Social science on terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan : The New Yorker

Image by Searocket via Flickr

by Nicholas Lemann

A few days after the September 11th attacks—which killed seven times as many people as any previous act of terrorism—President George W. Bush declared that the United States was engaged in a global war on terror. September 11th seemed to confirm that we were in a clash of civilizations between modernity and radical Islam. We had a worldwide enemy with a cause that was general, not specific (“They hate our freedoms”), and we now had to take on the vast, long-running mission—equal in scope to the Cold War—of defeating all ambitious terrorist groups everywhere, along with the states that harbored them. The war on terror wasn’t a hollow rhetorical trope. It led to the American conquest and occupation first of Afghanistan, which had sheltered the leaders of Al Qaeda, and then of Iraq, which had no direct connection to September 11th.

Today, few consider the global war on terror to have been a success, either as a conceptual framing device or as an operation. President Obama has pointedly avoided stringing those fateful words together in public. His foreign-policy speech in Cairo, last June, makes an apt bookend with Bush’s war-on-terror speech in Washington, on September 20, 2001. Obama not only didn’t talk about a war; he carefully avoided using the word “terrorism,” preferring “violent extremism.”

But if “global war” isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors—that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires—who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking.

That approach, along with these scholars’ long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations. In “A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq” (Yale; $30), Mark Moyar, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University, tells us that, in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s pay scale (financed by the protection payments demanded from opium farmers) is calibrated to be a generous multiple of the pay received by military and police personnel (financed by U.S. aid); no wonder official Afghan forces are no match for the insurgents. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor of strategy at the National War College, reminds us, in “How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns” (Princeton; $29.95), that one can find out about Al Qaeda’s policy for coördinating attacks by reading a book called “The Management of Barbarism,” by Abu Bakr Naji, which has been available via Al Qaeda’s online library. (Naji advises that, if jihadis are arrested in one country after an attack, a cell elsewhere should launch an attack as a display of resilience.) In “Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism” (M.I.T.; $24.95), Eli Berman traces the origins of the Taliban to a phenomenon that long preceded the birth of modern radical Islam: they are a direct descendant of the Deobandi movement, which began in nineteenth-century India in opposition to British colonial rule and, among other things, established a system of religious schools.

What is terrorism, anyway? The expert consensus converges on a few key traits. Terrorists have political or ideological objectives (the purpose can’t be mere profiteering). They are “non-state actors,” not part of conventional governments. Their intention is to intimidate an audience larger than their immediate victims, in the hope of generating widespread panic and, often, a response from the enemy so brutal that it ends up backfiring by creating sympathy for the terrorists’ cause. Their targets are often ordinary civilians, and, even when terrorists are trying to kill soldiers, their attacks often don’t take place on the field of battle. The modern age of suicide terrorism can be said to have begun with Hezbollah’s attack, in October of 1983, on U.S. marines who were sleeping in their barracks in Beirut.

Image by doodledubz collective via Flickr

Once you take terrorists to be rational actors, you need a theory about their rationale. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, built a database of three hundred and fifteen suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003, and drew a resoundingly clear conclusion: “What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” As he wrote in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (2005), what terrorists want is “to change policy,” often the policy of a faraway major power. Pape asserts that “offensive military action rarely works” against terrorism, so, in his view, the solution to the problem of terrorism couldn’t be simpler: withdraw. Pape’s “nationalist theory of suicide terrorism” applies not just to Hamas and Hezbollah but also to Al Qaeda; its real goal, he says, is the removal of the U.S. military from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries. Pape says that “American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11”; the only effective way to prevent future Al Qaeda attacks would be for the United States to take all its forces out of the Middle East.

By contrast, Mark Moyar dismisses the idea that “people’s social, political, and economic grievances” are the main cause of popular insurgencies. He regards anti-insurgent campaigns as “a contest between elites.” Of the many historical examples he offers, the best known is L. Paul Bremer’s de-Baathification of Iraq, in the spring of 2003, in which the entire authority structure of Iraq was disbanded at a stroke, creating a leadership cadre for a terrorist campaign against the American occupiers. One of Moyar’s chapters is about the uncontrollably violent American South during Reconstruction—a subject that a number of authors have turned to during the war on terror—and it demonstrates better than his chapter on Iraq the power of his theory to offend contemporary civilian sensibilities. Rather than disempowering the former Confederates and empowering the freed slaves, Moyar says, the victorious Union should have maintained order by leaving the more coöperative elements of the slaveholding, seceding class in control. Effective counterinsurgency, he says, entails selecting the élites you can work with and co-opting them.

In “Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies” (Basic; $26.95), Mark Perry describes a little-known attempt to apply Moyar’s model in Iraq. The book jacket identifies Perry as “a military, intelligence, and foreign affairs analyst and writer,” but his writing conveys a strong impression that he has not spent his career merely watching the action from a safe seat in the bleachers. Much of the book is devoted to a detailed description, complete with many on-the-record quotes, of a series of meetings in Amman, Jordan, in 2004, between a group of Marine officers based in Anbar province, in western Iraq, and an Iraqi businessman named Talal al-Gaood. Gaood, a Sunni and a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, suggested he could broker a deal that would make the horrific, almost daily terrorist attacks in western Iraq go away.

Perry’s tone calls to mind a Tom Clancy novel. Tough, brave, tight-lipped officers do endless battle not just with the enemy in the field but also with cowardly, dissembling political bureaucrats in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. The crux of his story is that a promising negotiation was tragically cut short, just as it was about to bear fruit, when the key negotiator, a Marine colonel, was “PNG’d”—declared persona non grata—by Washington and denied entry to Jordan. Not long after that, Gaood died suddenly, of a heart ailment, at the age of forty-four (according to Perry, he was so beloved that his wake had to be held in a soccer stadium), putting an end to any possibility of further talks. It’s startling to read about American military commanders in the field taking on a freelance diplomatic mission of this magnitude, and to imagine that there was a businessman in Amman who, on the right terms, could have snapped his fingers and ended what we back home thought of as pervasive, wild-eyed jihad.

What dominates the writing of experts about terrorism, however, is a more fine-grained idea of terrorists’ motives—at the level of ethnic group, tribe, village, and even individual calculation. Pape thinks of terrorists as being motivated by policy and strategic concerns; Cronin, of the National War College, shares Pape’s view that most terrorists are, essentially, terroirists—people who want control of land—but she is also attuned to their narrower, more local considerations. The odds are against them, because of the natural forces of entropy and their lack of access to ordinary military power and other resources, but, if they do succeed, they can be counted upon to try to ascend the ladder of legitimacy, first to insurgency, then to some kind of governing status. (Examples of that ultimate kind of success would be the Irgun and the Stern Gang, in Israel, Sinn Fein and the Provisional I.R.A., in Northern Ireland, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the West Bank and Gaza.)

Cronin goes through an elaborate menu of techniques for hastening the end of a terrorist campaign. None of them rise to the level of major policy, let alone a war on terror; in general, the smaller their scope the more effective Cronin finds them to be. She believes, for instance, that jailing the celebrated head of a terrorist organization is a more effective countermeasure than killing him. (Abimael Guzmán, the head of the Shining Path, in Peru, was, after his capture in 1992, “displayed in a cage, in a striped uniform, recanting and asking his followers to lay down their arms.” That took the wind out of the Shining Path’s sails. A surprise ambush that martyred him might not have.) Negotiating with terrorists—a practice usually forsworn, often done—can work in the long term, Cronin says, not because it is likely to produce a peace treaty but because it enables a state to gain intelligence about its opponents, exploit differences and hive off factions, and stall while time works its erosive wonders.

Cronin offers a confident prescription, based on her small-bore approach to terrorism, for defeating the apparently intractable Al Qaeda. The idea is to take advantage of the group’s highly decentralized structure by working to alienate its far-flung component parts, getting them to see their local interests as being at odds with Al Qaeda’s global ones. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri have focused on exploiting and displacing the local concerns of the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, and many others, and sought to replace them with an international agenda,” Cronin writes. The United States should now try to “sever the connection between Islamism and individualized local contexts for political violence, and then address them separately.” It should work with these local groups, not in an effort to convert them to democracy and love of America but in order to pry them away, one by one, from Al Qaeda. (“Calling the al-Qaeda movement ‘jihadi international,’ as the Israeli intelligence services do,” she writes, “encourages a grouping together of disparate threats that undermines our best counterterrorism. It is exactly the mistake we made when we lumped the Chinese and the Soviets together in the 1950s and early 1960s, calling them ‘international Communists.’ ”)

Eli Berman, an economist who has done field work among ultra-orthodox religious groups in Israel, is even more granular in his view of what terrorists want: he stresses the social services that terror and insurgent groups provide to their members. Berman’s book is an extended application to terrorism of an influential 1994 article by the economist Laurence Iannaccone, called “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” Trying to answer the question of why religious denominations that impose onerous rules and demand large sacrifices of their members seem to thrive better than those which do not, Iannaccone surmised that strict religions function as economic clubs. They appeal to recruits in part because they are able to offer very high levels of benefits—not just spiritual ones but real services—and this involves high “defection constraints.” In denominations where it’s easy for individual members to opt out of an obligation, it is impossible to maintain such benefits. Among the religious groups Iannaccone has written about, impediments to defection can be emotionally painful, such as expulsion or the promise of eternal damnation; in many terrorist groups, the defection constraints reflect less abstract considerations: this-worldly torture, maiming, and murder.

Berman’s main examples are Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in Iraq, and the Taliban, whom Berman calls “some of the most accomplished rebels of modern times.” All these organizations, he points out, are effective providers of services in places where there is dire need of them. Their members are also subject to high defection constraints, because their education and their location don’t put them in the way of a lot of opportunity and because they know they will be treated brutally if they do defect.

Like most other terrorism experts, Berman sees no crevasse between insurgents and terrorists. Instead, he considers them to be members of a single category he calls “rebels,” who use a variety of techniques, depending on the circumstances. Suicide bombing represents merely one end of the spectrum; its use is an indication not of the fanaticism or desperation of the individual bomber (most suicide bombers—recall Muhammad Atta’s professional-class background—are not miserably poor and alienated adolescent males) but of the supremely high cohesion of the group. Suicide bombing, Berman notes, increases when the terrorist group begins to encounter hard targets, like American military bases, that are impervious to everything else. The Taliban used traditional guerrilla-warfare techniques when they fought the Northern Alliance in the mountains. When their enemies became Americans and other Westerners operating from protected positions and with advanced equipment, the Taliban were more likely to resort to suicide bombing. How else could a small group make a big impact?

The idea of approaching terrorists as rational actors and defeating them by a cool recalibration of their incentives extends beyond the academic realm. Its most influential published expression is General David Petraeus’s 2006 manual “Counterinsurgency.” Written in dry management-ese, punctuated by charts and tables, the manual stands as a rebuke of the excesses of Bush’s global war on terror.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the introduction to the manual declares. “They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law.” The manual’s most famous formulation is “clear-hold-build,” and its heaviest emphasis is on the third of those projects; the counterinsurgent comes across a bit like a tough but kindhearted nineteen-fifties cop, walking a beat, except that he does more multitasking. He collects garbage, digs wells, starts schools and youth clubs, does media relations, improves the business climate. What he doesn’t do is torture, kill in revenge, or overreact. He’s Gandhi in I.E.D.-proof armor.

Petraeus has clearly absorbed the theory that terrorist and insurgent groups are sustained by their provision of social services. Great swaths of the manual are devoted to elaborating ways in which counterinsurgents must compete for people’s loyalty by providing better services in the villages and tribal encampments of the deep-rural Middle East. It’s hard to think of a service that the manual doesn’t suggest, except maybe yoga classes. And, like Berman, the manual is skeptical about the utility, in fighting terrorism, of big ideas about morality, policy, or even military operations. Here’s a representative passage:

REMEMBER SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Another tendency is to attempt large-scale, mass programs. In particular, Soldiers and Marines tend to apply ideas that succeed in one area to another area. They also try to take successful small programs and replicate them on a larger scale. This usually does not work. Often small-scale programs succeed because of local conditions or because their size kept them below the enemy’s notice and helped them flourish unharmed. . . . Small-scale projects rarely proceed smoothly into large programs. Keep programs small.

One problem with such programs is that they can be too small, and too nice, to win the hearts and minds of the populace away from their traditional leaders. The former civil-affairs officer A. Heather Coyne tells the story, recounted in Berman’s book, of a program that offered people in Sadr City ten dollars a day to clean the streets—something right out of the counterinsurgency manual. The American colonel who was running the program went out to talk to people and find out how effective the program was at meeting its larger goal. This is what he heard: “We are so grateful for the program. And we’re so grateful to Muqtada al-Sadr for doing this program.” Evidently, Sadr had simply let it be known that he was behind this instance of social provision, and people believed him. For Berman, the lesson is “a general principle: economic development and governance can be at odds when the territory is not fully controlled by the government.” That’s a pretty discouraging admission—it implies that helping people peacefully in an area where insurgents are well entrenched may only help the insurgents.

One could criticize the manual from a military perspective, as Mark Moyar does, for being too nonviolent and social-worky. Moyar admires General Petraeus personally (Petraeus being the kind of guy who, while recuperating from major surgery at a hospital after taking a bullet during a live-ammunition exercise, had his doctors pull all the tubes out of his arm and did fifty pushups to prove that he should be released early). But Moyar is appalled by the manual’s tendency to downplay the use of force: “The manual repeatedly warned of the danger of alienating the populace through the use of lethal force and insisted that counterinsurgents minimize the use of force, even if in some instances it meant letting enemy combatants escape. . . . As operations in Iraq and elsewhere have shown, aggressive and well-led offensive operations to chase down insurgents have frequently aided the counterinsurgent cause by robbing the insurgents of the initiative, disrupting their activities, and putting them in prison or in the grave.”

Because terrorism is such an enormous problem—it takes place constantly, all over the world, in conflict zones and in big cities, in more and less developed countries—one can find an example of just about every anti-terrorist tactic working (or failing to). One of the most prolific contemporary terrorist groups, the Tamil Tigers, of Sri Lanka, appears to have been defeated by the Sinhalese Buddhist-dominated government, through a conventional, if unusually violent, military campaign, which ended last spring. In that instance, brutal repression seems to have been the key. But the Russians have tried that intermittently in Chechnya, without the same effect; the recent suicide bombing in the Moscow subway by Chechen terrorists prompted an Op-Ed piece in the Times by Robert Pape and two associates, arguing that the answer is for Russia to dial back its “indirect military occupation” of Chechnya.

The point of social science is to be careful, dispassionate, and analytical, to get beyond the lure of anecdote and see what the patterns really are. But in the case of counterterrorism the laboratory approach can’t be made to scan neatly, because there isn’t a logic that can be counted upon to apply in all cases. One could say that the way to reduce a group’s terrorist activity is by reaching a political compromise with it; Northern Ireland seems to be an example. But doing that can make terrorism more attractive to other groups—a particular risk for the United States, which operates in so many places around the world. After the Hezbollah attack on the Marine barracks, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, a decision that may have set off more terrorism in the Middle East over the long term. Immediate, savage responses—George W. Bush, rather than Reagan—can work in one contained area and fail more broadly. If the September 11th attacks were meant in part to provoke a response that would make the United States unpopular in the Muslim world, they certainly succeeded.

Even if one could prove that a set of measured responses to specific terrorist acts was effective, or that it’s always a good idea to alter terrorists’ cost-benefit calculations, there’s the problem implied by the tactic’s name: people on the receiving end of terrorism, and not just the immediate victims, do, in fact, enter a state of terror. The emotion—and its companion, thirst for revenge—inevitably figure large in the political life of the targeted country. As Cronin dryly notes, “In the wake of major attacks, officials tend to respond (very humanly) to popular passions and anxiety, resulting in policy made primarily on tactical grounds and undermining their long-term interests. Yet this is not an effective way to gain the upper hand against nonstate actors.” The implication is that somewhere in the world there might be a politician with the skill to get people to calm down about terrorists in their midst, so that a rational policy could be pursued. That’s hard to imagine.

Another fundamental problem in counterterrorism emerges from a point many of the experts agree on: that terrorism, uniquely horrifying as it is, doesn’t belong to an entirely separate and containable realm of human experience, like the one occupied by serial killers. Instead, it’s a tactic whose aims bleed into the larger, endless struggle of people to control land, set up governments, and exercise power. History is about managing that struggle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, rather than eliminating the impulses that underlie it.

For Americans, the gravest terrorist threat right now is halfway across the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. On paper, in all three countries, the experts’ conceptual model works. Lesser terrorist groups remain violent but seem gradually to lose force, and greater ones rise to the level of political participation. At least some elements of the Taliban have been talking with the Afghan government, with the United States looking on approvingly. In Iraq, during the recent elections, some Sunni groups set off bombs near polling places, but others won parliamentary seats. Yet this proof of concept does not solve the United States’ terrorism problem. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all have pro-American governments that are weak. They don’t have firm control over the area within their borders, and they lack the sort of legitimacy that would make terrorism untempting. Now that General Petraeus is the head of the Central Command and has authority over American troops in the region, our forces could practice all that he has preached, achieve positive results, and still be unable to leave, because there is no national authority that can be effective against terrorism.

Long ago, great powers that had vital interests far away simply set up colonies. That wound up being one of the leading causes of terrorism. Then, as an alternative to colonialism, great powers supported dictatorial client states. That, too, often led to terrorism. During the Bush Administration, creating democracies (by force if necessary) in the Middle East was supposed to serve American interests, but, once again, the result was to increase terrorism. Even if all terrorism turns out to be local, effective, long-running counterterrorism has to be national. States still matter most. And finding trustworthy partner states in the region of the world where suicide bombers are killing Americans is so hard that it makes fighting terrorism look easy.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/04/26/100426crbo_books_lemann?printable=true#ixzz0lZfPJ1mQ

Related articles by Zemanta

• Revealed: Iraq Terrorists' Deadly New Tactic (news.sky.com)
• Ahmad Afzali, Imam, Dodges Jail Time, Must Leave US (huffingtonpost.com)
• New York Terror Suspect Admits Guilt and Cooperates (nytimes.com)
• Doug Bandow: Blowback: The Lessons of the Moscow Bombings for America (huffingtonpost.com)
• Oklahoma City Bombing 15 Years Later (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• Brian Levin, J.D.: Thwarted Plane Bombing Shows Continuing Threat and Diversity of Jihadist Radicalism (huffingtonpost.com)
• Russia's War on Terror: A Crackdown By Popular Demand (time.com)

Alleged Sept. 11 planner will be tried in New York - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

A shift to civilian court Four co-conspirators also will be transferred

By Peter Finn and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-conspirators will be tried in Manhattan federal courthouse less than a mile from Ground Zero, the Justice Department announced Friday, the most concrete demonstration yet of the Obama administration's desire to reassert the primacy of the criminal justice system in responding to terrorist acts.

In planning to transfer Mohammed and his co-defendants from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to civilian court, the administration takes a significant step toward reversing the Bush administration's practice of declaring suspected members of al-Qaeda and related groups to be unlawful enemy combatants subject to extra-judicial or military detention. The decision also adds some momentum to the administration's lagging effort to close the military prison camp on the southeastern tip of Cuba.

"For over 200 years, our nation has relied on a faithful adherence to the rule of law to bring criminals to justice and provide accountability to victims," said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. "Once again we will ask our legal system to rise to that challenge, and I am confident it will answer the call with fairness and justice."

But the effort to criminalize the events of Sept. 11 and accord Mohammed the full panoply of rights enjoyed in a federal trial has infuriated and dismayed Republicans, as well as some organizations of victims' families. They argued that military commissions at Guantanamo Bay offered a secure environment, a proper forum for war crimes, and adequate legal protections for a ruthless enemy.

"The Obama Administration's irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in a statement. "The possibility that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators could be found 'not guilty' due to some legal technicality just blocks from Ground Zero should give every American pause."

The trial of the man the 9/11 Commission Report called a "self-cast star -- the superterrorist" will probably draw extraordinary attention and could burrow into the raw details of the Sept. 11 plot and its fallout, from its conception in Afghanistan to the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at CIA "black sites" around the world. Officials said they hope that in placing Mohammed before a jury of ordinary Americans, he will be denied the warrior status he craves.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other officials applauded the decision, but on the streets of Lower Manhattan, the financial district wreathed in ash when the World Trade Center came down in 2001, reaction was more nuanced.

"The jurisdiction of the crime is New York, so I guess it makes sense," said Gwen Taylor, an office worker grabbing her midday meal at a lunch truck, the stainless steel All American Diner. "However, I would rather try them in Guantanamo. Bringing them here and trying them here may cause other radicals to show up and protest. Or it might provoke them into doing something in support of their brethren. But I really understand why they have to do it here."

Shaka Trahan, 34, displayed no such ambivalence. "Wow," he said. "I look at it like this: Wherever the crime took place, that's where they should try them."

Speaking to reporters in Japan, President Obama defended Holder's decision. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice," Obama said. "The American people insist on it, and my administration will insist on it."

Difficult deadline

Although Guantanamo Bay will soon lose some of its most infamous inhabitants, the administration has all but acknowledged that the facility itself cannot be closed by Jan. 22, the one-year deadline Obama set in an executive order shortly after taking office. Bruising and often unexpected political, diplomatic and legal problems have slowed the administration's effort to empty the military detention center.

The four other alleged key players in the Sept. 11 conspiracy to face trial in Manhattan are Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni; Tawfiq bin Attash, a Yemeni better known as Khallad; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mohammed's nephew and a Pakistani also known as Ammar Al-Baluchi; and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a Saudi.

The administration is required to give Congress 45 days' notice of its intent to transfer detainees so that the Sept. 11 defendants will not be immediately moved to the United States.

The administration also announced that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi accused of orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole when it was docked off the coast of Yemen in 2000, will be tried at a military commission. Holder said one factor in deciding to keep Nashiri's case within the military justice system was that the attack targeted a U.S. warship docked in foreign territory, rather than a civilian target on American soil. Seventeen sailors were killed in the bombing.

The cases of four other detainees who had been charged in military tribunals will remain in the military system, officials said. They include Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who is accused of killing a U.S. Army sergeant in a grenade attack in Afghanistan in 2002. His case is controversial because he was a minor at the time of the alleged attack, and his attorneys, as well as international human rights monitors, argue that he was a child soldier who should be rehabilitated, not prosecuted.

While in CIA custody, Mohammed was subjected to a series of coercive interrogation techniques, culminating in waterboarding. Asked about the prospect that defense attorneys could use the acknowledged waterboarding to derail the case, Holder said he would not have authorized the prosecutions if he were not convinced the outcome would be successful.

Emptying Guantanamo

Prosecutors must still present evidence before a New York grand jury, and while the specific charges they will seek remain unclear, Holder said Friday he was all but certain to order the death penalty against the five Sept. 11 conspirators. Mohammed and his co-defendants have said at Guantanamo Bay they want to be executed so to achieve martyrdom.

Of the 215 detainees who remain at Guantanamo Bay, nearly 90 have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in third countries, according to an administration official. But more than 30 of those are Yemeni, and the administration is reluctant to send them home to a country plagued by a resurgent al-Qaeda and civil strife. A deal to send some Yemenis to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation is all but dead, the official said. Other detainees are resisting repatriation, and the administration's special envoy, Daniel Fried, is still searching for enough countries to resettle the rest.

As many as 40 detainees could ultimately be brought to trial -- some in federal court and some in military commissions. Both federal and military prosecutors have also been discussing plea agreements with lawyers for detainees, according to sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Excluding those detainees destined for transfer or trial still leaves as many as 75 inmates who will probably be held in some form of prolonged detention because they are too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted -- a sizable category not anticipated by some in the administration until they started to read classified files, a number of government officials said privately.

The administration has yet to identify and refurbish facilities in the United States for both military trials and indefinite detention. That process could take at least eight months, according to Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in the Bush administration, who studied the logistics involved in 2006.

Human rights groups welcomed the prospect of federal trials.

"The transfer of these cases is a huge victory for restoring due process and the rule of law, as well as repairing America's international standing, an essential part of ensuring our national security," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. The organization, along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, provided legal assistance to the five individuals accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks.

The ACLU and other human rights and civil liberties organizations continue to balk at the administration's decision to continue to use a revised system of military commissions for some detainees, and are stridently opposed to prolonged detention without trial.

Other human rights activists say military commissions, as recently restructured by Congress to provide more due process rights to defendants, can be appropriate for some detainees.

"We applaud the administration's recognition that both the law of war and domestic criminal law are appropriate tools" against al-Qaeda, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. "It makes sense that those who killed civilians in New York face justice in federal court there. And using military tribunals to try those who attack military objectives overseas as part of a self-declared war on the United States is consistent with the law of war so long as those trials are in fact fair."

Staff writer Karl Vick in New York and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

What to Do About the Torturers? - The New York Review of Books

Image via Wikipedia

By David Cole

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

by Philippe Sands

Palgrave Macmillan, 254 pp., $26.95

The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book

by Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights

New Press, 242 pp., $23.95

Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond

by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh

Columbia University Press, 374 pp., $29.95; $22.50 (paper)

The story of America's descent into torture in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been told now by many writers. Mark Danner, Jane Mayer, and Ron Suskind have written brilliant expositions of the facts, showing how the drive to prevent the next attack led the administration's highest officials to seek ways around the legal restrictions on coercive interrogation of suspects.^[1] After the abuses at Abu Ghraib came to light, the military itself commissioned three detailed investigative reports, including highly critical ones by Major General Antonio Taguba and by a panel led by former defense secretary James Schlesinger. Among other factors, they blamed ambiguity in the standards governing interrogation—an ambiguity ultimately attributable to the attempts at evasion directed from the top. Congressional committees have held numerous public hearings into the use of coercive interrogation tactics at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, and the NYU Center on Law and Security have each published collections of official documents, which effectively indict the government using its own words.^[2]

But undoubtedly the most unusual and deeply revealing take on the subject is the work of the British lawyer and law professor Philippe Sands. As Alexis de Tocqueville showed long ago, sometimes it takes the eyes of an outsider to show us ourselves. Sands, a leading international lawyer and a professor at University College London, took it upon himself to conduct his own personal investigation of one aspect of the torture policy—the Army's adoption of coercive tactics to interrogate suspects at Guantánamo. This policy was not the worst of the post–September 11 abuses. As far as we know, no one has been waterboarded at Guantánamo, as some were at the CIA's secret "black sites," nor have any suspects been killed in interrogation, as happened on several occasions elsewhere. No one we know of has been rendered from Guantánamo to another country to be tortured, although some prisoners who were earlier subject to rendition and torture have since been transferred to Guantánamo.

---

---

But precisely because the Army's interrogation policy was not the worst of the worst—to borrow a phrase—its story may actually be more instructive. The CIA has always operated to a significant degree outside the law. The military, by contrast, is at its core an institution committed to discipline and order, strictly governed by the laws of war. So the fact that illegal abusive tactics were officially authorized at the Pentagon's highest levels is in some sense more shocking than the CIA's crimes. We should expect more of the military.

America's experiment with torture presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult challenges: how should the nation account for the abuses that have occurred in the past, what are the appropriate remedies, and how can we ensure that such abuses not happen again? Torture Team offers new insight into what will surely be one of the leading human rights issues of the next several years.

1.

Sands began his investigation, as any good lawyer would, with the documents—from a memo drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a staff lawyer for the Army stationed at Guantánamo; to a log detailing the interrogation of "Detainee 063," Mohammed al-Qahtani; to a one-page memo drafted by William Haynes, Department of Defense general counsel, and signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, authorizing a series of coercive interrogation tactics beyond anything the military had previously permitted. In signing that memo, which approved sixteen coercive tactics, including forcing suspects to stand for up to four hours straight, Rumsfeld scribbled in the margin, "I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" As that comment itself suggests, these documents chillingly underscore the mundane banality with which cruelty and torture became official policy of the United States Department of Defense.

The smoking gun is the Army's log of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani. Al-Qahtani was thought to be the twentieth hijacker; he was denied entry to the United States in August 2001 at Orlando Airport, where Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September 11 attacks, was waiting to meet him. It was his interrogation that prompted the military to authorize new coercive techniques. The log of al-Qahtani's interrogation, leaked to the press and initially published by Time magazine, provides a detailed, minute-by-minute account of the tactics employed against al-Qahtani, all of which had been approved by Rumsfeld in his one-page memo.

Over fifty-four days, beginning in late 2002, al-Qahtani was interrogated for eighteen to twenty hours each day, denied anything more than four hours' sleep per night, threatened with dogs, stripped naked, hooded, forced to wear women's underwear on his head, humiliated sexually by female interrogators, subjected to extreme heat and cold and loud noises, doused with cold water, and injected with intravenous fluid and not allowed to go to the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. The account has been public for some time, but Sands brings it to life, using it as a kind of drumbeat of reality throughout the book by closing nearly every chapter with a short excerpt from the log.

The Army investigated the interrogation of al-Qahtani and concluded that no laws were broken and that nothing inhumane was done. Sands took the log to Dr. Abigail Seltzer, a London-based psychiatrist who consults with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, in order to obtain an expert assessment. She was exceedingly thorough, marking each time that al-Qahtani was subjected to abusive treatment, required medical care, or expressed distress, but also noting each time his rights were respected. She was cautious in her analysis, remarking on the absence of physical violence and the extremely organized and disciplined way in which the tactics were employed. (Only the US Army could conduct—and record—torture with such meticulous attention to detail.)

When Sands asked Dr. Seltzer whether she thought the treatment had produced severe physical or mental pain, the legal threshold for torture, she pointed to the Army's own recording of al-Qahtani's expressions of distress. Sands puts them together in a single quotation, editing out the tactics that produced the reactions. It is the closest thing we have to seeing the experience through the eyes of its victim, and it is truly harrowing. Here is a portion:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee butted SGT R in the eye. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Began to cry. Claimed to have been pressured into making a confession. Falling asleep. Very uncomfortable. On the verge of breaking. Angry. Detainee struggled. Detainee asked for prayer. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Pushed guard. Dizzy. Headache. Near tears. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Complained of dizziness. Tired. Agitated. Yelled for Allah. Started making faces. Near crying. Irritated. Annoyed. Detainee attempted to injure two guards. Became very violent and irate. Attempted to liberate himself. Struggled. Made several attempts to stand up. Screamed....

Dr. Seltzer concluded that al-Qahtani had undoubtedly suffered severe emotional and possibly physical distress.

What makes Sands's book most intriguing, however, is that he does not merely analyze the documentary evidence. Instead, he personally set out to interview as many of the participants in this sordid tale as would talk to him. Remarkably, nearly all of them did—including Diane Beaver; Major General Michael Dunlavey, commanding officer at Guantánamo until November 2002; Douglas Feith, a leading neoconservative and, as undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three man in the Department of Defense; and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sands also interviewed FBI lawyers, military interrogators, the general counsels for the Department of Defense and the Navy, and several others involved in the decision-making process.

Why would so many people willingly talk to a stranger about their roles in the development and implementation of a policy that led to torture, one of the most harshly condemned practices known to mankind? In part, Sands's ability to gain access may have turned on his outsider status—as a British lawyer studying the role of lawyers in the war on terror, he was not obviously identified with any side of the warring camps within the United States on this subject. A Google search, however, would have quickly led the people he interviewed to see that his previous book, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War,^[3] was a biting critique of the United States' role in the realm of international law in recent years. In fact, several of the officials he approached appear to have done just that, and after initially agreeing to an interview, sought to back out at the last moment. But Sands always managed to talk his way into getting the interview anyway, and in most cases was able to build a strong rapport with his subjects, leading them to be remarkably candid in their responses to his questions.

The more convincing explanation for why so many decided to talk to Sands is that they felt they had done nothing wrong. Douglas Feith, for example, practically gloats about his role in formulating the administration's policy that the Geneva Conventions did not protect al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters. This determination, announced publicly by President Bush in February 2002, cleared the way for coercive interrogation, because if the Geneva Conventions applied, any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of detainees was absolutely forbidden by Common Article 3, which sets a minimum baseline of human rights protections for all detained persons, whether or not they are uniformed fighters. Sands pressed this point with Feith, prompting a striking admission. As Sands relays the dialogue:

I was...curious about the connection between the decision on Geneva and the new interrogation rules approved by Rumsfeld at the end of 2002.... I observed to Feith that his memo to the President and the Geneva decision meant that its constraints on interrogation didn't apply to anyone at Guantánamo. "Oh yes, sure," he shot back. So that was the intention, I asked. "Absolutely," he replied, without any hesitation. Under the Geneva Conventions no one there was entitled to any protection. "That's the point."

Sands's interviews sometimes persuaded him to adopt a more sympathetic understanding of particular protagonists in the torture story. Thus, he portrays Diane Beaver, the lawyer who wrote the initial Army memo justifying coercive interrogation, including waterboarding, as well-meaning if deeply wrong. She was simply out of her depth, Sands suggests, since she had no real experience or serious training in the legal issues about which she was asked to give her opinions.

What's more, Sands contends, Beaver was in reality a scapegoat. The administration sought to portray the decision to use coercive tactics as originating from Guantánamo, but Sands makes a convincing case that the decision in fact came from the top—from Feith, Rumsfeld, Haynes, David Addington (Dick Cheney's legal counsel at the time), Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, among others. Beaver's October 2002 memo was largely unnecessary, since it was written after the critical legal decisions had already been made in Washington. By the time Beaver wrote it, President Bush had already publicly declared that Guantánamo detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and John Yoo and Jay Bybee had already written the infamous August 2002 Justice Department "torture memo" at Gonzales's request. This memo argued that as commander in chief, the president could order torture without fear of criminal liability, and that in any event the torture statute did not prohibit threats of death, as long as the threatened death was not imminent; nor did it prohibit the infliction of intense physical pain, so long as the pain did not rise to the severity associated with organ failure or death itself. In the wake of such opinions, what a staff lawyer at Guantánamo thought was beside the point.

Others are also portrayed in a surprising light. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the Rumsfeld memo was adopted, had, by his own account, astoundingly little understanding of what was at stake. At one point, he told Sands that all the coercive measures approved by Rumsfeld were already authorized by the Army Field Manual; in fact, none of the tactics were permitted under the manual. Sands concludes that Myers was "hoodwinked" by Rumsfeld and Haynes. General James Hill, who headed the Southern Command and passed Diane Beaver's memo up the chain to Washington, admits to Sands that he would never have approved some of the tactics Rumsfeld okayed. And military intelligence experts closely involved with the Guantánamo interrogations tell Sands that no valuable information was obtained from al-Qahtani.

Sands's book prompted the House Judiciary Committee to launch hearings last summer into the role of lawyers in the development of the interrogation policies, and those hearings in turn led the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold still further hearings. Addington, Yoo, Feith, and Haynes all testified very defensively, often refusing to answer political questions or not recalling key details. But documents disclosed in the course of the hearings now show that when the coercive measures were under consideration, top lawyers for every branch of the military—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—objected that the tactics might be illegal. The comments encouraged Jane Dalton, legal counsel to General Myers, to undertake a more detailed review of the legal questions posed—until General Myers, at Haynes's request, ordered that the legal inquiry be quashed. It appears that General Myers may not have been hoodwinked after all.

Because so many of the facts surrounding the torture policy are now well known, Sands's book is illuminating not so much for breaking new factual ground as for the human insight he brings to the events. Through his interviews, he tells a story about how ordinary human beings, all working within an institution designed to fight by the rules, felt tremendous pressure to bend the rules—and in most cases did so without apparent concern or self-doubt. A narrowly pragmatic ethos guided virtually all actors. The real arguments were for the most part not about whether coercive tactics were legally or morally acceptable, but about whether they worked. Some, especially those in the FBI, felt strongly that they were counterproductive, and that building rapport through noncoercive questioning was the only way to gain credible intelligence from captives.^[4] Others thought the idea of building rapport with al-Qaeda suspects was foolish; it could not be done. But with the courageous exception of Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, few argued that coercive tactics were wrong because they were immoral and illegal, whether or not they worked. In America after September 11, idealists were few and far between, and an amoral, blinkered pragmatism ruled the day.

Sands is an unabashed idealist. He considers it the government lawyer's obligation to be the guardian of legality, even (and especially) where one's clients, the politically elected and appointed decision-makers, have decided that the law and the rules are inconvenient. Sands argues that torture is ineffective, and that building rapport with suspects is the better course. Indeed, he demonstrates in his own interviews the power of rapport to get subjects talking candidly. But in the end, his argument is not a pragmatic one—it is an argument of principle. The prohibition against torture is absolute, and expresses a fundamental norm about human decency, not a practical judgment about what produces results in interrogation.

2.

The critical question, now that the administration is changing hands, is how to address the fact that the United States after September 11 adopted an official practice of cruel, inhuman, and degrading interrogation tactics, some of which, including at a minimum the interrogation of al-Qahtani and the waterboarding of CIA suspects, rose to the level of torture. Some, including current Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, have argued that no further investigations, much less prosecutions, are needed, and we should simply move on.^[5]

Mukasey insists that everyone acted in good faith—but his judgment is compromised by his refusal even to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture. He never squares his finding of "good faith" with the fact that Haynes and Myers cut off an inquiry into the legality of the Army's tactics after the military's top lawyers objected that the tactics were illegal, or that Yoo and Bybee failed even to cite important contrary legal authority in their torture memo. And while good faith is certainly a factor to be considered in making the discretionary decision whether to prosecute, it is not in itself a legal defense to the crimes of torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.

In Jack Goldsmith's view, the facts are already known, the normative judgments have been made, and the real risk is that an extensive investigation will induce federal officials to be overly risk-averse in their approach to controversial national security issues. Goldsmith, however, is not a disinterested party; he was Haynes's top lawyer on international law when Haynes drafted the Rumsfeld memo on interrogation tactics. Later, as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, he oversaw a review of the Yoo-Bybee "torture memo" that, while it ultimately resulted in the memo's replacement, did not reverse the office's authorization of any of the CIA's coercive tactics, including waterboarding.^[6]

Others, such as Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights, call for criminal prosecution. Their book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, convincingly makes the case that Rumsfeld committed war crimes, and is a useful companion to Torture Team because it includes excerpts from all the critical evidence and a lucid explanation of the legal issues. The center has formally petitioned the German and French governments to bring criminal charges, but both have thus far declined.^[7]

Sands's prescription is similar. His book begins with a discussion of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, which featured the trial of judges and lawyers complicit in Nazi atrocities, and closes with a discussion of the principle of "universal jurisdiction," which holds that any country has the right to prosecute certain war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter where or by whom they were committed, so long as it observes the fundamental requirements of a fair trial. Sands himself played a part in the landmark UK extradition case against General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, in which the UK's Law Lords ruled that even a former head of state was not immune to prosecution by a foreign country (Spain) for torture and other crimes against humanity.

Criminal prosecution within or outside the United States is highly unlikely. At home, the Justice Department's "torture memo" would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it, and Congress, in the Military Commissions Act, granted retrospective immunity to officials involved in the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of September 11. The latter immunity, Sands points out, actually makes US officials more susceptible to prosecution overseas, because it removes a major impediment to international prosecution—namely, the principle that universal jurisdiction should not be exercised as long as domestic remedies are available. Still, as a matter of realpolitik, it is difficult to imagine any nation greeting the Obama administration with an international prosecution of former high-level US officials.

But even if criminal prosecution seems unlikely, the acts of the past administration demand accountability. Here's what Eric Holder, whom Obama will nominate as attorney general, said several months ago:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning.

That "reckoning," owed not just to the American people but to the world, will be made especially difficult by the fact that complicity in the torture policy reaches the very top of the Bush administration. The tactics used by the CIA in its interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other "high-level" detainees, including waterboarding, were specifically approved in the White House situation room by Vice President Dick Cheney, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Ashcroft is reported to have remarked that "history will not judge us kindly," but none of the participants is reported to have objected to the tactics.^[8] On December 15, Vice President Cheney acknowledged for the first time that he had authorized and continues to support techniques including waterboarding. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney told ABC News. Apparently CIA officials insisted on such high-level approval as a form of insurance against future prosecution.

This poses a real political dilemma: How is President Obama, committed to bipartisan leadership, to hold such officials accountable? A prosecution of any of these men would be as divisive a criminal case as the United States has ever seen—even if it could surmount the legal hurdles identified above. Just launching an investigation will be bruisingly controversial.

Must we then settle for the judgment of history that Ashcroft worried about? In some sense, that judgment has already begun to take shape, thanks to the efforts of Sands, Ratner, enterprising journalists like Mark Danner and Jane Mayer, and especially the ACLU, which forced the disclosure of over 100,000 documents on the interrogation policy by filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. Administration of Torture, a guide to those documents with excerpts from the most interesting, will prove an immensely useful resource for future historians.

Without prosecutions or an independent investigation, significant progress toward repudiating the administration's approval of cruelty and torture has already been made. In 2006 the Supreme Court rejected President Bush's position that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda. The military rescinded its authorization of coercion, and has limited itself, in the Army Field Manual, to noncoercive interrogation tactics. The CIA has reportedly abandoned waterboarding, and there have been no reports of renditions to torture in foreign countries for several years. The Justice Department rescinded the August 2002 "torture memo"—although, as noted above, the replacement memo did not alter the department's approval of illegal CIA tactics. Congress, under the leadership of Senator John McCain, resoundingly rejected a White House interpretation that the Torture Convention's prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment exempted foreign nationals held outside the United States; the McCain Amendment provides that the prohibition applies to all persons held by US officials, no matter where they are located.

Critically, however, while the administration has been forced to retreat, there has been no official acknowledgment of high-level criminal wrongdoing. The treatment of prisoners authorized by the administration clearly violated the prohibitions on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment contained in Common Article 3 and the Torture Convention; and waterboarding unquestionably qualifies as torture. All these violations were war crimes. Yet no high-level official has been held accountable for the torture policy. The only officer convicted of any crime with respect to the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, had his conviction reversed on appeal in January 2008. (And even that conviction was not for any role in the abuse itself, but for disobeying an order not to talk about the investigation.) No one has even been charged for any abuse inflicted at Guantánamo.

On December 11, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin and John McCain, released an important report on abusive interrogations that concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials had

solicited information on how to use agressive (interrogation) techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

Most of the report was classified, however. And apart from this, Congress has largely acted symbolically, avoiding any real measures to enforce accountability. The McCain Amendment, for example, provides no sanctions for its violation. The Military Commissions Act not only retrospectively gave immunity to interrogators, but prospectively watered down the War Crimes Act so that inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees is no longer a war crime.

While the CIA claims to have abandoned waterboarding, the administration has refused to say what tactics CIA interrogators are still permitted to use. Its secret prisons, into which suspects are disappeared for incommunicado interrogation, remain open. The administration has never repudiated the practice of rendering suspects to third countries for interrogation by torture, and has never held anyone accountable for that practice. And several still-secret and still-governing Justice Department memoranda from 2005 reportedly authorize the CIA to continue using coercive tactics even after the McCain Amendment was passed. In March 2008, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have required the CIA to limit itself to interrogation techniques approved in the Army Field Manual.

In short, the United States has never taken full responsibility for the crimes its high-level officials committed and authorized. That is unacceptable. In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong—as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form. We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, officially apologizing for the Japanese internment and paying reparations to the internees and their survivors. That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again. There has been nothing of its kind with respect to torture.

We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past. The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward.^[9] We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment—our own federal government—the healing cannot begin.

—December 17, 2008

Notes

^[1]Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review Books, 2004) ; Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008) ; Ron Suskind, The One-Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon and Schuster, 2006).

^[2]Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld ; Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Administration of Torture ; The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

^[3]Viking, 2005; reviewed in these pages by Brian Urquhart, May 11, 2006.

^[4]For an argument by a seasoned military interrogator that rapport-building is far more effective than torture and cruelty, see Matthew Alexander with John R . Bruning, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (Free Press, 2008). Alexander, a pseudonym, led an interrogation team in Iraq that located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. For a more detached historical account drawing the same conclusion, and finding that there is no evidence that torture "works," see Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2007).

^[5]See "Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Michael Mukasey at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Federalist Society," November 20, 2008, at www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2008/ag-speech-081120.html; Jack Goldsmith, "No New Torture Probes," The Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

^[6]See my review of Goldsmith's book The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration in these pages, December 6, 2007.

^[7]I am a member of the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights, although I did not take part in the efforts to have criminal proceedings initiated against Rumsfeld.

^[8]Mayer, The Dark Side, p. 143.

^[9]The International Center for Transitional Justice, which focuses on the question of how new governments can pursue accountability for the crimes of former regimes—a problem more common in the developing world, but one that the United States itself must now confront—has written a very useful brief on the benefits of such a commission, and on how it should be constituted: Policy Brief: US Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in the "War on Terror" (November 2008).

For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Intellipedia, the intelligence community's version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results.

Similarly, a page established in November immediately after the terrorist attack in Mumbai provided intelligence analysts with a better understandinsg of the scope of the incident, as well as a forum to speculate on possible perpetrators.

"There were a number of things posted that were ahead of what was being reported in the press," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped establish the site.

Intellipedia is a collaborative online intelligence repository, and it runs counter to traditional reluctance in the intelligence community to the sharing of classified information. Indeed, it still meets with formidable resistance from many quarters of the 16 agencies that have access to the system.

But the site, which is available only to users with proper government clearance, has grown markedly since its formal launch in 2006 and now averages more than 15,000 edits per day. It's home to 900,000 pages and 100,000 user accounts.

"About everything that happens of significance, there's an Intellipedia page on," Dennehy said.

Intellipedia sprung from a 2004 paper by CIA employee Calvin Andrus titled "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community."

Dennehy listened to a presentation by Andrus and recalled the skepticism among colleagues about adapting Wikipedia to the intelligence community. He shared their skepticism. "But something he said interested me enough to look into it further," Dennehy said.

Context was also a factor. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence agencies had come under intense criticism for failing to pull together disparate strands of information pointing to the possibility of a major incident.

"We were all doing it in stovepipes," Dennehy said.

Dennehy described 9/11 not so much as a catalyst but as a selling point to explain how Intellipedia could help collate information. "Cal used 9/11 as a backdrop," said Dennehy. "It was really more about what was happening on the Web."

In 2005, Dennehy was given the job of leading the effort and persuading the intelligence community to use it, a task likened to "promoting vegetarianism in Texas" by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group devoted to improving the federal government.

Cultural resistance to Intellipedia includes concerns that foreign intelligence agents could hack into the system. Many intelligence officers, particularly of the older generation, simply do not trust it.

"There isn't any one agency that is more or less prone to use it. It's really a product of individuals," said Don Burke, a fellow CIA officer who helps promote the Intellipedia initiative.

Burke said Intellipedia remains largely the province of early adopters. While some pages are robust and balanced, he added, "there are other pages that leave a lot to be desired, to put it bluntly."

A CIA officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of his work, said Intellipedia "makes it very real-time. You can move down the road fast and focus on catching bad guys. We can really bring our expertise right to the war without leaving our desks."

Intellipedia, which uses the same software as Wikipedia, operates on three levels: an unclassified version, a secret version and a top-secret version. Beyond that, there are "bread crumbs" that could lead a user with proper clearance to additional information offline, Burke said.

Burke said that beyond major incidents such as the Mumbai attack, the biggest advantage is in connecting users seeking information on small, obscure subjects, something he described as "a thousand small wins a day."

Burke and Dennehy have been chosen as finalists for the 2009 Service to America Medals, sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service. The recipients of the medals, which are awarded in eight areas of public service, will be announced next month.

Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, described Intellipedia as an important post-Sept. 11 reform, but one that did not involve a major bureaucratic shake-up, as with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"It's the kind of work we need to see more out of government," Stier said. "They're connecting the dots without rearranging the deck chairs."

Related articles by Zemanta

• CIA, Intel Director Locked in Spy Turf Battle (abcnews.go.com)
• Barack Obama's security advisor intervenes in US intelligence turf war (telegraph.co.uk)