Torture as a tool of democracy

OF all the dreadful novelties to which we have accustomed ourselves after Sept. 10, 2001, none is more grotesque than our continuing national debate over torture’s moral and legal legitimacy.

The existence of a clandestine network of CIA prisons where suspected Al Qaeda terrorists and other alleged Islamic militants are held and tortured to obtain information first was revealed by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports. Ron Suskind’s excellent account of the war on terror, “The One Percent Doctrine,” sketched in further insights. British journalist Stephen Grey now builds on that work in “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program.” His account is an impressively detailed investigation that includes original reporting, public documents and a rather remarkable number of on-the-record interviews.

The title describes the fleet of executive jets the United States’ intelligence agency has used to ferry captured Islamic militants secretly around the world. Some have gone to the CIA’s own “black site” facilities. Many more have gone to prisons in the Middle East and Central Asia, where repressive foreign governments, including the Assad regime in Syria, have been all too happy to torture them on the Americans’ behalf. This process is known as “extraordinary rendition,” and one of the services Grey performs in this dossier-like volume is to chart the practice’s origins during the Clinton administration. In those days, the White House was at pains to make sure that prisoners were sent to countries only where they were wanted on what passed for the local equivalent of a valid warrant.

Even then, though, the intelligence professionals were nervous about the legality and utility of the process. Michael Scheuer was in charge of the CIA’s effort to fight Osama bin Laden in those years, and he told Grey, “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals. And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policy maker, where do you want to take them, the answer was -- ‘that’s your job.’ ”

Thus, extraordinary rendition was born and, after 9/11, Bush’s administration embraced it with a vengeance. While Grey’s account of the Bush administration’s program of secret prisons and institutionalized torture is rich in detail and more clearly sourced than many previous accounts, most of this material is essentially fascinating infill material connected with sensational revelations already broadly known, particularly through Priest’s and Suskind’s reporting.

Some of Grey’s freshest insights come somewhat obliquely and are all the more convincing for that reason. For example, Grey returns several times and in various contexts to the fact that many CIA and FBI employees involved with extraordinary renditions have felt the need to retain private counsel -- to “lawyer up,” as the jargon goes. That’s because, from the start of the Bush administration’s retooling of the rendition process, many of those involved have believed they were breaking the law and might be called to account. As Scheuer, the functional founder of the system, told Grey, “The whole rendition process has been conducted under the guillotine. You just wait for the blade to fall.”

That’s because in 1994, the United States wrote the U.N. Convention Against Torture into its federal criminal code. The convention defined torture as any 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.” As Grey points out, “the maximum sentence for violators was to be 20 years in jail -- or the death penalty if the torture victim died. The statute had particular relevance for the CIA, as it was aimed specifically at what U.S. officials do overseas.... The statute prohibited not only torture by the CIA itself, but also any conspiracy to torture. Conspiring to torture would be ‘subject to the same penalties’ as torture itself, except for the death penalty.”

Still, according to Grey, since 9/11, the CIA has held and tortured the senior most Al Qaeda captives: “These high-value detainees disappeared into what came to be known as ‘black sites.’ These were true ghost prisoners, undeclared to the Red Cross, and held, in some cases, for years without any outside communication, even with their families.” They include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, captured in 2003; Abu Zubaydah, captured in March 2002; Ramzi Binalshibh, captured in September 2002; and the Indonesian Islamic militant Hambali, who was taken in 2003. Because all have been tortured, they cannot be used as witnesses in criminal trials nor their statements to interrogators introduced as evidence.

One of the documents Grey has uncovered is a 2002 memo from an FBI special agent based in Guantanamo who clearly had this in mind when he objected to techniques such as “water-boarding,” which was then being used on “senior Al Qaeda detainees.” The agent also denounced a plan to send a detainee “to Jordan, Egypt or another third country to allow those countries to employ interrogation techniques that will enable them to obtain the requisite information” because it would be a “per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute.” Moreover, the agent wrote, “any person who takes any action in furtherance of implementing such a plan would inculpate all persons who were involved in creating this plan.”

Viewed against the backdrop of these apprehensions and grave reservations among the intelligence and law enforcement professionals, the Bush administration’s eagerness to embrace contrary opinions from legally and intellectually marginal figures such as John Yoo or -- for that matter -- then White House counsel and current U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales comes into clearer focus.

Another of the telling points in Grey’s account is that the intelligence professionals -- again, from the start -- have believed that the administration’s program of institutionalized torture and extraordinary renditions has fueled Islamic radicalism and undercut the only remaining rationale for the war in Iraq, which is the extension of democracy into the Middle East. In large part, that’s because the outsourcing of torture goes to some of the most sinister regimes in the region, not simply sympathetic tough guys like the Moroccans, Egyptians and Jordanians, but the real bad actors, like Syria and Uzbekistan. (In Uzbekistan, prisoners quite literally are boiled alive.) As the CIA’s Scheuer told Grey, “Any kind of detainee capture is a technical success, but in the strategic sense we are losing, and one of the main reasons is because of our support for dictatorships in the Muslim world.”

Former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, another of Grey’s on-the-record sources, is even more specific: “Eventually, the contradictions between the practice of prisoner transfer ... and the Bush Administration’s intent to work for the democratic transformation of the Middle East could paralyze the administration’s foreign policy.”

Oh, right.

You’d think among all those policy intellectuals advising the White House, there’d have been an old Russian hand who’d read Alexander Herzen on the problem of means and ends: “The houses of free men never will be built by prison architects.”

Abraham Lincoln was this country’s greatest wartime president. A gloss on his famously pithy summation of the case against slavery cuts to the heart of this debate, for all sorts of reasons: If torture isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com