The Torture Files

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Within a few months, as the invasion of Afghanistan reached its climax, hundreds of captured al-Qaeda fighters and irregulars fighting for the Taliban regime were shipped to the naval base at Guant??namo Bay for interrogation. Gonzales wrote a memo to Bush in January 2002 that described aspects of the Geneva protocols as "quaint" and "obsolete." A few weeks later, Bush signed an order deeming al-Qaeda combatants "unlawful" and thus not deserving of prisoner-of-war status or the protections Geneva provided. "The war on terrorism," wrote Bush, "... ushered in not by us but by terrorists, requires new thinking in the law of war, but thinking that should nevertheless be consistent with the principles of Geneva."

WHAT DID THAT MEAN FOR PRISONERS?

Initially it meant that prisoners at Guant??namo were not going to be spending any time with appointed lawyers or international counselors who might be interested in obtaining their release. They were stuck in Cuba, some indefinitely, literally outside the law. That alone was an incentive for the prisoners to talk. For a time, the military followed Army field manual rules, which allowed for 17 interrogation techniques, such as the use of the good cop--bad cop routine; the we-know-everything gambit; the use and removal of incentives; emotional and psychological pressure; and silence.

But it quickly became clear that the 17 techniques might not crack some among the well-trained gang at Gitmo. As the U.S. began to round up high-value targets like al-Qaeda's chief operating officer, Abu Zubaydah, who were held in undisclosed locations, CIA officials turned to Washington for guidance about how far interrogators could go against the new terrorist enemy. In the summer of 2002, the CIA and Gonzales asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion on the definition of illegal interrogation methods. On Aug. 1, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee sent Gonzales the following guidance: the President is within his legal limits to permit his surrogates to inflict "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment on prisoners without violating strictures against torture. For an act of abuse to be torture, the interrogator must be inflicting pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The definition of illegal torture had been significantly narrowed, which meant that anything short of that was O.K.

And so, a few months later, when officers at Guant??namo, frustrated by the lack of usable intelligence they were getting from prisoners, asked Washington to approve the use of more aggressive techniques than the 17 methods in the manual, the legal groundwork had already been prepared for a new age of harsher--and now legal--interrogation. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on 16 additional measures for use at Gitmo, including stress positions, such as standing for long periods; isolation for up to a month; hooding during transportation and questioning; removal of clothing; and "exploiting individual phobias, e.g., dogs." A study led by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger reported last August that Rumsfeld's more aggressive methods were used on only two detainees, "gaining important and time-urgent information in the process."