Abu Ghraib deceived us. Its sexual degradation was so over-the-top that it was difficult to imagine any senior administration official ordering it. At worst, the mistreatment seemed the product of an environment of undue permissiveness toward abusive interrogation.

We now know that explanation was incomplete. Far from being simply the concoction of a few reservists on the night shift, abusive interrogation has emerged over the past year as a deliberate part of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy.

The first clear warning sign came in January 2005 during the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Reinterpreting the meaning of a U.S. reservation to the Convention Against Torture, Gonzales claimed that the treaty’s prohibition of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (also known as “CID”) did not apply to non-Americans held by U.S. forces outside the United States. Other governments abuse detainees clandestinely, but the Gonzales testimony made the United States the only government in the world to affirm the power to use CID as a matter of official policy.

Responsibility for this shameful policy did not stop with Gonzales. When Senator John McCain introduced legislation to reverse the Gonzales position, President George Bush threatened to veto it, and Vice President Dick Cheney lobbied to permit the CIA to continue using CID.

With the passage of the McCain legislation, the CID prohibition applies once more to anyone in U.S. custody, American or foreigner, held at home or overseas, but that is no reason for complacency. Under the definition adopted by the U.S., CID occurs when an interrogation technique “shocks the conscience.” But CIA Director Porter Goss testified in March that water-boarding—a classic form of torture in which suspects are subjected to mock execution by drowning—is a “professional interrogation technique.” Timothy Flanigan, former deputy White House counsel who at the time had been nominated as deputy attorney general, refused during testimony in September to say that water-boarding constitutes inhumane treatment. If even water-boarding doesn’t shock the conscience of senior administration officials, what will?

And since the CIA continues to “disappear” dozens of detainees into secret detention facilities where they are held incommunicado, there may be no opportunity to test the administration’s practices in court.

As for detainees held by the military, the McCain bill requires they be treated in accordance with the high standards codified in the Army’s Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. But the administration is amending the Field Manual, including attaching a secret annex that reportedly permits highly coercive techniques. The Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment, which restricts judicial review for suspects held at Guantanamo, makes independent review of these techniques even more difficult.

The architects of abusive interrogation undoubtedly feel that it is the best way to defend the U.S. against terrorist attacks, but their policy is short-sighted. It has been widely noted that U.S. interrogation abuses generate rage and a desire for revenge that is a boon to terrorist recruiters. Applying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous metric, the administration may well be generating more terrorists than it is stopping. But there are two other consequences to U.S. interrogation policy that are less frequently noted.

First, the same rage discourages international public cooperation in the fight against terrorism, which tends to be a far more important source of information than anything gained from interrogation. Regardless of the perennial debate about whether torture can secure information of any value, most security and law enforcement officials agree that tips from the public—a neighbor reporting suspicious activity, a young man reporting an approach by a terrorist recruiter—are more often the key to cracking a secretive terrorist conspiracy. By discouraging cooperation from people who don’t want anything to do with such abuse, coercive interrogation may be penny wise but pound foolish.

Second, coercive interrogation effectively precludes later criminal prosecution. Once a confession is coerced from a suspect, it becomes extremely difficult to prove, as due process requires, that a subsequent prosecution of him is free of the fruits of that coercion. As a result, the administration is holding some suspects who clearly have joined terrorist conspiracies and might have been convicted and subjected to long prison terms, but whose prosecution has become impossible. A year ago, the CIA began openly fretting about the problem. What happens, it worried, when continuing to detain suspects without trial becomes politically untenable, but prosecuting them is precluded by the taint of coercive interrogation?

Thus, even after the McCain amendment, independent scrutiny of the administration’s interrogation practices is needed—not only to prevent further affronts to our most basic values, but also to end a misguided policy that is making us less safe.



Kenneth Roth is the executive director at Human Rights Watch and co-editor of “Torture,” published this year by The New Press. He will speak in Winthrop Library at 6:30 tonight.