Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3339162
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Interrogation

Introduction: Where We Are Now and How We Got There

The Collapse of Secrecy about Interrogations

The Bush administration tried to keep secret three sets of facts about our policies on interrogation: (1) the very high level of officials participating in the decisions leading to the use of specific highly coercive techniques of interrogation; (2) the legal opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that authorized such coercive techniques, sometimes in frighteningly bureaucratic detail; and (3) the actual practices of the CIA and Department of Defense as each pursued intelligence through interrogations. The efforts at secrecy failed. Leaks to the press, followed by several good books by reporters, revealed the names and responsibilities of officials involved. The extent of the outrage over Abu Ghraib opened up to scrutiny the first of the OLC opinions, even before the Obama administration took office and released the rest. Reports by outraged career professionals, inspectors general, and defense counsel, as well as interviews by the International Committee of the Red Cross, laid out the actual practices.

Early in his administration, President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, made clear that they would not prosecute anyone who had acted under the authority of the OLC opinions. In August 2009, Holder announced that he had authorized a preliminary investigation into whether crimes by CIA interrogators had occurred that did not fall within that protective umbrella. The decision was broadly controversial although, throughout this period, Vice President Cheney was almost alone among Bush officials in insisting that what was done was necessary and legal.

The Unsuccessful Effort to Institutionalize Cruel Interrogation Authorized by U.S. Officials

This much seems clear from well-documented, published accounts. There was an immense early concern about the possibility of a further, second-stage attack like that of September 11, 2001. Our intelligence agencies did not have the penetration into terrorist organizations that would ensure any likelihood that we would know of such plans. The administration believed that members of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda captured during the course of our invasion of Afghanistan might well know the answer to the extremely important questions about enemy intentions. To obtain information from captives, the administration quickly turned to the CIA, which disparaged the slow, patient methods of the FBI, starting when the first seemingly high-level member of Al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaida, was captured.

Having no expertise in interrogation, the CIA turned to psychologists who had worked for the military on its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program. Relying on a psychological theory of "learned helplessness," they set about reverse engineering the training we had been giving our military to resist the severe techniques used by the communists decades earlier. Through this process, they unsurprisingly produced many of the same techniques which we had trained against and protested—ironically, as "torture."

In the meantime, individuals in the White House and the OLC worked together to produce interpretations of national and international law that would provide the president nearly unlimited power to order any form of interrogation he wished, despite our adherence to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.