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CIA Officers Didn’t Carry Out Waterboarding

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A lot of people are pointing to John Brennan’s assurances that CIA won’t ever torture again as if it means anything (usually ignoring Brennan’s motivation from institutional preservation, not efficacy or morality or legality).

CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News in an exclusive interview that his agency will not engage in harsh “enhanced interrogation” practices, including waterboarding, which critics call torture — even if ordered to by a future president.

“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” Brennan said.

[snip]

When asked specifically about waterboarding Brennan could not have been clearer.

“Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again,” he said.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn’t mean anything, starting with the fact that President Trump could easily fire Brennan and replace him with someone pro torture.

But it’s funny, too, because Brennan’s assurances about waterboarding would hold true even for the period when CIA was waterboarding detainees. Because CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding.

As a reminder, at least four detainees were known to be waterboarded under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. The first, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, was waterboarded by Egyptian intelligence, though with Americans present.

The others were waterboarded as part of torture led by Mitchell and Jessen, who were not CIA officers, but instead contractors. CIA officers were definitely involved in that torture (as they were present for our outsourced Egyptian torture). But the torture was technically done by contractors.

Don’t get me wrong: CIA officers did engage in a whole lot of torture directly.

But Brennan’s squirmy language should only emphasize the fact that even when CIA was in the business of waterboarding, CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding. So Brennan’s guarantees that CIA officers won’t do so in the future are pretty meaningless guarantees.

“Killing Is a Part of War, and Torture Isn’t”

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I wasn’t crazy about the way that Tom Junod framed his first piece on Obama’s Lethal Presidency; but it’s getting a lot of people to think about the issues, so while I didn’t comment on it I was happy to have it.

But I am rather interested in where the debate has gone, now that Andrew Sullivan got involved. At issue is whether Obama’s targeted killing–done because, having made detention an unpalatable option (except in the giant black hole of Bagram), it’s all that left–is morally better or worse than torture.

Sully says it’s much better, Junod says it’s not much different. But both make an assumption that gets to one heart of the issue.

Yes, killing is a part of war, and torture isn’t. But what if the the kind of militant who was captured and tortured under Bush is the kind of militant who is simply being killed under President Obama?

Torture is not a part of war? Then why do we put our servicemen and women through SERE training to make sure they’ll be able to withstand torture if we don’t expect, based on historical experience, that they might be subjected to it?

Torture is illegal. But it is, very much, a part of war (and sometimes power generally, as Ayman al-Zawahiri learned in Nasser’s Egypt). Intentionally targeting civilians is also illegal, but part of war. Given that we now seem to be defining “civilian” more narrowly than international law does, we can’t very easily distinguish between torture and killing in this way.

The point is important because this debate is actually talking about at least four different things: reality, morality, legality, and efficacy. The legal argument doesn’t get you very far in this debate, because it puts you on John Yoo’s ground of proclaiming, correctly, that our adversaries don’t abide by international law–they’ve clearly both tortured and killed civilians–and that therefore, incorrectly IMO, we can and should invent new categories to cover both them and their detention.

But the question of morality is equally slippery, as it allows Sully this squishy defense of Obama.

First and foremost, there is an end to the torture program. For many of us, that was the first non-negotiable deal-breaker from the Bush administration. To bungle two wars, as Bush and Cheney did, is one thing. To throw away the invaluable tradition of decency in wartime was unforgivable. Torture is not, as Bunch would have it, a “difficult issue”. It is an easy one. We don’t do it or condone it and we bring to justice anyone caught doing it. Obama’s failing is in the latter part – but it pales in comparison with Cheney’s lawless barbarism. And the end of torture has immensely improved intelligence and brought some moral credibility back to the West. Are some terror suspects being treated horribly in allied countries? There’s much evidence that this is true. And the Obama administration should be extremely careful not to exploit or use any intelligence garnered from torture or abuse. But there is an obvious difference between the injustices perpetrated by regimes in developing countries and the standards we set for ourselves.

For Sully, this is about civilization and barbarism, which comes packed with unexamined assumptions.

This might be an interesting time to note how, within al Qaeda and its affiliates, a similar debate is and has long gone on. Not only have we seen debates about when Islamic law allows the killing of civilians, both non-Muslim and Muslim. We’ve seen Osama bin Laden’s recognition that killing Muslim civilians–and fighting the battle against the US on Muslim grounds–ruined the brand of his movement. But we’ve also seen, in al Qaeda’s now apparently failed attempt to rebrand as Ansar al-Sharia, al Qaeda also trying to “win” the “war” by providing services, by turning on the electricity.

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