DARE WE INTERROGATE OURSELVES?

June 12, 2005
NY TIMES MAGAZINE.

Interrogating Ourselves

By JOSEPH LELYVELD

I. The Silence After Abu Ghraib

In order to get to the nub of the question of what we as citizens really expect and require of American interrogators facing supposed terrorists -- how far we're prepared to allow those asking the questions to venture into the dark realm of brutalization and coercion -- let's for argument's sake put aside the most horrific, shameful cases, those of detainees who died under interrogation: that of Manadel al-Jamadi, for instance, whose body was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice when it was carried out of an Abu Ghraib prison shower room a year and a half ago, where he'd been handcuffed to a wall; or Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who, elsewhere in Iraq, appears to have been thrust headfirst into a sleeping bag, manhandled there and then, finally, suffocated. By anyone's definition of torture -- even that of the Bush administration, which originally propounded (and later withdrew) a strikingly narrow definition holding that torture occurs only when the pain is ''of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure'' -- these cases answer the question of whether torture has been committed by our side in what's called the global war on terror. No one steps forward to condone what's plainly illegal under United States and international law. And although we've seen no indication that blame will attach to any official or command officer at any level for these killings, there are small signs that conclusions have been drawn somewhere between the Pentagon and White House, signs of an overdue housecleaning, or maybe just a tidying up. By the coldest cost-benefit calculation, a dead detainee is a disaster: he cannot be a source of ''actionable intelligence,'' only fury. So there's now a new policy, ''Procedures for Investigations Into the Death of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the U.S.,'' that was duly conveyed last month to the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations body, in a subsection of a longer report. The subsection's heading even carried a whiff of contrition. It was ''Lessons Learned and Policy Reforms.'' Also, the Pentagon has let it be known that it's preparing a new manual for interrogators that prohibits physical and psychological humiliation of detainees. What interrogation techniques it does allow are listed in a classified annex as, presumably, are any hints of what can happen when those techniques fail to produce the desired results. Can the detainee then be handed over to another agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, that may not be constrained by the new directives? Or to units of a foreign government like the counterterrorism units now being financed and coordinated in Iraq by the United States?

For more, see NY Times Magazine, feature article, June 12, 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/magazine/12TORTURE.html?pagewanted=print