Last week saw the release of a previously-classified torture memo of March 14, 2003, authored by John Yoo. The memo (here are parts 1 and 2) was declassified in the face of a judicial inquiry into why it was not disclosed as part of the torture FOIA brought by our organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as the ACLU, PHR, and two veterans groups. Almost as astonishing is an excellent article in the latest issue of Vanity Fair by another lawyer, Philippe Sands Q.C., that details the evolution of the Bush administration's torture policies up through early 2003 - policies which culminated in the "First Special Interrogation Plan" devised for our client Mohammed al Qahtani, now a capital defendant in the military commissions.
Those torture policies were the predictable result of our government's response to 9/11. Whenever intelligence and law enforcement agencies are caught off guard, as they were by the 9/11 attacks and by the size and strength of the insurgency in Iraq, governments have responded by sweeping huge numbers of people into detention without real cause for suspicion, based on profiling criteria – being Arab in Afghanistan, being Sunni in the wrong Baghdad neighborhood – and then relying on the interrogation process to find the suspects from among the mass of detainees. It happened domestically here after 9/11 with immigration detentions, it happened in Afghanistan and it happened in Iraq. And while everyone knows that sweeps end up punishing the innocent, they also generate pressure to torture – because the "sweep-first-and-ask-questions-later" policy puts tremendous pressure on the interrogation process to make wheat out of chaff. Abuses predictably follow.
Like a law of bureaucratic physics, the process generates the pressure – but did this manifest itself from the bottom up, or the top down? Since the invisible hand of history always works through the actions of real people, we must ask: was the torture revolution the product of the masses or the vanguard? Did the Yoo memos reflect a desire to defend what soldiers and CIA officers in the field had already started doing, as the administration has implied, or did pressure from political officials in Washington drive a change in interrogation policy on the ground?
Professor Sands' detective work brilliantly shows that the "trickle up" theory that the administration has consistently put forward – that the torture memos were shaped in response to the demands of the interrogation experts working on the ground – is nonsense:
Those torture policies were the predictable result of our government's response to 9/11. Whenever intelligence and law enforcement agencies are caught off guard, as they were by the 9/11 attacks and by the size and strength of the insurgency in Iraq, governments have responded by sweeping huge numbers of people into detention without real cause for suspicion, based on profiling criteria – being Arab in Afghanistan, being Sunni in the wrong Baghdad neighborhood – and then relying on the interrogation process to find the suspects from among the mass of detainees. It happened domestically here after 9/11 with immigration detentions, it happened in Afghanistan and it happened in Iraq. And while everyone knows that sweeps end up punishing the innocent, they also generate pressure to torture – because the "sweep-first-and-ask-questions-later" policy puts tremendous pressure on the interrogation process to make wheat out of chaff. Abuses predictably follow.
Like a law of bureaucratic physics, the process generates the pressure – but did this manifest itself from the bottom up, or the top down? Since the invisible hand of history always works through the actions of real people, we must ask: was the torture revolution the product of the masses or the vanguard? Did the Yoo memos reflect a desire to defend what soldiers and CIA officers in the field had already started doing, as the administration has implied, or did pressure from political officials in Washington drive a change in interrogation policy on the ground?
Professor Sands' detective work brilliantly shows that the "trickle up" theory that the administration has consistently put forward – that the torture memos were shaped in response to the demands of the interrogation experts working on the ground – is nonsense:
The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld's office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.
~ read on... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment