Ever since the 9/11 attacks, which left more than 3,000 Americans dead in one day, the debate on the torture of enemies of state of the United States has been weakened. Fears of the average American of the possibility of further attacks were fueled by the administration of President George W. Bush, who invaded Afghanistan in 2002 because the Taleban were sheltering Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and then Iraq in 2003 because Saddam Hussein was allegedly hiding weapons of mass destruction. This caused thousands of suspects to fall into the hands of the US military, who used force and torture in the interrogation of many of them. This also left millions of Americans looking the other way when suspects were being tortured in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
Now the Intelligence Committee of the US Senate this week released a report of 6,000 pages on the torture of detainees by the US Central Intelligence Agency, finding that 119 prisoners passed through the top secret system of interrogation of agency; 39 of them suffered torture; seven of them did not give up any useful information, and 26 of them failed to meet requirements for arrest. The program began in 2002, authorized by President Bush, and lasted until 2008. In the program, the CIA chose targets considered of high importance, such as Abu Zubaidah of Al-Qaeda, and transported them in their private jets to their secret black sites in several countries that are US allies, such as Thailand and Poland, where they were tortured and interrogated by agency staff.
The Senate report concluded that the questioning and living conditions of prisoners held by CIA were much more brutal than the agency admitted; that the harsh techniques were ineffective in extracting useful information from prisoners; that the CIA misled the White House on the results of the torture, exaggerating the results; that the intelligence agency ignored criticism and created barriers for monitoring, and finally, that all this torturing damaged the US’ image in the world. I do not know why it took the Senate five years and 6,000 pages to reach these conclusions, which have been very clear to many in the general public for a long time now.
The torture methods used by the CIA are already well-known: Isolation for days on end; ice baths; psychological torture and death threats; the use of aggressive dogs against Muslim prisoners; the use of the infamous “waterboarding” technique where the prisoner is laid with his head lower than rest of his body and water is poured over the detainee’s face until he thinks he will drown, and in the case of Abu Zubaidah, to be put in a closed coffin, something he underwent for a total of 300 hours.
None of this surprises me much. After all, the neoconservative Bush administration was famous for having hard-line members such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, not to mention Bush himself, who thought that Al-Qaeda should be treated with violence and torture. And American television programs such as “24” and “Homeland” only reinforced the idea that we can toss out the window our concerns about human rights and torture and practically torture freely any person deemed a threat to US national security.
Clearly, the CIA feels that it is above the law, and has felt so for decades. Thankfully, President Barack Obama ended the agency’s excesses in 2009 when he assumed the presidency. In a way I understand the harsh reaction of the American public to how to treat enemy combatants. But it is also disappointing to see a democracy that values defending human rights so much lowering itself to such execrable levels as the CIA did in torturing suspects.
It is lamentable that after spending five years to create such an extensive report on the use of torture by the CIA, the US Senate has not even made recommendations on how to regulate the interrogation of terrorist suspects by the agency. The report also sins in only blaming in general terms the directors of the CIA for the excesses of its agents, leaving the political leaders of the time, such as Bush and Cheney, free of any responsibility and guilt. This is unfortunate since Cheney this week defended the CIA’s actions in several interviews and said he would do it all over again the same way if necessary.
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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
