'Nobody is talking'

'Nobody is talking'

The evidence of two new books demonstrates that 9/11 created the will for
new, harsher interrogation techniques of foreign suspects by the US and
led to the abuses in Guantnamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. In a special
report, James Meek reveals that it is the British who refined these
methods, and who have provided the precedent for legalised torture

Friday February 18, 2005
The Guardian

One day in the autumn of 1942 Kim Philby, an officer in Britain's secret
intelligence service, received a message from a colleague in MI5. The MI5
man, Helenus Milmo, was in a state of near despair about a Spanish
prisoner and suspected spy, Juan Gomez de Lecube, who had been under
interrogation since his arrest in the Caribbean that summer.

Despite Spanish protests, Lecube had been transported across the Atlantic
and imprisoned, incommunicado, in Britain's interrogation centre for
suspected enemy agents at Camp 020, the codename for Latchmere House in
Middlesex.

MI5 and MI6 had high hopes for war-shortening information from Lecube.
They believed they had verified beyond doubt that he was a spy. They only
needed to make him talk. But after a week, Milmo wrote: "No progress has
been made ... it looks as though he is going to be an extremely obstinate
nut to crack." Soon afterwards, Milmo wrote to Philby, seeking approval to
apply special measures to the interrogation of the detainee.

Sixty years later, in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington, Milmo and Philby's counterparts in US
military intelligence and the CIA faced what they believed was a similar
dilemma. All over the world, US agents and soldiers were seizing and
interrogating hundreds of foreign men whom they suspected held information
that would enable new terrorist attacks to be prevented. Like Milmo, they
began coming up against stubborn prisoners. Like Milmo, they wrote to
those higher up the chain of command seeking permission for special
measures to make the prisoners talk.

It has taken more than half a century for Britain's government to put the
details of Camp 020 into the public domain. But thanks to a small group of
leakers, journalists and freedom of information campaigners, together with
the testimony of released detainees, the story of torture and its official
endorsement in America's secret overseas prison system - in Guantnamo, Abu
Ghraib, Afghanistan and other locations - is emerging more quickly.

This month, British readers get the chance to study in full the catalogue
of leaked memos and government investigations which track the evolution of
the White House's torture policy from 9/11 to Afghanistan, Guantnamo and
Iraq, with the publication here of Torture and Truth by the US journalist
Mark Danner, and The Torture Papers, edited by two US lawyers, Karen
Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.

The story that emerges from the assembled documents is of a group of
lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians and soldiers convinced not only of the
rightness of their cause but of the unprecedented danger posed by the
terrorists.

Had they made the same arguments, Britain's second-world-war spy
interrogators would have had a stronger case for using whatever methods
they felt necessary to extract information from secret agents. At the time
Milmo of MI5 and his fellow-interrogators started grilling Lecube, London
and other British cities had barely begun to recover from a Nazi bombing
campaign that had killed 42,000 civilians and destroyed 130,000 houses.
Britain's merchant fleet was losing 50 ships a month. Most of Europe was
under fascist rule and millions of civilians were being slaughtered and
enslaved. Britons did not know they would win the war.

Reading through the transcripts and letters relating to Lecube's
interrogation in the Public Records Office at Kew, the modern reader
awaits the moment the MI5 men would talk about hooding the Spaniard,
stripping him naked, handcuffing him till his hands went numb, beating him
up, subjecting him to extremes of cold and heat, menacing him with guard
dogs, sodomising him or pretending to drown him with wet towels.

They did none of these things.

Violence towards the prisoner, or humiliation of the kind practised in
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, was ruled out. "Never strike a man," wrote Robin
"Tin-Eye" Stephens, the monocled commander of Camp 020, in his secret
advice to interrogators. "For one thing it is the act of a coward. For
another, it is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please,
an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else
depends upon the false premise."

And so Milmo's letter to Philby contained only a request to put into
operation "Plan Squealer", which involved nothing more brutal than trying
to convince Lecube that another spy had betrayed him. The plan failed. A
few days after the war ended, the mysterious Spaniard was deported,
vanishing from history.

In the feverish atmosphere of America in the immediate aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, Stephens's advice was reversed. In mutterings from the US
secret service and op-ed pieces in the US media, it was suggested that
moral courage demanded support for torture. "Nobody is talking.
Frustration has begun to appear," a senior FBI official told the
Washington Post a month after the attacks. A few days later, a CIA veteran
was quoted in the LA Times: "A lot of people are saying we need someone at
the agency who can pull fingernails out." Alan Dershowitz, a professor of
law at Harvard, wrote that judges should be able to issue warrants
licensing the torture of suspects where the authorities somehow knew that
the suspects were concealing information about "an imminent large-scale
threat".

In a recent paper for the New England Journal of Public Policy, Alfred
McCoy, a history professor at Wisconsin-Madison University, surveys the
CIA's use of torture over half a century in Vietnam, Central America and
Iran, and marvels at the recklessness of the commentators of 2001. "In
weighing personal liberty versus public safety," he writes, "all those
pro-pain pundits were ignorant of torture's complexly perverse
psychopathology, that leads to both uncontrolled proliferation of the
practice and long-term damage to the perpetrator society."

In the new collections of memos and reports, the American will to inflict
pain on captives and the conviction that the 9/11 killing of civilians was
unique in history is spelled out. In January 2002 the senior White House
lawyer, Alberto Gonzales - now attorney general - writes to Bush claiming
that there have never been wars before in which civilians are "wantonly"
killed, or where it has been necessary to "quickly obtain information"
from prisoners. The Geneva Convention, he argues, is a quaint relic. "In
my judgement," he tells the president, "this new paradigm renders obsolete
Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."

In October 2002 the commander of the interrogation teams at Guantnamo,
Lt-Col Jerald Phifer, pleads to be allowed to inflict more suffering on
the prisoners there. "The current guidelines ... limit the ability of
interrogators to counter advanced resistance," he writes. He asks for his
people to be able to force prisoners to stand for up to four hours, put
prisoners in solitary for 30 days or more, hood them, interrogate them
continuously for up to 20 hours, subject them to sensory depriOne FBI
agent describes leaving the interview room at Camp Delta one evening. "I
heard and observed in the hallway loud music and flashes of light ... From
the monitoring room, I looked inside the adjacent interview room. At that
time I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room
with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a
strobe light flashing."

Another writes: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to
find a detainee chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor,
with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on
themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one
occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far ... that the
barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.

"On another occasion, the air-conditioning had been turned off, making the
temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees ...
The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next
to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out
throughout the night."

Guantnamo is only part of the network of US prisons overseas that the Bush
administration has created since 9/11. What emerges from the paper trail
assembled in these new books is the way in which military interrogation
techniques migrated from installation to installation. Danner's book, for
instance, includes the report by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, the
Guantnamo commander, after he was asked to advise interrogators at Abu
Ghraib and other US prisons in Iraq how to get better information from
prisoners about the wave of attacks on US forces. Gen Miller suggests
reorganising the prisons so that the guards help the interrogators "set
the conditions for ... successful interrogation".

It was following his visit that torture and humiliation by the guards
began in earnest. Prisoners were hooded, threatened with rape, threatened
with torture, had pistols held to their heads, made to strip naked, forced
to eat pork and drink alcohol, beaten till they bled - sometimes with
implements, including a br a chemical light, ridden like horses, made to
wear women's underwear, raped, deprived of sleep, exposed to the midday
summer sun, put in stress positions and made to lie naked, in empty
concrete cells, in complete darkness, for days on end.

On one visit to Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross
came across a Syrian prisoner lying in an unlit cell, two metres long and
less than a metre wide, without a window, latrine, water tap or bedding.
On the door was written "the Gollum", with a film still of the character
from the Lord of the Rings. The ICRC was not allowed to talk to him.

The worst may be to come. Little has yet emerged about conditions inside
the prisons run by the US in Afghanistan, where eight deaths in US custody
remain unexplained, and an internal military report remains unpublished.
In an essay accompanying the documents, Danner draws attention to the
language of one of the official investigators of Abu Ghraib, James
Schlesinger, who wrote in his report of "five cases of detainee deaths
[worldwide] as a result of abuse by US personnel". Danner points out that
Schlesinger could as easily have written: "American interrogators have
tortured at least five prisoners to death."

The worst treatment in Afghanistan seems to have been reserved for those
who have been, in effect, kidnapped by the US from third countries, held
in Afghanistan, and subsequently transferred to Guantnamo. In a previously
unpublished sworn affadavit obtained by the lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith,
Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a teacher of Islamic law with
Palestinian citizenship, describes how he was arrested in Pakistan, in May
2002, handed over to the Americans and taken to Afghanistan.

While at Bagram air force base, Hussain said, he was blindfolded, tightly
handcuffed, gagged and earplugged and sodomised with a stick while three
soldiers held him down. "It was excruciatingly painful," said Hussain. "I
have always believed that I am not a person who would scream unless I was
really hurt. Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would
ever sthing I experienced at the time."

Hussain said that besides the physical pain, he could not go to the
bathroom to this day without remembering what had happened. "The Americans
never said anything about why they were doing it to me," he said. "I think
maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would live with me for
the rest of my life. It would dehumanise me." Hussain has never been
charged with a crime. He was kept without explanation and released without
apology after more than two years. When he got out, he learned that his
eldest son had died.

In late 2001 and early 2002, when the pro-torture lobby in the US was in
full cry, the case of Abdul Hakim Murad, arrested in Manila in 1995, was
often cited as justification. According to the story popularised in the
US, torture by the Philippines police drew confessions from Murad which
revealed a plot to blow up 11 US aircraft over the Pacific and led the FBI
to captured Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Murad's co-conspirator and the man behind
the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. Both men are now
serving life sentences in US prisons.

In fact, while the plot and the torture were real enough, the notion that
the torture helped save lives is bogus. In an investigation the
Philippines journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria found that Yousef
was actually caught after he visited his dentist in Pakistan. He had left
his dentist's address in the conspiratorial flat. As for the aircraft
plot, the information came from a computer found in the same flat.

Murad's torture may have cast its bane beyond tortured and torturers. The
recent report of the 9/11 commission drew heavily on still-classified
transcripts of interrogations with the three dozen or so most senior
suspected Bin Laden associates captured and held by the US at secret
locations around the world, particularly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Yousef's
uncle, thought to be the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks. Under
interrogation, he seems to have talked freely about Murad - and
contradicted almost everything Murad told the Philippines police.
w collections of US torture papers. The discussions about torture being
carried on behind the scenes in the US in the weeks after 9/11 weren't so
much about the kind of military interrogations being carried out at
Guantnamo, in Afghanistan or, later, in Iraq, as about how far
non-military interrogators could go. We now know a great deal about the
rules the US military has set itself. But to find out what the CIA is up
to now, how it works on unknown prisoners in hidden cells in unknown
places, there is little to go on.

The most detailed statement about the early thinking on torture in
Washington came in August 2002, with a memo to Alberto Gonzales from Jay
Bybee, then assistant attorney general. A devout Mormon and a keen kazoo
player, Bybee spent seven years in the Reagan and elder Bush
administrations, and returned to the capital with the inauguration of Bush
Jr. After the Bybee memo was leaked last year, the administration
disavowed it with a new, milder legal opinion. Their disavowal might have
been more convincing had the departing Bybee not been rewarded with a
federal judgeship in Las Vegas.

In the memo, Bybee's concern is not with the wellbeing of suspects, but
with the risk that a US government employee might be prosecuted.

Bybee goes to great lengths to differentiate between "torture", which US
citizens are forbidden by law from inflicting on foreigners, and "cruel,
inhuman and degrading treatment", which they aren't. "Physical pain
amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of
bodily function, or even death," he writes. "The infliction of pain or
suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to
amount to torture."

According to Bybee, an interrogator won't be criminally liable if, in the
course of subjecting a prisoner to cruel, inhuman and degrading acts, he
accidentally tortures them: "A defendant could show that he acted in good
faith by taking such steps as surveying professional literature,
consulting with experts, or reviewine US law criminalising the torture of
foreigners overseas was passed in the 1990s as the final stage in
Washington's ratification of the United Nations Con