Elusive Starting Point On Harsh Interrogations

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
June 11, 2008 News Analysis
By Scott Shane
WASHINGTON — In a flurry of oversight that some critics say comes years too late, Congress is pressing Bush administration officials on a still-unanswered question: How did the United States come to embrace harsh interrogation methods it had always shunned?
The interrogation techniques themselves have been repeatedly discussed, and administration officials have been forced to explain why waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique of torturers dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, was not torture when used by the C.I.A.
But it has never been clear what roles were played by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their subordinates in approving the interrogation techniques used after the Sept. 11 attacks against terrorism suspects. Only gradually has the fog of secrecy begun to lift, and two hearings on Tuesday showed there is a long way to go.
At the Senate Judiciary Committee, senior F.B.I. officials described the bureau’s halting efforts in 2002 to protest harsh interrogations being carried out by the military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to make the case that traditional rapport-building methods worked far better.
But the F.B.I. officials said agents were rebuffed and were told that senior Pentagon officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, with the backing of Justice Department legal opinions, had approved the treatment. Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, testified that when she asked to read classified legal opinions on torture in 2004, she was refused access and has still not seen them.
Meanwhile, a House International Affairs subcommittee grilled John B. Bellinger III, formerly legal adviser to the National Security Council and currently to the State Department, about the transfer of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency and others to countries where they face torture.
Mr. Bellinger, who is known to have fought inside the administration against secret detention and harsh interrogations, largely dodged questions about specific cases in which prisoners went to Egypt, Syria and other countries condemned in State Department human rights reports. But growing emotional at one point, he declared, “I’ve been working for seven years for better laws and better policies on detention.”
More testimony on interrogation is coming, some of it from officials with firsthand knowledge of how the policies were developed, including those that applied to the secret prisons that the C.I.A. established overseas.
Next Tuesday, the Defense Department’s former legal counsel, William J. Haynes II, and several other former military officials will address the Senate Armed Services Committee, which has been investigating how harsh tactics were approved for use at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
In the next few weeks, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to hear testimony on interrogation from John Ashcroft, the former attorney general; John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote legal opinions justifying harsh methods in 2002 and 2003; David S. Addington, chief of staff and legal adviser to Mr. Cheney; and Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary of defense.
Last week, 56 House Democrats signed a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey asking him to appoint a special counsel to investigate the interrogation policies and whether they violated laws against torture.
Human rights advocates are heartened. “Members of Congress are beginning to connect the dots,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “First they blamed the privates and the field operatives, then the generals. But now Congress is finally beginning to ask who made the ultimate decisions at the top.”
The latest hearings reflect a slow transformation of Congressional sentiment.
In the first years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Republican-controlled Congress largely supported the tough stance the administration took in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Interrogation programs were kept highly classified, and the few Democrats who learned details made no public protest.
In 2005, Congress, led by Senator John McCain, a Republican who had been tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp, banned the military from using harsh methods. Still, many Democrats trod cautiously on the delicate subject of interrogation, fearful of Republican accusations that they were soft on terrorism.
“I think the oversight up to 2007 was abysmal: it just didn’t exist,” said Representative Bill Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat who has organized a series of recent hearings, including the one with Mr. Bellinger. “Democrats were powerless and had no access to information.”
But since gaining control of Congress last year, Democrats have become more outspoken. They have gained political cover as more veteran F.B.I. agents and military interrogators have spoken out publicly against the use of physical pressure in interrogations, saying it violates American values and can produce false information.
Jack Cloonan, who retired in 2002 after 27 years in the F.B.I., described at Tuesday’s hearing his success in questioning Qaeda members without force in the 1990s.
“Gaining the cooperation of an Al Qaeda member is a formidable task, but it is not impossible,” Mr. Cloonan said. He said he saw Qaeda operatives who had pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden “cross the threshold and cooperate with the F.B.I. because they were treated humanely, understood what due process was about and were literally seduced by our legal system, as strange as that might sound.”
Congress late last year passed a bill that extended the ban on harsh methods to all agencies, including the C.I.A., but Mr. Bush responded with a veto. Now, Democrats appear determined to examine the origins of the interrogation methods and try again for a ban on the use of force.
“It is absolutely essential that we obtain reliable and usable intelligence to successfully fight the war on terror,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who led Tuesday’s hearing. “I believe it is wrong to use coercive interrogation and torture to try to accomplish that goal. I believe we must stop it.”
Most Republicans continue to defend the administration’s policies. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, insisted that while there had been occasional mistakes, the policies had prevented a repeat of Sept. 11. “By and large, I would say our people have done a terrific job,” he said.
But some Republicans have expressed doubts about some policies. Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania questioned Mr. Bellinger about the wisdom of accepting “diplomatic assurances” from Egypt that it would not torture Coptic Christians and political opponents sent there.
Mr. Pitts and others expressed astonishment that Chinese interrogators were permitted to go to Guantánamo to question Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority, and that American military personnel kept the prisoners awake the night before their interrogation to soften them up.
 
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