicious of him more than a decade after they first clashed over his role, as an aide to Defense Secretary Cheney, in efforts to scale back the authority of lawyers in the uniformed services.
Mr. Addington worked closely with Mr. Libby, who stepped down as chief of staff last Friday after he was indicted on five felony charges related to the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had traveled to Niger at the C.I.A.'s request to explore accusations related to Iraq's weapons program. Mr. Addington is mentioned briefly, by title, in the indictment of Mr. Libby, as having participated in a conversation on July 8, 2003, in which Mr. Libby asked what paperwork the C.I.A. might keep if an employee's spouse took an overseas trip.
One of the titles held by Mr. Libby, that of Mr. Cheney's national security adviser, will not fall to Mr. Addington but to John P. Hannah, a foreign policy aide whose ties to the vice president are less deeply rooted.
Mr. Hannah has worked for Mr. Cheney since 2001, but he began his career in Washington as a protégé of Dennis B. Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator. Mr. Ross taught Mr. Hannah at Stanford University, and later took him to the State Department, under the first President Bush, when Mr. Ross was director of policy planning.
Mr. Hannah later served at the State Department under Warren Christopher, where he worked with Thomas E. Donilon, who was Mr. Christopher's chief of staff. Under Mr. Bush, Mr. Hannah worked closely with Mr. Libby in preparing a draft of a speech for Secretary of State Colin Powell that laid out the Bush administration's rationale for war against Iraq.
Beyond the more circumscribed role, friends of Mr. Addington say he is a very different person from Mr. Libby, a novelist and avid athlete who was picked up at his home each morning by a government driver. Mr. Addington rides the Metro back and forth to work from his home in Alexandria, Va., associates say, and they say that is unlikely to change even though his new post entitles him to car service.
The father of three daughters, the oldest of whom is in college, Mr. Addington is married to Cynthia M. Addington, who does not work outside the home, his friends say. He typically works late into the evening, said Nancy Dorn, who worked with Mr. Addington in Congress, in the White House, and as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
"Whether it was a micro issue or a macro issue, Dave gave it the same kind of attention," Ms. Dorn said. "He's the antithesis of the image of Washington, in some regards."

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Archives: October 11, 2004

David Addington's power moves makes him "a player" in Washington.

In Cheney's Shadow, Counsel Pushes the Conservative Cause

Since he took office, Vice President Cheney has led the Bush administration's effort to increase the power of the presidency. "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," he said after a year in office, calling it "wrong" for past presidents to yield to congressional demands. "We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."
Cheney has tried to increase executive power with a series of bold actions -- some so audacious that even conservatives on the Supreme Court sympathetic to Cheney's view have rejected them as overreaching. The vice president's point man in this is longtime aide David Addington, who serves as Cheney's top lawyer.

Where there has been controversy over the past four years, there has often been Addington. He was a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects. He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts.
Addington also led the fight with Congress and environmentalists over access to information about corporations that advised the White House on energy policy. He was instrumental in the series of fights with the Sept. 11 commission and its requests for information. And he was a main backer of the nomination of Pentagon lawyer William J. Haynes II for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Haynes's confirmation has been a source of huge friction on Capitol Hill.
Colleagues say Addington stands out for his devotion to secrecy in an administration noted for its confidentiality. He declined to be interviewed or photographed for this article, and he did not respond to a list of specific points made in the article.
Addington, 47, was a lawyer and GOP staffer on congressional committees on intelligence and the Iran-contra matter, before Cheney chose him to serve as general counsel at the Pentagon when Cheney was defense secretary.
Even in a White House known for its dedication to conservative philosophy, Addington is known as an ideologue, an adherent of an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that favors an extraordinarily powerful president.
The unitary executive notion can be found in the torture memo. "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority in these areas," the memo said. Prohibitions on torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority. . . . Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield." The same would go for "federal officials acting pursuant to the president's constitutional authority."
"The Framers understood the [commander in chief] clause as investing the president with the fullest range of power," the memo said, including "the conduct of warfare and the defense of the nation unless expressly assigned in the Constitution to Congress." That "sweeping grant" of power, it continued, is given because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."
On the job, colleagues describe Addington as hard-edged and a bureaucratic infighter who frequently clashes with others, particularly the National Security Council's top lawyer, John Bellinger. Officials say disputes between Addington and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, led Goldsmith to resign after eight months in the job; Addington had sought to persuade OLC to take a more permissive line on torture.
Still, even foes admire Addington's work ethic and frugality; he takes Metro from his home in Alexandria instead of using his White House parking space.
Addington's influence -- like Cheney's overall -- extends throughout the government in his bid to expand executive power. He goes through every page of the federal budget in search of riders that could restrict executive authority. He meets daily with White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and often raises objections to requests for information from Congress or the public, officials say. He also routinely works to defeat proposals from the State Department, where the pervasive internationalist philosophy is at odds with Cheney's neoconservatism.
Occasionally, others in the administration have sought to keep Addington out of the loop to avoid his inevitable objections. When the White House agreed, under pressure from Congress, to appoint a commission to investigate the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Cheney's office did not know about it until a reporter from The Washington Post called to inquire. There has been something of a backlash against Addington's philosophy within the administration, where some believe his aggressive legal arguments have caused the courts to become more suspicious of executive authority. That was a common complaint when the Supreme Court in June dealt the administration major defeats in the Hamdi and Rasul cases regarding terrorism detainees.
The court ruled that U.S. citizens held as "enemy combatants" are entitled to contest the government's case in court. It also ruled that al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could ask to be set free by a U.S. judge. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
"Addington adds to the problems the president has with the courts," said Bruce Fein, who was an official in the Reagan Justice Department and worked with Addington during the Iran-contra probe. Fein said Addington is the "intellectual brainchild" of overreaching legal assertions that "have resulted in actually weakening the presidency because of intransigence."
Fein said Cheney and Addington, while arguing that they are reclaiming executive authority, are actually seeking to push it to new levels. Many of the restraints on executive authority -- the War Powers act, anti-impoundment legislation, the legislative veto and the independent counsel statute -- have already disappeared or become insignificant.
"They're in a time warp," Fein said. "If you look at the facts, presidential powers have never been higher."
In part, Cheney and Addington may be reflecting the reality from when they served in Congress, Cheney as a Republican leader and Addington as a staff member. During the Iran-contra hearings, Addington was heavily involved in arguing that Congress was improperly tying the hands of the president by preventing him from helping Nicaragua's contras.
Cheney and Addington became close in 1984, when Addington was a lawyer on the House intelligence committee, one of Cheney's panels. After their time together at the Pentagon, where Addington was known as Cheney's "gatekeeper," Addington became president of a Cheney political action committee, Alliance for American Leadership, that helped fund a 1996 presidential exploration bid for Cheney.

David Addington, 47: Title: Counsel to Vice President Cheney.
Education: Bachelor's degree, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service; law degree, Duke University School of Law.
Past Careers: Senior vice president and general counsel, American Trucking Associations; partner, Holland & Knight; counsel, Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell; president, Alliance for American Leadership; general counsel, Defense Department, 1992-93; special assistant to the secretary of defense; special assistant and then deputy assistant to President Ronald Reagan for legislative affairs; counsel, House committees on intelligence and foreign affairs, 1984-87; assistant general counsel, CIA, 1981-84.

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US slammed by UN

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UN body accuses US of violating human rights

5 Nov. 2010

America face barrage of criticism from UN Human Rights Council over Guantanamo and torture allegations. US President George Bush personally authorised the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind. UN members accused the US of violating human rights though covert CIA operations "carried out on pretext of combating terrorism". US officials said: "United States does not torture and it will not torture."

US official Ileana Ros-Lehtinen refused to accept criticism from member of UN body. She said "the 47-member UN Human Rights Council was "dominated by rogue regimes. Serial human rights abusers like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela all hijacked the platform to attack the US for imaginary violations. The US should walk out of this rogues' gallery and seek to build alternative forums that will actually focus on abuses and deny membership to abusers."

Amnesty International said that the US must hold accountable those officials responsible for torture. Human rights organisations said that the current and previous US administrations should be accountable to all allegations of torture in Iraq and interrogations of terror suspects around the world; and not only is justice not being done, it is also prevented from being done; Obama administration is becoming an obstacle to achieving accountability in human rights.

Newly-published Iraq war secrets by WikiLeaks have revealed a large number of brutalities against Iraqi civilians, many recounting tales of abuse by coalition forces. The field reports contain numerous official accounts of alleged detainee abuse by the multi-national troops in war-torn Iraq. One such document dating back to September 2005 depicts the forces brutally kicking and stoning a farmer over allegations that he was planting an improvised explosive device. The secret documents published by the whistleblower website over the weekend are a part of the nearly 400,000 classified reports about the US-led invasion of Iraq dating from January 2004 to the end of 2009. The documents have shed light on a spate of crimes and offences committed in Iraq over the past few years, including rape, assassinations and murders. The site has also exposed documents on the similar US-led war in Afghanistan and is expected to disclose additional related details.


US still investigating waterboarding torture: official

A senior US official said on Friday that waterboarding was clearly outlawed as torture, with an investigation still under way to see if those who ordered such a practice could be prosecuted.

The United States is under the scrutiny of the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council for the first time on Friday 5 November 2010.

This is the first time the U.S. has formally participated in the Universal Periodic Review, a process under which the human rights records of all 192 U.N. Member States are assessed every four years.

Cuba and Iran blast U.S. on human rights at U.N. summit

The United States defended its human rights record from criticism from countries including Cuba and Iran, who called for it to close Guantanamo prison and investigate alleged torture by its troops abroad.

A U.S. delegation also heard demands for an end to discrimination against minorities and immigrants and a banning of the death penalty.

The debate took place in the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is gradually reviewing the performance of all 192 U.N. member states.

"While we are proud of our achievements, we are not satisfied with the status quo. We will continue to work to ensure that our laws are fair and justly implemented," Michael Posner, assistant U.S. secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, told the Geneva forum. The United States ratified the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 1994.

But diplomats from countries at odds with Washington -- some of whom queued overnight to be among the first on the speakers' list -- hammered the U.S. delegation for alleged abuses.

Cuban ambassador Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez spoke first, calling on Washington to end the blockade on his island country and respect the Cuban people's right to self-determination.

Venezuela's envoy German Mundarain Hernandez said it should "close Guantanamo and secret detention centers around the world, punish those people who torture, disappear and execute detainees arbitrarily and provide compensation to victims."

Iran's delegation urged the United States to "halt serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law including covert external operations by the CIA carried out on pretext of combating terrorism."

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that former president George W. Bush said in his memoirs that he personally gave the go-ahead for CIA officers to use waterboarding on self-confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The United States submitted a 29-page report to the 47-member forum listing achievements and conceding shortcomings.

UN heard that US blockade against Cuba was "a crime of genocide."

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US rejects UN calls for torture probe

US rejected UN call for independent investigation into abuses of human rights and torture by Americans. The US has faced much criticism at the UN top human rights assembly over allegations of torture and delays in the closure of Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.

The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council called on the White House to investigate allegations of torture in US detention centers abroad.

The ambassadors of 47 member-states urged the swift closure of US detention centers in Guantanamo in Cuba and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

European countries including Britain, as well as Australia, recommended a moratorium or abolition of the death penalty

France urged President Barack Obama to "honor his promise" in 2009 to close Guantanamo where a total of 172 of the 242 detainees, from when Obama took office in 2008, are kept. France insist on the need for help from Congress, the courts and US allies willing to host ex-detainees.

Cuban ambassador Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez called on the US to "halt war crimes and the killing of civilians." Venezuela's German Mundarain Hernandez recommended that Washington "put to trial those responsible for victims of torture."

US is trying to limit damage by hundreds of thousands of newly-released Iraq war secrets by Wikileaks. It reveals a large number of brutalities against Iraqi civilians and children. One log by US military recounts the rape of an Iraqi girl by a US soldier. According to the document, a US soldier raped a little Iraqi girl in 2007 but was not disciplined for his act of violence. The soldier was merely notified that an Iraqi man intended to kill him because of the rape. The Iraqi man was transferred to the Ramadi Detention Facility for threatening to kill a foreigner.

Four hundred thousand files, released by the whistleblower website, cover the period between January 1, 2004, and January 1, 2010 of the US occupation of Iraq.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that former US president George W. Bush wrote in his new memoir that he personally gave the go-ahead for CIA officers to waterboard alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The 36-member US delegation tried to downplay the human rights violations committed by Washington, but recognized that the US record was "not perfect."

"While there were some politically-motivated conversations, overall the conversation was constructive dialogue on international human rights," delegation chief and assistant secretary at the US State Department, Esther Brimmer told reporters afterwards.

Although no action is taken in the four-yearly "Universal Periodic Review" it exposes governments to examination by their peers and the UN. The US had refused to join the UN council under the Bush administration.


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News on CIA Torture

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ICRC claims CIA tortured detainees
Report deatils torture methods used
CIA admits torture

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BBC - Monday, 16 March 2009

Report claims CIA used 'torture'

The ICRC report implies the US violated international law

By Paul Reynolds - World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

CIA interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda suspects "constituted torture", according to a leaked report by the international Red Cross.

The findings were based on testimonies by 14 so-called "high-value" detainees who were held in secret CIA prisons.

They were interviewed after being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

President George W Bush denied torture had happened and President Barack Obama has banned US agents from carrying out such practices.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has an international role in monitoring standards for prisoners and trying to ensure compliance by governments with the Geneva Conventions.

It was denied access to the prisoners until their transfer to Guantanamo Bay.

Among those interviewed by the ICRC was the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who said he was told he would be "brought to the verge of death and back".

The ICRC report was obtained by Mark Danner, a US writer, whose account is in the New York Review of Books.

The report was not intended for publication but, as is the procedure in such cases, was given in confidence to the US government.

"For the first time the words are those of the detainees themselves," Mark Danner says in a podcast attached to his story.

'Breaking point'

The report's table of contents lists the methods the prisoners told the ICRC they had endured.

Taken overall they constitute an attempt to break a prisoner down through sensory deprivation and beatings, none of which is supposed to leave physical damage that can be traced.

The accounts indicate that a combination of methods was used on each prisoner.

The methods listed included: Suffocation by water or waterboarding; prolonged stress standing; beating by use of a collar; confinement in a box; prolonged nudity; sleep deprivation and subjection to noise and cold water; and denial of solid food.

"They never used the word 'torture'... only to 'hard time'," Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is quoted as saying.

"I was never threatened with death, in fact I was told that they would not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the 'verge of death and back again'."

He said he underwent waterboarding five times: "A cloth would be placed over my face, cold water from a bottle kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so I could not breathe."

He said a clip was put on his finger to monitor his pulse "so they could take me to the breaking point".

'Minimise physical damage'

Another prisoner Abu Zubaydah was apparently the first to be subjected to this "alternative set of procedures".

He said: "I was told... that I was one of the first to receive those interrogation techniques, so no rules applied."

In his case, there was a variation apparently not used subsequently.

He said he was put into a tall box and later into a smaller one in which he had to crouch, causing a wound on his leg to start bleeding.

He also had a towel tied round his neck with which his interrogators would slam him against a wall, which had plywood attached to it.

Mr Danner surmised this was to minimise the physical damage caused to him.

With other prisoners this towel became a plastic collar used with the same effect.

Contradiction?

President Bush acknowledged that, as he put it, an "alternative set of procedures" had been used on some prisoners but he denied this meant they had been tortured, which is outlawed by an international convention.

"The United States does not torture," President Bush said in September 2006. That was after the techniques described had been used.

The Bush administration developed a legal protection, under which the definition of torture was narrowed to exclude the methods described.

Mr Danner says the ICRC report now presents a "clear contradiction" of that position and that "this contradiction needs to be worked out".

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the US's Senate Judiciary Committee, has proposed that former officials be given immunity in return for evidence.

Human rights groups want accountability.

President Obama has spoken of "looking forwards". He has also banned the use of the techniques by all US agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had been given special dispensation by the Bush administration.

The ICRC has said that it regrets the publication of the information attributed to its report.

'Essential'

There has been a counter attack by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who once said that the use of waterboarding had been, for him, a "no-brainer".

He accused President Obama of "making choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack".

Some have questioned the value of the intelligence gained from harsh techniques.

Mr Cheney said: "I think those programmes were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States after 9/11."


'INTERROGATION METHODS'

Waterboarding
Beatings
Sleep deprivation
Prolonged stress standing
Prolonged nudity
Confinement in a box
Denial of solid food

Source: ICRC Report

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7945783.stm
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The Independent - Tuesday, 17 March 2009

Revealed: the secret report that details abuse of terror suspects

Red Cross dossier based on interviews with inmates of Guantanamo Bay

By David Usborne in New York

Interrogation techniques used by the US on al-Qa'ida suspects in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, including beatings, sleep deprivation and so-called waterboarding, "constituted torture" as well as "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment, according to a secret Red Cross report.

The report, which was not meant for public release, was written after Red Cross observers were allowed to speak to 14 "high value" detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The detainees had been transferred from secret prisons, or black sites, operated by the CIA. The testimony given to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), notably by Abu Zubaydah, who was captured after fighting US soldiers in Pakistan, provides a level of detail about the treatment the men received that has not been seen before.

Zubaydah recalls being slammed repeatedly against a plywood wall in his cell and being confined in dark, coffin-like wooden boxes. He speaks of being left unclothed and struggling to breathe as water was poured on a cloth over his face – a simulated drowning procedure known as waterboarding.

"I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress," he is quoted as saying.

The report's authors say all the men gave strikingly similar descriptions of what had happened, even if they had had little or no contact with the others. Excerpts of the report appear in an article written by Mark Danner, a professor of journalism, to be published in New York Review of Books. It is not clear how he obtained the document.

It is legally and politically significant that the ICRC wrote the report, five copies of which were given to White House and CIA officials in early 2007.

"It could not be more important that the ICRC explicitly uses the words 'torture' and 'cruel and degrading'," Mr Danner told The Washington Post. "The ICRC is the guardian of the Geneva conventions, and when it uses those words, they have the force of law."

The report's contents page lists the interrogation techniques used as: "suffocation by water; prolonged stress standing; beatings by use of a collar; beating and kicking; confinement in a box; prolonged nudity; sleep deprivation and use of loud music; exposure to cold temperature/cold water; prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles; threats; forced shaving and deprivation/restricted provision of solid food."

The report concludes: "The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme, either singly or in combination, constituted torture... Many other elements of the ill-treatment... constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, George Bush told victims' families that some prisoners had been subjected to interrogation beyond US territory using an "alternative set of methods" but that "the United States does not torture... I will not authorise it". Within hours of taking office, Barack Obama outlawed any further torture.


Torture dossier:

The detainees' stories

Abu Zabaydah
Al-Qa'ida operative captured in 2002

"I was strapped down with belts. A cloth was placed over my face and the interrogators poured water on it so I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed rotated upright. The pressure of the straps was very painful. I vomited. The bed was lowered and the same torture carried out again... I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die."

Walid Bin Attash
Yemeni national who planned the attacks on the USS Cole in 2000

"I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell... I was not allowed to clean myself after using the bucket. Loud music was playing 24 hours a day."

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Last Updated: Tuesday, 5 February 2008, 22:15 GMT

CIA admits waterboarding inmates

Michael Hayden (R) spoke as Mike McConnell reported to Congress

"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time", Michael Hayden, CIA director

The CIA says it used waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The CIA has for the first time publicly admitted using the controversial method of "waterboarding" on terror suspects.

CIA head Michael Hayden told Congress it had only been used on three people, and not for the past five years.

He said the technique had been used on high-profile al-Qaeda detainees including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.#

Waterboarding, condemned as torture by rights groups and many governments, is an interrogation method that puts the the detainee in fear of drowning.

Mr Hayden was speaking as National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell presented his annual threat assessment.

Congress has been debating banning the use of waterboarding by the CIA.

President Bush has threatened to veto such a bill.

Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is accused of masterminding the 11 September attacks on the United States.

The two other men Mr Hayden said the CIA had also used waterboarding against are also top al-Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both from Saudi Arabia.

Catastrophe fears

He told Congress: "We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time.

"There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaeda and its workings.

"Those two realities have changed."

In his report, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell focussed attention on al-Qaeda and its leadership based in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Al-Qaeda remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States, both here at home and abroad," he said.

His report said al-Qaeda enjoyed many of the same benefits from its bases in the border areas as it had when it was in Afghanistan proper, and was able to:

use the region as a staging area for attacks outside
maintain a group of skilled operators able to direct operations around the world
pass on morale-boosting messages from Saudi-born al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri
improve its ability to attack the US itself.
Despite this, Mr McConnell praised the Pakistani authorities, saying they had done more to "neutralise" terrorists than any of the US's other partners - despite more than 860 members of their security forces being killed by bombs in 2007.

And although al-Qaeda had suffered some reverses, he said, it remained active and dangerous in Iraq, in North Africa, in the Arabian peninsula, Lebanon, East Africa, Pakistan and South-East Asia.

Other worries outlined by Mr McConnell included:

Russia, China and oil producers using their wealth to advance political goals
nuclear proliferation, especially Iran and North Korea
computer system vulnerabilities.
"The threats we face are global, complex and dangerous," he wrote.

"We must have the tools to enable the detection and disruption of terrorist plots and other threats."

See also:

CIA 'SECRET WAR'

KEY STORIES

UK apology over rendition flights
US 'may' use waterboarding again
CIA admits waterboarding
Inquiry into destroyed CIA tapes
CIA rejects secret jails report
CIA jails in Europe 'confirmed'
Italy CIA kidnap trial adjourned

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7229169.stm

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