These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct the “war on terror” and how to interrogate and treat that war’s detainees. Sadly, they reveal that the FBI knew perfectly well — and repeatedly warned Defense Department officials, as well as Justice Department lawyers — that the abusive interrogation techniques being used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay were likely to be ineffective and make subsequent prosecutions impossible.

As one memo says, while the interrogation techniques based on tactics used in the U.S. Army Search, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) training “may be effective in eliciting tactical intelligence in a battlefield context, the reliability of information obtained using such tactics is highly questionable, not to mention potentially legally inadmissible in court.”

That memo was written in May 2003.  The “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as stress positions and prolonged sleep deprivation, were still being used and justified in memos as late as July 2007. The memo raises several important questions. Did the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers drafting those later memos for the CIA not know about the FBI’s earlier objections? Or did they just dismiss them out of hand? Were they told to ignore those earlier conclusions?

Then there’s the fact that senior officials from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, including the chief psychologist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service “repeatedly argued for implementation of a rapport-based approach” and “lamented the fact that many DHS [Defense Human Intelligence Services] interrogators seem to believe that the only way to elicit information from uncooperative detainees is to use aggressive techniques on them.”

“Despite objections raised by the [Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI], the DHS initiated an aggressive interrogation plan for #63,” who elsewhere in the document is identified as Mohammed al-Qatani. “This plan incorporated a confusing array of physical and psychological stressors which were designed, presumably, to elicit #63′s cooperation. Needless to say, this plan was eventually abandoned when the DHS realized it was not working and when #63 had to be hospitalized briefly.”

Officials from the Criminal Investigative Task Force and the Behavioral Analysis Unit drafted a letter “reiterating the strengths of the FBI/CITF approach” and providing “a detailed historical record of the development of interagency policies regarding aggressive interrogation techniques in GTMO.” The letter also argued that they were a bad idea.

Not only did the officials not succeed in convincing DHS to abandon the techniques, but the document described how the military and DHS inaccurately portrayed to the Pentagon that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit approved of and helped design the very techniques that the BAU warned would backfire.

Although we knew before that the FBI had disagreed with the so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques and refused to participate in them, this latest release of previously classified information reveals the extent to which FBI officials made both the legal and practical case to senior Pentagon and Justice Department officials for why the usual rules on interrogations should be followed.

That they were so blatantly ignored suggests more than just bad judgment. It suggests a deliberate indifference to the facts and the law, which cries out for a more thorough investigation.

09 Memos

Still, according to the recently released July 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the technique was determined not to cause “serious physical pain or suffering” and not to violate the War Crimes Act. The War Crimes Act prohibits torture and “cruel and inhuman treatment.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A comparison of the inspector general report with legal memos released from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, however, reveals that lawyers were so uncertain about how and whether sleep deprivation could be used legally that their advice to the CIA ranged from restricting its use to 48 continuous hours, to allowing it for 180 hours or more. And although the 2007 legal memo specifically mentions that the CIA said it might use the technique for 180 hours, the lawyers restricted their analysis, in footnote 7, to only the legality of its use for up to 96 hours. Meanwhile, the inspector general report discusses the contemplated use of sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah for up to 11 days at a time — or 264 hours straight.

None of the former interrogators, physicians, lawyers or government officials could explain to TWI exactly why the CIA and Justice Department lawyers changed the rules so sharply and frequently. A call to Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law Professor and director of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was not returned.

“How they go from 48 to 100 plus hours is anybody’s guess,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent who worked in the Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. “I think that they were making the rules up as they went along,” he said, adding that “they outsourced a lot of this,” referring to the role, recently revealed by The New York Times, of Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two businessmen-psychologists who developed the interrogation procedures for the CIA but had no interrogation experience themselves.

But the experts on sleep deprivation all appear to agree – and the literature on the subject is remarkably consistent – that sleep deprivation is physically and mentally harmful, and largely ineffective at producing useful information. Still, it’s tempting for government officials desperate to get detainees to talk.

“It will elicit information, that’s true,” said Cloonan. “People will talk. But in point of fact the substance is what separates what works and what doesn’t. Did they provide actionable intelligence, and could you verify what was being told?” asks Cloonan. “There’s a big diff between compliance — giving information to stop what they’re being subjected to — and real cooperation, where they’re giving useful information.”

Scientists, physicians and interrogators all say that because sleep deprivation causes extreme confusion and even psychosis, it’s impossible to know if what the detainee is telling interrogators is true or not.

“Sleep deprivation has been extensively studied,” said Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, as well as the author of the book, “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.” “It will cause people to speak. It does not produce reliable intelligence. It impairs the ability to concentrate in a way that allows the interrogatee to assemble coherent narratives. So it’s counterproductive in terms of information solicitation.”

A December 2006 report from the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College says that sleep deprivation is associated with, among other things, “increased suggestibility,” adding: “On this last point it is worth noting that suggestibility increases specifically under conditions simulating an interrogation. At least one study has found that “the effect on suggestibility of one or two night’s sleep loss is comparable to the difference in suggestibility between true and false confessors.”

That’s such a basic fact for interrogators that in the book, “Introduction to Forensic Psychology,” by Curt and Anne Bartol, the glossary lists “Coerced-compliant false confessions” as “Admissions of guilt most likely to occur after prolonged and intense interrogation experiences, especially in situations where sleep deprivation is a feature. The suspect, in desperation to avoid further discomfort, admits to the crime even knowing that he or she is innocent.”

As Tom Parker, a former British Intelligence agent, now Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights explained: “Sleep deprivation was never designed as an interview tool. It was used by the KGB and its precursors as a way to break people down to give false confessions. These techniques are not about getting people to tell the truth, they’re about breaking people down to kill their spirit.”

The justification for the technique originated with the idea of learned helplessness, based on studies conducted decades ago on dogs.

“They took dogs, tied them in a cage and shocked them,” explained Miles. “They showed that the dogs would act to resist or escape, unless the dogs learned there was nothing they could do to resist. Then they would just lie there and take it.”

The theory, explained Miles, is that “when used with other techniques it will induce dependence on the interrogator, which will cause the person to comply.” But all the research done on this from around the world reveals that “this technique simply does not gather intelligence.”

Sleep deprivation is always part of a package: as described in CIA inspector general report, prisoners were shackled, semi-starved, put in diapers and forced to stand that way. Their hands were cuffed along the wall close to their chins, according to Department of Justice memos. If they nodded off and stopped standing, the chains would pull at their wrists, waking them up.

Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, recently told The Associated Press that her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured in Vietnam, has also said that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture, and recently denied the claim in the CIA inspector general report that he was among several members of Congress who approved its use.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, tortured by the KGB as a young man, famously described sleep deprivation in his book, White Nights:

“In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it,” he wrote. “I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them” — time to sleep.

Although the technique was prohibited by President Obama, some worry it could be revived in the future because it at least gets people to talk, and it’s generally perceived as less offensive than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity. “Sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore,” wrote reporter Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times recently.

In justifying the use of sleep deprivation in a 2005 memo, Justice Department lawyers argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight — because “even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain.” They relied for that claim on the work of university researchers who found that people who were deprived of sleep for just one night had an increased sensitivity to certain types of pain. Justice Department memos dated May 10, 2005 cited this study to support the conclusion that severe sleep deprivation of up to 180 consecutive hours might cause some increased pain but not “severe physical pain” — even when used together with slaps, stress positions, water dousing and “walling” — slamming a detainee’s head repeatedly against a flexible wall.

“Because sleep deprivation appears to cause at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance, the use of these techniques in combination with extended sleep deprivation would not be expected to cause severe physical pain,” wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the memos. (Bradbury has since left the department and works at a private law firm in Washington. He did not return calls for comment.)

But those same academic researchers have since called the Justice Department’s use of their work “nonsense.” “To claim that 180 hours [of sleep deprivation] is safe in these respects, is nonsense.” Dr. James Horne, with the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, told the blog Obsidian Wings. “Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.”

In their studies, the doctors explained, the subjects were well-fed and could play video games and watch television. Detainees under interrogation, on the other hand, were often semi-starved and chained into place, not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

“In a manner, it’s like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic — and can even kill them,” another of the researchers cited, Dr. S. Hakki Onen, sleep specialist and geriatrician, told Time Magazine.

Although the Justice Department lawyers wrote that “extended sleep deprivation cannot be expected to cause ‘severe mental pain or suffering,’” the doctors vigorously disagree.

After several days, “the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain,” Dr. Horne said to Obsidian Wings.

Notably, a combination of techniques similar to those used by the CIA has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In the case Ireland v. U.K., the court held that a combination of sleep deprivation, hooding, wall-standing, continuous white noise, sleep deprivation and “the bread and water diet” violated international humanitarian law.

What’s odd, say former interrogators, is that the military knew this and for the most part, resisted using these techniques. The CIA, however, relying on inexperienced contractors who developed its interrogation strategies based on the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, seems to have completely ignored common knowledge.

“The point is you realize when you’re going through that [SERE] training, they tell you this isn’t about trying to get useful intelligence out of you, it’s about getting propoganda,” said Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the air force and leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq and author of “How to Break a Terrorist.” (Matthew Alexander, seen here on The Daily Show, uses a pseudonym.) Sleep deprivation may be used for no longer than 48 hours in SERE training, according to the inspector general report. “They’re just trying to break down your will.”

“I think people misinterpreted that,” Alexander added. “Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists, they took that learned helplessness theory, but they’d never done an interrogation. They were so off base.”

iStockphoto

On the same day that the government produced the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on interrogations, it also turned over seven more memos and letters from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The memos released on Monday were the Justice Department’s legal justifications for continuing to use those controversial interrogation techniques, despite a new law passed by Congress and an intervening landmark Supreme Court ruling that governs U.S. detentions overseas.

The Office of Legal Counsel is where John Yoo and Jay Bybee, beginning in 2002, wrote a series of what came to be called the “torture memos,” defining torture so narrowly and the law so permissively that near-drowning, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions and many more “enhanced interrogation techniques” were deemed legal. Yoo also concluded that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to certain executive action during wartime, even in the United States.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The more recent documents, written by Steven Bradbury, who became acting assistant attorney general and head of the OLC in 2005, were the Justice Department’s attempts to deal with the ways the law had changed in the intervening years – and the clarifications from the Supreme Court that certain basic international laws, like portions of the Geneva Conventions, do apply to terror suspects held abroad.

What experts say is surprising about the 2006 and 2007 memos released on Monday, however, is how little the legal analysis changed, despite the new legal backdrop that had emerged, and how selectively the lawyers chose which laws and cases to apply.

In 2005, after photographs surfaced showing U.S. troops abusing Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act specifically to outlaw the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of detainees that was plain for all to see. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to “war on terror” detainees. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had famously called the Geneva Conventions a “quaint” relic of the past.

But the CIA still wanted to use many of the controversial interrogation techniques it had adopted, based in part on the advice of two psychologists and businessmen with no interrogation experience. In particular, as is set forth in the recently released Office of Legal Counsel memos, the CIA still wanted to use six techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, food deprivation, shackling, forced standing in stress positions, and a variety of “corrective techniques” that include physical slaps and grabs – all of which would be used alone, or in combination.

Despite the intervening change in the legal landscape, legal experts who have reviewed the memos say that strangely, the analysis remained essentially the same.

“It’s surprising how little the analysis in this memo changed from the past memos, notwithstanding the passage of the [Detainee Treatment Act] and the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan,” said American Civil Liberties Union national security project lawyer Alex Abdo.

The July 2007 opinion, for example, analyzed whether prolonged sleep deprivation for up to 96 straight hours (or 180 hours in a 30-day period) while a prisoner is forced to stand, shackled, in diapers, and eventually in his own urine and feces violates the Detainee Treatment Act and Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.

The Justice Department lawyers concluded that it does not violate either law, even if the sleep deprivation is combined with restriction to a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet (half the recommended daily human intake) of liquid formula, and with “corrective techniques” such as the “facial hold,” “facial slap,” and “abdominal slap”.

The rules are not violated because the CIA has determined that such techniques are “safe”, concludes the memo, meaning they cause no “serious,” permanent or long-lasting injury.

The lawyers are confident of that conclusion because “the CIA adapted each of the techniques from those used in the United States military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (“SERE”) training,” which is “designed to familiarize U.S. troops with interrogation techniques they might experience in enemy custody and to train these troops to resist such techniques.”

Although the lawyers recognize “that a detainee in CIA custody will be in a very different situation from U.S. military personnel who experienced SERE training, the CIA nonetheless found it important that no significant or lasting medical or psychological harm had resulted from the use of these techniques on U.S. military personnel over many years in SERE training.”

That’s the same reasoning the OLC used to justify waterboarding and other techniques in its Aug. 1, 2002 memo.

The Aug. 31, 2006 Office of Legal Counsel memo goes on to say that the techniques don’t “shock the conscience” – the same standard the lawyers used in 2005 to say the CIA’s interrogation techniques didn’t violate the international Convention Against Torture.

In effect, in the Justice Department’s view, despite the new law and Supreme Court interpretation, nothing had changed.

“Especially following the DTA you’d think it would no longer be okay to beat someone up for information,” said Abdo. “At the end of the day, that for me is what this 2007 memo amounts to. The techniques of sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation—you’d think that was precisely what Congress was focused on when it passed the DTA. It’s surprising how much of the techniques survived the new law,” he said. The memo is “dodging bullets fired at the CIA by Congress and the Supreme Court.”

The lawyers similarly interpreted the Geneva Conventions to add nothing new to the equation. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that Common Article 3 applies to detainees held by the United States overseas, notwithstanding the Bush administration’s strenuous arguments to the contrary. Common Article 3 requires the “humane treatment” of all prisoners. But the July 2007 memo interprets that to not even require the U.S. government to report the prisoners’ existence to the International Committee of the Red Cross, for example.

That’s a strangely narrow reading of the Geneva Convention’s requirements, said Jamil Dakwar, an expert on international law and director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program. In a “non-international conflict,” which is how the Supreme Court defined the United States war with al Qaeda and the Taliban, “Common Article 3 talks about allowing the ICRC to offer its services,” says Dakwar. If the government does not inform the ICRC of the prisoners’ existence, however, the organization cannot offer any services.

In general, “there’s a gap between the way the United States interpreted international law, and the way the rest of the world interprets it,” says Dakwar. “In non-international armed conflict, human rights law, such as the U.N.’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights should be applicable,” he said. But the Bush administration said it did not apply, so it examined the techniques only as narrowly as possible under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. That several international courts and human rights committees have disagreed with the Bush administration’s conclusion did not alter its analysis.

The International Committee of the Red Cross in its commentaries, for example, stresses that Common Article 3 does not apply in isolation, but in conjunction with the laws of the country where the prisoners are held, and that country’s interpretations of international human rights law. In the OLC memos, however, “the assumption is that we created secret detention, we can’t operate them anywhere but in secret, so this is an excuse to ignore all other laws,” says Dawkar. “So you see here cherry-picking of what kinds of protections the detainees will be afforded.”

Even when the memos rely on U.S. law, the comparisons between terror suspects held for years in secret CIA prisons and detainees held in U.S. prisons with the full panoply of constitutional rights often don’t make sense. For example, the memos evaluate the legality of conditions of overseas detention by relying on cases interpreting the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, although those cases only pertain to prisoners who have been charged and convicted of a crime in a U.S. court. In these cases, although the memos repeatedly assume that the detainees are “extremely dangerous,” none has even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of anything. Similarly, cases governing pre-trial detention conditions in the United States, where a suspect is awaiting trial and has a right to a lawyer, aren’t applicable to detainees who may be held incommunicado — unable to speak to other inmates or contact anyone in the outside world — in secret detention with no rights at all for years.

“They pick and choose Supreme Court cases that talk about Eighth Amendment law without addressing the difference in the context,” said Dakwar. “I found that amazing.”

Where the Aug. 31, 2006 memo does note a difference in circumstances, it is to emphasize that terror suspects “are not ordinary accused criminals; instead, they are extremely dangerous, and often quite sophisticated, terrorist enemy combatants detained because they pose a serious and direct threat to the national security of the United States.” The memo thereby assumes the detainees’ guilt, and justifies the conditions of detention accordingly.

The memo also dismisses the impact of being held incommunicado. “They say it doesn’t matter because they have access to books, music and movies,” notes Dakwar. “That is fundamentally unacceptable by all authorities. The fact that you have no contact with other people is the issue. Having newspapers or movies does not make the confinement less severe.”

Indeed, in in the New Yorker in March, Harvard Medical School Professor Atul Gawande cites a range of experts and torture victims, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who refer to long-term solitary confinement as more agonizing than physical abuse and ultimately, a form of torture. (Prolonged isolation, Gawande finds, actually creates physical abnormalities in the brain.)

To compare the temporary isolation of a convicted criminal or pretrial detainee to prolonged isolation of a terror suspect in a secret overseas prison, then, makes no sense, says Dakwar. “These are two unparalleled situations,” he said.

In general, the memos “cherry-pick the law and cases that they want to apply,” says Dakwar. For example, the memos rely on interpretations by the International Criminal Court, even though the United States, and particularly the Bush administration, opposed the creation of the ICC and don’t recognize its legitimacy. “Yet it utilized those interpretations in defense of their unjustified practices.”

The other strange thing about the memos is that in parts, they analyze the conditions of the detainees’ confinement — the physical conditions of their cells and whether they were provided with food and water and allowed to sleep, for example — separately from their treatment during interrogations, which sometimes specifically included sleep and food deprivation. And portions of the conditions’ descriptions — for example, the way prisoners’ cells are illuminated 24-hours a day — are redacted, and therefore incomplete. That makes it almost impossible to consider the legality of the conditions as a whole. “Alone, a condition may not amount to a violation, but in certain circumstances, a combination of techniques and methods would constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, or could even rise to the level of torture,” said Dakwar.

Certain combinations of treatment that violate the Geneva Conventions could also rise to the level of war crimes, which may be why the Office of Legal Counsel was so eager to define all of the CIA’s actions as falling well within the bounds of international law.

According to Newsweek, although the public demand for prosecutions had seemed to die down, in late June Holder spent two days holed up in his office poring over a classified CIA inspector general report on interrogation abuses and was “shocked and saddened” by what he read. The New York Times later reported that if Holder does open an investigation, it’s likely to be a narrow one, “focusing only on C.I.A. interrogators and contract employees who clearly crossed the line and violated the Bush administration’s guidelines and engaged in flagrantly abusive acts.”

That’s what The Post’s editorial board now wants as well, arguing that “those who relied on the memos and shaped their behavior in the good-faith belief that they were following the law should not be subject to prosecution.”

Of course, that’s exactly what former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Vice President Dick Cheney argued more than a year ago. Will President Obama’s attorney general now conduct an investigation according to the strict parameters those Bush administration officials set out back then, which were widely viewed as self-serving?

Glenn Greenwald today points out the absurdity of the Justice Department’s going after low-level criminals and ignoring the bosses who instructed and cheered them on. That’s precisely the opposite of the way the Justice Department usually goes after criminal investigations — at least the ones it takes seriously.

As Greenwald puts it:

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking:  when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it’s necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but — no matter what else happens — the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability.  In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset:  namely, a willingness to immunize low-level soldiers in order to ensure that the higher-level criminals suffer the consequences of their crimes.  But when it comes to crimes committed by political officials in America’s Versailles culture, only the pawns are subjected to the rule of law while the monarchs and their highest royal court aides are immunized.

In a letter — sorry, I don’t have a URL — Feingold wrote to Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder after April’s decision to declassify the Justice Department’s 2002 and 2005 rulings authorizing CIA torture, he urged the new administration to go further:

[O]rder the public release of other memoranda and letters associated with that program, including the July 22,2004 letter of the Attorney General; the August 6,2004 letter of the Acting Assistant Attorney General; the August 2006 OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] memoranda on detention; and the July 2007 OLC memo on interrogation. Moreover, the OLC memoranda should be withdrawn.

Obviously, not all of these are related to surveillance. But Feingold noted that on January 15, outgoing acting associate attorney Steve Bradbury reaffirmed a 2006 unclassified “white paper” on the surveillance programs in a letter clarifying that Bradbury had … withdrawn most of his office’s work authorizing that program. Bradbury:

As set forth in the Justice Department’s white paper of January 19, 2006, addressing the legal basis for the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency publicly described by the President in December 2005, the Department’s more recent analysis is different: Congress, through the Authorization for Use of Military Force of September 18, 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001) (“AUMF”), confirmed and supplemented the President’s Article II authority to conduct warrantless surveillance to prevent further catastrophic attacks on the United States, and such authority confirmed by the AUMF could reasonably be, and therefore had to be, read consistently with FISA, which explicitly contemplated that Congress could authorize electronic surveillance by a statute other than FISA. See U.S. Department of Justice, Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National SecurityAgency Described by the President (Jan. 19, 2006) (“NSA Legal Authorities White Paper”). As the January 2006 white paper pointed out, “[i]n the specific context of the current armed conflict with al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Congress by statute [in the AUMF] had confirmed and supplemented the President’s recognized authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct such surveillance to prevent further catastrophic attacks on the homeland.”

Feingold wants that white paper released and formally withdrawn, along with its ilk. The stakes, as the senator puts it:

It is particularly important that your administration act soon to provide the.clarity that is needed before Congress considers the reauthorization of provisions of the USA Patriot Act, as well as possible changes to the FISA Amendments Act. By formally affirming the executive branch’s commitment to adhere to the statutes governing surveillance, your administration can provide the necessary basis for a productive public discussion on how we can defend the American people and their freedoms while fighting terrorism aggressively.

That the Justice Department sought responses from the subjects of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report and is now changing the report as a result has been a source of controversy in the past, particularly from Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

They both pressed Holder again today at the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, asking Holder why it’s taken so long for the report to be finalized and released.

Holder responded:  “My hope is to share as much of that report as I can with members of congress and the public.  There are some potentially classified parts of that report, which we will work to declassify.” Holder promised to release the report “in a matter of weeks. They’re pretty close to the end.”

He added, though, that there will then be a “declassification process” that could further delay the report’s release. “As people look at the work that the OPR has done I’d like them to have the full range of information that OPR considered,” Holder said. “That’s why I think declassification of the report is so important. I wouldn’t want to put an incomplete report in the public.”

Among other things, Ratner suggested that the subcommittee should subpoena “all of the documents, including emails, that surrounded their [the OLC memos'] writing.”

The committee could then “subpoena all those who wrote those emails or had conversations with the OLC lawyers about those memos both before or after they were written. That context might well demonstrate that the memos were not written in good faith and were shaped to fit the torture policy.”

Sounds like a good start.

The floor of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters (Wikimedia)

Hidden in plain sight in the Office of Legal Counsel memos on the CIA interrogation is a mystery: How did the “enhanced interrogation” technique of sleep deprivation come to depend on stress positions?

Somehow, between 2002 and 2005, CIA interrogators began using what the International Committee of the Red Cross called “prolonged stress standing” as a means to keep detainees from falling asleep so as to make them docile and cooperative when questioned. What isn’t clear is how that non-intuitive sense of “sleep deprivation,” which was not mentioned in the initial legal authorization for the technique, came into official CIA usage. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will examine that development in its ongoing review of CIA interrogations and detentions, according to knowledgeable sources.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In an August 1, 2002 memorandum outlining interrogation methods that the CIA could lawfully employ on captured al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, then-OLC chief Jay Bybee authorized the technique of sleep deprivation, writing that the CIA’s goal was “to reduce the individual’s ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate” with his interrogators. There is no discussion in the memorandum, declassified by the Obama administration on April 17, about how the CIA would keep Abu Zubaydah awake. Yet Bybee wrote, “it is clear that depriving someone of sleep does not involve severe physical pain within the meaning of the [federal anti-torture] statute. … Based on the facts you have provided us, we are not aware of any evidence that sleep deprivation results in severe pain or suffering.”

But by the time the OLC reevaluated the CIA’s interrogation program in 2005, it revealed that the technique was overwhelmingly physical. “The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake,” wrote Bybee’s eventual replacement, Steven Bradbury, on March 10, 2005. “In this method, the detainee is standing and is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached by a length of chain to the ceiling.” The detainee’s feet are shackled to a bolt in the floor, giving him a “two-to-three-foot diameter of movement.” His hands “may be raised above the level of his head, but only for a period of up to two hours.” His weight is “borne by his legs and feet during sleep deprivation,” ensuring that he had to keep awake, for if he “los[t] his balance” from exhaustion he would feel “the restraining tension of the shackles.”

Both memos gave legal approval to the use of stress positions like shackling. And both memos contemplated and blessed the use of techniques in combination with each other, finding that no conceivable permutation of combined techniques would constitute “severe pain or suffering” or “severe mental pain or suffering.” But until the release of the 2005 memo, there had been no official acknowledgment that sleep deprivation as practiced by the CIA depended on physically restraining a detainee.

Experts say individual methods of torture are commonly combined, and can have more than one physiological or psychological effect. “Each term, like ‘stress positions,’ covers a wide variety of techniques, but they’re used together,” said Scott Allen, a Rhode Island-based doctor and medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. “With the use of a stress position, it’s virtually impossible for someone to sleep.”

The stress positioning was not the only technique involved in the sleep deprivations. According to Bybee in the 2005 memorandum, detainees undergoing sleep deprivation could also be “subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique.” Whether nude or not, a detainee experiencing sleep deprivation wore “an adult diaper,” which the CIA assured Bradbury would be “checked regularly and changed as necessary.” Since the use of the diaper “is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee,” the CIA did not consider it to be “an interrogation technique.” According to the memo, the “maximum allowable duration for sleep deprivation” is “180 hours,” or seven and a half days, “after which the detainee must be permitted to sleep without interruption for at least eight hours.”

A footnote to the memo indicated that there was an associated technique of keeping a detainee awake through “horizontal sleep deprivation.” In that technique, “the detainee’s hands are manacled together and the arms placed in an outstretched position — either extended beyond the head or extended to either side of the body — and anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for either balance or comfort.” Interrogators would place similar restraints on the detainee’s legs. “The position is sufficiently uncomfortable to detainees to deprive them of unbroken sleep, while allowing their lower limbs to recover from the effects of standing sleep deprivation,” Bradbury wrote.

It is unclear how the CIA came to believe that shackling and stretching a detainee was an allowable form of inducing sleep deprivation, but senior CIA officials approved of the determination. According to the memorandum, on January 28, 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet issued two “guidelines,” one on interrogations and one on detentions policy, which are still classified. Hints appear in the May 10, 2005 memorandum: use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” required prior written approval “from the Director [of the] Counterterrorist Center, with the concurrence of the Chief, CTC Legal Group,” and a “contemporaneous record shall be created setting forth the nature and duration of each such technique employed.”

Attempts to reach Tenet for comment were unsuccessful, as were attempts to solicit responses from key Tenet-era CIA deputies. The CIA declined to comment for this article.

In a confidential February 17, 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross — recently obtained and published by the New York Review of Books’ Mark Danner — several detainees formerly in CIA custody who had been subjected to stress-position-based sleep deprivation described the practice. “I was kept sitting on a chair, shackled by hands and feet for two to three weeks,” said Abu Zubaydah. “If I started to fall asleep a guard would come and spray water in my face.” The cell in which he was kept was “kept very cold” through air conditioning, according to the Red Cross report, and “very loud ‘shouting’ music was constantly playing on an approximately fifteen minute repeat loop twenty-four hours a day.” Other detainees said that feces would run down their legs “when they defecated while held in the prolonged stress standing position.”

Several other detainees — 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his aide Ramzi bin al-Shibh; as well as Majid Khan, Khalid bin Attash, Abdulrahim Hussein Abdul Nashiri, Mohammed Nazir bin Lep and Encep Nuraman — described being “shackled to a bar or hook in the ceiling above the head for periods ranging from two or three days continuously, and for up to three months intermittently,” according to the Red Cross report. If a detainee managed to fall asleep despite the shackling, “the whole weight of their bodies was effectively suspended from the shackled wrists, transmitting the strain through the arms to the shoulders.”

Allen of Physicians for Human Rights said a number of long-term ailments could emerge from extended use of the stress position. “There’s traumatic arthritis, tendon and muscle problems further down the road,” he said, including long-term nerve damage, swelling of the feet and ulceration, among other ailments.

While much remains unclear about the CIA’s merging of stress positions and sleep deprivations, Allen found one aspect of the story to be less than mysterious. “Common sense will tell you that the longer someone is held in these positions, the greater risk of injury,” he said.

As he said on a conference call with reporters organized by the Federalist Society this morning, “as reprehensible as people may find it [waterboarding], it’s not an infliction of severe pain.”  What’s more, it’s “not of long term duration such that it would be considered infliction of severe mental pain under cases that interpret that,” either.

“As far as mental suffering is concerned, that involves at least the creation of a fear of imminent death,” said McCarthy. “While it’s a favorite talking point that people were waterboarded 180 times … it undercuts the fear that there was going to be imminent death. After the first or second time you get the point that there’s no death to be feared here.”

So the more a detainee is waterboarded, this astute legal reasoning goes, the more he gets the idea he’s going to survive, and the less like torture it really is.

But isn’t the idea to terrify the guy into talking?  Otherwise, why do it?

The president has publicly opposed prosecuting the CIA officers who carried them out, but now he’s also saying that it’s up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether to prosecute the lawyers that wrote the many legal memos authorizing and justifying them.

A broad range of advocates have been calling on Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to begin criminal investigations.