Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), June 9:
I want my colleagues and the American public to know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions.
This week, Sheldon Whitehouse gave a Senate speech on torture that should be one for the history books. emptywheel caught part of its significance in calling it "a barnburning", and more with these specifics on content:
The speech goes further than President Obama's and Russ Feingold's and Carl Levin's calls on Cheney's lies in two ways. First, those other calls focused on whether the documents Cheney wants declassified actually say what he claims they say; Whitehouse focused on whether Cheney's more basic claims about torture are true. And second, Whitehouse here focuses not on whether we needed waterboarding to get intelligence (Obama, for example, said, "the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques -- which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques -- doesn't answer the core question, which is: Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?), but whether we actually got any useful intelligence from the methods at all.
But for me, even more important was the sentiment of patriotic indignation, exquisitely expressed in relentlessly thorough logic, and culminating in lead quote above, toward the end of the speech carrying with it the accumulated weight of the various key falsehoods Whitehead had knocked down the course of his speech. This was a masterful conclusion to a compelling presentation in which Whitehouse framed the issue of torture in terms of values, not just in the abstract, but in terms of lived history confronting threats far more dangerous to our survival as a nation. This speech clearly defined for one and all what a progressive perspective on torture looks like.
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Whitehead's first act of framing in terms of our values is an historical one, which then leads directly to an acknowledgment of the difficulties we feel--and to the fact we have been deeply deceived:
When Washington's troops hid in the snows of Valley Forge from a superior British force bent on their destruction, we did not torture. When our capital city was occupied and our Capitol burned by troops of the world's greatest naval power, we did not torture. When Nazi powers threatened our freedom in one hemisphere and Japanese aircraft destroyed much of our Pacific fleet in the other, we did not torture. Indeed, even when Americans took arms against Americans in our bloody Civil War, we did not torture.
I know this is not easy. Our instincts to protect our country are set against our historic principles and our knowledge of right versus wrong. It is all made more difficult by how much that is untrue, how much that is misleading, and how much that is irrelevant have crowded into this discussion. It is hard enough to address this issue without being ensnared in a welter of deception.
The historical framing of our values is picked up again later, and then segues into framing in terms of damage to our nation's institutions:
There is another set of questions around how this was allowed to happen. When one knows that America has over and over prosecuted waterboarding, both as crime and as war crime; when one knows that the Reagan Department of Justice convicted and imprisoned a Texas sheriff for waterboarding prisoners; when one sees no mention of this history in the lengthy opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ that cleared the waterboarding--no mention whatsoever; when assertions of fact made in those OLC opinions prove to be not only false but provably false from open source information available at the time; when one reads Chairman Levin's excellent Armed Services Committee reports on what happened at the Department of Defense, it is hard not to wonder what went wrong. Was a fix put in? And, if so, how? A lot of damage was done within the American institutions of government to allow this to happen.
If American democracy is important, damage to her institutions is important and needs to be understood. Much of this damage was done to one of America's greatest institutions--the U.S. Department of Justice. I am confident the Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Leahy's leadership, will assure that we understand and repair that damage and protect America against it ever happening again.
This is very important language. It used to be much more commonplace, but now we seem to only hear it turned upside down and inside out. Like many others, I had hoped to hear such language coming directly from Barack Obama. Instead, he is speaking in the Bushian language of equivocation. But Senator Whitehouse is not. Senator Whitehouse is reminding us what real patriotic straight talk sounds like.
And he is also reminding us what a real, serious interrogation sounds like as well:
To try to clarify it [the issue of torture], I wish to say a few things. The first is that I see three issues we need to grapple with. The first is the torture itself: What did Americans do? In what conditions of humanity and hygiene were the techniques applied? With what intensity and duration? Are our preconceptions about what was done based on the sanitized descriptions of techniques justified? Or was the actuality far worse? Were the carefully described predicates for the torture techniques and the limitations on their use followed in practice? Or did the torture exceed the predicates and bounds of the Office of Legal Counsel opinions?
The last question is crucial, for it lays open the way for criminal prosecutions--and those, in turn, can bring out even more deeply hidden information. And here, Whitehouse reminds us, Leon Panetta himself has already substantially given us the answer we seek:
We do know this. We do know that Director Panetta of the CIA recently filed an affidavit in a U.S. Federal court saying this:
He is referring to descriptions of EITs--enhanced interrogation techniques--the torture techniques. He says in his sworn affidavit:
These descriptions, however, are of EITs as applied in actual operations and are of a qualitatively different nature than the EIT descriptions in the abstract contained in the OLC memoranda.
The words ``as applied'' and ``in the abstract'' are emphasized in the text.
He then goes on with even more questions, and then lets everyone know they are not idle ones:
The questions go on: What was the role of private contractors? Why did they need to be involved? And did their peculiar motivations influence what was done? Ultimately, was it successful? Did it generate the immediately actionable intelligence protecting America from immediate threats that it had been sold as producing? How did the torture techniques stack up against professional interrogation? Well, that is a significant array of questions all on its own, and we intend to answer them in the Senate Intelligence Committee under the leadership of Chairman Feinstein, expanding on work already done, thanks to the previous leadership of Chairman Rockefeller.
But all the above was, in a sense, mere prelude to the heart of the speech, in which Whitehouse lays bare the welter of lies and misrepresentations that have deliberately obscured the central truths of the matter:
Finally--and I am very sorry to say this--but there has been a campaign of falsehood about this whole sorry episode. It has disserved the American public. As I said earlier, facing up to the questions of our use of torture is hard enough. It is worse when people are misled and don't know the whole truth and so can't form an informed opinion and instead quarrel over irrelevancies and false premises. Much debunking of falsehood remains to be done but cannot be done now because the accurate and complete information is classified.
From open source and released information, here are some of the falsehoods that have been already debunked. I will warn you the record is bad, and the presumption of truth that executive officials and agencies should ordinarily enjoy is now hard to justify. We have been misled about nearly every aspect of this program.
President Bush told us ``America does not torture'' while authorizing conduct that America itself has prosecuted as crime and war crime, as torture.
Vice President Cheney agreed in an interview that waterboarding was like ``a dunk in the water'' when it was actually a technique of torture from the Spanish Inquisition to Cambodia's killing fields.
John Yoo, who wrote the original torture opinions, told Esquire magazine that waterboarding was only done three times. Public reports now indicate that just two detainees were waterboarded 83 times and 183 times. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reportedly was waterboarded 183 times. A former CIA official had told ABC News: ``KSM lasted the longest on the waterboard--about a minute and a half--but once he broke, it never had to be used again.''
We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but we were not told how badly the law was ignored and manipulated by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers tried to reject the defective OLC opinions.
We were told we couldn't second guess the brave CIA officers who did this unpleasant duty, and then we found out that the program was led by private contractors with no real interrogation experience.
All the above came in relatively rapid-fire manner. But now, Whitehouse slows the pace to focus our attention more exactly on the bogus claim that it was the CIA that possessed the greater expertise:
Former CIA Director Hayden and former Attorney General Mukasey wrote that military interrogators need the Army Field Manual to restrain abuse by them, a limitation not needed by the experienced experts at the CIA.
Let's look at that. The Army Field Manual is a code of honor, as reflected by General Petraeus' May 10, 2000, letter to the troops in Iraq. He wrote this:
Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. . . . In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual . . . shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.
We are indeed warriors. . . . What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.
Military and FBI interrogators, such as Matthew Alexander, Steve Keinman, and Ali Soufan, it appears, are the true professionals. We know now that the ``experienced interrogators'' referenced by Hayden and Mukasey had actually little to no experience.
Philip Zelikow, who served in the State Department under the Bush administration, testified in a subcommittee that I chaired. He said the CIA ``had no significant institutional capability to question enemy captives'' and ``improvised'' their program of ``cooly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment.'' In fact, the CIA cobbled its program together from techniques used by the SERE Program, designed to prepare captured U.S. military personnel for interrogation by tyrant regimes who torture not to generate intelligence but to generate propaganda.
Colonel Kleinman submitted testimony for our hearing, in which he
stated:
These individuals were retired military psychologists who, while having extensive experience in SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) training, collectively possessed absolutely no firsthand experience in the interrogation of foreign nationals for intelligence purposes.
To the proud, experienced, and successful interrogators of the military and the FBI, I believe Judge Mukasey and General Hayden owe an apology.
This is arguably the most devastating of all the exposures Whitehouse presents, since it clearly demolishes the pretence that not investigating protects the most dedicated and honorable of those protecting us. Quite the opposite: investigating will vindicate the most dedicated and honorable, who were trampled over by a stampede of rank amateurs, as clueless and arrogant as the Vice President who was their prime enabler.
This leads to the last big lie--that of torture saving lives--which Whitehouse deconstructs in even greater detail, which I abridge here:
Finally, we were told that torturing detainees was justified by American lives saved--saved as a result of actionable intelligence produced on the waterboard. That is the clincher, they stay--lives saved at the price of a little unpleasantness. But is it true? That is far from clear.
FBI Director Mueller has said he is unaware of any evidence that waterboarding produced actionable information. Nothing I have seen convinces me otherwise. The examples we have been able to investigate-- for instance, of Abu Zubaida providing critical intelligence on Khalid Shaik Mohammed and Jose Padilla--turned out to be false. The information was obtained by regular professional interrogators before waterboarding was even authorized.
As recently as May 10, our former Vice President went on a television show to relate that the interrogation process we had in place produced from certain key individuals, such as Abu Zubaida--he named him specifically--actionable information. Well, we had a hearing inquiring into that, and we produced the testimony of the FBI agent who actually conducted those interrogations.
Here is what happened....
[Detailed description of Abu Zubaida interrogations, shifting back and forth between trained FBI interrogator Ali Soufan & the CIA's private contractors, in which all the valuable information was obtained by Soufan using non-coercive methods.]
As best as I have been able to determine, for the remaining sessions of 83 waterboardings that have been disclosed as being associated with this interrogation, no further actionable information was obtained. Yet the story has been exactly the opposite. The story over and over has been that once you got these guys out of the hands of the FBI and the military amateurs and into the hands of the trained CIA professionals, who can use the tougher techniques, that is when you get the information. In this case, at least, the exact opposite was the truth, and this was a case cited by the Vice President by name.
All that is what leads up to the quote I began this diary with, which I repeat again:
I want my colleagues and the American public to know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions. |
