So the big news today was the release of the CIA inspector general's (IG) report from May 2004 (PDF) made public as part of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement of a decision to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a preliminary investigation into whether federal laws were violated during the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.

But the IG report wasn't the only big document dump the ACLU received today. This evening, we received more than 60 documents, dating from 2002 through 2007. Included are memos, letters, and documents between the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and the CIA about the torture and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.

This document (PDF), a background paper sent by the CIA to the OLC, actually contains an official detailed account of the CIA’s detention, interrogation and rendition programs — from a detainee’s initial apprehension, to his transfer to a CIA “black site,” to his interrogation — and describes the use of abusive interrogation techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and stress positions.

The May 2004 IG report provides a detailed description of torture and abuse of detainees and addresses the legality and effectiveness of the agency's "enhanced interrogation" program under the Bush administration. Although we initially received this report as part of our FOIA case in May 2008, it was so heavily redacted (PDF), we learned very little. While the version made public today still contains heavy redactions, it does include newly unredacted sections and details of serious detainee abuse in CIA custody that were previously unknown.

According to the IG report, agents committed mock executions and threatened to harm at least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, with a gun and a power drill if he did not cooperate with the interrogation. Al-Nashiri is represented by military attorneys assisted by the John Adams Project, a joint effort by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to provide support for the under-resourced military defense counsel in the Guantánamo military commissions.

While we welcome the positive step toward accountability for torture that Attorney General Holder made in announcing a preliminary investigation into the abuses committed, we are disappointed that he is still unwilling to commit to conducting a full investigation and prosecuting any crimes that are uncovered. We will never achieve real accountability by limiting the scope of an investigation, and overlooking those who commissioned and authorized these illegal acts — including those at the highest levels of our government.

Send Attorney General Holder a message today to let him know that you support a full and thorough investigation of torture that follows the evidence — wherever it may lead.

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)

Recent reports that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate illegal torture carried out during the Bush administration is a positive sign, especially given President Obama's desire to avoid what he has called "a backward-looking" inquiry. When Holder began studying the brutal acts carried out in America's name, some of them even exceeding the horrors authorized in the infamous Justice Department torture memos, he reportedly said it "turned my stomach." In "Tortured Logic," a video released by the ACLU today, you'll hear well-known people like Oliver Stone, Rosie Perez and Philip Glass, among others, read from those chilling memos, which were disclosed as part of ACLU litigation:

Please note that by playing this clip You Tube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see You Tube's privacy statement on their website and Google's privacy statement on theirs to learn more. To view the ACLU's privacy statement, click here.

While it is encouraging that Holder now understands that there were serious crimes committed that demand investigation, press reports say that he envisions an investigation narrow in scope that would focus only on low-level interrogators and contract employees. This is deeply troubling.

There is ample evidence already in the public domain that the widespread and systemic torture of detainees was authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration. This evidence comes from congressional reports, the torture memos themselves and even the boastful admissions of officials including former vice president Dick Cheney, who has been aggressively forthright in his defense of waterboarding. But notwithstanding all this evidence, there are still those who would reduce the authorization of these crimes by government officials to discretionary policy decisions. This cannot be the case in a nation where the rule of law means anything.

It is a core premise of our democracy that in America, no one is above the law, regardless of rank or position. Going after those who carried out illegal orders while shielding those who actually gave the orders goes against the most fundamental American ideals of fairness. To date, the highest-ranking officer to be prosecuted for detainee abuse is a lieutenant colonel who was acquitted. Yet there is simply too much evidence of high-level orders to justify limiting criminal investigations to the field. In this country, we investigate crimes — no matter how powerful the suspected perpetrators — and, when appropriate, we prosecute those who broke the law. The American system of justice would be rendered meaningless if we were to start compromising our principles and laws simply because enforcing them might be politically messy, inconvenient or even painful.

We cannot move forward confidently knowing that the abuses of the past will not be repeated by future administrations as long as everyone knows that crimes were committed and that the powerful who perpetrated and enabled those crimes get off scot-free. A failure to prosecute those responsible for torture — those who authorized it, those who legally sanctioned it and those who carried it out — would essentially serve to ratify illegal behavior by government officials. The attorney general should appoint a special prosecutor who will follow the facts where they lead, whether it be to prisons overseas or to the halls of power at home.

Visit www.aclu.org/torturedlogic to share the video with a friend and to send it to Attorney General Holder with a note urging him to conduct a full investigation of torture under the Bush administration.

In May 2006 at the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York, Jenny Holzer first exhibited her Redaction Paintings. The paintings feature formerly classified and sensitive government documents concerning American engagement in the Middle East, particularly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001. The documents, culled from various government agencies and departments, such as the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defense, were released through the landmark 1966 Freedom of Information Act. With the torture scandal in its insurgency and another Republican administration firmly in place, Holzer set about, with some urgency, to collect a representative series and sequence of documents to explore the discourse concerning the war on terrorism and torture through the language of its shapers, practitioners, and wagers.

Instead of attempting to deduce the truth claims in journalistic reportage (whether textual or visual), Holzer pared story or scoop down to the basics of communication—the directives, emails, memos, letters, and autopsies that are the linguistic bones (and individual voices) of a potentially instrumentalized and motivated rhetorical body. Her urgency was partially goaded by what has characterized as the Bush administration's "secrecy obsession." From secret military tribunals to continual reclassification of documents to ordering agencies to use the most restrictive and legalistic response possible for FOIA requests, the Bush administration's withdrawal and obfuscation of information made it imperative to assemble and classify materials from a slippery archive that furtively slides in and out of exposure.

Translated into photographic positives that are then made into screens, the documents the artist appropriates are transferred, unaltered, onto linens that have been painted with oils. The scale of the works is some ratio of the original 8.5-by 11-inch page, keeping manipulation minimal, merely enlarging for presentation. In the catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition, the paintings are distributed and classified under three headings: Archive, Guantanamo, and Iraq. Archive largely includes works that trace the history of the U.S.'s presence in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War. President George H. W. Bush's January 15, 1991, security directive establishing the parameters of war and authorizing military action in Iraq and President George W. Bush's February 7, 2002, memo suspending the Geneva Conventions for suspected al Qaeda detainees sandwich documents like the infamous July 10, 2001, Phoenix memo that presaged the 9/11 attacks and Richard Clarke's January 25, 2001, memo to Condoleezza Rice urging a review of the Presidential policy towards al Qaeda. Guantanamoand Iraq, unlike the Archive documents, do not represent the now canonical governmental communiqués of bold-faced historical names. Rather, the emails, interrogation technique documents, sworn statements, letters, and autopsies that provide the surround sound of voices implementing and impacted by a policy and culture of torture are authored by the unnamed or unknown—these pieces are the day-to-day filler predestined for a policy crust shipped from Washington to be baked in the heat of an Iraqi, Afghani, and Cuban sun.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib, like any representation, provide an ideologically malleable surface. As Mark Danner wrote in October of 2004:

As I write, four months have passed since a series of bizarre photographs were broadcast on American television and entered the consciousness of the world. Seven military police, those 'few bad apples,' have been indicted and two have pled guilty…What has been on trial thus far, however, is the acts depicted in the photographs and these acts, while no doubt constituting abuse, have been carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, US policy—a policy that permits torture. Thus far, in the United States at least, there has been relatively little discussion about torture and whether the agents of the US government should be practicing it.

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 1 Wish List pewter, 2007 oil on linen 102.25 x 79 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Moving outside of the confining frames of the Abu Ghraib photographs to reconstruct context, sequence, and a narrative shell, Holzer's use of the documents also assertively places both feet within the frame to demolish a limited purview that sees the abuse as exceptional. The operation of constructing a framework to house a painting such as Wish List (fig. 1) that details alternative interrogation techniques that are categorically contrary to the Geneva Conventions (stimulus and sleep deprivation, white noise exposure, close quarter confinement, and open hand strikes, among others) along with one like Jaw Broken (fig. 2) where a detainee in Iraq testifies to abuse he suffered consistent with the techniques listed in Wish List works to link concept with event, hypothetical with enacted. And instead of rhetorically making the link, dogmatically crafting an argument that interweaves policy and torture, Holzer's suspension of the two documents as paintings lying in proximity creates that spatial and conceptual gap for undetermined reception. Instead of pointing at the enmeshment of policy and torture, she allows one to see with one's own eyes.

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 2 Jaw Broken, 2006 oil on linen, 3 elements 33 x 76.5 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In her study, Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture, Elizabeth Klaver writes, "The Greek roots of the word 'autopsy' (auto+opsis) contain the dead metaphor of vision together with the empirical thrust of Western epistemology since the Renaissance—to see with one's own eyes." Holzer concludes her catalogue with four diptychs—final autopsy reports conducted by the Office of the Armed Forces Regional Medical Examiner in Landstuhl, Germany, of three Iraqi men and a Pashtun male murdered under circumstances consistent with torture while held in American detainment facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan (fig. 3).

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 3 FINAL AUTOPSY REPORT DOD 003235-DOD 003241 Ochre, 2006 oil on linen 66 x 25.5 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

To make paintings of medicolegal documentation that details the surgical move within the body to ascertain cause of death is to reveal the shocking inadequacy of sensational representation—like the Abu Ghraib photographs. While avowing the specificity of a body and a subject identified by visual description, paperwork, fingerprints, and DNA sampling and the particular traumas that resulted in death by, respectively, a pulmonary embolism due to blunt force injuries, strangulation, blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration, and blunt force injuries and asphyxia, the paintings work to fix the mobility of signification by replicating the physical operation of autopsy as a uniquely visual one. The paintings provide an operation of vision that doesn't rest on the surface of symptom but pierces the skin of the spectacle to reveal a consistency of violence evincing a system of torture. Holzer works to endow the still unnamed tortured with the coordinates of personal identity (date of birth, date of death, home, ethnicity, bodily markings, rank, gender) that provide a schema for subjectivity and personhood. That is, the display of the autopsy documents allows one to see with her own eyes, simultaneously, individual bodily fragility as well as the network of systematized and like abuse covered by the mask of symbol and spectacle.

Autopsy assumes that the body exists within a framework (in this case, social, medical, legal, and juridical) that is a pre-condition for, constitutes, and testifies to a subject. The autopsy also figures as a categorical end. Unlike the photograph that suspends the pictured figure at a particular moment of concomitant becoming and undoing, a superficial symptom that hides the origin and context of meaty, temporal life, the autopsy, in the words of Foucault, "plunges," "penetrates," "advances," and "descends" into sequential, ordered, geographical, bodily space. The end of the autopsy is knowledge of the body itself and the deceased in particular, not the symptom in its exteriority and precarious associative valences. In his short essay "What Is a Camp," Giorgio Agamben writes:

The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime."

Working with the autopsy as a visual document, Holzer refutes the Abu Ghraib photographs as sufficient visual evidence. And this is primarily because the photographs of abused bodies solely signify exceptional horror without revealing the regularity of horror, the accounting of atrocity, which the torture autopsies—through their similarities and congruities with approved "alternative interrogation techniques"—disclose as system. As a medicolegal document, the autopsy and its discourse as report circulate among the directives, memos, and emails that established a policy of torture (and not its individual incarnations). Yet, the policy reaches its crisis when the body constructed as extralegal (outside of nation-state as figured in Bush's notorious February 7, 2002 memo) is re-inscribed using the legal paraphernalia of the state itself. A body is not only represented in the autopsy, but physically reconstructed as a life functioning within a juridical system—that is, one that can end through the legally defined event homicide, the cause of death given in each autopsy painting.

As early as the fourteenth century, autopsies were being executed for medicolegal purposes. These early procedures were performed in order to determine for the courts whether the manner of death was homicide, abortion, poisoning, or infanticide. It was not until the eighteenth century that the autopsy became the institution that we know today—that is, a regulated confluence of subjects working within an ideologically governed space. As Elizabeth Klaver writes:

Since a vast network of subjects is involved, the practice of autopsy cannot be idiosyncratic—it must be governed by highly regulated procedures as to how the medical operation is performed on the corpse and how the discourse is used to record and report it, together with stringent privacy rules and obligations with respect to the deceased, the family, and the public.

Marie François Xavier Bichat, best known as the father of modern histology and pathology, established the lesion-based concept of disease through autopsy—a transformative epistemic break that looked to irregularities and mutation in tissue, and not the organs, for the origin and spread of disease. Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, locates Bichat's work as a radical rupture not only in the direction of medical practice, but the means through which illness would be known and discerned—the deceased body's interior would trace the origin of disease allowing a tabulation and organization of attendant symptoms, as opposed to a loose assemblage of symptoms signifying disease in the living. And Foucault primarily explains this fissure through language that references the visual—the medical gaze. Preceding Bichat, observation was limited to the visual study of manifest symptoms. At this juncture, the medical gaze was a survey of surface. In contradistinction, the gaze of Bichat used autopsy as an instrument to chart a geographic spatiality, of actual lesion in the dead rather than symptom in the living, a "plunging from the manifest to the hidden." Foucault writes:

The gaze plunges into the space that it has given itself the task of traversing. In its primary form, the clinical reading implied an external, deciphering subject, which, on the basis of and beyond that which it spelt out, ordered and defined kinships. In anatamo-clinical experience, the medical eye must see the illness spread before it, horizontally and vertically in graded depth, as it penetrates into the body, as it advances into is bulk, as it circumvents or lifts its masses, as it descends into its depths. Disease is no longer a bundle of characters disseminated here and there over the surface of the body and linked together by statistically observable concomitances and successions; it is a set of forms and deformations, figures, and accidents and of displaced, destroyed, or modified elements bound together in sequence according to a geography that can be followed step by step. It is no longer a pathological species inserting itself into the body wherever possible; it is the body itself that has become ill.

If torture can be considered an illness (a palsy of policy), with particular sources that can be empirically examined, I have taken the autopsy as painting by Jenny Holzer as a visual means of diagnosing it. Following Foucault's analysis of medical observation, the autopsy document creates the tortured body as a legal subject when the medical procedure of seeing is inscribed within bureaucratic discourse. Piercing the illusion of exception and surface, the autopsy document not only reconstitutes the tortured body within a legal, juridical, medical, and political framework, but permits the circulation of it within an archive capable of constructing torture as policy and not event—that is, torture no longer as "a bundle of character disseminated here and there over the surface of the body" but as "the body itself that has become ill."

Holzer has hung the two panels of each autopsy painting stacked on top of each other. Displayed in this totemic fashion, the painting measures twenty-five and a half by sixty-six inches (a factor of the original 8.5 x 11 inch document), approximately human size. She considers it critical to have the idea of body (both of the viewer and the deceased) implicated, accentuated even, in this clinical presentation. The bureaucratic body, then, a matrix of the political, the medical, and the juridical, looks back at us. And as it does, we are undone before it into the strands of competing structural formations that weave a life—our nationalities, medical histories, ranks, political affiliations, statistics, titles, statuses. There is some consolation that the concession of autopsy suggests that the life of the "Other" finally is deemed substantial enough to be categorized in "our" bureaucratic terms. The mourning at work in the paintings is that "our" very terms are the ones that invalidated those bodies and lives to begin with. The hope is that they provide enough to hold the guilty accountable.

David Breslin is a project manager at the Jenny Holzer Studio and is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.

Today, several prominent bloggers are writing about detainees who died in U.S. custody, using documents released through the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. We're not talking suicide, or death by "natural causes." No, this is death as a result of torture and abuse while in custody. This effort comes on the eve of the release — we hope — of the CIA Inspector General's report on waterboarding. (You might've heard last Friday that the release was delayed.)

At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody -- at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that's one reason we've always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others -- because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we Look to the Future, not the Past -- are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

Marcy Wheeler focuses on the case of detainee 04-309:

Now I'm no doctor--and I definitely can't make sense of the cardiac findings. But it sounds like "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," "walling," and "water dousing" are all leading candidates to have caused the death of 04-309. Or, to use the terms used for techniques approved for use by one Special Forces group in Iraq until May 18, 2004, about a month after 04-309's death, "safety positions," "sleep adjustment/sleep management," "change of environment/ environmental manipulation," and "mild physical contact." It doesn't really matter what you call the techniques, though, because they amount to torture that--in the case of an apparently healthy 27 year old man--appear to have killed him in three days time.

A lot of people--from the CIA to Cheney to the torture apologists--want this debate to be about waterboarding, a technique they've only admitted to using with three detainees, and a technique that--as far as we know--did not kill anyone in US custody. But that distracts from the other techniques that just as much torture, the ones that were killing Iraqi civilians in a matter of days.

Drational at Daily Kos zeroes in on one detainee, known as Habibullah, and the circumstances of his death:

Habibullah was being interrogated by the military. Upon autopsy he was clothed only in an adult diaper. Because he was taken from his cell to the Bagram medical facility "dead on arrival" it is likely he was wearing a diaper when he was found "unresponsive, restrained in his cell" (hanging shackled from the ceiling). This is consistent with the nudity and use of diapering during "sleep deprivation" approved by Rumsfeld and described as part of the protocols for CIA interrogation during one technique: sleep deprivation- in which the detainee is shackled standing or sitting for up to 7 1/2 days straight. We have learned from the 2005 Bradbury memos that sleep deprivation causes venous stasis in the legs and has led to severe leg edema. We know that Habibullah was shackled to the ceiling of his cell for sleep deprivation, where he was ultimately found dead. This scenario is reinforced by a citation of a DOD criminal investigation report in the recently released Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Detainee Treatment (PDF). This citation noted that "the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands of Bagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides [Habibullah and Dilawar]."

The most shocking and saddening part: these deaths are the direct result of authorizations for abusive techniques at the highest levels of the Bush administration. And the Obama administration has yet to hold those who authorized those techniques accountable.

Today is the last day of June, which is Torture Awareness Month. If you haven't already, send the Justice Department evidence of torture. Tell the DOJ you demand accountability and justice.