The Torture Report | Investigating the Bush Administration's Rendition Detention Interrogation Program

The Torture Report Diary

The Torture Report, an initiative of the ACLU’s National Security Project, aims to give the full account of the Bush administration’s torture program. It will bring together everything we know from government documents, investigations, press reports, witness statements and other publications into a single narrative – one that is updated regularly and subject to critical review and improvement as it unfolds.

This Diary page will guide you through newly added sections, recent additions and changes and other relevant information about the Report.

Binyam Mohamed and the Search for Accountability

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 14:27

One of the interesting aspects of Binyam Mohamed's case, which is at the center of the story of Chapter 4, is that it provides a measure of how poorly the U.S. is performing on the question of accountability.

Last week The New York Times published this Reuters piece in its “World Briefing”:

The United States is among dozens of countries that have kidnapped and held terrorism suspects in secret detention over the past nine years, violating their basic human rights, a United Nations report charged Tuesday. It said that Algeria , China , Egypt , India , Iran , Russia , Sudan and Zimbabwe were also detaining security suspects or opposition members in unknown places. “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counterterrorist policies remains a serious problem,” investigators said in a yearlong study that will be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in March.

It is one of the few mentions of the United Nations (UN) report in the American press, and it conspicuously understates the report's aims and conclusions. In fact, while the UN report puts secret detention in a global and historical framework, fully half of the space it devotes to recent violations of prohibitions on secret detention concerns the conduct of the United States since 9/11.

Among these violations is the rendition of detainees to proxy detention sites in third countries. Some snippets of the report's findings:

At least 15 prisoners—mostly seized in Karachi, Pakistan, or in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia—claim to have been rendered by the CIA to the main headquarters of Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID, or Da'irat al-Mukhabarat al-‘Amma) in Amman, Jordan, between September 2001 and 2004. (¶144)

At least seven men were rendered to Egypt by the CIA between September 2001 and February 2003, and another was rendered to Egypt from the Syrian Arab Republic , where he had been seized at the request of the Canadian authorities. (¶146)

At least nine detainees were rendered by the CIA to the Syrian Arab Republic between December 2001 and October 2002, and held in Far Falestin, run by the Syrian Military Intelligence or Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-Askariyya. (¶147)

And finally,

At least three detainees were rendered to Morocco by the CIA between May and July 2002, and held in Temara prison. (¶151)

One of these three is Binyam Mohamed, whose name appears again several pages later, in a section entitled “Complicity in the practice of secret detention.” As the report's authors explain, a country is complicit in secret detention when it either asks another country to secretly detain a person or takes advantage of a secret detention situation by sending questions to the State holding the detainee to use in their interrogation. Among the complicit countries, the report finds, is

The United Kingdom in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed, Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed and Rashid Rauf. In its submission for this study the United Kingdom Government referred to ongoing and concluded judicial assessment of the cases and stressed the work of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), as well as its policy of clear opposition to secret detention. (¶159)

That one paragraph attracted more attention in the UK that the entire report, which documents exponentially more violations by the Americans, did in the United States. In fact, I only found the UN report because the UK 's reaction made more news in the US that the report itself. The Associated Press (AP), in an article rather misleadingly titled “ Authors Defend Claim on UK Secret Prisons,” reported:

The authors of a U.N. report on the use of secret prisons in the fight against terrorism defended on Wednesday their claim that Britain was among countries complicit in the practice, even as the U.K. government dismissed the allegation as unsubstantiated and irresponsible….

The report explicitly mentions Britain as a country that was complicit in secret prisons, based on the claims by former detainees who say U.K. agents provided questions for, or were present at, interrogations conducted by intelligence services of another country.

The report refers to the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was arrested in Pakistan and allegedly tortured there and in Morocco before being flown to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

In its statement the British Foreign Office said: “there is no truth in the suggestion that it is our policy to collude, solicit, or participate in abuses of prisoners.” It also rejected the suggestion that wrongdoing may have been covered up.

As we've seen already in Chapter 4, and as we'll follow in more detail in the chapter's conclusion, the British government's involvement in Binyam Mohamed's rendition and interrogation is being thoroughly investigated by both the Parliament and the courts, and the courts have clearly established that UK intelligence agencies passed questions through to Mohamed's interrogators in Morocco. What the British government continues to deny is that it knew the United States had essentially disappeared Mohamed and that Mohamed was being held and interrogated in Morocco. The facts suggest otherwise, of course, and investigations continue in Britain.

It was because of these investigations that the UN report resonated in England last week and the UK government felt compelled to contest the report's conclusion about its complicity. Meanwhile, in the country whose role in the secret detention of Binyam Mohamed and hundreds of others goes beyond complicity, to that of instigator and ringleader, the U.S. government did not even feel the need to defend or explain itself publicly.

According to the AP, “A spokesman for the U.S. mission in Geneva, Dick Wilbur, said the United States was still reviewing the report.”

"A Ponzi Scheme of Torture"

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 02/03/2010 - 12:17

Today we post the first of two parts of Chapter 4, “A Ponzi Scheme of Torture.”

This chapter connects the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, Jose Padilla, and Binyam Mohamed, three people who were allegedly involved in a ‘dirty bomb' plot that grew more fantastical the more the men were tortured. It traces how torture begat torture, first because bad information extracted through abusive interrogations led to more torture and more bad information, and finally because interrogations were being conducted not only, as the Bush administration has insisted, to produce new intelligence to thwart impending attacks but also to force confessions and extract information that it would use to justify its detention and torture of others.

At the center of this Chapter's “Ponzi scheme of torture” is Binyam Mohamed, a UK-based Ethiopian émigré who was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, abused, flown to Morocco and tortured for 18 months, then flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan , where he was again tortured, and finally delivered, in September 2004, to Guantánamo. Once called Jose Padilla's accomplice in several diabolical terror plots and identified, with Abu Zubaydah, as the source of information about those planned attacks, Mohamed was released last year and is now living as a free man in London.

Part 1 of this Chapter, which we are posting today, is called “The Scheme;” Part 2, which will be posted next week, is entitled, “The Story Unravels.”

Isolation and Torture

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 13:59

It says something about the extreme isolation in which many so-called high value detainees were held, and the extreme secrecy surrounding their circumstances and treatment, that something as simple as a detainee's signature can seem startling.

This week, reading through a sequence of documents that were released to the ACLU in 2008, I found myself staring at not one, but six copies of Jose Padilla's signature.

The first two are on documents he was required to sign on his arrival at the naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina on June 10, 2002, acknowledging the brig rules (“No sitting or lying on your rack between reveille and taps unless you are on medical bedrest; likewise, you may not lie on the floor”; “All meals will be eaten in your cell; you must partake of all meals”; “You may not drill or march in military formation for any purpose except as authorized and directed by the facility commander”; etc.). The other four sign documents with the subject “Approved Request for Telephone Use,” all of which begin “You have been approved the use of the facility's telephone to call your mother for the time period specified below.” The approvals contain a list of rules for the conversation such as “The entire telephone call will be monitored” and “No discussion of the interrogation process.”

The earliest of these is dated December 6, 2004—two and one half years after he'd signed in at the brig. For almost two years of that time, Padilla's lawyers have asserted in a lawsuit he has filed against John Yoo, “Mr. Padilla was deliberately denied all contact with persons outside the military brig, including his family and lawyers. During this period, Mr. Padilla's only human contact was with interrogators during interrogation sessions, or with guards when they delivered his meals through a slot in his cell door, or escorted him to the shower or the concrete cage in which he was intermittently permitted to exercise.”

To get a sense of the effect of those kinds of conditions, all you have to do is read through the rest of the documents in that same batch. These are emails between those who were guarding Padilla and Yasar Hamdi and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri—the two other detainees the U.S. held as enemy combatants in naval brigs under similar conditions—and their superior officers. Many of these messages express serious misgivings about the conditions of their detention and implore their superiors to increase their privileges and contact with the outside world.

Against a backdrop of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, these are some of the most human, and humane, things that I have read so far. There are also a vivid illustration of why prolonged incommunicado detention is itself considered a form of torture.

Here is one particularly moving example, this one concerning Yasar Hamdi:

Tuesday June 03, 2003, 17:55
Subject: CARE OF DETAINEE USCIT [redacted]

I saw the detainee this morning during routine daily rounds and found him to be in low spirits and somewhat depressed. When I questioned him concerning his mood he indicated he was having problems sleeping again and continues to have the same re-occurring bad dreams as before. He indicated he feels very stressed due to the incarceration and being here now for almost (14) months, with no news pertaining to his future. He wanted me to know that he understands we are doing everything we can here at the facility to make him as comfortable as possible and that he has no complaints with my staff or their treatment of him, but that does not help how he feels and that he is finding it increasingly difficult dealing with the incarceration. I told him I had no new information pertaining to his length of stay, that we continue to push incentives as a means to keep his mind off the incarceration [redacted]…. He went on to indicate that he feels as if has been forgotten and that no one is working on getting him freed. I could only tell him this was not the case and that he needs to continue to put his faith in his god and that I and his family would view his giving up at this juncture, as being a failure and the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere from here as a “Basket Case,” of use to no one, to include himself. I continue to point to his family's support and the goals he has set for himself, as reasons to continue to be strong despite the circumstances and uncertainty. He indicated he would continue to endure, but he did not leave me with a good impression that he is capable of going on much longer…. Sir are there any new developments with regard to the detainee's fate that can be passed along. I know I can not give him any false hope, but I fear the rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can keep his head in the game much longer. I will continue to monitor his behavior and get [redacted] and [redacted] aboard, but fear that once this individual decides to go south, there will be little if anything, I can do to bring him back around. I have directed my staff to pay close attention to his behavior, to pick up their discussions with him and that I will conduct evening rounds in an effort to assure him we are concerned about his state of mind and health and welfare.

New Morsels on the Destruction of the Tapes

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 01/15/2010 - 18:20

New materials released last week in the ACLU’s ongoing FOIA proceedings seeking documents on the destruction of the torture videotapes add some details to the narrative in Chapter 3.

The materials are Vaughn indexes containing brief descriptions of 165 internal CIA electronic communications relating to the reasons behind the destruction of the tapes. The CIA continues to withhold the documents themselves, but descriptions of several of the documents are illuminating.

A few of the things we learn:

The conversation about destroying the tapes began during the torture of Abu Zubaydah. Two cables sent from the black site to CIA headquarters on August 19, 2002 discuss “lessons for the future based on CIA experience” and an August 20, 2002 cable discusses “a proposed policy regarding the use of videotapes in interrogations.”
There were extensive conversations about destroying the videotapes in December 2002, right after a CIA lawyer had traveled to the Thai black site to review the tapes and just as the CIA’s inspector general was beginning his special review of the CIA’s RDI program. This conversation, carried out in numerous cables between December 19 and the end of the month, included “proposals on how to handle the possible destruction of the videotapes” and culminated in a memo to CIA Director George Tenet on “the disposition of the videotapes.”
Chapter 3 suggested that, after the July 38, 2003 Principals meeting, the question of the tapes “seemed settled” until the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004. In fact, the Vaughn index shows the conversation continuing even during this period, with a sequence of emails around September 22, 2008 “concerning a draft memo on the destruction of the videotapes” and a February 19, 2004 email with attachment “concerning the legalities as to whether the CIA is legally required to retain the videotapes.”
There are numerous emails in the days leading up to destruction of the videotapes on November 8, 2005, just after the Washington Post published Dana Priest’s front-page exposé of CIA secret prisons and the day before The New York Times published a story on the CIA inspector general’s damning report. The CIA is clearly bracing for these leaks: on October 31, there is a 13-page email chain “discussing whether to publically acknowledge the counterterrorism program” and on November 1, an email with attachment “that discusses the Agency’s detention and interrogation program from a legal standpoint.” There are communications orchestrating how the agency will talk about the destruction of the tapes—a November 4 email “that contains proposed language regarding the disposition of the tapes,” and a November 10 email with the subject “Language for tapes” that discusses “communication between CIA officers relating to the tapes.” Finally, there are destruction orders themselves: a one-page cable on November 8 from the black site to headquarters “requesting permission to destroy the videotapes” and a two-page cable that same day, under the subject “Approval to destroy videotapes,” “discussing a proposal and granting permission to destroy.”

Interestingly, in a related affidavit summarizing the agency’s reasons for continuing to withhold these communications, the CIA says it was willing to release parts of thirteen of the documents.

Prior to releasing the documents, however, the Agency was informed by the Department of Justice that Special Prosecutor John Durham was asserting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Exemption (b)(7)(a) over the proposed-for-release portions of 10 of the 13 documents that the CIA was prepared to release in part. The other three documents the CIA proposed for partial release have Congressional equities that require consultation with Congress before a final determination can be made. Therefore, all of the documents are currently withheld in full.

The three documents being withheld pending consultation with Congress relate to the February 2003 briefings of two members each of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—the briefings that prompted Jane Harman’s letter counseling against destroying the tapes.

The 10 documents that Durham is apparently blocking from release, on the grounds that their release would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation, are:

a 11/9/05 email with embedded cable “confirming the destruction of the videotapes that were stored at a field location”;
an 10/25/02 cable from CIA Headquarters to the field “discussing a proposal to destroy the videotapes”;
a 10/27/02 document consisting of “excerpts of two cables discussing the use of the videotapes”;
a 12/02/02 cable with the subject “Destruction of classified materials” that contains “excerpts from two cables discussing a proposal to destroy the videotapes;
a 12/03/02 cable with the same subject line “discussing the proposed destruction of classified material”;
the 11/08/05 cable requesting permission to destroy the videotapes;
the 11/08/05 cable granting permission to destroy the videotapes;
an undated memo that is a “two-page timeline” “regarding the destruction of the AZ tapes;
an undated three-page memo with the subject line “Interview Questions” that is a “list of questions regarding the CIA’s RDI program”; and
an undated document with the subject “CIA Interrogation Techniques” that is a “thirteen-page memo with handwritten marginalia discussing the CIA’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”

We know from these most recent Vaughn indices, which follow similar indices of documents relating to the tapes’ destruction that the CIA has forwarded to the ACLU in recent months, that there is a substantial paper trail surrounding the destruction of the videotapes. We know Durham has been down that trail. Where is his investigation going?

"Not Well For Anyone"

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 16:25

For me, the one astonishingly honest moment of John Stewart's Daily Show interview with John Yoo two nights ago, a moment that didn't make it into the televised version, came about two and a half minutes in, when Stewart, in his way, first raises the subject of the legal memos Yoo authored.

“I read the briefs that you wrote on torture—” he begins. “And by the way, I didn't finish them, so don't tell me how it ends.”

Yoo laughs for a second, and then grows serious, leans forward, and says emphatically, “Not well for anyone.”

If Stewart had just stopped right there and pressed Yoo to unpack that remarkable admission, we might have watched a significant landmark on the road to accountability.

“That's interesting,” he might have said. “Not well for anyone. Let's expore that. You're saying, not well for those we tortured. Not well for the torturers. Not well for those who authorized or rationalized the torture. Not well for you. Not well for those who came after you, and for those now struggling with how to prosecute cases tainted by torture. Not well for me. Not well for your fellow citizens here in the studio. Not well for the country. Not well for anyone on earth.

[Pause]

“Wow. Great. I tell you what: let's forget these note cards and just spend the next half hour talking about that.”

Instead, Yoo, and the conversation, quickly retreated onto his turf, a mixture of musings on the vast elasticity of presidential powers and a fact-discredited narrative that “we had amazingly captured the number three guy in al-Qaeda, which is an amazing coup” and “the guy was resistant to interrogation.” Stewart, who at the outset conceded the argument on legal questions, saying he found the constitutional questions “gobblety-gook,” never challenged that narrative, and never brought the conversation back down to that early, startlingly human level.

The fact is, “not well for anyone” is the way torture and abuse always ends. Admitting that this is how it has ended in America 's post-9/11 experiments with torture is a huge step, and Stewart should've just let Yoo, who leaned forward to say this, actually take it.

The Fruits of Torture

Submitted by Larry Siems on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 17:01

In Chapter 4, which I'll begin posting next week, I look at how torture begat torture - how bad information extracted through abusive interrogations led to the apprehension of others, who were in turn tortured until they, too, provided bad information.

At the center of the story is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian émigré living in the UK who was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, taken into U.S. custody, flown to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months, then flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was again tortured, and finally delivered, in September 2004, to Guantanamo, where he remained until he was released last year. Binyam Mohamed, who today is a free man living in London, is one of five plaintiffs who are suing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, for providing logistical support to the CIA's illegal extraordinary rendition flights.

One of the remarkable documents I keep referring to as I make my way through the chapter is the November 17, 2009 ruling of Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler in the habeas corpus petition of another Guantánamo detainee, Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed. The government's case that Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed was an enemy combatant hinged on information Binyam Mohamed had provided that they had spent time together at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. That information was likely the fruit of torture, Judge Kessler found, and ordered the government “to take all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate [Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed's] release forthwith.” (He becomes the 31 st detainee to prevail in a habeas corpus petition since the Supreme Court affirmed the right of Guantánamo prisoners to raise such claims in U.S. courts.)

In one particularly striking passage in her opinion, Judge Kessler rejects the government's assertion that because Binyam made the allegations about Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed during relatively benign interrogations after arriving at Guantánamo, rather than during his earlier torture in Morocco and Afghanistan, the information should be admissible in the habeas corpus proceeding. Citing new studies on the neurological and psychological impact of abusive interrogations, she writes:

Torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the government during the War on Terror have been shown to be “geared toward creating anxiety or fear in the detainee while at the same time removing any form of control from the person to create a state of total helplessness.” Metin Basoglu, M. D., PhD., et al., Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment: Is the Distinction Real or Apparent? 64 Archives of Gen. Psychiatry 277, 283 (2007). Indeed, rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ("PTSD") in torture survivors far exceed the rate among the general population. Physicians for Human Rights, Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, 43-44; 43 n.337 (Aug. 2007), available at http://wwww.physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents/report s/leave-no-marks.pdf (collecting journal articles that report rates for torture victims higher than 3.6% rate of PTSD among general population).

According to a new study about to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, "prolonged and extreme stress has a deleterious effect on frontal lobe function," Shane O'Mara, Torturing the Brain: On the Folk Psychology and Folk Neurobiology Motivating "Enhanced and Coercive Interrogation Techniques" Trends in Cognitive Sciences _ (forthcoming) (manuscript at 2), available at http://download.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/PIIS1364661309001... (published Sept. 24, 2009).

A common consequence of coercive interrogation techniques is "confabulation," or the "pathological production of false memories." As the author explains, "[s]tress causes heightened excitability or arousal in the brain and body. Experiencing stress causes release of stress hormones (cortisol and catecholamines. [which] provoke and control the 'fight or flight' response that, if overly prolonged, can result in compromised cognitive neurobiological function (and even tissue loss) in [the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus]." Id. at 1. Because of these physiological reactions, the brain areas function improperly, and "both memory and executive functions (intention, planning[,] and regulation of behavio[]r) can be impaired." Id. The study specifically addresses the "folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect" underlying adoption of enhanced interrogation techniques. Id. at 1.

The author concludes that "[i]t is likely to be difficult or perhaps impossible to determine during interrogation whether the information that a suspect reveals is true: information presented by the captor to elicit responses during interrogation might inadvertently become part of the [subject's] memory, especially because [subjects] are under extreme stress and are required to tell and retell the same events that might have happened over a period of years." Id. at 2.

In this case, even though the identity of the individual interrogators changed (from nameless Pakistanis, to Moroccans, to Americans, and to Special Agent [redacted], there is no question that throughout his ordeal Binyam Mohamed was being held at the behest of the United States. Captors changed the sites of his detention, and frequently changed his location within each detention facility. He was shuttled from country to country, and interrogated and beaten without having access to counsel until arriving at Guantánamo Bay, after being re-interrogated by Special Agent [redacted]. See JE 72 (declaration of Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, stating that he did not meet with client until May of 2005).

From Binyam Mohamed's perspective, there was no legitimate reason to think that transfer to Guanáanamo Bay foretold more humane treatment; it was, after all, the third time that he had been forced onto a plane and shuttled to a foreign country where he would be held under United States authority. Further, throughout his detention, a constant barrage of physical and psychological abuse was employed in order to manipulate him and program him into telling investigators what they wanted to hear. It is more than plausible that, in an effort to please Special Agent [redacted] (consistent with how captors taught him how to behave), he re-told such a story, adding details, such as Petitioner's presence at training, which he thought would be helpful and, above all, would bring an end to his nightmare.

From the New Batch

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 12/23/2009 - 17:28

One of the most fascinating aspects of huge caches of official documents is how, the more you look at them, the more human, and less coldly bureaucratic, they reveal themselves to be.

Last week, the Justice Department released another round of documents in response to the ACLU’s torture documents FOIA, these mainly connected to the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General’s 2008 review of the FBI’s involvement in interrogations in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Two in particular caught my eye.

The first is, on the surface, one of the least personal of the bunch. This 6-page document (which begins on page 25 of this batch), headed “Potentially Relevant Federal Criminal Statutes,” simply lists the laws under which abusive interrogators might be tried – not just the torture and war crimes statutes, but also federal laws barring assault, maiming, sexual abuse, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and others.

The second, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is 9 pages of handwritten notes evidently summarizing interviews with FBI agents in Guantánamo (this document begins on page 13 of this batch). It includes such striking notations as:

Camp X-ray was locale where harsh techniques were used.

“if you think this is tough – you should see what’s happening in Afghanistan”

and

#63

-- During [illegible] meeting [name redacted] learned he was in hospital w/ hypothermia
-- [name redacted] asked about him
-- Colonel: not hypothermia. Low core temp & low B/P. Corpsman was present

Clear to [name redacted] that they didn’t get it.

and

BAU – not effective but also skews into abuse
-- stuff w/in boundary of their guidelines just gets out of control

It is the kind of document you can spend hours staring at, first deciphering the handwriting, then trying to connect shorthand references to what is known about the cases they refer to (#63 is Mohammed al-Qahtani), and then trying to picture the conversations the notes summarize.

And yet I keep returning to the first one, and the fact that, as Office of Legal Counsel attorneys were occupied with twisting and distorting the Torture Convention to accommodate SERE techniques and enhanced interrogation methods, someone took the time to sit down and simply list the laws prohibiting the kinds of treatment detainees were being subjected to in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As such, it, too, is a very human document, striking in its intellectual and moral clarity.

Blowing Smoke

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 15:30

In one of her excellent annotations to Chapter 3, Marcy Wheeler called my attention to this document, which is simply a list that the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) prepared of "physical pressures" commonly used in the services' various "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (SERE) training programs. Like the JPRA memo quoted in the chapter that explicitly warned of the dangers and ineffectiveness of torture, the list was attached to a JPRA memorandum Office of Legal Counsel lawyers used to support the infamous August 1, 2002 torture memo.

As Marcy notes, one of the "pressures" on the list is blowing smoke in a detainee's face—a technique that we saw used in Chapter 2, in a January 2002 incident reported by a military interpreter in Afghanistan in 2002, and in Chapter 3, during the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand. Another is "Immersion in Water/Wetting Down," which we also saw in Chapter 3 and which obviously led to the death of the anonymous detainee at the Salt Pit site in October 2002.

And then there's this item:

Manipulation of diet: Purposeful manipulation of diet, nutrients, and vitamins can have a negative impact on the subject's general health and emotional state. Medical personnel in the POW camps in North Korea believe that a B vitamin compound was responsible, in large part, to the phenomena called "give-up-itis." Recent studies suggest the removal of certain amino acids from a diet can induce heightened levels of emotional agitation.

I now have this document pinned to the wall beside my desk -- as an easy reference to the many SERE techniques "reverse-engineered" for use in real interrogations, and as a reminder of their truly sinister origins.

Will There Be Prosecutions?

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 12/11/2009 - 13:48

Today we post the fifth and final installment of Chapter 3, “Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes.”

It is nearly two years since Attorney General Michael Mukasey made the announcement that, “Following a preliminary investigation into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations, the [Justice] Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter.” It has been months since John Durham, the US attorney assigned to the case, called several CIA officials before a grand jury.

Of course there are the tapes, and there is the conduct that the tapes would have provided a glimpse of – conduct the tapes' destruction was meant to conceal permanently from view. As the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer noted in a blog post yesterday on Daily Kos, the next few weeks will see a new series of tests of whether there will be a full public accounting of detainee mistreatment and abuse, and whether any of those who participated in, ordered, or aided and abetted the torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees will be brought to justice.

In writing Chapter 3, I was haunted by Judge Hellerstein's comment, quoted near the end of the chapter, about the difference between the very detailed descriptions of the CIA's interrogations like this one that have been made public and their application in practice. He reached this conclusion after reading just a few of the hundreds of classified cables that describe the interrogation sessions the videotapes had recorded. So much, clearly, remains to be seen.

The Destruction of the Tapes

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 12/09/2009 - 12:33

It says something about the fundamental unsoundness of the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program—legally, practically, and ethically—that it depended on extreme secrecy, and that breaches of that secrecy were understood to pose a major existential threat to the program itself and a serious legal threat to those charged with carrying it out.

Today's installment, the fourth of the five sections that make up Chapter 3, tracks the fate of the tapes through two periods of crisis for the Bush torture program: the first, in May and June of 2004, beginning with the completion of Helgerson's report and the release of the Abu Ghraib photos and continuing through the leak of the August 1, 2002 torture memo (one of the most tumultuous periods on torture program timeline but one through which the tapes nevertheless survived); and the second, in November 2005, when The Washington Post revealed the network of secret CIA black sites and The New York Times broke the story that gave the first public account of the inspector general's investigation and his conclusions.

The torture tapes would not survive this second spate of leaks. Descriptions of CIA cables released last month (PDF) in the ACLU's ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation revealed that the tapes were destroyed the same day The New York Times ranthe story on Helgerson's report, November 9, 2005.

What Would I have Seen? How Would I Have Reacted?

Submitted by Larry Siems on Mon, 12/07/2009 - 19:08

Today's third installment of Chapter 3 follows CIA Inspector General John Helgerson's inquiry into the black site torture program that led up to the publication of his Special Review in May 2004—and in particular, the conclusions he reached when he reviewed the videotapes of the Thai black site interrogations. We will never be able to see those interrogation tapes, but we have Helgerson's reaction as the best guide to we would have seen and how we might have felt if we had.

It seems to me those two questions—What would I have seen? And how would I have reacted?—are the two simple questions we should all be asking about the interrogations of detainees in US custody after 9/11. The documents are full of accounts by men and women who saw what was happening and had emphatic, clear reactions that it was wrong-Helgerson in this Chapter, the unnamed soldier who worked on an interrogation team in Afghanistan and reported an abusive interrogation in Chapter 2 are just two examples. So much was done, and is still being done, to keep us from seeing what was going on. But we are not without good guides.

On The al-Nashiri Interrogation

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 12/04/2009 - 15:50

Today we post the second installment of Chapter 3, which includes a closer look at the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Al-Nashiri, of course, is one of the detainees Attorney General Holder addressed in his recent announcement about the trials of several Guantánamo prisoners. Although Holder announced that at least five will be tried in federal court, Al-Nashiri is among the group who will still be tried before a military commission. A few days ago the New York Times ran an interesting article exploring the controversy surrounding the decision to try some detainees in civilian courts and some in military commissions – a decision that appears to correlate closely to the quality of evidence in the cases.

At Al-Nashiri's Combatant Status Review Hearing in Guantanamo, his Personal Representative told the Tribunal:

The Detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him. Also, the Detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop. The Detainee confessed under torture to the following events:

1. The French Merchant Vessel Limburg incident.

2. The USS COLE bombing.

3. The rockets in Saudi Arabia .

4. The plan to bomb American ships in the gulf.

5. Relationship with people committing bombings in Saudi Arabia .

6. Usama Bin Laden having a nuclear bomb.

7. A plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship.

Al-Nashiri himself told the Tribunal, "From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way and another time they tortured me in a different way."

One of those ways was the mock execution using a handgun and a drill, which we cover in more detail in today's section.

The remaining three sections of Chapter 3 will be posted on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week.

Eyes in the black sites

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 16:35

Why the CIA filmed the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in its secret prison in Thailand in 2002 and why it suddenly stopped filming; why the agency went back and forth with the White House about destroying those 92 tapes, why it didn't for three years, and why it ultimately did – in many ways the tale of the videotapes tracks the arc of the whole CIA black site torture program, from favored project of a White House inner circle that literally directed the action to a public relations disaster and potential legal nightmare.

Over the next week, I will be posting Chapter 3 of the Torture Report, which begins just before the CIA switched off the cameras in the black site and ends with a court hearing in New York this September over whether the CIA would be forced to release hundreds of documents that describe what the videotapes recorded. Until they are, the best information we have on what was on the tapes – and what went on in the black sites outside the view of the cameras – comes from the May 2004 report of the CIA's Inspector General (PDF), who traveled to the Thai dungeon to watch the tapes in May, 2003.

We post the first of Chapter 3's five sections today, and will add sections every day over the next week.

"Is It Humane"?

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 16:37

This past week, David Frakt, one of our Contributors for the report, sent me the following very illuminating response to my last diary post, “How Close to the Rack and Screw.”

David served as lead defense counsel for the Office of Military Commissions and represented several Guantánamo detainees including Mohammed Jawad, who was recently released. He traces some of the phrases quoted in the “Rack and Screw” questionnaire to the court rulings where they first appeared – and he notes that in the Jawad case in particular, a court affirmed the idea, present in some form in all of the cases the questionnaire alluded to, that torture and abusive treatment seriously jeopardize the government's ability to prosecute those it has abused.

His analysis is particularly timely and valuable in light of the announcement on Friday that five Guantánamo detainees who had been held both in secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times) will be transferred to the United States to stand trial in New York. Much is being made of the daunting legal challenges and procedural challenges these prosecutions will face. But as the legal history David cites makes clear, many of these challenges wouldn't exist if they hadn't been tortured in the first place.

Larry–

In reading your latest post about the mystery document, I recognized many of the quotes, and wanted to share the sources with you and our readers.

1. Describe how each technique is consistent with “traditional executive behavior, contemporary practice, and the standards of blame generally applied to them.” This is a quote from the Supreme Court opinion, County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 848 n.8 (1998) ”in a due process challenge to executive action, the threshold question is whether the behavior of the governmental officer is so egregious, so outrageous, that it may fairly be said to shock the contemporary conscience. That judgment may be informed by a history of liberty protection, but it necessarily reflects an understanding of traditional executive behavior, of contemporary practice, and of the standards of blame generally applied to them.”

2. To what extent are the techniques designed to “instill stress, hopelessness, and fear, and to break resistance.” I believe that the source of this quote is a federal appellate opinion Cooper v. Dupnik, 963 F.2d 1220, 1229 (9thCir. 1992) “ In accord with the plan, the record amply demonstrates that Cooper was subjected to Barkman's interrogation techniques designed to instill stress, hopelessness, and fear, and to break his resistance.”

This case sets forth a standard for what it takes to overcome the qualified immunity standard in a civil rights lawsuit against government officials. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on this case. Here is the Lexis-Nexis overview of Cooper v. Dupnik:

Pursuant to their plan to extract a confession to serial rapes, appellant police officers deliberately ignored appellee detainee's requests for counsel and subjected him to intense custodial interrogation. After appellees, detainee and family, brought suit under 42 U.S.C.S. § 1983 against appellants, city and officers, for violation of his U.S. Const. Amend. V and XIV rights, the trial court denied appellants' defense of qualified immunity. Appellants sought review, arguing that the interrogation contravened the Miranda standards but was not a violation of constitutional rights. The court affirmed and ruled that the privilege against self-incrimination applied to custodial questioning as well as court proceedings, that the privilege included the right to remain silent and to have counsel present, and that no immunity shielded a deliberate constitutional violation. The court also ruled that the failure to extract a confession or to charge a crime was irrelevant, that extraction of a statement with any evidential value denied due process, and that the right to remain silent was breached and due process violated effective with the physical or psychological coercion.

3. Do any of the techniques cause “severe mental distress or suffering”? This language paraphrases the Convention Against Torture, Article I: “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession” The prohibition on torture in the CAT has been codified into U.S. criminal law in the U.S. War Crimes Act, which provides the following definition of torture: “ an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession” 18 U.S. C. § 2441 (d) (1)(A)

4. How close is each technique to the “rack and screw”? This is a quote from Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 172 (1952) , a Supreme Court case which established the premise that evidence derived from outrageous government conduct could be excluded and convictions based on such evidence could be overturned. The full quote from Rochin: “ This is conduct that shocks the conscience. Illegally breaking into the privacy of the petitioner, the struggle to open his mouth and remove what was there, the forcible extraction of his stomach's contents -- this course of proceeding by agents of government to obtain evidence is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities. They are methods too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation.”

5. Do the techniques “offend hardened sensibilities”? Another quote from Rochin v. California , 342 U.S. 165, 172 (1952)

6. Do the techniques violate “the whole community sense of decency and fairness that has been woven by common experience into the fabric of acceptable conduct”? This is a quote from another Supreme Court case, Breithhaupt v. Abram , 352 U.S. 432, 436 (1957) : “ Furthermore, due process is not measured by the yardstick of personal reaction or the sphygmogram of the most sensitive person, but by that whole community sense of "decency and fairness" that has been woven by common experience into the fabric of acceptable conduct. It is on this bedrock that this Court has established the concept of due process.” (A sphygmogram is a tracing made by a sphygmograph and consisting of a series of curves that correspond to the beats of the heart.)

7. Do the techniques “violate the decencies of civilized conduct”? Another quote from Rochin v. California , 342 U.S. 165, 173 (1952): “It has long since ceased to be true that due process of law is heedless of the means by which otherwise relevant and credible evidence is obtained. This was not true even before the series of recent cases enforced the constitutional principle that the States may not base convictions upon confessions, however much verified, obtained by coercion. These decisions are not arbitrary exceptions to the comprehensive right of States to fashion their own rules of evidence for criminal trials. They are not sports in our constitutional law but applications of a general principle. They are only instances of the general requirement that States in their prosecutions respect certain decencies of civilized conduct. Due process of law, as a historic and generative principle, precludes defining, and thereby confining, these standards of conduct more precisely than to say that convictions cannot be brought about by methods that offend "a sense of justice."

8. Are the techniques “so egregious, so outrageous, that they fairly may be said to shock the contemporary conscience”? This is a quote from another U.S. Supreme Court opinion, County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 848 n.8 (1998) : I n a due process challenge to executive action, the threshold question is whether the behavior of the governmental officer is so egregious, so outrageous, that it may fairly be said to shock the contemporary conscience. That judgment may be informed by a history of liberty protection, but it necessarily reflects an understanding of traditional executive behavior, of contemporary practice, and of the standards of blame generally applied to them.

The County of Sacramento quote is a paraphrasing of Rochin v. California , “ This is conduct that shocks the conscience.”

What the series of questions in this mystery document suggests is that those reviewing the interrogation techniques were concerned that the use of the techniques could subject them to criminal charges for torture or civil lawsuits for damages, and could result in the exclusion of the evidence obtained and/or dismissal of entire charges in subsequent criminal prosecutions of the persons being interrogated utilizing the proposed techniques on the basis of a due process violation.

This questionnaire also shows the author's awareness that the Supreme Court would likely find that Constitutional due process standards would apply to detainees when ultimately tried, even in military commissions.

This series of questions highlights the importance of the President's decision that the Geneva Conventions, even Common Article 3, did not apply to those captured in the war on terror. If these standards applied, then you wouldn't need all these questions, because you would only need to ask one question about any proposed interrogation technique: “Is it humane?” (Common Article 3 requires that persons detained in an armed conflict “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.”) “Is it humane?” is the one question you will never see in any of the Bush Administration memos.

The reason that I recognize so many of these quotes is that I used them in my motion to dismiss the charges against my client Mohammed Jawad (a former Guantánamo detainee, now released) on the basis of torture, utilizing the “outrageous government conduct” standard. The motion and government response can be found here. Although the judge did not grant the motion to dismiss, he did affirm that he had the power to do so, reaffirming the viability of this doctrine, even in military commissions. The opinion is available here.

(Emphasis added.)

How Close to the “Rack and Screw”?

Submitted by Larry Siems on Wed, 11/04/2009 - 12:18

On Friday, the government released a new round of documents in the ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation, among them several that the CIA and Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel claimed they'd missed on previous searches of their files.

One of these documents (PDF) is a mysterious one-page questionnaire that reads in its entirety:

Describe the importance of each technique as applied to this person. What do you reasonably hope to accomplish? Describe past successes of each technique in detail.
Describe how each technique is consistent with “traditional executive behavior, contemporary practice, and the standards of blame generally applied to them.” Describe any other traditions – in state law, or in foreign practice – in which these techniques are used or approved.
To what extent are the techniques designed to “instill stress, hopelessness, and fear, and to break resistance.”
Do any of the techniques cause “severe mental distress or suffering”?
How close is each technique to the “rack and screw”?
Do the techniques “offend hardened sensibilities”?
Do the techniques violate “the whole community sense of decency and fairness that has been woven by common experience into the fabric of acceptable conduct”?
Do the techniques “violate the decencies of civilized conduct”?
Are the techniques “so egregious, so outrageous, that they fairly may be said to shock the contemporary conscience”

Leave aside the shock of seeing the phrase “rack and screw” in a document evidently intended for someone preparing or approving an interrogation plan. What I find deeply disturbing is the way it mirrors and encourages the kind of sophistry that pervaded the OLC's torture memos.

Take for example the phrases “traditional executive behavior, contemporary practice, and the standards of blame generally applied to them” and “so egregious, so outrageous, that they fairly may be said to shock the contemporary conscience.” An analysis of the OLC memos (PDF) that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department prepared jointly and declassified earlier this year describes how the OLC navigated its way through the legal landscape:

OLC also concluded that the techniques in the CIA program were not objectively “egregious” or “outrageous” in light of traditional executive behavior and contemporary practice. In reaching that conclusion, OLC reviewed U.S. judicial precedent, public military doctrine, the use of stressful techniques in SERE training, public State Department reports on the practices of other countries, and public domestic criminal practices. OLC concluded that these sources demonstrated that, in some circumstances (such as domestic criminal investigations) there was a strong tradition against the use of coercive interrogation practices, while in others (such as with SERE training) stressful interrogation techniques were deemed constitutionally permissible. OLC therefore determined that use of such techniques was not categorically inconsistent with traditional executive behavior, and concluded that under the facts and circumstances concerning the program, the use of the techniques did not constitute government behavior so egregious or outrageous as to shock the conscience in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

In other words, the only examples the OLC can point to where “contemporary practice” includes the enhanced interrogation methods are the military's SERE training – where they are used in carefully controlled scenarios to mimic the torture methods of authoritarian regimes – and in countries whose detention and interrogation practices are criticized in the U.S. State Department's annual human rights reports. And so, despite the fact that in both those situations we call the methods what they are, torture, somehow, by virtue of the fact they're used somewhere, they don't shock the conscience.

Ineffective, Short-sighted, and Wrong

Submitted by Larry Siems on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 11:11

One of the most striking things to me as I work my way through the documents is how much opposition there was to the Bush torture program, from within the administration and from men and women in the U.S. military and intelligence services, from the very beginning.

Chapter 2 recounts a showdown between an FBI interrogation team and the CIA team led by the psychologist Dr. James Mitchell in a secret CIA prison in Thailand over the treatment of Abu Zubaydah. That confrontation led FBI Director Robert Mueller to prohibit FBI interrogators from participating in any interrogations involving techniques the FBI does not normally use in questioning suspects in the United States – a policy that remained in effect throughout the Bush administration.

That policy, which came to include instructions to FBI agents to report incidents of detainee abuse, gave rise to one of the most important summary documents available, the May 2008 report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled, A Review of the FBI's Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (PDF).

Recounting the clash over Zubaydah's interrogation, the OIG's report describes a 2002 meeting with Director Mueller, FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Pasquale D'Amuro, and Andrew Arena, Section Chief of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations. “Arena stated that there were discussions with the FBI regarding “should we go down that track?” the report relates. “Arena told the OIG that during the meeting D'Amuro predicted that the FBI would have to testify before Congress some day and that the FBI should be able to say that it did not participate.”

The architects of the torture program often cite the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as a justification for harsh interrogations. CIA Director George Tenet, in a 2007 60 Minutes interview, insisted:

…So the context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City , apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know—I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: the palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know.

But operating in the same climate, the FBI – the one agency with real interrogation experience and a proven record of eliciting information from al-Qaeda detainees – declared from the outset that abusive interrogations were ineffective, short-sighted, and wrong.

Experimenting with Torture

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 10/16/2009 - 15:35

Today we post Chapter 2 of the report, “Experimenting with Torture.”

The chapter chronicles the development of the so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and their carefully-orchestrated application during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in a CIA black site in Thailand in the spring and summer of 2002. In it, Zubaydah himself speaks; his statement to the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), which was finally allowed to visit 14 “high value” detainees after they were transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, is one of the few first-hand accounts we have describing interrogations in the secret CIA prisons.

“I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied,” Zubaydah tells the ICRC. “It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

The more we learn about his interrogation, the more we see how right he was.

Words and Images

Submitted by Larry Siems on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 17:25

The question of the power of words versus the power of visual images is on my mind this week as I work through this section describing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah at the secret CIA dungeon in Thailand. Ninety of the 92 videotapes the CIA destroyed in 2005 recorded that interrogation, which took place from April though August on 2002 and culminated in 83 sessions of waterboarding. Just knowing those tapes existed exerts a subtle pressure on the imagination. Now, when you read a description of Zubaydah being swung around by a collar and slammed against a wall, your mind's eye is sometimes drawn to a wider, surveillance-camera angle: he's naked, you remember.

Last week, the Center for Constitutional Rights won a court order disclosing that the government has videotapes of the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani. The minute-by-minute log of that 7-week interrogation in Guantánamo in late 2002 and early 2003 is essential reading to have any understanding, for example, of what “sleep deprivation” means. But it must be an altogether different experience to watch videotape of something like this:

Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee's emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smiley face on it and placed on the detainee's head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the “sissy slap” glove. This glove was touched to the detainee's face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee's head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.

Whether anyone outside of government ever sees this video of course remains to be seen. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding whether it will hear the government's appeal of a federal court ruling ordering the release of perhaps hundreds more photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration insists that releasing the photos would fan anti-Americanism and extremism, endangering U.S. troops in the region. Last week, House and Senate conferees moved toward endorsing that position, approving language for the defense appropriations bill that included an amendment sponsored by Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham allowing the Secretary of Defense to determine what images the public can see. The House will likely pass the bill later today, with the Senate likely passing it within the next in the next couple of weeks.

As we learned when photos of the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib were leaked to the press in 2004, images of torture and abuse do provoke powerful reactions. What we're reacting to, though, is the treatment, not the images. No amount of erasure or concealment can undo the fact that the treatment occurred – and that, in these cases, it was witnessed and recorded.

What’s In Those Cables?

Submitted by Larry Siems on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 12:29

Next week I'll be adding a section to the Report about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site.

It is the videotapes of this interrogation that the CIA destroyed in November 2005. Earlier this week, in a hearing in a contempt case arising out of the destruction of those tapes , the ACLU pressed again for the release of 580 documents that describe what they portrayed – the vast majority of which are cables sent from the black site to CIA headquarters, sometimes as many as 9 in one day, from April to November of 2002.

I've had a list of these documents in front of me as I've been working through this chapter. With so much now documented about the treatment of Abu Zubaydah, it's chilling to stare at this list and try to imagine what else these documents that the CIA still refuses to release – and the tapes no one will ever see – might reveal.

On the Contributors and books

Submitted by Larry Siems on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 12:35

As I mentioned, we’re thrilled to have several of the most knowledgeable people in the country serving as Contributors to the Report. The group includes Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who led an elite interrogation team in Iraq; David Frakt, who served most recently as Lead Defense Counsel for the Office of Military Commissions in D.C. and Guantanamo; former constitution law attorney and contributing Salon.com columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald; Joanne Mariner, who directs Human Rights Watch's Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program; Deborah Popowski, who has worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and the UN Committee against Torture; private investigator, attorney, and writer John Sifton; and writer and blogger Marcy Wheeler. Their contributions to what we now know about the Bush administration’s torture program have been enormous.

They will be joined at the outset by attorneys from the ACLU’s National Security Project and in the future by some of the many other researchers, writers, journalists and lawyers who are working to expose and document torture and mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The feedback from these Contributors, which will appear as annotations throughout the text, is an essential part of the report-writing process.

And I also mentioned good books. Here are three indispensible ones, for starters: Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side (Doubleday, 2008); Philippe Sands’ Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh (Columbia University Press, 2007)

Piecing together Bush's torture program

Submitted by Larry Siems on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 14:04

Today we launch The Torture Report. On this site, over the next several months, we will construct a comprehensive account of the Bush administration’s torture program.

The goal is simple: to tell the whole story and to get it right. How to do this – how to bring together everything we know from tens of thousands of formerly secret documents, from official and independent investigations, from press reports and the many good books that have recently appeared, and from the growing number of first-hand accounts of those who witnessed, participated in, or suffered mistreatment, how to register it all so we can come to some conclusions – is a daunting challenge.

But it’s a challenge we all share. In a way, as the Report’s lead writer, I’m just trying to do what any one of us should be doing in the face of evidence that our elected officials presided over gross human rights violations: to piece together exactly what happened and who is responsible.

I have help, fortunately. As sections are posted, a group of expert Contributors will offer comments; you’ll see their annotations, which will include corrections, elaborations, questions, and suggestions, in-line in the text. We invite your comments as well; these will appear at the end of the chapters. The Report will be constantly updated to incorporate the best of these suggestions and the very latest information.

We begin at the beginning – the first days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This chapter, "Origins," looks at two of the earliest actions of the Bush administration , one that literally opened a space for torture to happen and one that revealed the administration’s approach to legal barriers and restrictions.

Navigating The Torture Report

Submitted by Larry Siems on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 14:03

The Torture Reportis meant to be a one-of-a-kind, interactive resource that provides regularly updated, in-depth information and analysis on the Bush administration's torture program.

This Diary page will point you to the latest additions, changes, and improvements to the report, along with important report-related developments and news; you’ll land here whenever you visit the site. Follow the tab at the top or the chapter links at the left to reach the Report itself, and the floating menu to view expert Contributors’ annotations or to comment. The Document Search tab puts an archive of some 130,000 pages of formerly secret government documents at your disposal. Watch for additional features, including a library of first-person testimonials, in the weeks ahead.

More information about how to navigate this site and the Report can be found under the About this Project tab.