Prisoners could be kept awake for more than a week. They could be stripped of their clothes, fed nothing but liquid and thrown against a wall 30 consecutive times.
In one case, the CIA was told it could prey on one prisoner’s fear of insects by stuffing him into a box with a bug. When all else failed, the CIA could turn to what a Justice Department memo described as “the most traumatic” interrogation technique of all, waterboarding.
Baring what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Barack Obama on Thursday released a collection of secret Justice Department documents that provided graphic guidance to the CIA on how far the agency could go to extract information from terrorism suspects.
The memos provide the most detailed account to date not only of the interrogation arsenal the CIA employed against Al Qaeda captives in secret prisons around the world, but the legal arguments that the Bush administration constructed to justify their use.
At the same time, Obama assured CIA employees and other U.S. operatives that they would be protected from prosecution or other legal exposure for their roles in the nation’s counterterrorism efforts over the past eight years.
“This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” Obama said in a message delivered to CIA employees Thursday, explaining his decision to release a collection of documents that CIA veterans and some senior officials in his administration had fought to keep sealed.
The release of the memos was seen as a test of the Obama administration’s commitment to its pledge of transparency, as well as its promise to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies.
But the decision was met with criticism among conservatives and CIA veterans who warned that the highly detailed documents would serve as a counterinterrogation training manual for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Thursday that the release of the memos would make the country less safe.
The documents go beyond cataloging the methods that the CIA was authorized to use and spell out in often disconcerting detail how such methods were to be administered.
Prisoners could be kept shackled in a standing position for as many as 180 hours. The documents provide statistics, noting that more than a dozen CIA prisoners had been deprived of sleep for at least 48 hours, three for more than 96, and one for the nearly eight-day maximum stated on one memo. Another seemed to endorse sleep deprivation for 11 days.
The documents include elaborate legal debate over waterboarding, the interrogation technique that makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning. The memos spell out that a prisoner could be waterboarded at most six times during a two-hour session, and they require an attending physician to be on duty in case a prisoner didn’t recover after being returned to an upright position.
In that event, “the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy,” said a May 10, 2005, memo, one of several documents that seemed to strain to find a legal rationale for the technique.
The memos were crafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a unit that was at the center of a series of legal debates during the Bush administration over the limits of executive power and counterterrorism tactics.
The memos were designed to fill in details left out of more theoretical opinions — some of which eventually surfaced publicly — that were produced by the Justice Department as it sought to lay out the legal boundaries of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”
The four documents cover a period from 2002 until 2005, when the government was recalculating its approach to detention and interrogation matters in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
The release of the documents was preceded by months of jostling between CIA and Justice Department officials over how much to disclose. A Justice Department official said Atty. Gen. Eric Holder urged full disclosure to help restore trust in a department that had been beleaguered by criticism that it had twisted the law to fit the Bush administration’s political ends.
The release of the memos was driven to a large degree by an ACLU lawsuit aimed at forcing the government to disclose secret rulings issued in connection with the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs.
But Obama’s decision to shield agency employees from legal liability drew criticism from human-rights groups. Holder said the Justice Department would provide legal representation to CIA employees facing legal challenge in the United States or overseas.
Meanwhile, Spain’s attorney general Thursday rejected opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying a U.S. courtroom would be the proper forum. Candido Conde-Pumpido’s remarks reduce the chance of a case moving forward against the Americans, including former U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales.
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Excerpts from the memos
Justice Department lawyers said in a “top secret” memo to the CIA that they could place Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-ranking members of Al Qaeda, in a cramped confinement box, and introduce insects into the box under the following conditions. An excerpt of the memo, dated Aug. 1, 2002, reads:
“As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar.
If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.
If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause death. (material redacted with black lines here) so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position.”
The tactic ultimately was not used.
Another excerpt referred to a process called “walling” in which an interrogator grasps the subject and slams him into a wall. Part of the memo reads:
“For walling, a flexible false wall will be constructed. The individual is placed with his heels touching the wall.
The interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall.
It is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall. During this motion, the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a c-collar effect to help prevent whiplash. To further reduce the probability of injury, the individual is allowed to rebound from the flexible wall. You have orally informed us that the false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock or surprise the individual. In part, the idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action.”
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jmeyer@tribune.com
Read memos for yourself
The Justice Department memos are available at chicagotrib une.com/unsealedmemos
