Religious right threatens judges

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports on last week's meeting of the American Bar Association, at which there was a panel of judges who have been recipients of threats after controversial unions. In every case, the threats came when decisions were made that upset the religious right.

The CIA in Venezuela in 2002

A major gap in Tim Weiner's A Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007, Doubleday) is that it contains not a word about the 2002 coup in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez, which lasted 47 hours. The U.S. has denied any involvement, and an Office of the Inspector General investigation started at the request of Sen. Christopher Dodd came to the same conclusion. Press reports published in the U.S. about Hugo Chavez's recent referral to the coup as "attacks" by the U.S. put the word in quotes and gave it no credence. But the foreign press, on the other hand, documents facts which make it sound just like many other events described in Weiner's book where the CIA gave support to coup attempts in Central and South America, and the CIA's own reports in advance of and during the coup are remarkably detailed predictions of what was going to happen.

The incidents prior to the coup were growing protests against Chavez's heavy-handed approach to politics (which he has unfortunately continued since regaining power), which culminated in violence and gunfire between pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez protestors on April 11, 2002. There are conflicting reports about who was responsible (the pro-Chavez protesters say they were shooting back at snipers who were shooting at them, the anti-Chavez protesters say they were fired upon unprovoked), but the result was that military leaders seized Chavez, threw him in jail, and asked for his resignation on the condition that he would be exiled, otherwise he would be tried for the deaths of the protesters. Chavez said that he would resign only under the condition that his vice president would succeed him and the government would continue. The military leaders publicly proclaimed that Chavez had resigned, and put businessman Pedro Carmona, not Chavez's vice president, in charge. Carmona and other coup leaders had visited the White House on multiple occasions in months and weeks prior to the coup to visit Special Envoy to Latin America Otto Reich, and the U.S. was the only foreign government to immediately recognize the authority of the new leader.

But Carmona began his short term of office by abolishing the Venezuelan constitution, dissolving the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, and even changing the name of the country. This did not make the Venezuelan public or the military happy, and Carmona was quickly forced to resign in favor of power being briefly turned over to vice president Diosdado Cabello until Chavez was returned to office a few hours later. The total duration of the alternative government was about 47 hours. Carmona and his team went into exile.

It certainly looks like the CIA was involved. Otto Reich founded the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean at the State Department, which engaged in covert propaganda activities before being declared illegal by the U.S. Comptroller General in 1987 for engaging in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities, beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities." Reich was also involved with Col. Oliver North during the Iran-contra scandal. Both of these appear to indicate Reich being directly involved with the CIA.

Congressional earmark reform is a sham

From Robert Novak (ick, but it doesn't change the facts here) via Distributed Republic:

With the midnight hour approaching on Saturday, Aug. 4, near the end of a marathon session, Democratic and Republican leaders alike wanted to pass the defense appropriations bill quickly and start their summer recess. But Republican Rep. Jeff Flake's stubborn adherence to principle forced an hour-long delay that revealed unpleasant realities about Congress.

Flake insisted on debating the most egregious of the 1,300 earmarks placed in the defense money bill by individual House members that authorize spending in their districts. Defending every such earmark was the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee: Democratic Rep. John Murtha, unsmiling and unresponsive to questions posed on the House floor by Flake. Murtha is called "King Corruption" by Republican reformers, but what happened after midnight on Aug. 5 is not a party matter. Democrats and Republicans, as always, locked arms to support every earmark. It makes no difference that at least seven House members are under investigation by the Justice Department. A bipartisan majority insists on sending taxpayers' money to companies in their districts without competitive bidding or public review.

Claims of newly established transparency were undermined by the late-night follies. Flake, who ran a Phoenix think tank, the Goldwater Institute, before coming to Congress in 2001, is immensely unpopular on both sides of the aisle for forcing votes on his colleagues' pork. He burnished that reputation by prolonging the marathon Saturday session and challenging selected earmarks.

What ensued showed the sham of earmark "reform." With debate on each earmark limited to five minutes per pro and con, and roll calls also pressed into five minutes, the House was mainly interested in finishing up and defeating Flake with huge bipartisan majorities. The mood of annoyance with Flake was personified by the 17-term Murtha, who as subcommittee chairman defended and retained every earmark (including notorious infusions of cash to his Johnstown, Pa., district).

Murtha is on CREW's list of the most corrupt Congressmen (as "one to watch") and has a history of working with Republicans in order to block fraud investigations and prevent lobbying reform. I observed last November that it looked like the Democrats were off to a poor start on reforming Congress.

Dick Cheney on why not to invade Iraq

The Dick Cheney of 1994 is pretty persuasive, and his reasons clearly applied just as well in 2003 and today. Too bad he changed his mind and put us into that quagmire.


(Hat tip: The Agitator.)

Why is there something rather than nothing?

The latest issue of Skeptic magazine (vol. 13, no. 2, 2007, pp. 28-39) has an article by Robert Lawrence Kuhn which supplies a nice list of possible explanations for the answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The article, titled "Why This Universe? Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations" (PDF), briefly sets out descriptions of each explanation, but the meat of the article is found in the footnotes, which provide extensive references for each offered explanation.

Here's the list, minus the footnotes and descriptions:

1. One Universe Models
1.1 Meaningless Question
1.2 Brute Fact
1.3 Necessary/Only Way
1.4 Almost Necessary/Limited Ways
1.5 Temporal Selection
1.6 Self Explaining

2. Multiple Universes
2.1 Multiverse by Disconnected Regions (Spatial)
2.2 Multiverse by Cycles (Temporal)
2.3 Multiverse by Sequential Selection (Temporal)
2.4 Multiverse by String Theory (with Minuscule Extra Dimensions)
2.5 Multiverse by Large Extra Dimensions
2.6 Multiverse by Quantum Branching or Selection
2.7 Multiverse by Mathematics
2.8 Multiverse by All Possibilities

3. Nonphysical Causes
3.1 Theistic Person
3.2 Ultimate Mind
3.3 Deistic First Cause
3.4 Pantheistic Substance
3.5 Spirit Realms
3.6 Consciousness as Cause
3.7 Being and Non-Being as Cause
3.8 Abstract Objects / Platonic Forms as Cause
3.9 Principle or Feature of Sufficient Power

4. Illusions
4.1 Idealism
4.2 Simulation in Actual Reality
4.3 Simulation in Virtual Reality
4.4 Solipsism

One of the most entertaining philosophical books I've ever read was David Lewis' On the plurality of worlds (pretty much everything Lewis wrote was entertaining as well as brilliant), which falls in category 2.8 (Multiverse by All Possibilities), cited by Kahn in note 43. The same category includes another very entertaining philosophy book, Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations, which is cited in note 44.

This taxonomy shows that there are a lot more possibilities than "God did it."

UPDATE: Thanks to John Lynch at stranger fruit, who pointed out that the article is available online.

Institute for Creation Research relocates to Dallas

The August 2007 issue of Acts & Facts (PDF, p. 5) reports that the Institute for Creation Research is relocating from Santee, California to Dallas, Texas. Their new location is the Henry M. Morris Center, a four-acre campus with three buildings fifteen minutes' drive from DFW Airport.

The ICR Graduate School, which now offers most of its courses online, will also relocate. The ICR Creation Museum will remain in Santee "for the foreseeable future."

The ICR cites the "rising costs of living and working in southern California" as a key reason for the relocation. In Texas, its employees will have no state income tax to pay, and the cultural climate will no doubt also be much more receptive to the ICR.

Texas is a state with a governor who has just appointed a creationist to head the Texas State Board of Education. It's also a state that has introduced a bill to require the blatantly unconstitutional and proselytizing NCBCPS Bible curriculum in public schools, which the ACLU has already filed a lawsuit over in Odessa.

UPDATE (April 24, 2008): The ICR Graduate School has been denied the right to issue Master of Science degrees in Texas by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The full board will vote on the measure today, which is also expected to deny them the right to issue degrees.

UPDATE: The full board agreed. ICR is not permitted to issue Master of Science degrees in Texas.

UPDATE (May 12, 2008): The school board members in Odessa who voted for the unconstitutional NCBCPS Bible curriculum have all been voted out of office, in a repeat of the Dover, PA intelligent design disclaimer.

A Brief History of the CIA: 1945-1953 (Truman)

Source and page references are to Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007, Doubleday, pp. 1-70.

1945-1953
President: Harry S Truman

September 20, 1945: Office of Strategic Services ordered to disband; General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan fired. OSS Intelligence analysts moved to the State Department.

January 24, 1946: Truman appoints Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers as chief of the "Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers" and "Director of Centralized Snooping," the Central Intelligence Group. Brigadier General John Magruder interprets this as meaning the group should operate a clandestine service, though Truman has said nothing of this and no legal authority has been given.

June 10, 1946: General Hoyt Vandenburg appointed director of central intelligence. He creates an Office of Special Operations and obtains $15 million in Congressional funding. The group uses the money to buy intelligence information in Europe about the Soviets, most of which turns out to be fraudulent.

July 17, 1946: Vandenburg obtains an additional $10 million in funding from the Secretary of War and Secretary of State.

September-October 1946: The OSO attempts to organize Romania's National Peasant Party into a resistance force. Soviet intelligence and the Romanian secret police detect the plot and imprison the Peasant Party's leaders. The OSO gets the former foreign minister of Romania and "five other members of the would-be liberation army into Austria" and out to safety on October 5. "A brutal dictatorship took control of Romania, its rise to power hastened by the failure of American covert action." (pp. 18-19)

May 1, 1947: Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter becomes head of central intelligence.

June 27, 1947: A Congressional committee holds secret hearings that lead to formal creation of the CIA on September 18. Dean Acheson writes "I had the gravest forebodings about this organization, and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it." (p. 25) James Forrestal wrote that "This office will probably be the greatest cemetery for dead cats in history." (p. 24) The National Security Act says nothing about clandestine operations overseas, only the correlation, evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence information.

September 1947: CIA counsel Lawrence Houston warns Hillenkoetter that the agency has no legal authority to conduct covert action without Congressional approval.

December 14, 1947: The National Security Council instructs the CIA to engage in "covert psychological operations designed to counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities." (p. 26) The CIA's first plan of action is to defeat the communists in the April 1948 Italian elections. The CIA gains access to the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which held $200 million for the reconstruction of Europe. $10 million is distributed to wealthy Americans, many of whom are Italian-Americans, who pass it on to CIA political front groups as "charitable donations," and on to Italian politicians in suitcases filled with cash. Italy's Christian Democrats win the election, and the CIA repeats this process in Italy and many other nations for the next 25 years (p. 27).

March 5, 1945: After Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia, General Lucius D. Clay, head of occupation forces in Berlin, cables the Pentagon that he fears Soviet attack. The CIA's Berlin office assures the president that there is no sign of a Soviet attack. Truman warns Congress of an imminent Soviet attack, gaining approval of the Marshall Plan. 5% of Marshall Plan funds are allocated to the CIA ($685 million), used to create front organizations throughout Europe and to create underground political groups that would become a fighting force if needed. This operation was carried out under the Office of Policy Coordination inside the CIA, reporting to the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State.

September 1, 1948: Frank Wisner becomes head of covert operations at the CIA; his organization quickly becomes larger than the rest of the CIA. Wisner recruits spies from Ivy League institutions, obtains a quarter of a billion dollars worth of military equipment in Europe and Asia, and builds a huge organization.

November 1948: Wisner attempts to break communist influence over trade organizations in France and Italy using U.S. labor leaders Jay Lovestone (former head of the American Communist Party) and Irving Brown to deliver cash to "labor groups backed by Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church" (p. 36). The CIA creates the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe.

Early 1948: James Forrestal asks Allen Dulles to investigate the weaknesses of the CIA. The report's main conclusions are (in Weiner's words) that "the CIA was churning out reams of paper containing few if any facts on the communist threat," "the agency had no spies among the Soviets and their satellites," and "Roscoe Hillenkoetter was a failure as director." (p. 37)

May 27, 1949: Congress passes the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, giving the CIA power to do pretty much whatever it wanted, except for acting as a secret police force inside the United States. One clause of the act permits the CIA to admit 100 foreigners per year into the U.S., giving them "permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws." The CIA brings Ukrainian Mikola Lebed into the U.S. under this law, despite the fact that the CIA's files describe Lebed's organization as "a terrorist organization." Lebed went to prison for his murder of the Polish interior minister in 1936, escaping when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The Justice Department considered Lebed a war criminal responsible for the slaughter of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, but he was defended by Allen Dulles for his assistance in operations against the Soviets.

December 1948: CIA officer Steve Tanner assesses a band of Ukrainians in Munich, the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine, as a group deserving CIA backing. July 26, 1949: CIA special operations chief General Willard G. Wyman approves an operation to drop two Ukrainians from the group into their homeland. Tanner hires "a daredevil Hungarian air crew who had hijacked a Hungarian commercial airliner and flown it to Munich a few months earlier" (p. 44). The men were dropped on September 5, 1949; a CIA history declassified in 2005 says that "The Soviets quickly eliminated the agents."

July 1949: The CIA took over the Munich-based group run by General Reinhard Gehlen, former leader of Hitler's military intelligence service, the Abwehr. This group turned out to be penetrated by Soviet and East German moles at the highest levels, including Gehlen's chief of counterintelligence.

September 5, 1949: An air force crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radioactivity in the atmosphere. September 20, 1949: While those radioactive traces were being analyzed, "the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years." (p. 48) September 23, 1949: Truman informs the world that Stalin has the atomic bomb.

October 1949: Frank Wisner and the British send nine Albanian rebels from Malta into Albania. Three are killed immediately, the rest are captured by secret police. Wisner sends additional recruits via Athens with Polish pilots after training in Munich, each time all are captured or killed. It turns out that the German training camps were infiltrated by Soviet spies, and CIA counterintelligence head James Angleton was sharing information with Kim Philby at MI6, who was also working for the KGB. "Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for the drop zone for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania." (p. 46)

1950s: "hundreds of the CIA's foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s." (p. 47)

1945-1949: U.S. signals intelligence intercepts and decrypts messages between the Soviet Union and the Far East. This ends when William Wolf Weisband, a Russian translator and Soviet spy recruited in the 1930s, gives information about broken codes to the Soviets. The loss of intelligence information leads to the creation of the National Security Agency.

July 25, 1950: The Korean War begins with a surprise attack from North Korea.

October 1950: General Walter Bedell Smith becomes head of the CIA.

October 11, 1950: Truman leaves for Wake Island. The CIA assures him that "no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea .. barring a Soviet decision for global war." CIA Tokyo station chief George Aurell, however, "reported that a Chinese Nationalist officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops near the Korean border." October 18: The CIA "reported that 'the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.'" October 20: "The CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydroelectric power plants." October 28: "those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers." October 30: "after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely." November 1: "300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea." (All quotes from p. 52.)

1950-1960s: Classified CIA histories of the Korean War "say the agency's paramilitary operations were 'not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.'" (p. 54) "Bedell Smith repeatedly warned Wisner to watch out for false intelligence fabricated by the enemy. But some of Wisner's officers were fabricators themselves--including the station chief [Albert R. Haney] and the chief of operations [Hans Tofte] he sent to Korea." (pp. 55-56) Haney's 1952 replacement, John Limond Hart, found that "nearly every Korean agent he had inherited had either invented his reports or worked in secret for the communists. Every dispatch the station had sent to CIA headquarters from the front for the past eighteen months was a calculated deception." (p. 57) Similar operations in Taiwan to recruit spies and drop them into mainland China failed. Over $100 million is spent on weapons for a "third force" of 200,000 guerillas between April 1951 to the end of 1952, but the agency was unable to recruit them.

January 4, 1951: Allen Dulles appointed CIA deputy director of plans (a cover for his actual position, chief of covert operations) despite not getting along with Bedell Smith. Shortly thereafter, deputy director Bill Jackson resigns, and Dulles is appointed to deputy director and Frank Wisner to chief of covert operations.

Early 1951: 1,500 followers of Chinese Nationalist General Li Mi were stranded in northern Burma; the CIA supplied guns, gold, and additional Chinese Nationalist soldiers. Those who crossed into China were killed; Li Mi's radioman in Bangkok was a Chinese communist agent.

July 1952: A four-man Chinese guerilla team is dropped into Manchuria and radios for help four months later, which turns out to be a trap that leads to the death or capture of the rescuers--with two young CIA agents spending the next 19-20 years in Chinese prisons. "Beijing later broadcast a scorecard for Manchuria: the CIA had dropped 212 foreign agents in; 101 were killed and 111 captured." (p. 60) The CIA supplies more guns and ammunition, but Li Mi's men choose not to fight, but instead to settle into the Golden Triangle, harvest opium poppies, and marry local women. Li Mi becomes a heroin kingpin. [Note added 23 November 2014: The CIA film "Extraordinary Fidelity" tells the story of John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, the two young CIA agents imprisoned in China mentioned here.]

July 1953: After the armistice, the CIA nearly kills South Korean President Syngman Rhee when a yacht he is on sails past Yong-do, an island where the agency trained Korean commandos. The CIA's paramilitary group is given 72 hours to leave the country.

1950s: Wisner's men are active in Europe, spending Marshall Plan money to prepare for a future war against the Soviets, including "dropping gold ingots into lakes and burying caches of weapons for the coming battle" (p. 64).

1948-1950s: Secret prisons set up to interrogate suspected double agents--in Germany, in Japan, and in the Panama Canal Zone (the largest such prison).

May 15, 1952: Dulles and Wisner receive a report on Project Artichoke, a "four-year effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, the newly discovered LSD, and other 'special techniques in CIA interrogations.'" (p. 65) Dulles approves Ultra, under which "seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days" and Army civilian employee Frank Olsen is dosed and leaps to his death out the window of a New York hotel. Project Artichoke continues until 1956, but most records of these activities were destroyed.

1952: The "Young Germans" (many of which were aging Hitler Youth) are supported by the CIA. The "Free Jurists' Committee," an underground group in East Germany, was taken over by Frank Wisner, whose men selected one of Gehlen's officers to train them as a fighting force. "After Soviet soldiers kidnapped and tortured one of their leaders on the eve of the international conference, every one of the CIA's Free Jurists was arrested." (p. 67)

1952: Wisner supported a Polish liberation group, the Freedom and Independent Movement (known as WIN). They had contacts with "WIN outside," emigres in Germany and London, and believed they were supporting thousands of sympathizers of "WIN inside" in Poland. They dropped $5 million in gold and weapons for "WIN inside," but the Polish secret police and the Soviets had wiped out WIN in 1947 and it was all a trap. (p. 67)

October 27, 1952: Gen. Bedell Smith convened a "Murder Board" to kill off the worst of the CIA's covert operations, but his efforts came to naught when Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles as head of the CIA.

November 26, 1952: "British spy Monty Woodhouse flew to Washington to meet with Walter Bedell Smith and Frank Wisner" about how to get rid of Mossadeq in Iran (p. 83).

Dirty Politician: Don Young

How corrupt is our Congress? They're not even pretending to follow the Constitution.

Talking Points Memo reports on how Rep. Don Young (R-AK) inserted an earmark to spend $10 million on a highway interchange in Florida ("Coconut Road") to benefit real estate developer Daniel Aranoff, a few days after Aranoff raised $40,000 for Young.

The really interesting part is not an Alaskan legislator doing political favors for contributions from a Florida developer, but the fact that the earmark was not in the version of the bill that passed the House or Senate--it was added to the bill during the enrollment process, after its passage but before being signed by President Bush. This is a process which is only supposed to allow correction of typographical and technical but non-substantive errors.

Arizona home sales way down

Despite new home builders offering unprecedented incentives, new home sales in Arizona are dismal. 2007 year-to-date sales (through July) were 33,510, compared to 41,835 for the same time period in 2006 and 68,235 for the same period in 2005. And this is while inventories and foreclosures are climbing.

Inside the CIA's secret prisons

Jane Mayer has a story in the August 13, 2007 issue of The New Yorker which describes practices in the CIA's secret prisons, whose existence was recently admitted by the president. Some excerpts:

[Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.
...
The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th. The program has been extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the nomenclature of the intelligence world. By design, there has been virtually no access for outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security. The Justice Department argued this point explicitly last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the government said, had to be prohibited from access to a lawyer specifically because he might describe the “alternative interrogation methods” that the agency had used when questioning him. These methods amounted to a state secret, the government argued, and disclosure of them could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.)
...
Finally, last year, Red Cross officials were allowed to interview fifteen detainees, after they had been transferred to Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has been kept from the public. The committee believes that its continued access to prisoners worldwide is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore it addresses violations privately with the authorities directly responsible for prisoner treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”

The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.

Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in this case. Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

...

A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the agency’s detention and interrogation policies, said he worried that, if the full story of the C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel could face criminal prosecution. Within the agency, he said, there is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution” for the interrogation program. If congressional hearings begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. officers have taken out professional liability insurance, to help with potential legal fees.

...

The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

...

According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

...
A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

...

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

...

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

...

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

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Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.

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Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.”

I recommend reading the whole article.