CIA Harsh Intimidation Tactics
It’s not like the C.I.A. hasn’t done this sort of thing before. Assassination and torture were the agency’s standard operating procedure in the Middle East, Latin America and South America during the Cold War. What absolutely gobsmacks me these days: The NY Times reports that BushAdmin and CIA decisions to use various forms of torture were made out of total historical ignorance.
In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.
That last quote is a priceless nutshell of the entire Bush era. Still…bullshit. Not plausible, for one thing. And “Durrrrrr, we din know” is not an excuse. Holy crap! Just typing this, I realized that those are the same words I tell my daughter whenever she can’t explain her actions.
Me: Why did you do that thing that I have told not to do a millions times before?
Daughter: I dunno.
Me: That is not an excuse!
But will anyone get sent to their rooms for this? Not unless we demand accountability from our government. This is NOT about “retribution,” as the ObamAdmin frame it strawmanwise. It’s about ensuring this crap doesn’t happen again.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:07 am
The parts about them not knowing it was used elsewhere doesn’t pass a basic smell test. It’s a lie by anonymous officials that will cite it later if under investigation to bolster their case that they were only trying to help America and didn’t know anyone in history had used it before.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
Yeah, not being a member of the intelligence and national security community, I managed somehow to have read history books about the Spanish Inquisition, CIA torture tactics in Chile, and military testing on U.S. soldiers. Must be cuz I’m a crazy lefty.
And not some journalist dupe of anonymous sources.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:52 am
First time they embraced torture? How can they believe that bullshit? They *taught* torture techniques to the latin american death squads at the School of the Americas! That’s at Ft. Benning, Georgia, IN THE U.S.A, and is where some of the most disgusting people in history were taught how to be good, loyal tyrants – Rios Montt, ‘Blowtorch’ D’Abuisson, Eduardo Viola; not only that, but many of the death squads responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed and tortured in the dirty wars in latin america, were trained there – even Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute – who went so far as to machete children to death as an ‘intimidation’ tactic! (As an aside, they also trained terrorists, like bomber Posada Carilles!)
To my eyes, the C.I.A and the U.S government now getting a wrist-slap for using torture techniques is like an afterthought, it’s far too little and far, far too late for all those who suffered. I seriously doubt that even if the perpetrators of the recent abuses were to be punished, that it would stop future abuses. That’s not how the U.S. works, sadly.
The real tragedy is the real grand ignorance out there – the belief that the C.I.A (and the government in charge) was ever any more moral than the Soviet K.G.B or the Israeli Mossad or any of the others. Even most of the people who are outraged now think that this was an exception, a black spot in the mythical ‘clean’ record of the U.S.
Let’s face it, Obama doesn’t have enough of a moral conscience that he’s going to go so far as to risk his *career* by admitting just what a disgusting past the U.S.A has – never mind changing how it behaves in the future. At best he’ll let things cool down a little during his term, so that he will look good when time comes for him to step down. That said, the last Pres. to try that was Carter, and look how he ended up going!
Sorry if this is a bit of a rant. It’s rather a sore spot, partly because I hate the lie of it all, and partly because of family lost to Kissinger’s boy in Argentina. But mostly because I know that sooner or later, they may well be training torturors and assassins to fight our great Bolivarian movement – they may be doing so already.
-Aidan.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:30 am
You are right on the money, Aidan. It’s mind-blowing how little people know or acknowledge about the CIA’s past crimes. Another reason I want real accountability is to put a stop to it. A girl can dream, can’t he?