Jane Mayer on the torture program

[Joanne98]

I'm a big Jane Mayer fan since reading her book "The Dark Side." Here she writes about the Levin Report on CIA interrogations:

Jane Mayer: Thoughts on the Levin Report

President Obama has thrown a kind of protective, legal “invisibility cloak” over C.I.A. officers who may have participated in torture or other war crimes, but whose actions were authorized by lawyers in the Bush Administration. The reasoning goes that, if they were acting in good faith on the orders of superiors, it’s unfair to hold them to a different standard. But the unclassified report (pdf) from the Senate Armed Services Committee, released tonight by Chairman Carl Levin, raises questions about whether the C.I.A. was always operating with legal authorization.
Take. for instance, the torment of Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, the guinea pig for the C.I.A.’s most abusive interrogation techniques, who was critically injured in a gunfight and captured on March 28, 2002. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel authorized harrowing tactics for interrogating Zubaydah in the infamous “Bybee Torture Memo” of August 1, 2002, which Obama released publicly last week. So, presumably, whatever happened to Zubaydah after August is indemnified by the Obama invisibility cloak. But what about what happened to Zubaydah in the four months before?

The Levin report provides some new details. On April 16, 2002—a couple weeks after Zubaydah’s capture, and three and a half months before the Bybee memo—a military psychologist named Dr. Bruce Jessen was already circulating a blueprint for cruelly coercive interrogations based on torture methods used by Chinese Communist forces during the Korean War. The report describes Jessen’s blueprint as a “draft exploitation plan” for U.S.-held captives. (I wrote about Dr. Jessen’s partner, James Mitchell, in the July 11, 2005, issue of The New Yorker.)

By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.

What did the F.B.I. see in the spring of 2002? And exactly who was involved? How high up was this activity authorized? Is it off-limits for criminal investigation?

There are plenty of new names and details in the Armed Services Committee report, including a scene of two military men teaching the C.I.A. how to use Chinese torture techniques. One of the instructors, Joseph Witsch, played the “beater,” while the other, Gary Percival, became the “beatee.” By the mid-summer of 2002, beating was no longer just an academic exercise. Precisely when these tactics were used on live captives, and at what point top Bush officials endorsed them, may be a matter of serious interest to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Put that Levin report on the summer reading list!
http://gecon.blogspot.com/2009/04/jane-mayer-on-torture-program.html

[Larkspur]

1. The FBI agent walking out on the torture scene reminds me of the 1998 movie..

The Siege starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. Washington played the FBI agent who refused to cooperate with Willis’ torture policy in the wake of Al Queda type terrorist attacks inside the United States.

President Obama should take a hint from the ending of this movie and support prosecutions of all who committed war crimes. At the end of the movie, Washington arrests Willis' character, the general in charge of rooting out the terrorists, because he tortured a terrorist suspect and the suspect died from it.