’We Have Ways of Making You Talk’

<http://www.msnbc.com/news/956061.as...>

We Have Ways of Making You Talk

by Christopher Dickey

The United States figures it can get plenty out of
the newly captured Chemical Ali. But how? And are
these ’interrogation’ techniques being readied for
American citizens?

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Aug. 22 - So Chemical Ali is back from the dead. You
may remember that this infamous cousin of Saddam Hussein
was reported killed early in the war, during those heady
days when ’smart bombs’ supposedly solved big problems
in Iraq.

WELL, IT HAS since become obvious that the smart bombs
weren’t so smart and neither was the intelligence that
guided them-and that Chemical Ali (real name Ali Hassan
al-Majid) was alive and well and on the run, just like
Saddam himself.

How he was caught this week, precisely, nobody in the
Coalition is saying. But they’re sure happy to have him.
He earned his nickname using poison gas on Kurdish
Iraqis in 1988, but his list of offenses is much longer
than that. He ran the bloody campaign of murder and
torture in Kuwait under Iraqi occupation in 1990. He
helped butcher Shiites when they revolted in 1991. He
even slaughtered two of Saddam’s traitorous sons-in-law
in 1996. This thug is a walking encyclopedia of
atrocity. He might know where to find Saddam’s missing
weapons of mass destruction. He might even know where to
find the missing Saddam.

’We won’t know, will we, until we have an opportunity to
visit with him?’ CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid
told the expectant press when Chemical Ali’s capture was
announced. ’After that we’ll know a little bit more.’
But how do you make a man like this talk? We Americans
have ways, it would seem, and they were recently
outlined by none other than Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby,
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. No need to
get out the battery cables or fingernail pliers, it
seems. The only thing Jacoby tortures is prose.
’Interrogation is the art of questioning and examining a
source to obtain the maximum amount of usable, reliable
information in the least amount of time to meet
intelligence requirements,’ Jacoby writes in a legal
brief. ’DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely
dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and
trust between the subject and interrogator.’

Actually, we know from other documents declassified over
the years that when it comes to questioning hard cases,
dependency is a whole lot more important than ’trust.’
Suspected bad guys are isolated and dependent for every
bit of information they receive, even the time of day.
The interrogators have the power to grant or withhold
permission for every bodily function, including sleep.
It’s amazing how fast most people break down under such
circumstances.

If that doesn’t work, the treatment can get rough. But
you have to read between Jacoby’s lines to figure that
out. Because the enemy in the war on terror is so hard
to identify and doesn’t fight the kind of war the United
States spent trillions of dollars to wage, Jacoby tells
us ’innovative and aggressive solutions are required.’ A
’robust program’ has been put in place during which
’interrogations have been conducted at many locations
worldwide by personnel from DIA and other organizations
in the Intelligence Community.’

As one of Jacoby’s subordinates in the U.S. Navy
explained to me, the idea is to keep most of the
important players out of the United States. Apparently
there is no shortage of black holes in which to soften
up the bad guys, although only a few are publicized.
’The most interesting thing about interrogations is how
the U.S. government and military capitalizes on the
dubious status (as sovereign states) of Afghanistan,
Diego Garcia, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and aircraft carriers
to avoid certain legal questions about rough
interrogations,’ my friend told me. ’Whatever
humanitarian pronouncements a state such as ours may
make about torture, states don’t perform interrogations,
individual people do. What’s going to stop an impatient
soldier, in a supralegal location, from whacking one
nameless, dehumanized shopkeeper among many?’
Not the law, certainly. But should we complain? These
American interrogators have worked their magic on some
of the very bad actors in Al Qaeda, which is one reason
the United States is a little safer today than it was
two years ago.

But there are some real problems with all this. First of
all, as a Lebanese torturer-er, interrogator-of my
acquaintance once told me, the real challenge comes if
someone is telling the truth: ’How do you know?’ And
what if that truth doesn’t fit with what you really want
to hear? And what your bosses really believe-really know
in their souls to be the truth? What if, for instance,
there really are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
because they really were destroyed to keep United
Nations inspectors from finding them? The United States
now has captured 37 of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis in the
famous pack of cards. That’s what all of them are
saying, and lesser-known scientists have told the same
story. Yet still the WMD beat goes on.

The means of making people talk, even relatively benign
means, become problematic when you don’t actually care
what they say.
Still, as a freedom-loving American, that’s not what
worries me most about Jacoby’s rationale for robust
interrogations in faraway places. What worries me is
that it was submitted in January to the U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York to explain
techniques used on an American citizen by DIA
interrogators after that citizen was arrested and jailed
in the United States of America.

The man’s name is José Padilla. Some 15 months ago,
Attorney General John Ashcroft commanded worldwide
attention when he announced dramatically (on live TV
from Russia of all places) that Padilla had been
plotting to set off a ’dirty bomb’ in the United States.
Padilla, a high-school dropout and former gang member
from Chicago, had drifted into the orbit of Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan and had been persuaded to bring a
terror campaign back to the United States. Or, rather,
to think about doing it. Or, at least, he surfed the Web
trying to find out how he might do it. The FBI
questioned him for a month, then handed him over to the
Pentagon.

Padilla was declared an ’enemy combatant’ based on the
assertion-not the presentation-of ’some evidence’ by the
administration that he was a bin Laden bad guy. As an
enemy combatant, Padilla has no right to appear in
court. And he has no right to see a lawyer. Indeed, by
executive fiat, he’s been deprived of every inalienable
right with which our creator endowed us. The Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights has filed a brief in the case
damning this approach as (quoting James Madison) ’the
very definition of tyranny.’

And for what? Whatever Padilla knew in May 2002 when he
was caught, the intelligence he can give these days is
not exactly real-time. Indeed, the only information he’s
received at the Naval Brig in South Carolina, probably
including when it is day and when it is night, comes
from his interrogators. So why not let him see counsel?
Why not present him to the court?

Admiral Jacoby’s rationale is fascinating: first of all,
because there might be something the interrogators
missed, or can find out if there are new suspects
captured somewhere else sometime. And you wouldn’t want
Padilla to have any sense of hope if they need to
question him again: ’Any delay in obtaining information
from Padilla could have the severest consequences for
national security and public safety.’ Secondly-and this
is what’s really creepy-because Padilla might reveal
’sources and methods.’ That is, he might talk about
precisely those means that were used to make him talk,
therefore he can never be allowed to talk at all.
If the courts buy this line of argument, then we
Americans can kiss our sweet rights goodbye. And reading
the admiral’s brief, you have to ask yourself if that
isn’t really the goal: to give the president and his
people the power to treat all Americans like José
Padilla, unless and until we give the answers expected
of us.

(c) 2003 Newsweek, Inc.