US president has granted immunity to CIA officers involved in interrogations during the Bush years, write GREG MILLERand JOSH MEYERin Washington
PRISONERS COULD be kept awake for more than a week. They could be stripped of their clothes, fed nothing but liquid and thrown against a wall 30 consecutive times.
In one case, the CIA was told it could prey on a top al-Qaeda prisoner’s fear of insects by stuffing him into a box with a bug. When all else failed, the CIA could turn to what a justice department memo described as “the most traumatic” interrogation technique of all – water-boarding.
Baring what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Barack Obama on Thursday released a collection of secret justice department documents that provided graphic guidance to the CIA on how far it could go to extract information from terrorism suspects.
The memos provide the most detailed account to date not only of the interrogation arsenal the CIA employed against suspected al-Qaeda captives in secret prisons around the world, but the legal arguments that the Bush administration constructed to justify their use.
At the same time, Obama assured CIA employees and other US operatives that they would be protected from prosecution or other legal exposure for their roles in the nation’s counter- terrorism efforts over the past eight years. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” Obama said in a message to CIA employees, explaining his decision to release documents that agency veterans and some senior officials in his administration had fought to keep sealed.
The memos were crafted by the justice department’s office of legal counsel, a unit that was at the centre of a series of debates during the Bush administration over the limits of executive power and counter-terrorism tactics.
The release of the memos was seen as a test of the Obama administration’s commitment to its pledge of transparency, but the decision was criticised by conservatives and CIA veterans, who warned that the highly detailed documents would serve as a counter-interrogation training manual for terror groups.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden said release of the memos would make the country less safe.
The documents spell out in often-disconcerting detail how the approved techniques were to be administered. Prisoners could be kept shackled in a standing position for as many as 180 hours. They also noted that more than a dozen CIA prisoners had been deprived of sleep for at least 48 hours, three for more than 96, and one for the nearly eight-day maximum stated on one memo.
When the CIA proposed putting an al-Qaeda suspect with a phobia of insects in a small box with an insect, the justice department endorsed the idea but added conditions it said were necessary to keep it from violating the convention against torture.
“If you do so . . . you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain,” said a 2002 memo sent to the CIA’s acting general counsel. The CIA never carried out the insect plan.
The documents include elaborate legal debate over the simulated drowning method known as water-boarding.
A May 10th, 2005, memo spelt out that a prisoner could be water-boarded at most six times during a two-hour session. It also required that a doctor be on duty in case a prisoner didn’t recover after being returned to an upright position. In that event, “the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy”.
The documents cover a period from 2002 until 2005, when the government was recalculating its approach to detention and interrogation in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
On Wednesday, the justice department issued a memo repudiating the opinions in the four Bush administration documents, saying they no longer represented the views of the office of legal counsel. Three of the four released memos were signed by Steven Bradbury, who served as head of the office of legal counsel from 2005 until Bush left office.
The release of the memos was driven to a large degree by a court-imposed deadline in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit aimed at forcing the government to disclose secret rulings issued in connection with the CIA’s detention and interrogation programmes.
But Obama’s decision to shield agency employees from legal liability drew criticism from human-rights groups. US attorney general Eric Holder said the justice department would provide representation to CIA employees facing legal challenge in the US or overseas.
Amnesty International described the administration’s position as a “get-out-of-jail-free card to individuals who, by Holder’s own estimation, were involved in acts of torture”.
The memos make clear that many of the methods were imported from the military’s survival training programmes, and frequently refer to doctors and psychologists who took part in evaluating CIA prisoners being subjected to coercive methods.
The ultimate goal, the memos said, was to make a detainee feel “he has no control over basic human needs”. Detainees’ heads and beards were shaved, and they were photographed naked. At first, interrogators would be cordial. But if a prisoner was unco-operative, interrogators would design an interrogation regimen that would grow in intensity over time.
Even the less violent techniques can have a harrowing aspect. A prisoner being subjected to sleep deprivation, for example, would have his feet shackled to the floor, his hands cuffed near his chin, and be forced to stand for the duration. If the prisoner starts to fall asleep, “he will lose his balance and awaken, either because of the sensation of losing his balance or because of the restraining tension of the shackles,” said a May 10th, 2005, memo. A prisoner undergoing such treatment was to be fed by hand and forced to wear a nappy. If he became co-operative, the agency could unshackle him “and let him feed himself”.
That memo outlined an escalating series of interrogation methods, sometimes used in concert, and was written just months after the justice department had issued a December 2004 document that declared “torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms”.
Other methods outlined include dietary manipulation, in which prisoners were fed only liquids; forced nudity, including in front of female personnel; slaps to the face and abdomen and a technique called "walling" in which a detainee has a towel wrapped around his neck to guard against whiplash before being slammed against a "flexible, false wall". – ( LA Times-Washington Post)