In June, while we were marking Torture Awareness month with our Document a Day feature, the U.S. continued its undignified slink away from accountability — most notably when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in Maher Arar's lawsuit against the United States for his rendition and torture.
We end this month with the still-classified document that launched the torture program, President Bush’s September 17, 2001 directive giving the CIA the authority to disappear detainees and interrogate them in secret prisons. The directive literally created the extralegal space for the CIA to conduct its experiments with torture.
The directive remains one of the most closely guarded torture documents. All we know about it comes from today’s documents from the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act litigation, where the government has thrown every argument it can think of at the court to keep the directive secret.
Although we will never see the 92 interrogation videotapes that the CIA destroyed in 2005, last year a federal judge ordered the CIA to fill the gap left by the destruction by releasing any records describing the contents of the tapes. Unsurprisingly, the CIA has refused to release almost all of those records, the bulk of which are the cables that flew back and forth between the CIA headquarters and the "black site" in Thailand where CIA interrogators were torturing Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
With more of those who were criminally mistreated turning to courts in their own countries for recognition of their ordeals, the efforts of U.S. officials to suppress evidence and escape accountability now extend overseas.
These seven paragraphs summarize the contents of 42 documents the CIA sent to British intelligence agencies describing the interrogation of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002. The paragraphs were part of the written opinion of a British court which concluded that the “sleep deprivation, threats, and inducements” Mohamed was subjected to during the interrogation “would clearly have been in breach” of the Convention Against Torture.
The CIA wasn't the only agency to videotape interrogations—or to make tapes disappear.
In 2007, during the trial of alleged would-be dirty-bomber Jose Padilla, prosecutors admitted they had not turned over to his defense team all of the videotapes the U.S. military had recorded of his interrogations — and that the one tape it had not produced was the recording of the final interrogation session before Padilla was finally allowed to meet with attorneys after almost two years in incommunicado detention in a naval brig in North Carolina. By then the government had abandoned the dirty bomb plot allegation, a plot it had constructed and supported through serial torture.
When he ordered the government to release images of detainee abuse, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein noted:
[T]he pictures are the best evidence of what happened, better than words, which might fail to describe, or summaries, which might err in their attempt to generalize and abbreviate.
As we saw yesterday, the battle over the visual documentation of abuse goes on, but the CIA has ensured that at least one part of that documentation will never be seen. In 2002, the CIA videotaped its interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim Al Nashiri, including its use of waterboarding and the other White House approved “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
A graphic example of the shocking lack of accountability for the gravest human rights abuses, these documents follow the murder of Iraqi general Abed Hamed Mowhoush in U.S. custody in December 2003.
Mowhoush died during an interrogation in which he was forced into a sleeping bag that was bound with an electrical cord. The autopsy report on the left lists the cause of death as “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” and rules it a homicide. The lone interrogator disciplined for the murder was reprimanded and fined $6,000; the document on the right is his statement protesting his letter of reprimand. The interrogator insists he was using what he believed were approved Survival, Evasion, Resist, Escape (SERE)-based techniques; “the ‘sleeping bag technique' is a stress position I considered authorized by the [Coalition Joint Task Force] in their memo “CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” He argues that “the sleeping bag had been used on prior occasions on other detainees without incident” and says, “while I have not examined the autopsy report, I do not believe that the sleeping bag was responsible for his death.”
After the Abu Ghraib photographs surfaced and the Washington Post published a redacted version of the August 1, 2002 Bybee/Yoo torture memo in 2004, Jack Goldsmith — Jay Bybee's replacement as the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — announced he was withdrawing the OLC's 2002 legal opinions. “Dan” is Dan Levin, who served as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the OLC from July 2004 through February 2005 and who was charged with creating replacement memos that would maintain the legality of the Bush torture program.
As protests over prisoner abuse mounted, top Bush administration officials produced new rounds of self-serving documents and legal opinions aimed both at preserving the torture program and protecting themselves from possible prosecution.
In this heavily redacted June 4, 2004, memorandum from CIA Director George Tenet to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, submitted the day after President George Bush announced Tenet's resignation, Tenet writes that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to use Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) starting in September 2002; that EITs were used only on “the most hardcore, senior terrorist figures,” and that Congress had been fully briefed on the torture. The first two statements are blatantly untrue: the White House-orchestrated, Justice Department-approved torture of Abu Zubaydah occurred earlier in 2002; and the approximately 100 detainees who spent time at secret CIA blacksites included many who were far from “senior terrorist figures.” Here is an account by one who was held for a time in the CIA's “dark prison” in Afghanistan and who was eventually released without charge from Guantánamo. The extent to which Congress was briefed on the Bush administration's torture program remains hotly contested.
In June, while we were marking Torture Awareness month with our 