The Debate Over Torture

The American public seems split. According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, 44 percent of the public thinks torture is often or sometimes justified as a way to obtain important information, while 51 percent say it is rarely or never justified. A clear majority--58 percent--would support torture to thwart a terrorist attack, but asked if they would still support torture if that made it more likely enemies would use it against Americans, 57 percent said no. Some 73 percent agree that America's image abroad has been hurt by the torture allegations.

Clearly, some sort of rules--some real limits beyond the risk of "organ failure"--are necessary. Otherwise, as McCain warns, America will sink to the level of its worst enemies. A reconstruction of the road to Abu Ghraib shows why: at each step, the Bush administration made understandable decisions to permit the use of harsh interrogation techniques against a few individuals. But the decisions were made in such an atmosphere of secrecy and confusion that the whole process spun out of control and produced atrocities that America may never live down.

The story of the first "High Value Target" captured by U.S. intelligence illustrates some of the dilemmas and pitfalls of interrogating terrorists. When Ibn Al-Shaykhal-Libi, who helped run Qaeda training camps, was picked up in Afghanistan in November 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the province of the FBI. For some years before 9/11, the bureau's "Bin Laden team" had typically handled suspects with a carrots-and-no-sticks approach: grant favors to suspects and their families (one terrorist's son even got a heart transplant), and they'll talk. But after 9/11, fighting Al Qaeda was deemed to be war, not law enforcement, and the usual rules went out the window. The CIA took al-Libi, strapped some duct tape over his mouth and put him on a plane to Egypt, where interrogations are a little rougher than down at FBI headquarters. At the airport, according to Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI officer who handled al-Libi, a CIA case officer went up to the suspected terrorist and said, "You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her."

Sending a suspect off to languish (and possibly be abused) in the prison of a foreign country is called a "rendition." The CIA has done numerous renditions over the years, usually not for the purpose of seeing suspected terrorists subjected to torture, but just to get them off the street while the agency follows up leads from captured documents, laptop computers and the like. In the case of al-Libi, however, the Bush administration was only too glad to make use of the "take" from al-Libi's interrogation, helpfully provided by Egyptian intelligence. Under questioning by the Egyptian authorities (techniques unknown, but not hard to imagine), al-Libi confessed that Al Qaeda terrorists, beginning in December 2000, had gone to Iraq to learn about chemical and biological weapons. This was just the evidence the Bush administration needed to make the case for invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In his famous, now discredited speech to the United Nations in February 2003, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the intelligence extracted from al-Libi, referring to him not by name but as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist" who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.

There was only one problem with al-Libi's story: after the Powell presentation, he recanted it. Overlooking timely doubts raised by some U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ideologues in the Bush administration had used information obtained by torture to mislead the world.

Better, then, for the CIA to interrogate terror suspects on its terms. In April 2002, Abu Zubaydah, a top Qaeda lieutenant, was captured in Pakistan. At first he talked, but then he clammed up. Frustrated, the CIA went to its political masters in the Bush administration to ask: how far could the agency go in interrogating a crucial but reluctant suspect like Zubaydah?