1 Boring Old Man

CIA Used Gun, Drill in Interrogation
IG Report Describes Tactics Against Alleged Cole Mastermind

By Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post
August 22, 2009

CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday. The tactics — which one official described Friday as a threatened execution — were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA’s inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA’s "black site" prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

The report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to one terrorism suspect, according to Newsweek magazine, citing two sources for its information. The magazine was the first to publish details from the report, which it did on its Web site late Friday. A federal judge in New York has ordered a redacted version of the classified IG report to be publicly released Monday, in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Since June, lawyers for the Justice Department and the CIA have been scrutinizing the document to determine how much of it can be made public. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been weighing the report’s findings as part of a broader probe into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods.

The IG’s report, written in 2004, offers new details about Nashiri’s interrogation, including the incidents in which the detainee reportedly was threatened with death or grave injury if he refused to cooperate, one current and one former U.S. official told The Post. Both officials have seen classified versions of the report. In one instance, an interrogator showed Nashiri a gun and sought to frighten the detainee into thinking he would be shot, the sources said. In a separate encounter, a power drill was held near Nashiri’s body and repeatedly turned on and off, said the officials, who spoke about the report on the condition of anonymity because it remains classified.

The federal torture statute prohibits a U.S. national from threatening anyone in his or her custody with imminent death. Three months before Nashiri’s capture, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge — advised the CIA in an August 2002 memo that threats of "imminent death" were not illegal unless they deliberately produced prolonged mental harm. Independent legal experts have called that interpretation too hedged and thus too lax…

Again, it’s not that we’ve forgotten how angry and frightened we were after 9/11. But the rules were made for just that eventuality – when our emotions were running high. Who was this guy that lead us to ignore our own rules? What was the point?

He was a bad actor, sure enough – maybe constructing the bomb used in the U.S. Cole bombing. But as to his torture, there’s the very real possibility that our motive was to get al-Nashiri to confirm an al Qaeda/Saddam Hussein connection. The timing is right. Bushies had begun to talk up Iraq in September and they were desparate for some justification.

So to the central point of this article – Bybee’s Memo – which seems to me to be a greater crime than that of the interrogators. Bybee reframes the Federal Torture Statute [which explicitly says that threats of imminent death are illegal]. In Bybee’s world, death threats are only illegal if they deliberately produced prolonged mental harm. What is obscene about this interpretation is that it’s okay to produce prolonged mental harm if you don’t have that intent. What can that possibly mean? It’s more than too hedged, it’s absurd. I think that one of the main reasons to pursue these Memos in the courts is to make it clear that this kind of manipulation of the law will not be tolerated no matter what the topic. To my way of thinking, crazy laws are worse than no laws at all.

One of the outcomes of all of this should be that there be no situation where people like Jay Bybee and John Yoo can render interpretations of the law without judicial review by a court that is not controlled by the people requesting the opinion. These two guys weren’t functioning as lawyers or judges. They were "plants." No lawyer in his right mind would’ve made a decision like this one on his/her own. It’s inconceivable that someone would define torture by the mindset of the torturer rather that by the impact on the tortured person. And further, the questions being asked were themselves crazy in the first place. "How can we torture people and make them tell us what they know without being prosecuted for torture."