The report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, detailing the CIA's secret interrogation of terrorism suspects, known as “enhanced interrogation,” a euphemism for a practice that involves extreme brutality, was not just bleak in and by itself. The report confirmed that the US had broken its own law, international law and moral law.
While many of the abuses in the program were already known — the Washington Post’s investigative reporter Dana Priest, among others, exposed them in 2006 in a three-part series, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize — but the end result of the revelations was to project an image around the world of America as a hypocrite, even in countries that routinely practices torture the report got wide play.
Still, the feisty 22-year-old veteran California Democrat and chairwoman of the Committee, Diane Feinstein, was determined, come what may, to release the report, against objections by some of her colleagues, because, she said, “history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth, and say never again.”
There is no need to reiterate what gruesome practices were inflicted on detainees in black sites, where many, as it now turned out, were innocent of any crime. Let’s just say that the stomach-churning techniques used were ones that, to subvert Oscar Wilde, would not dare speak their own name — certainly not in a family newspaper.
All of which is indeed disgraceful, and never mind that it happened on President George W. Bush’s watch and not on that of President Obama, who put an end to black sites and the dreadful things that went on there in the spring of his first year in office. What matters is that the US, which in its zeal to “catch terrorists” after 9/11 engaged in torture, pursued policies that had been endorsed at the highest levels of government, policies that even now continue to be brazenly defended by the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA acting director John McLaughlin.
But then what matters even more is that the United States has shown the moral courage, via its highest legislative body, to own up to its past mistakes (as France had done after its Algerian debacle in 1962) and, one would presume, think twice before authorizing the same repugnant practices again, by the CIA or any other government agency.
One last question about this sordid affair that needs to be answered is this: Are CIA agents that dumb?
It would appear that the enhanced interrogation techniques adopted by the agency, we read in the committee report, were recommended by a pair of “military psychologists” who had resurrected a study from the 1960s that involved experiments with dogs, conditioned by mild electrical shocks to behave in a desired way, a study they now applied at black sites to eliminate detainees’ “sense of control” and induce a “desired level of helplessness.”
If that is true — and it is, for it’s all there in the committee report — then US taxpayers have been paying the salaries of extremely naive, if not dimwitted, agents. As any student who had completed a course in Psychology 101 in his undergrad years would tell you (and this columnist had), this antiquated theory is based on the Skinnerian model of SR (stimulus-response), devised in the 1950s by the Harvard University behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who conducted experiments on mice, giving them a stimulus (S) to which in time they had become conditioned to give a typical response (R).
Skinner’s theory was discredited totally by the humanistic psychologists in later years who argued that, well, human beings are not mice. They are complex creatures, and you cannot extrapolate about them from experiments you conduct with mice. Their alternative equation, they postulated, should be SOR, that is, stimulus-organism-response. Unlike mice, a human internalizes processes or rationalizes a stimulus before he responds. In short we are not mice, or in this case dogs, but creatures of a higher, more complex order. But tell that to the dummies at the CIA.
In the end, it is not just the CIA that is to blame but all those in the government at the time who knew and condoned what was going on. As Michael Curry, an ordinary citizen who wrote in a letter to the New York Times last Thursday said: “The torture of detainees is a dark spot on our soul. The torture report reminds us that the stain is not simply the result of depraved CIA operatives but was authorized explicitly or implicitly at the highest levels of our government.”
What else is there to do than abide by Sen. Diane Feinstein’s admonition: Never again.
