The Debate Over Torture

In July 2002, the president's counsel, Alberto Gonzales, convened his colleagues in his cozy, wood-paneled office in the White House. Present were top Justice Department and Defense Department lawyers. Significantly missing were lawyers from the State Department and uniformed military, whose views on interrogation were known to be a good deal more cautious. (The military worries what will happen to captured American POWs in return.) According to a participant at the meeting who declined to be identified discussing private deliberations, Gonzales emphasized that it would be wrong to go over the line, but that America was at war, and it was necessary to "lean forward." (Gonzales has declined to comment.)

One by one, the lawyers went through five or six pressure techniques proposed by the CIA. They approved "waterboarding," dripping water onto a wet cloth over the suspect's face, which feels like drowning. But they nixed mock burials as too harsh.

It has never been clearly established if their methods worked to sweat useful information out of Zubaydah. But a precedent had been established, and interrogators creatively made the most of it. Toward the end of 2002, there was a spike in intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda was preparing another major attack. The CIA had in custody Mohammad al-Qatani, the so-called 20th hijacker who had been refused entry to the United States before 9/11. But al-Qatani, trained in resistance (one method is to memorize and recite the Qur'an over and over), was not responding to the usual interrogation techniques.

So his handlers at Guantanamo Bay obtained permission from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to try new techniques. According to a Southern Command report that came out earlier this year, al-Qatani was forced to perform dog tricks on a leash, was straddled by a female interrogator, told that his mother and sister were whores, forced to wear a woman's bra and thong on his head during interrogation, forced to dance with a male interrogator and subjected to an unmuzzled dog to scare him. At congressional hearings last July, Southern Command's Gen. Bantz Craddock testified that as a result of the use of some of these techniques, the formerly defiant al-Qatani had "provided insights" into Al Qaeda's planning for 9/11.

The harsh techniques used at Gitmo produced a backlash. The FBI and lawyers for the uniformed military services protested. A behind-the-scenes bureaucratic struggle broke out in Washington and raged and spluttered into the summer of 2003 and beyond, producing a welter of conflicting and confusing rules. The Geneva Conventions, international law requiring humane treatment, applied to some, but maybe not all prisoners--or did they? The answer seemed to depend on--what? No one seemed to know for sure. The international Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994, bans the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of all prisoners. But Justice Department lawyers had obligingly declared that the president could ignore such constraints.

At the same time, the war in Iraq was starting to go badly. American soldiers were being killed by bombs planted by insurgents, and the Army seemed powerless to stop it. In Washington, a furious Rumsfeld was pounding the table for more and better intelligence. Where was Saddam? Where was the WMD? Why couldn't U.S. troops catch the insurgents before they could set off crude roadside bombs?