[NYTr] Alex Cockburn on Congress and Torture

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl 

The Nation - Dec 31, 2007 issue
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071231/cockburn

Congress to CIA Torturers: 'If Only You'd Told Us'

By Alexander Cockburn

If there was ever a parable about the futility of Congressional
"oversight," it's surely the uproar over the CIA's secret destruction
of the videotapes of its torture sessions with the Al Qaeda men Abu
Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Here we have the spectacle of
members of the CIA oversight committees, like Senator Jay Rockefeller
of West Virginia, saying virtuously that the CIA never told them at the
time about deep-sixing the videos. If true, the CIA was stupid. All the
agency needed to have done was set up a secret viewing room on Capitol
Hill and hold "last peek before we burn them" sessions. Sworn to
silence, a few senators and reps would have trooped along, no doubt
with Larry Craig in the front row hogging three seats with his wide
stance. The CIA says it did brief key legislative overseers about
torture techniques in about thirty private briefings. Democrats thus
briefed included Pelosi, Harman and Rockefeller, along with Republicans
Graham and Goss. With one unknown exception the politicians said it all
looked fine to them, except the CIA should be rougher.

It's all in the labeling. Former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou says he
used to think waterboarding wasn't torture but an enhanced interrogation
technique--even though he refused to inflict it after experiencing it.
Now that he's retired he thinks torture is the word to use. In the
Algerian war of independence, the French general Jacques Massu had a
twelve-volt battery clipped to his body to see how bad it was before he
OK'd its use in interrogation, or so the story goes--though his
torturers certainly finished off many of their victims. Let all these
fence-hoppers, on the Hill or in the government or on the campaign
trail, pontificating on what is or is not torture, get waterboarded,
subjected to isolation, intense sound, savage cold, starvation and
frequent physical abuse. Then let them give their opinion.

The CIA continues to maintain it doesn't go in for torture. As Jeffrey
St. Clair and I describe in detail in "Whiteout," our book on the CIA
(available at www.counterpunch.org), the documented record of its
savageries in this area goes back decades, starting with the
recruitment of Nazi torture technicians in Operation Paperclip. The
1950s saw its increasing obsession with brainwashing and sensory
deprivation. The CIA supplied the interrogators for the Phoenix program
in Vietnam. Witnesses in Congress in 1972 testified that the torturers
cut off fingers, ears and testicles, used electroshock, shoved wooden
sticks through the skulls and into the brains of some prisoners and
rammed electric probes up the rectums of others. Bart Osborn, a US Army
Intelligence officer, told Congress in 1972, "I never knew in the
course of all these operations any detainee to live through his
interrogation. They all died." In 1968, in Bien Hoa prison outside
Saigon, CIA psychologists--frustrated by their failure to break their
captives--performed horrifying atrocities.

Down the years, the CIA has methodically destroyed records on matters
pertaining to torture, assassination and mind control. Every decade
there are protestations that malpractices have definitively ceased,
usually just before the tenure of the CIA director making the claim
ends. Every decade they continue.

Even today, though the Bush Administration is pro-torture, the CIA
shrinks from the word, preferring more genteel vocabulary, like "harsh
interrogation." This prudery has now landed the agency in its public
relations debacle, trying to explain (a) why in 2002 it secretly
videotaped "harsh interrogation" of two members of Al Qaeda, and (b)
why it secretly destroyed these tapes in 2005.

Explanation for the videotaping takes the pious line that the CIA gave
supervisors the ability to assess whether harsh interrogation had
slipped over the line into the no-no land of torture. What they were
actually doing to Zubaydah and Nashiri was abusing them physically in
various violent forms, ultimately suffocating them underwater--the
notorious "waterboarding"--and the more plausible explanation is that
the videotaping was for training purposes. If the sessions were being
filmed to ensure only legal applications of force, then why hastily
destroy the tapes three years later? The CIA says destruction was
prompted by the fear that the tapes might surface in some court
proceeding or as reality TV and the CIA interrogators would be
identified by hostile elements. Translation: the tapes were conclusive
evidence of felonious conduct, and the head of Clandestine Operations
ordered them destroyed.

The White House, still incandescent with rage about the recent National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nonproduction of nukes--one in which
the CIA was of course involved--is taking enormous pleasure in
expressing official dismay at this attempt to purge the historical
record. Since Bush's posture toward archival data is like that of the
early Christians to the great library in Alexandria, it's amazing the
White House press official didn't burst out laughing as she made this
claim.

The uproar has reignited the familiar debate about torture, with the
emphasis on utility rather than moral principle. The retired CIA
interrogator Kiriakou says that after thirty-five seconds of water
torture Zubaydah babbled out Al Qaeda's plans for attack on the
Christian West, and thus thousands of lives were saved. A somewhat
different assessment can be found in Ronald Suskind's recent book The
One Percent Doctrine, based on many interviews with intelligence
officials. They told Suskind that the CIA team that captured Zubaydah
soon determined he was not a senior Al Qaeda man and furthermore was
clinically insane. Nonetheless, they grilled him with great brutality.
Frantic with pain and terror, he shrieked out one imaginary plot after
another, including planned assaults on New York's water supplies,
nuclear plants, shopping malls, banks, the Brooklyn Bridge. At each
disclosure, Suskind writes, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced
in a panic to each...target." Thus "the United States would torture a
mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he
uttered."