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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

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This exceedingly important book documents the incremental slide into justifying the use of torture by the United States government and is a shocking depiction of just how easily and swiftly the downfall can occur. The various lawyers are shown being pumped for the legal grounds, in case of exposure. The assault on the Geneva Convention is depicted, and it seems the figures involved can't grasp the ominous implications, and don't want to. Their minds are made up. The dates of the various key memos begin shortly after 9/11 and show the onset and then its downhill all the way. It seems that with this administration it was an accident waiting to happen, and the excuse of 9/11 triggered a monster lurking in the predispositions of the Bush regime. This is a massive tome of nearly a thousand pages large size, but is extremely well done, and clear for all its detail. The record now speaks for itself and we have ample proof of the mindset of the Bush gang in action.

The editors of this book have done a fine job, and the publisher should be commended for bringing this sizable collection to print. Due to the size of the book, long periods of time would be required to read all of the memorandums in it. A great deal of information can be gained however from the perusal of even a small number of these memorandums. They give an inside view of the workings of a collection of individuals who are far from the combat sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, and whose goal is to make sure that they will be insulated from any legal consequences of their actions and recommendations. Joshua L. Dratel, one of the editors of the book, states this clearly when he asserts that the implicit message in the memoranda is that the policy makers who wrote them actually detest the American system of justice and find it impractical as a tool for fighting terrorism. This reviewer is in full agreement with Dratel's commentary. Indeed, the memoranda definitely support the notion that its authors consider it axiomatic that the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and other bodies of law are impotent in the face of international terrorism. They have let the events of 9/11 lower considerably their confidence in rational, legal procedures for the resolution of conflicts. Dratel states it concisely and correctly when he states that the events of 9/11 `cannot serve as a license - for our government in its policies, or for ourselves in our personal approach to grave problems - to suspend our constitutional heritage, our core values as a nation, or the behavioral standards that mark a civilized and humane society.'

Some insight, however limited, can be gained from Memo 11, which is one of the memorandums that Bush put forward regarding the treatment of detainees and the prisoner-of-war status of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. After reading Memo 11, the question immediately arises: Why did the memorandums and discussion continue even after Memo 11 (the Bush memorandum to the Vice President, et al)? After all, in this memo, Bush explicitly states that the Geneva provisions do not legally cover Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Bush emphasizes that even though he accepts the legal conclusions of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice regarding the inapplicability of the Geneva convention to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that he therefore has the "authority under the Constitution" to suspend Geneva, he nevertheless decides to "decline to exercise that authority." However, Bush is careful to note that he "reserves the right" to exercise this authority in future conflicts. In addition, he orders that detainees be treated humanely, according to the principles of Geneva, "including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment." Thus it appears that any further legal argumentation by anyone in the administration regarding the use of torture should be viewed as purely academic. But as this book clearly shows, there was still much discussion on these matters after Memo 11 was sent (February 7, 2002). The need for further discussion is not clear even after reading the memorandums that were sent between various individuals after Memo 11.

Torture has been practiced by many different individuals, political and religious groups, and regimes throughout history. Whether it is the Catholic Church in the Inquisition, the Chinese government under Mao ZeDong, or American military personnel in Iraq, the practice of torture is not exclusive to "leftist" or "rightist" political groups. The use of torture though to gain information is an implicit admission of the inability to collect real intelligence, either because of laziness or incompetence. Those individuals who practice torture for this reason no doubt understand this. They fully understand that torture is useless in gaining helpful information from prisoners. Therefore their decision to engage in the torture of prisoners is no doubt a result of their sadistic nature, which can be brought out not only in the theatre of war but also under the protection of religious and governmental institutions. These institutions, despicable and contemptible as they are, deserve every legal penalty available against them. Of course, legal penalties presuppose the existence of institutions that have the legal authority to carry them out. Considering the status and jurisdiction of international law in the last few years, the number of these institutions is in rapid decline, leaving the practical application of torture open to any country that desires to carry it out.

Karen Greenberg, Joshua Dratel and the Cambridge University Press have produced a valuable resource for anyone interested in the controversy surrounding the United States' detention and interrogation of terrorists, suspected terrorists and other combatants in the War on Terror.

The introduction by Anthony Lewis and essays by Ms. Greenberg and Mr. Dratel argue that the memorandums, legal briefs, reports and interviews compiled in this volume conclusively prove President Bush and his administration systematically sought to circumvent US and international laws, conventions and treaties, with the ultimate goal of actively sanctioning and engaging in activities that any reasonable person would view as torture. As stated in the preface, "...this volume document[s] the systematic attempt...to authorize the way for torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices, forbidden under international law..." While strictly true, this statement is also misleading. It's clear that some of the interrogation techniques extensively documented and admitted by the military and administration violate some "international" laws, such as human rights conventions adopted by the member states of the European Union. That these techniques violate international treaties and conventions to which the US is signatory is somewhat less clear. This book provides no new information to bring that debate to a close, although the documents will reinforce the opinions of those driven by ideology to the presumption of guilt.

Messrs. Lewis' and Dratel's essays are direct and somewhat vitriolic in their criticism. Mr. Lewis labels the US prosecution of the War on Terror as "the cause of evil", firmly establishing the ideological prism through which he views the torture controversy. Mr. Dratel, who is representing detainees at Guantanamo, makes the arguments you would expect from a lawyer attempting to paint his client in the best light (and, by extension, their antagonist in the worst light). He makes an interesting point when he refers to the "[un-American]...antipathy and distrust of our civilian and military justice system..." Clearly, many in the Bush administration share a concern that the courts could be abused to the detriment of US national security, and are wary of the judiciary encroaching into what they feel is the realm of the executive, although whether you feel such scepticism is "un-American" will depend largely on your political leanings. Ms. Greenberg is more circumspect in her language, if no less direct in her criticism. There are flaws in the arguments of all three essays, including extensive innuendo, assumptions, and quotes taken out of context. However, the essays are thankfully brief, and the reader has the benefit of access to the source material in the same volume.

The extensive compilation of documents related to the controversial interrogation techniques approved for use by the Bush administration makes this book a truly valuable resource. Here you'll find the tortured legalese of the infamous Bybee memo, the Gonzales memos, Secretary Rumsfeld's direction to combatant commanders on the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, the transcripts of MGen Tugaba's interrogation of the main players at Abu Ghraib and his ensuing report on the abuses, the Schlesinger report and reports on treatment of detainees from the ICRC and other humanitarian groups. Even though, with a little searching, all these resources can be found for free on the internet, the editors have done an outstanding job in compiling them into an easily readable format. The documents are provided in a chronological order that lays out, in a way individual news reports can't, how American leaders wrestled with fighting a new type of war that couldn't be neatly reconciled with existing conventions and treaties governing the conduct of armed conflict. The information is presented for the reader to study and draw their own conclusions. Anyone interested in the cause of justice and human rights, especially an American concerned that injustice may have been committed in their name, owes it to themself to become familiar with this record.

This book does not present, except in the legal memos from within the administration, any arguments that Pres Bush's decision not to apply the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War to the Taliban and Al Qaeda shouldn't be considered controversial, either by precedent or a common sense reading of the convention. Despite the title, you also won't find a clear chain of causation between the administration's decisions and what went on at the prison, unless you've already decided Pres Bush bears ultimate culpability for the travesty. However, you will get to see BGen Karpinski, the brigade commander at Abu Ghraib, throwing barbs up and down her chain of command in her deposition to MGen Tugaba. It's left to the reader to decide where the breakdown in command occurred.

THE TORTURE PAPERS contains 1,242 eye-popping pages of documents--memos, legal opinions, reports, interrogation transcripts, etc.--gathered and conveniently ordered in one handy volume. The government documents show, among other things, that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not the result of a few bad apples on the nightshift, as the Pentagon has maintained, but was a result of the Bush administration's own operational rationale (i.e., by direction of the civilians installed by Bush/Cheney at the Pentagon and Justice Department). The reasoning behind both the war and the manner in which it was conducted is all laid out in amazing detail in the official documents. They themselves have provided the "smoking gun." It's all here folks, in their own words, if you take the time to read it. Unfortunately, even Democrats in Congress don't take the time, which is shamefully obvious in the congressional hearings.

Despite the extensive documentary evidence collected in this book, the Bush administration maintains that "we don't torture." Journalists don't seem to be able to cut through to the main issue, rarely--if ever--confronting Bush with the most damning documents. Moreover, journalists pose inadequate questions that fail to clarify. Just yesterday I watched Larry King interviewing Dick Cheney. Larry King brought up the subject of torture. Cheney claimed that they don't torture. Larry pressed Cheney a little and Cheney admitted that they use certain techniques, but never said what those interrogation techniques were. That was that.

But philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasize how different people mean vastly different things by the same words. Just because you share a word in common doesn't mean you're thinking the same thing by it. To sort out controversies, it's imperative that key terms be clarified. What does torture mean? To clarify the issue of whether we torture or not, journalists first need to establish what torture is. When Bush or Cheney claim that they don't use torture, the journalist must ask them what their working DEFINITION is: How do they define torture? There is probably a vast difference between what they mean by torture and what most Americans consider to be torture. The next step a journalist/interviewer must take is to ask whether specific acts constitute torture. Bush people might refuse to answer, saying that they don't comment about specific techniques, but it is in itself significant when they refuse to acknowledge that a specific technique, such as waterboarding or beatings, constitutes torture. Whenever SPECIFIC techniques are discussed, it makes them uncomfortable, which is exactly what the journalists should strive for on this topic.

It is often said that the President and his people have effectively "redefined" torture, or changed the law. Actually, what they did is REINTERPRET the law, which is vague in determining what torture is. As the documents in the book show, Bush's lawyers claim that only actions that result in organ failure or death constitute torture. If that is your definition, then the pulling out of fingernails is not torture. Thus, by simply reinterpreting the term, they can technically deny that they employ torture, but all the while they can be putting heads underwater and pulling out fingernails. The fact that the law can be so easily reinterpreted points to a severe shortcoming in the law itself, in how it is written (too much ambiguity). In any case, journalists must do a better job of establishing what the administration's working definitions of key terms are. If the Press simply did that, as well as use more documentary evidence (such as the plethora found in this book), so much more light, so much less confusion, obfuscation, and ambiguity, would result, taking the national dialogue up to a whole different level. Until then, we have books such as THE TOTURE PAPERS that gather the primary evidence on how the Bush administration has operated. Until the law is changed and made clearer in how it defines torture, Civil Rights lawyers will have an uphill battle fighting on this front, although in my opinion there's plenty of grounds for impeachment. It's a shame, in my opinion, that the Dems did not choose to bring Bush or Cheney to justice, since their actions now stand as precedent. But thanks to their own documents, at least history will record the amorality of the Bush administration in damning detail.

UPDATE: On 10/17/07, at a White House press conference, a journalist asked President Bush how he defined torture, a straightforward question. Bush's response? His definition, Bush said, was the legal definition. Then he called on another journalist, running away from the question. Bush's answer was a clever, if cynical, dodge, since the ambiguity resides in how Bush's laywers INTERPRET the legal definition of torture. As we noted, the definition of torture in the U.S. Code is intentionally vague, opening the way for the Bush administration's re-interpretation. How Bush and his legal team interpret torture is found in Memo 14, "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation" (August 1, 2002), on page 172 of THE TORTURE PAPERS. 18 U.S.C, Sections 2340-2340A, states that for an act to constitute torture it must cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." But the law, at least this section of it, doesn't define "severe" or specify what acts do (or don't) constitute torture. The Bush people pounce on this vagueness and define "severe pain" by turning to another area of the law: statutes governing health care benefits which define what constitutes an "emergency medical condition for the purpose of providing health benefits." This area of the law defines "severe pain" as something that places the "health of the individual . . . (i) in serious jeopardy" or causes "(ii) serious impairment to bodily functions, or (iii) serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part." They apply this definition to their interpretation of torture and conclude that for an interrogation technique to constitute torture, it "must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function." (They go on to similarly interpret "severe mental pain or suffering.") Using this perverse definition, a definition that takes "severe" to mean organ failure and/or death, interrogation techniques that have traditionally been considered torture such as the pulling out of nails or the temporary cutting off of the air supply to a person's lungs are no longer considered torture. Moreover, the memo observes that "certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's proscription against torture." Notice how their definition of torture sanctions virtually all that transpired at Abu Ghraib. Yet they blamed Abu Ghraib on "a few bad apples." In any case, when Bush claims that he defines torture the way the law defines it, he leaves unsaid just how his lawyers are interpreting the law. The adage is true: the devil is in the details. Instead of asking Bush how he defines torture, probably a better way is to ask Bush and his people to clarify how they define the phrase "severe pain" in the law. The interviewer can even anticipate the answer by directly citing what I cited above.

This is an excellent resource for any serious scholar or researcher dealing with the laws of war, the Iraq War or torture issues. It is a broad compilation of original source material, mostly post 9/11; with its depth (over 1200 pages), it may be too much for the casual reader (if so, try Torture and Truth, by Mark Danner), but for serious research, it is essential.

Michael J. Brady, PhD (international law)
Tucson, Arizona

Mostly a collection of memos. This book is only a record to let us know what some of the hub bub is all about. Let us not sweep this under the rug. This is a first step in our examination of what we are and what we may become if each citizen doesn't accept responsibility and act on what is rapidly becoming a standard operating proceedure. Does torture acheive better information, Or blind us to truth? The same amount of time spent in a search for evidence would give results. Evidence gained by torturing is an illusion that has caused the torturer to become a goon. Calling torture by some other name does not change its effect. Torture destroys its victims and demoralizes its perpetrators. For those who are pleased to dominate it gives dominance. Torture does not give facts because it is not physical evidence. The veracity of uncovered facts can not be observed, but must be further tested. Torture can destroy any resistance in the one tortured and give the dominator feelings of the power of god. The torturer is loosing the battle without physical evidence. Torturing only gives the feelings of power.
This book is the begining of the examination of official torture and might allow some of us to reconfirm that torture by any name is only the act of a despot and only dispoils free citizens.

This comprehensive and current compilation makes clear that our government has sanctioned practices not only outlawed by international conventions against torture, to which we are signatories, but which discracefully echo the techniques of tyrants through the ages. The documentation will make it impossible for Americans to claim that they didn't know what is being done in our name. This work should be required reading for every citizen as our nation confronts an official policy that claims our only defense against terrorism is our own use of teror and torture.

This book is an excellent way in to the tragic sequence of events in Abu Ghraib. It is dispassionate and gives you all the vital documentation that you need in order to make an independent considered judgement. If you want to know what really happened, this is the place to start. Christopher Catherwood (author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ: Carroll and Graf, 2004 and paperback 2005)

This very substantial (over 1242 pages) book is a treasure trove of information given all of the current attention (including Supreme Court decisions) being devoted to Gitmo detainees and issues of possible torture of alleged terroist detainees. The book consists for the most part of government memos and reports that were written to authorize and document coercive interrogation and torture in Gitmo, Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraid among other locales.

Some 28 memos are included in their entirety that cover the period from Sept. 25, 2001 into 2004. A number of reports are reproduced as well, written by the Bar of the City of New York, The American Bar Ass'n, former defense secretary Schesllinger's report on DoD detention operations, some briefing papers, DoD responses to AP reports, and the Fay/Jones report on Abu Ghraib. There simply is nothing like having the original documents at your fingertips. The book also includes a list of pertinent documents that at the time of publication had not been publicly released; most if not all of these are now available on the internet (e.g., the key John Yoo March 14, 2003 memo).

There are also helpful introductions (including a short one by Anthony Lewis of the NYT); a list of interrogation techniques; recommended readings; a listing of torture related laws and conventions; biographical sketches of the key players (except David Addington for some reason); a timeline; and some cases relevant to the incidence of torture. Also included is an afterword with some additional documents which had been released just as the book was going to press. The book nicely complements any of the current volumes out on this issue, such as Goldsmith's "The Terror Presidency" (also reviewed on Amazon). An indispensable resource in this important area.

Mandatory reading for every high school student. Not to be read through, but used as a reference. An objective, and factual paper on what we are capable of. Miss them yet?