Question of Torture CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Chapter One Two Thousand Years of Torture In April 2004, the American public was stunned when CBS Television broadcast photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, showing Iraqis naked, hooded, and contorted in humiliating positions while U.S. soldiers stood over them, smiling.1 As the scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Congress that the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom columnist William Safire branded as "creeps."2 Other commentatorsciting the famous Stanford prison experiment in which ordinary students role-playing the "guards" soon became brutalattributed the abuse to a collapse of discipline by overstretched American soldiers in overcrowded prisons.3 But these photos are not, in fact, snapshots of simple sadism or a breakdown in military discipline. Rather, they show CIA torture methods that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. If we look closely at these grainy images, we can see the genealogy of CIA torture techniques, from their origins in 1950 to their present-day perfection. Indeed, the photographs from Iraq illustrate standard interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror. These photos, and the later investigations they prompted, offer telltale signs that the CIA was both the lead agency at Abu Ghraib and the source of systematic tortures practiced in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In this light, the nine soldiers court-martialed for the abuse at Abu Ghraib were simply following orders. Responsibility for their actions lies higher, much higher, up the chain of command. In this heated controversy, all of us, proponents and opponents of torture alike, have been acting out a script written over fifty years ago during the depths of the Cold War. Indeed, a search for the roots of Abu Ghraib in the development and propagation of a distinctive American form of torture will, in some way, implicate almost all of our societythe brilliant scholars who did the psychological research, the distinguished professors who advocated its use, the great universities that hosted them, the august legislators who voted funds, and the good Americans who acquiesced, by their silence, whenever media or congressional critics risked their careers for exposes that found little citizen support, allowing the process to continue. What began as an isolated incident of abuse by a few "bad apples," "sadistic" soldiers on the "night shift," or some "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland" would grow, in just six months, into a great political scandal that diminished the majesty of the American state, the world's preeminent power. As the U.S. press probed and Washington's bureaucracy hemorrhaged documents, revelations of abuse spread from Abu Ghraib to American military prisons worldwide. Despite eleven military investigations, twelve congressional hearings, and forty White House briefings all designed to bury the scandal, responsibility climbed, by degrees, from the handful of prison guards to the Pentagon and, ultimately, the president.4 What started as an examination of the night shift in one cell block ramified into an inquiry, first into the Bush administration's interrogation policy, and then into the inner workings of the national-security state, the constitutional restraints on executive powers, and the limits of civil libertiesmaking other recent American political scandals appear, if not petty or parochial, at least somewhat more limited in their impMcCoy, Alfred W. is the author of 'Question of Torture CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror', published 2006 under ISBN 9780805082487 and ISBN 0805082484.