Why Did They Do It? (Updated 12/23/14)

real thugs

Never mind there should be no debate over torture, any more than there should be a debate over rape or child molestation. There is a debate and it’s heading downhill fast, witness this statement by one of the most powerful men in the land:

“I think it is very facile for people to say ‘Oh, torture is terrible,’” he said. “You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people.

“You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?”

Yes, that’s Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who knows torture works because he saw it work on TV, even referencing the specific episode of 24 he saw it on. He said this on Friday, days after the release of the Senate report on torture.

Jesus. I can’t. Even.

Yes, I’m still writing about an issue everyone clearly wants to ignore; everyone, that is, save for a friend or two who want me to go from talking about things I know about (SERE training, the experiences of Vietnam POWs I’ve flown and worked with) to speculating on things I know nothing about.

As in: why? Why did we torture captives when we knew torture didn’t work? Why did military and CIA interrogators agree to do it? Why did members of the medical profession go along with it? Why are the program’s architects, in the face of the shameful details revealed in the Senate report on torture, defending it so proudly and vigorously?

Why did we torture when we knew it doesn’t work? Historically, the US military (a century or more ago), and the CIA (as recently as the 1960s) had ample experience with torture. Both learned long ago that torture is counter-productive: victims will tell you what you want to hear, say whatever they think might stop the torment.

Making captives say what you want to hear can be useful if your purpose is to obtain false confessions, as in the forced chemical warfare confessions the North Koreans beat out of American POWs in the early 1950s, but it’s not useful at all if you’re looking for actionable information about upcoming attacks or the current location of terrorist leaders. Not once did our military or intelligence agencies learn anything truly actionable from tortured prisoners, either in earlier days or during our more recent experiments with torture, and they’re on record as saying so.

The CIA and US military renounced torture decades ago and rewrote regulations and procedures to ban its use. Then, within hours of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, even before there were captives to question, these agencies and their shadowy contractors began dusting off old torture plans, even hiring psychologists from the USAF’s SERE School to reverse engineer simulated training torture into the real thing, to be used on captives as soon as they had some. And pretty soon they did, and we were back in the torture business.

Why did military and CIA interrogators agree to torture captives? Well, why do cops so often falsify evidence or suppress exculpatory evidence? Why are they so anxious to close cases, even when multiple witnesses say they have the wrong man? Because their political masters want results. Because they have a quota system. Because career success depends on closing cases.

I’ve read many insider accounts from former administration, CIA, FBI, and military officials. Their accounts share a theme: top-down pressure for results from the highest levels of the George W. Bush administration. Dick Cheney wanted results and wanted them now. Rumsfeld & Tenet (and their successors), the men who briefed Cheney and Bush daily, wanted the same (and in Rummy’s case, metrics). The administration wanted to be able to demonstrate to the American public it was doing something to stop future terror attacks.

Never mind that false confessions made under duress had DHS and FBI agents running screaming from one imaginary threat to another (my god, the Sears Tower is next; oh no, they’re planning to hit a casino in Las Vegas); what was important was that interrogators send intelligence reports uphill, the more the better. Asses were covered, careers made.

And then there’s the torture bureaucracy, starting with the SERE psychologists and their multi-million dollar program, leading to the whole apparatus of contractors, black sites, military prisons, secret flight plans, and an army of interrogators and interpreters. Not to mention huge infusions of cash to agencies like the CIA and DHS. This is exactly the kind of banal corruption that drives innumerable other programs we know don’t work, like new C-130s for an air force that stopped wanting them decades ago, or the wasteful production of ethanol fuel), but never mind that, think of the jobs (I think of billionaire contractors setting up tax shelters in the Caribbean, but that’s just me).

Why did medical personnel agree to go along with it? Who the fuck knows? When I was a kid I believed the police were looking out for me, that I could turn to them if I was in trouble. I grew out of that pretty quickly, but I carried a belief in medical ethics well into adulthood. I guess I should have known better.

Does anyone like torturing captives? Does anyone get off on it? I mentioned the possibility in comments to earlier torture posts, but didn’t really believe it, at least at higher levels. Certainly the young US Army troops who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib appeared to be enjoying themselves in those infamous photographs, but I can’t bring myself to believe the professional interrogators who waterboarded prisoners were doing it for fun. I hope my belief in some remaining vestige of human decency isn’t as misguided as the trust I once had in the medical profession.

Why are torture’s architects, even in the face of the shameful details revealed in the Senate report on torture, defending so proudly and vigorously what they did? Wow, what a question. Does anyone think we’ll ever get an honest answer?

One writer, Charles Pierce at Esquire, thinks Cheney and other high-level torturers are defending the program because they know the CIA, should Cheney and friends try to throw it under the bus, can hit back, and hard. The CIA knows where the bodies are buried. I expect there’s some truth to that. I also suspect some of the principles have financial interests in the companies contracted to do some of the dirty work.

Then there’s simple embarrassment and legacy protection. No one wants to be a war criminal, not even Dick Cheney. His only option is to defend what he has done.

And maybe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Tenet and all the rest of them) are, like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, fans of 24, where torture always works.

Update (12/17/14): One thing I did not consider, but which Charles Pierce does in the above linked Esquire article, is that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld (and perhaps Tenet as well) tortured captives in order to extract false confessions, à la the North Koreans in the 1950s. The difference between us and the Norks would be, Pierce thinks, that our forced confessions were not to be used for propaganda, but to establish links … phony links would do just fine, thank you … between Iraq and the 9/11 terror attacks and thus help Bush & company sell the invasion of Iraq they’d been planning since inauguration day, long before 9/11.

Like Pierce, I want to deny the possibility, but it feels very much like something Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would do. And it ties in with the part of Pierce’s article I did remark upon, the resoluteness with which Cheney defends the CIA today, because if anyone is in a position to expose how Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld concocted the false intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, it would be the CIA, so it might be best not to throw the agency under the bus.

Holy shit, this is some low-down snake belly stuff here. I need a shower.

Update (12/23/14): Suspicions confirmed.

2 thoughts on “Why Did They Do It? (Updated 12/23/14)

  • Great piece. If the people who did this admit that they were wrong about torture what’s left that they were “right” about. Now many people do you know who like to admit they were wrong about anything let alone something of this magnitude. It’s also hard to admit to “I was just obeying orders” since the Nuremberg Trials.

  • Excellent follow-up. And now you really have answered the fundamental question of why they do it. Of course, the Democracy Now site presents reasons that are a little more chilling than even I expected. And so much more Freudian. Bush II was determined to finish off Bush I’s war, thereby proving himself just as good a man as Daddy, and therefore worthy of…oh, it’s Christmas, so let’s just leave it there.

    Regarding the medical staff who participated, see Robert Jay Lifton’s book, “The Nazi Doctors,” along with numerous others, and Kogon’s book, “The Theory and Practice of Hell,” about the system behind the Nazi concentration camps.

    Congrats on a really thoughtful and thorough analysis of the torture scandal. Let’s not discount, though, your theory that the CIA really does know where the bodies are buried and is controlling the politicians with that knowledge. After all, it worked so well for so many years for J. Edgar…
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