The Economist

Torture still casts a long shadow in the battle between spies and terrorists

JACK BAUER famously does whatever it takes to save America from disaster, be that disaster nuclear, biological or computer attack. Week after week, the hero of “24” acts brutally, and endures brutality, for the greater good. It is a sign of the times that this year’s season opened with Bauer being hauled before a congressional committee to face the charge of committing torture. He was unrepentant.

This television character, who first appeared in 2001, has been oddly at the heart of the arguments over the conduct of America’s “war on terrorism”. Critics in the American army have complained that he encourages young soldiers to abuse prisoners. Supporters, such as Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice, praised him for the episode in which he saved Los Angeles from nuclear attack, even though it meant staging the mock execution of a family to get a Middle Eastern villain to talk. “Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so,” said the judge.

In contrast with Europeans, who strongly reject the use of torture, the American public is pretty evenly divided about its use to extract information from terrorists. But President Barack Obama, for one, is clear. No sooner had he been sworn into office than he banned torture, rescinded legal opinions allowing simulated drowning and other harsh methods, ordered all American agencies to comply with the army’s field manual on interrogation, announced he would close the prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year and ordered a series of policy reviews on detention and interrogation. “From Europe to the Pacific”, Mr Obama said in May, “we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” Dick Cheney, George Bush’s vice-president, sneered at such talk as “recklessness cloaked in righteousness”.

Many people thought that Mr Obama’s election would finally settle the controversies about counter-terrorism’s “dark side” (as Mr Cheney once put it); a darkness that concealed secret prisons, abusive interrogation and “rendition” to countries that practise torture. The distorted DIY legal framework that treated suspected terrorists as neither criminals nor prisoners-of-war, leaving them in an unprotected grey zone between civil and military law, would, many liberals hoped, be put right.

In April, against the wishes of current and former CIA directors, Mr Obama released four secret memos from the Department of Justice, written in 2002 and updated in 2005, that made legal the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as the use of the “waterboard” (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, “walling” (hurling a prisoner against a partition wall), “stress positions” and strange practices like placing a “high-value prisoner” in a cramped box with an insect to exploit his phobia about bugs. It revealed that one prisoner, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the operational head of the September 11th 2001 attacks on America, was waterboarded 183 times.

Mr Obama said that he did not want to prosecute those who operated within these rules. He knows that if he takes action against interrogators he could be accused of seeking scapegoats; if he goes after the CIA chiefs he would be charged with undermining America’s security; and if he investigates leaders of the Bush administration he would look as if he were conducting a witch-hunt against his political rivals. “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” he argued.

Yet the past casts a long shadow. Some of Mr Obama’s supporters want a “truth commission” to establish what happened and, perhaps, recommend prosecutions. Congress is incensed that the CIA did not tell it of a secret programme (which may have had to do with the assassination of terrorists), apparently under orders from Mr Cheney, bringing the former vice-president a step closer to formal investigation. The attorney-general, Eric Holder, is thought to be about to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate those interrogators who exceeded the already lax limits set by the so-called “torture memos”.

Even before this, CIA officials had been hiring lawyers in anticipation of trouble. Some of Mr Obama’s favourite spooks have been unable to take up senior appointments because of their association, sometimes only peripheral, with the interrogation programme. John Brennan, a veteran CIA figure, was withdrawn from consideration as the agency’s director and was given a job in the White House instead. Philip Mudd, a respected intelligence man currently on secondment to the FBI, pulled out of his nomination to the senior intelligence post in the Department of Homeland Security. The Obama administration may have chosen these men but it put little effort into backing its choices.

The big chill

How will all this affect future intelligence operations? There is a distinct chill. Some reckon that the CIA and other agencies face their worst crisis since the post-Watergate inquiries in the 1970s uncovered evidence of spying on Americans and plots to assassinate foreign leaders. “There is undoubtedly some nervousness,” says one senior source. “It does not stop you taking action, but it makes you think twice and talk to your lawyer.”

Britain’s close relations with America are causing it similar problems. Its intelligence agencies are being dragged into the legal limelight, not for torturing suspects but for allegedly colluding in their maltreatment by others—whether they are Americans, Pakistanis or Moroccans. One member of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, is under police investigation.

Increasingly lawyers are being brought in to scrutinise British intelligence before it can be passed on. Will handing over the name of a suspect to America lead to him being killed by an unmanned aircraft in Pakistan? Will sharing a telephone number with, say, Egypt’s spies, lead to the arrest and torture of somebody who should instead be merely watched? Will submitting questions to be asked of a man held in a foreign prison mean that British agents will be held responsible for his treatment?

Agents have become warier of questioning detainees abroad for fear that they will be blamed for any abuse they may have suffered. The number of requests by officials in MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) for the legal cover known as “Article 7”, in which the foreign secretary approves actions that are illegal in Britain, has shot up.

Many of the woes of British agencies are embodied in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian asylum-seeker in Britain, who gave up his drugs habit after rediscovering Islam. He went to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to see an Islamic state at work. There he underwent some form of military training—to help the resistance in Chechnya, he says, not to fight the Americans. He was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in 2002 on a forged passport. He was beaten in prison, where he was seen by members of the FBI and MI5. He was then taken by the Americans to Morocco, where he says he was tortured by a questioner called Marwan, who took a sharp blade to his chest and penis while asking questions that had plainly been fed to him by MI5.

The British authorities say that once Mr Mohamed had left Pakistan, they did not know his whereabouts or conditions of detention; all questions were submitted through the Americans. Much of America’s programme of secret detention and interrogation was formally hidden from allies. The top-secret “torture memos” were classified “NOFORN” (no foreign nationals). But stories of prisoners being abused by the Americans were already circulating in 2002. Indeed some British officials had expressed concern at what they saw.

It was under torture, Mr Mohamed says, that he admitted to meeting Osama bin Laden and to taking part in plots including the detonation of a dirty bomb. This is what he would be accused of when he got to Guantánamo Bay in 2004, via a secret prison in Afghanistan. But, like many others, Mr Mohamed was released in February this year without charge.

By then Mr Mohamed’s lawyers, among them Clive Stafford Smith, founder of a legal charity called Reprieve, had been in full swing on both sides of the Atlantic. They sued the British government to release documents that might prove Mr Mohamed’s innocence, obtaining a High Court judgment that was critical of MI5 and led to the police investigation of one of its officials, known only as “Witness B”. In a parallel case in America, Mr Mohamed and other Guantánamo inmates are suing Jeppensen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which allegedly provided aircraft for the CIA’s rendition programme.

Mr Mohamed’s release has not stopped the litigation in either America or Britain. Both governments argue that the lawsuits should be thrown out because state secrets cannot be divulged. Indeed, the Obama administration has warned Britain that intelligence-sharing would be jeopardised if secret information provided by the CIA were to be revealed in British courts. Similarly, officials in Britain are alarmed by what may be disclosed in America.

Waterboarding the agencies

These days it is the intelligence agencies that find themselves under interrogation. Each snippet they provide produces requests for more information. And the courts, suspicious of what the agencies may be hiding, are demanding ever more disclosure. One source of information has been the succession of freedom-of-information requests for official documents, including the “torture memos”, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Legal campaigners are waging an information-gathering effort that earns the grudging respect of intelligence operatives. “They are chasing the paper trail and winning,” says one. “They are chipping away at state-secret privilege [the doctrine that courts can dismiss lawsuits if classified information will be released]. They could disclose an awful lot of information—names of interrogators and medical personnel. If secrets start seeping out, countries that have been sharing information may be disinclined to do so.”

The controversies show the extent to which torture and other forms of harsh interrogation—even though they may have been abandoned—cloud the legitimate work of counter-terrorism. American sources say that in the latter years of the Bush administration, European agencies, worried that they might be caught up in America’s abusive practices, became reticent about sharing intelligence. Today, America’s partners may hold back out of fear that America will not be able to protect their information. Officials lament that the machinery of Western intelligence-sharing is becoming “gritted up”—though information about “life-threatening” plots is still swapped briskly.

Intelligence-sharing is vital. America, with its vast resources, has become the main repository of information on global terrorism. Though Britain has well-regarded intelligence services, it obtains more than half its reports on terrorism from other agencies, principally American. And about half of America’s intelligence reports on al-Qaeda until 2006, says a former senior official, came from detainees.

The Justice Department’s memos were prompted by the arrest in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a man with close links to al-Qaeda. The CIA wanted clearance to exert greater pressure on the first of its “high-value detainees”—even though FBI investigators would later claim that Mr Zubaydah was already talking freely.

Degrees of pain

The memos gave the CIA licence to use “enhanced” techniques derived from American training advice to pilots and other personnel on how to withstand torture if they should fall into enemy hands. They are shocking for their bureaucratic punctiliousness. They parse the degrees of pain that would constitute forbidden torture (“an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury”). They set out in incongruous detail the limits of abuse.

A prisoner could be deprived of sleep, but for no more than 180 hours before being allowed to rest for eight. He could be stripped naked but only if the room was warmer than 68°F (20°C). He could be doused in water but it had to be potable. He could be waterboarded with cold (saline) water poured onto his face but each application should not last more than 40 seconds, there should be no more than six applications per session, no session could last more than two hours and there could be only two sessions in 24 hours.

The ACLU’s next target is a comprehensive and still largely secret internal CIA report written in 2004 by John Helgerson, then the agency’s inspector-general. This is believed to be particularly damning, providing evidence of abuse that went well beyond the permitted guidelines. Compared with the antiseptic legal memos, writes Jane Mayer, the author of a book called “The Dark Side”, the Helgerson report is a “Technicolor horror show”, including accounts of people who died in custody. A version of the report, so heavily redacted with black deletion marks as to be barely comprehensible, was released in 2008. A more complete version is expected in the coming weeks, although the Obama administration has asked for delays.

Crucially, the report is critical of the value of the information obtained through harsh interrogation. It apparently concludes that there is no evidence that such intelligence prevented any imminent attacks. But this argument was strongly contested by the Bush administration.

Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director from 2006 until earlier this year, wrote in April that enhanced interrogation had led the agency from one big fish to another. Abu Zubaydah, he says, was forced to give information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh (one of the planners of the September 11th attacks); he, in turn, helped lead to the capture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (which, the memos claimed, foiled a “second wave” plot to crash an aircraft into Los Angeles). Mr Hayden said that of the thousands of people captured as “unlawful combatants”, fewer than 100 were held under the CIA’s interrogation programme and fewer than one-third of those were subjected to the “enhanced” techniques set out in the memos. Just three people were waterboarded. This, however, ignores all manner of abuses committed in military prisons.

That there was no follow-on attack on America after September 11th was thanks in large measure, argues Mr Cheney, to the Bush administration’s policies, including the enhanced techniques. Though he denounced the release of the memos that allowed these methods, he now wants further documents to be published that would, he says, demonstrate their success.

People familiar with the inner workings of intelligence suggest a more ambiguous story. Intelligence, they argue, is about piecing together fragments of information and building up spider diagrams of connections between suspects. “Intelligence is grains of sand; you don’t usually get the whole beach,” says one veteran.

It is true that in 2001, a time when the CIA and other agencies were woefully ignorant of al-Qaeda’s methods, the prisoners captured after the overthrow of the Taliban were the first rich source of information to help “map the enemy”, as one intelligence source puts it. But, says a former counter-terrorism official, the most valuable information from Mr Zubaydah’s capture came not from his interrogation but from his address book. With Mr Mohammed, says another analyst, the most important factor in stopping further attacks on America was not what the terrorist said under duress, but that he had been captured in the first place.

Intelligence officials maintain that detainees under interrogation provided as many, perhaps more, specks of information as other sources of intelligence on terrorism, including signals and agents. The question that nobody can answer is how much of this could have been obtained without torture.

Bleak choices

The danger for Mr Obama, as he seeks to overhaul the intelligence system, is that a fresh attack on the American mainland would immediately expose him to the accusation of being soft on terrorism. In May Congress revolted against any attempt to move detainees from Guantánamo to American soil before a plan for the disposal of its 229 prisoners had been drawn up. Yet three task-forces examining the matter, including future policy on detainees, have delayed issuing their reports because of the complexity of the problem.

Mr Obama has decided to keep the reviled military commissions, albeit with reforms. And he may yet seek a form of indefinite detention for some prisoners, with judicial and congressional oversight. Lurking in the background are the lesser-known problems of America’s prison at Bagram, its main base in Afghanistan, where detainees are being held with much less scrutiny than those at Guantánamo.

Holding terrorism suspects has become a huge headache for America. One fear is that if, in future, it tracks down important al-Qaeda figures, it may prefer one of two bleak options: either turn them over to countries with far fewer qualms—or just drop a bomb on them. Jack Bauer would be delighted.

The Economist

Torture, long a moral stain, is now hindering intelligence services’ attempts to fight terrorism

SPEND time with spies on either side of the Atlantic—and you will discover that they are worried. That is partly because their profession, already sullied in recent years, may be hit by more bad news. In Europe the ordeal has already begun: an officer in Britain’s MI5 is under police investigation, and prosecutors in Italy, Germany and Spain are looking at cases linked to the CIA’s actions. In America, the centre of the problem, the spooks are preparing themselves for an onslaught that could be as bad as anything since the Church commission in the 1970s. There are hints of criminal investigations against CIA officials and a battery of lawsuits—to extract information and to claim compensation. But for the leading spymasters, there is an even bigger worry: they are finding it increasingly hard to do their jobs properly (see article).

 The reason for all this? Torture. In the aftermath of the attacks on September 11th 2001, it became widely fashionable—in allegedly liberal parts of American academia as well as Dick Cheney’s office—to argue that torture was a necessary part of democracy’s defence. In fact, those who fought against that pernicious argument, including this newspaper, possibly underestimated our case. For all its short-term uses (both claimed and, alas, real), torture has always been illegal and immoral, and ultimately counter-productive too. Long before Abu Ghraib, it was obvious that it would create terrorists as well as help capture them. But the extent to which torture would corrode the West’s security networks that are supposed to fight terrorism is only now becoming clearer.

Torture throws sand into the gears of intelligence. At first harsh interrogation may well yield information, both valuable and valueless. But over time it chokes the defences of democratic societies, because their courts and political systems cannot digest it. The work of Western intelligence is becoming gummed up with legal protocol. More information has to be vetted by lawyers before being passed on. America has warned Britain that intelligence-sharing will be curtailed if its secrets are divulged in court. Equally, many worry about what will emerge in American proceedings. The first lesson of the September 11th attacks was that intelligence agencies have to work more closely; “need to know” had to yield to “need to share”. These days, alas, it has become “need to get a lawyer”.

Would you tip off Pakistan?

Fighting a global network like al-Qaeda requires a global network of intelligence agencies. The information they swap should remain confidential, so as to protect sources and (legitimate) methods. But if judges, elected politicians and voters do not have confidence in their spooks, the system unravels.

The task is to restore trust. But how? In America Barack Obama moved quickly to ban the most abusive methods of interrogation and promised to shut the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. He released four Bush-era memos which had twisted legal doctrine until it proved that CIA interrogators could simulate drowning, among other techniques, without turning themselves into torturers.

Mr Obama’s stand against torture is a start. But the president and senior Republicans should reconsider their resistance to a “truth commission”, which could offer some immunity from prosecution to those who speak openly. An investigation would disrupt the intelligence services—but less than lengthy court battles, which would fail to stop revelations yet still leave a suspicion that wrongdoing remains hidden.

The third step is to be readier to prosecute terrorists for their crimes. The struggle against terrorism will be long; in a democracy methods have to be sustainable. Legal process is not a luxury for good times, but a tool to rob terrorists of legitimacy and show that locking them up is justified. That way those who share the terrorists’ religion or race are less likely to be silent accomplices. More could act as sources themselves.

Fighting terrorism will always be messy. Sometimes you have intelligence about an attack, but not enough evidence confidently to make an arrest; yet you don’t have the luxury of being able to wait. Western spies inevitably have to work with the secret police of Pakistan, Egypt and others who often abuse prisoners, but also have more access to jihadists than the West ever could. Here, co-operation is a matter of wary judgment, not absolutes. For the West to refuse to deal with such countries would be as wrong as for it to put its agents in rooms where electrodes touch flesh. In between, lies the murky territory in which the West must not only trade intelligence, but must also seek assurances that people are not being abused. Ultimately, if those assurances are broken, the West will have to limit its co-operation with abusive intelligence agencies—even if that might make information harder to get. Do not forget, though, that al-Qaeda has been unable to attack America since 2001 and Europe since 2005. That is in large part thanks to legitimate intelligence co-operation, not torture.

New York Times

Mark Danner

On a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

•

Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

•

Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

•

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•

Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College, is the author of “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.” This essay is drawn from a longer article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books, available at www.nybooks.com.

EDITORIAL

New York Times

 In a long series of valedictory speeches and interviews, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been crowing about Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and abusive interrogations, claiming they met the highest legal standards and that no prisoner had been tortured. Fortunately, the truth broke through the noise, in the words of some of the very people ordered to carry out the policies.

 In an interview in The Washington Post, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who runs the military tribunals at Guantánamo, said that harsh interrogation methods had endangered the life of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national accused of planning to take part in the 9/11 attacks. Authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they included sustained isolation, nudity and prolonged exposure to the cold.

 “We tortured Qahtani,” Judge Crawford said, adding that she was therefore unable to prosecute a man who seemed to pose a real threat to the United States.

Judge Crawford was not the only one speaking out. Major David Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who was assigned to defend another Guantánamo prisoner, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that he and all the other defense lawyers in the system consider the tribunals “unfair, rigged” and unconstitutional. He noted that his client’s prosecutor resigned to protest the lack of evidence in the case.

That is the real nature of Mr. Bush’s grotesque legacy: abuse and torture at an outlaw prison where hundreds of men — many of whom did nothing — have been held for years without real evidence or charges. And truly dangerous men were treated so badly that it may be impossible to bring them to justice.

It will be hard enough to close down Guantánamo as Barack Obama has vowed to do, but the legal burdens Mr. Bush is dumping on his successor are much greater.

The appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, railroaded through Congress, must be repealed. Interrogation rules that respect American values and laws and the Geneva Conventions must be set for all government agencies, including the intelligence agencies.

And there is the profound question of whether the new administration should prosecute those who tortured and abused prisoners — and those who ordered them to do it. Judge Crawford’s legal finding that torture occurred adds a new complication, since a treaty obliges the United States to investigate such allegations.

We have heard a lot of talk about how the country needs to look forward and not backward. We certainly would like to forget the horrors of the last eight years. But you cannot fix something before you know exactly how it is broken. The clandestine system Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have built will not give up its secrets easily.

To ensure that the abuses stop, Mr. Obama and his administration will have to work hard to find out all that has happened. They will have to locate and override all of the policy memos, directives and executive orders that have redefined and condoned torture and other abuses. Guantánamo is the place to begin.

 The timetable: Mr. Obama is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he is beginning the process of shutting Guantánamo. We hope he sets a target date. That may make it easier to persuade other governments to agree to accept some prisoners — one of the difficult challenges ahead. But we do not agree with critics who insist that date must fall within his first 100 days.

This page called early and often for closing Guantánamo. But we recognize that this is going to be very hard work.

 Sorting out the inmates: Mr. Obama’s lawyers will have to review every file, most of which the Bush administration has refused to turn over to any authority, including Congress. We know from bitter experience that the Bush administration’s judgment is worthless when it comes to what these prisoners may have done, how they have been treated and what justice they should face.

Just last week, Mr. Cheney claimed that the interrogation of prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of 9/11, who was tortured by waterboarding, allowed the United States to capture a “very impressive” list of Al Qaeda leaders in 2003. If that is true, Mr. Obama needs to know who they are, where they are, and what was done to them in the last five years.

A blueprint: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, has a bill for closing Guantánamo that Mr. Obama should embrace. It sets a one-year deadline and requires that every prisoner either be charged and tried in United States federal court; transferred for trial by an international tribunal under United Nations authority; returned to the custody of the government of their homeland, if that government does not abuse and torture prisoners; held as a prisoner of war; or, simply, released.

The separate system of tribunals created by the military commissions act must be abolished. They are a mockery of American justice, and utterly unnecessary.

It was extremely encouraging to hear Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s choice for attorney general, say at his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the new administration is open to trying prisoners in the United States. It is appalling that an attorney general nominee has to say he respects the law, but such is the Bush legacy.

The real bad guys: After the prisoners are sorted out, Mr. Bush’s egregiously bad judgment leaves all Americans with a huge problem. The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.

Mr. Obama’s team will have to come up with a solution that does not set such men free. We are not sure what it should be, but there is one unacceptable choice: creating a new detentions law that would allow them held without trial. That would merely compound Mr. Bush’s catastrophically bad choices.

Interrogations: The 2006 military tribunals law bound military interrogators to the Army field manual’s rules, which conform with the Geneva Conventions — unlike Mr. Bush’s policies. But, at Mr. Bush’s insistence, the bill carved out an exemption that allowed intelligence agencies to go on hiring civilian interrogators and to engage in practices that are clearly immoral and illegal. Ms. Feinstein’s bill would eliminate the loophole on how prisoners are treated and ban the use of civilian interrogators.

We were glad to hear Mr. Holder state that the Obama administration considers the Geneva Conventions binding. But we wish he had been more clear on a solution, beyond calling the Army field manual a “good start” for interrogation rules in C.I.A. prisons. We also were unclear from his answers whether Mr. Obama has decided, as he should, to ban civilian interrogators.

Mr. Holder unequivocally declared waterboarding to be torture, which his predecessors would not do. But this is not just about waterboarding. Other practices, like forced nudity, prolonged isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, are abuses under the same laws and treaties that prohibit torture. And Judge Crawford reminded us that torture is not necessarily just one terrible act. In the Qahtani case, she said: “This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive.”

C.I.A. prisons: We have never heard a convincing explanation for why the Central Intelligence Agency needs its own network of prisons beyond the reach of law, in undisclosed locations. If there is a good reason, we hope this administration will explain it. We are skeptical, and we urge Mr. Obama to support Ms. Feinstein’s bill, which would require the C.I.A. to report all detainees to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We recognize that this is a daunting agenda, and that to succeed, Mr. Obama’s White House, Justice Department and Pentagon will also have to rebuild demoralized legal divisions where professionals were replaced with apparatchiks whose mission was to twist the law to justify their masters’ decisions.

This work is essential to restoring the rule of law. It is essential to restoring this country’s reputation around the world. And it is essential to restoring Americans’ faith in themselves and in their government. That is the only way to move forward.