Privatising the GWoT

FBI interrogator Ali Soufan has a remarkably illuminating piece in today's New York Times. In it, Soufan shreds the Conservatist arguments that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were successful or that they produced meaningful intelligence that normal techniques could not.

Liss at Shakesville, on reading it, picked up something interesting in the narrative:

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It’s worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.) [emphasis added]

I share Liss' disgust at the transfer of military and intelligence operations to private entities, for much the same reason.

The Iraq conflict has employed at least as many "contractors" as it has servicepeople. Iraq needs a new base/barracks/school/whatever? Don't send in the Corps of Engineers: KBR can do that, and it'll only cost twice as much and need as much more in renovation of the electrical and plumbing systems. There's a new VIP coming to visit? Blackwater can cover the convoy (at 3x what it'd cost to bring in Rangers for the job), and they'll only shoot a few of the locals by mistake. The list is endless.

Now, through Soufan, we have an account that indicates the same busineses were among the first to "request" the interrogation tecniques Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury et al attempted to justify. Note that Soufan stipulates that it was the contractors, not the FBI nor the CIA, that made the initial requests.

It is becoming defensible that the GWoT, like the attempts to "reform" Social Security, was less a struggle against terrorism and more a means to outsource the Department of Defense. The advantages are clear: fewer "troops" would need to be deployed to a given theatre, reducing the visibility of the campaign at home; casualties would be the responsibility of the contractor, removing a burden from the Veterans' Administration; costly weapons programmes could be handed to the private sector which could write them off as business expenditures; shoddy workmanship in facilities and reconstruction efforts could be handed off to the private sector builders, who could at once claim benefit from the work perfomed and protection from litigation under the umbrella of the US government; and the private contractors could be far more free in their methods and tactics than US servicepeople constrained by law, duty and military codes of justice and conduct.

Disownership is perhaps the key item here: the US can at once contract with a private entity for a service performed, and distance itself from the success or failure of that service and the methods used to do the job. After all, it wasn't US soldiers/sailors that made such a mess, it was a contractor. But then again, the contractor can't be punished because it works for the US government. This gives the government a free hand to indulge its worst tendencies while still maintaining at least the pretense that those tendencies weren't its own.

Liss' perspective is quite clear:

At some point, I hope there's a reckoning for the influence private military contractors were allowed to have on our national policy during the Bush administration. I hope, but I suspect there won't be.

In fact, I suspect that outsourcing the really ugly stuff was the point all along.

Rereading Soufan's piece, and thinking back over the last eight years, I can't help but think she's right. But I think there's a larger problem: ShrubCo worked from the premise that that private anything was more cost-effective, and more efficient, than its public equivalent. I suspect that the interrogations and other "contract" work was an experiment in the effectiveness of a private defense entity, and that the eventual goal was to turn over all but the most basic command functions of the military and intelligence arms to private enterprise. If these "contractors" could be shown to be more effective, and less expensive, than their comparable DoD or intelligence branches, a case could be made to let them handle those tasks on an ongoing basis.

This vision is highly disturbing. Imagine, for a moment, a Blackwater or Custer Battles type of business possessing aircraft carriers and advanced attack aircraft leased long-term to the US Navy. Imagine a similar organisation tasked with the incarceration and interrogation of combatants - without DoD or CIA supervision or input. The materiel would present far less risk to the US' worth (the value would be covered by private insurance and neither protected nor guaranteed by the federal government, yet could still be defended as "US sovereign territory" should it be attacked or lost. The contractors would be responsible for their own out-of-theatre expenses such as healthcare, counseling and housing, saving countless millions in such expenses for the DoD, yet still be "our boys" when in harm's way. Conversely, the contracted businesses would be under extreme pressure - not to remain within any budget, but to produce satisfactory results: losing people or equipment, or performing atrocities, would become a cost of doing business, and only the success of a mission or campaign would be measure of the value of the contract. The simultaneous liberation to indulge the worst behaviours of wartime and freedom from the burdensome expenditures required to maintain a peacetime military would enable the administration to engage in some of the ugliest fighting imaginable without substantial risk to public resources. And if an individual contractor became sufficiently unpopular to risk public support its contract could always be cancelled and awarded elsewhere.

That scenario raises two major potential horrors. First, and most easily understood - particularly in light of Soufan's article - is how far and how fast a contractor with no oath, and only a W2 to demand loyalty, can sink into the quagmire. Second is the horrific scenario when a contractor as well equipped as the US government is cut loose: where will it go? who will pay its salaries? what will it be prepared to do to remain in business and pay its shareholders? Neither scenario is at all pretty.

There are sound reasons for maintaining standing armed forces and well trained intelligence professionals as public resources. There are equally sound reasons for keeping those resources public and not delegating their activities to private industry. In each case, one of the reasons is the controls placed on public service that private enterprise avoids. It's defensible that the Bush maladministration advocated the privatisation of these functions as they did precisely to bypass those controls.

As Bad As They Are, Part Two

Andrew Sullivan has a pair of tales from World War Two, highlighting just how different the earlier - and highly successful - interrogation methods were, and why even the Nazis avoided the barbarity on display from the Bush years.

Answering The Wrong Question

Talking Points Memo has an illuminating clip on the perspective that let the US get to this point.

Pay special attention to the section from about 0:48.

Note that the Bush apologist makes much of the US government "doing everything possible to keep us safe."

The problem here is what is possible.

Waterboarding is possible. So are sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory deprivation and a host of other documented practices employed by US intelligence and advocated and approved by the Bush Administration. They are demonstrably possible: their use is documented.

So too, however, are the use of thumbscrews, the Brazen Bull, the Iron Maiden, the rack, drawing and quartering, and a host of other methods and devices known to history. I doubt strongly that anyone would advocate reintroduction of those methods of coercion. Yet, as the tools exist, and have both a long and bloody record and precise documentation of their construction and application, the possibility of their use is demonstrable and the possibility that they could be used today is very real. Possible only means that the capacity for use is measurable; it has nothing to do with the propriety of that possibility.

The problem isn't what's possible. The problem is what's ethical and legal. Were the question only one of the possible, all manner of atrocities could be justified. Civilisation is not about the possible, nor even about the practical. It is a matter of the ethical, moral, and conscionable: without ethics and some semblance of morality civilisation is impossible.

None of the techniques described fit those constraints.

H/T Andrew Sullivan.

A Thought on the Torture Investigations

The problem with this entire discussion is that, rather than requiring that the subsequent President pursue the illegalities of his/her predecessor, the obligation actually rests on the concurrent Congress to review, investigate and prosecute any illegal behaviour on the part of the sitting President at that time. The 108th through 110th Congresses had ample opportunity, and substantial grounds, to undertake such an investigation. That they did not is far more indicative than any action the 44th President could take to investigate the administration of the 43rd.

Manufacturing Evidence

Andrew Sullivan brings up a key point in the Armed Services Committee findings, highlighted by the McClatchy coverage of the story:

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," [an unnamed former senior US intelligence official] continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

It wasn't enough to learn about upcoming al-Qaida plots from those caught early in the GWoT: the maladministration needed evidence that al-Qaida was colluding with Iraq in a global anti-US conspiracy. And if the normal interrogations failed to produce that evidence (assuming normal interrogation methods were employed from the outset), then the maladministration explicitly encouraged more outrageous methods to elicit that information - even if it meant abusing detainees to the point where they'd say anything just to make the horror stop.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress has a point-by-point takedown on the programme here.

(Misplaced) Expectations of Decency and Honour

A Senate Armed Services Committee report is expected today on inquiries into the origins of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used in the GWoT, made public some time ago and whose flimsy justifications have been recently made available through the memos the Obama administration released last week. Though the report has apparently not been released as of writing, both the Washington Post and New York Times have articles on the programme's origin, and my 'blogging peers are already starting to weigh in.

The evidence unearthed both damns the programme from its formation and spotlights the incredible ignorance, callousness and hubris of the GWoT as prosecuted. From the Post and Times items, the programme began perhaps eight full months before the first Justice Department memo affording its scope was delivered. Early questions from junior officers seeking clarification on the legality of the methods employed were brushed aside. And by the time the earliest memos were written, a de facto routine to employ those techniques, and a network of facilities in which to use them, was already well (if perhaps not fully) formed.

One of the most shocking things revealed is that the programme's origin in Department of Defense SERE training techniques, intended to assist US servicepeople captured and interrogated, was openly recognised and even approved. The logic that if we were trained to endure such treatment it couldn't really be all that bad drove both the programme itself and its general acceptance by the leadership; no recognition is indicated that the programme was designed to help soldiers survive treatment known to be illegal, immoral and inhumane meted out by governments and organisations whose own legitimacy would already be challenged and against whom the US was already engaged - presumably for reasons that included those very interrogation techniques.

Throughout the prosecution of the GWoT, we were told repeatedly that "the US doesn't torture." It is now clear that, though these techniques were clearly torture, the maladministration didn't believe it so - and held that belief simply because we employed a programme that meted out this same treatment as a training regimen. Some of the interrogators that employed these techniques first did so under the assumption that since SERE methods were part of their training they must be legal. The pattern that emerges follows that logic, conveniently ignoring the origins of SERE and the evil it was intended to combat.

The memos that followed adoption of these interrogation techniques at least recognize that justification for the interrogations required a radical reinterpretation of US law and international treaty. The parameters they list - denying the psychological effects even as those were depended upon, using US facilities on foreign soil to skirt the constraints imposed on the country by treaty - indicate a clear understanding of the ethics of the situation and a desperate effort to twist the letter of law and treaty to condone or overlook the interrogations. Now that it is obvious the "legal guidance" these memos provided ex post facto basis for methods already approved and in use their obscenity is compounded.

One striking item in the reports is the enthusiasm with which the interrogations were greeted by the entire administration in 2002. The intellectual laziness displayed in the near-total lack of curiosity about a programme whose origins were all readily available to those making these decisions is staggering. Had the programme had some totally alien origin it might be understood a little better; however, the SERE program was a long-standing training regimen designed to harden troops to interrogation techniques known to produce false intelligence and break its subjects and which had been encountered some forty to sixty years ago. One might be able to excuse a young recruit just subjected to SERE for not knowing why SERE training was necessary: the wars the US fought where it had faced the tactics the programme was designed to combat were over before most of them were born. One cannot excuse the leadership of the nation, being old enough to remember some of those conflicts personally.

Perhaps this is a predictable consequence of a "global war on terror" waged by a team that largely deferred its deployments to Vietnam past the duration of that conflict or found other means of avoiding service in that theatre. Disinclination to fighting is easily translated into intellectual incuriousity about how wars are fought. Certainly the offhand treatment of complex issues, and the naivete of the Bush administration were formative in other areas: that their treatment of the GWoT in general, and interrogation in particular, should be little surprise.

The initial reactions I have read to the announcement of this narrative has been one of shock and disgust. But there is another aspect that is highlighted in recent news. Some senators, including Patrick Leahy of Vermont, are calling on justice Jay Bybee, crafters of one of the now-infamous memos, to resign out of "decency and honor." From the Armed Services Committee's findings, those two virtues appear to have been nearly uniformly lacking in the Bush administration: no decent or honourable person would have agreed that SERE was an appropriate model for our intelligence services to use as an interrogation methodology, and no self-respecting legal professional would have gone through the legal gymnastics required to legitimize that decision and redefine SERE practices as anything other than torture in the manner Bybee and others are now irrefutably known to have done.

In 2000 then-Governor Bush campaigned for the Presidency on a platform of "Compassionate Conservatism," perhaps hoping to echo and expand on his father's "kinder, gentler" approach to politics. The US saw the results as systematic failures of management and execution in response to multiple natural disasters and acts of terrorism (those who shout about 9/11 conveniently forget the anthrax scares of following months) and as commonplace shredding of the social safety net and civic accountability as healthcare and Social Security were attacked and the GWoT was farmed out to private industry more interested in its bottom line than in providing meaningful services. The prosecution of the GWoT - and its treatment of those it captured - was the face of "Compassionate Conservatism" that the world saw: a petty, vengeful, amoral regime disinterested in human rights or the legitimacy of foreign powers and focused only on its own preeminence and revenge for its injuries.

The US understood Bush as something other than "Conservative" in the last years of his misgovernance. Now, at last, the US is learning something the world grasped some time ago: that the Bush maladministration was as alienated from compassion as it was from conservatism. Expectations that a self-described Christian would adhere to the standards of "honor and decency" that Leahy described and that the US as a presumably moral nation assumed were clearly misplaced. It is well past time the Bush administrative team was held to account for that failure.

Backroom Deals

There's a lot of noise today about this particular item.

I see two particular points of interest.

One, the investigation highlights just how much intelligence-gathering the NSA was doing within the US, and how much of it was truly targeted at US citizens. Had this merely been about foreign agents plotting harm to the US as the programme was originally presented, Rep. Harman would have gone essentially unnoticed. However, she was not, and only the intervention of (then) Attorney General Gonzalez prevented a full-blown and very embarrassing investigation. Of course, now that the deal that was struck has been exposed, the embarrassment is compounded, so any benefit Harman received was strictly temporary.

Two, it showcases how widespread foreign involvement in US policymaking could potentially be, and how diverse the prospective "foreign agents" would be by inference. If Harman, then a House Intelligence Committee member, was amenable to quid pro quo with foreign agents despite (or perhaps because of) her responsibilities, the AIPAC moment might be only one of many. Also, if AIPAC was the foreign agency snared by the wiretap, it certainly makes wiretapping to "catch foreign terrorists" harder to justify unless one is willing to label Israel a state sponsor of terrorism, which the Conservatists are loath to do and which even the US Left is hesitant to consider. And Gonzalez' intervention says much about what the Bush maladministration was prepared to overlook to achieve its aims.

Harmon's subsequent distancing from authority by House leadership is certainly appropriate. Unless charges are preferred, though, her continuing in office is best left between her and her constituents for the moment.

UPDATE: Re. Harman has issued an not-quite-rebuttal statement to the charges. It seems she's missing the larger point, though the point she does make is certainly troubling.

Of Law And Conscience

Much of the Conservatist reaction to releasing what are being called the “torture memos” is making a lot of noise about how future interrogators will feel unsure of their methods even though the DOJ has approved them. This is a highly troublesome position.

First, it assumes that the interrogators themselves are at some sort of risk by default. This is not all that irrational: interrogation is a highly subjective process, and the methods used are continually revisited as standards of conduct change. One would expect that any guidance received on the matter is temporary and likely to be revised or replaced in some future set of guidelines. However, the instances where individual interrogators have actually faced substantial prosecution and/or recrimination are few, and nearly all of those cases are against interrogators who stepped far beyond the lines of decency. There were, for example, very few if any such prosecutions following World War One, and while there have been many following World War Two those were for unnecessary cruelty in the Stalags, concentration camps and other similar sites and compelled by the ideologies that drove the governments responsible for them. In contrast, there have been relatively few such trials of interrogators in Chile, El Salvador or Guatemala, where such practices were not uncommon: the key culprits such as Pinochet have been the primary targets of legal proceedings.

Second, it assumes that personal ethics and sense of humanity are subordinate to the rule of law. If an individual interrogator is sufficiently disturbed by a particular technique to inquire as to its legality, that should in itself be a clear warning that, whether legal or not, the technique is probably not moral. It is not reasonable that an interrogator posing such a question should, on the assurances of his/her superiors, proceed blithely and unthinkingly with the technique following any such assurance. “It's OK – the AG signed off on this” may be an assurance of support from the administration, but it does not necessarily carry the force necessary to proceed without at least some questioning of moral rectitude.

Third, by implying that it is the interrogator, rather than the policymaker, that is to blame for any consequences of a particular technique. This would be true if the interrogator proceeded with a particular technique without discussing it with superiors, but far less so if the interrogator requests and is given explicit approval, and far less so if that technique is explicitly permitted in guidance proactively forwarded to the interrogator by the leadership. The implication is disingenuous, and dishonest, since it suggests that interrogators operate in a legal and moral vacuum unless provided guidance. By that suggestion, the first two listed assumptions are mooted simply because they remove the instruction deemed so fearful in them and hold the interrogator apart from the agency responsible for the interrogation. Questioning of detainees is rarely done without a reasonable understanding of the procedures, and acceptable conduct, of the process by those doing the questioning: this implication denies both that sensibility and the specific education required to perform such questioning.

Fourth, it addresses as piecemeal what has been implemented as policy. If a particular interrogation technique is employed without specific guidance or without specific prohibition, there is of course a risk to the interrogator that his/her methods may be questioned. However, if he technique is specifically listed as “approved” by agency or government policy, substantial risk to the interrogator is removed, and instead obtains to the agency or government that advocated the procedure in the first place. The authors of most of the statements denouncing the memos' release either do not or will not see this distinction: the moment a procedure becomes policy it mitigates the risk to the individuals employing it, thereby shielding them at least somewhat from pursuit should that policy change. Conversely, an agency or government that advocates more severe interrogation techniques runs a greater risk for that advocacy than one that does not, and risks (at least) its reputation and legality; while one that does not, regardless of the success or failure of its intelligence gathering efforts, will be far less susceptible to censure or prosecution for that.

Fifth, there are additional constraints in the US on what is acceptable behaviour than the opinions of the Department of Justice. The UCMJ, federal laws, codes of conduct and international treaty all bear on the the prosecution of war, the collection of intelligence, and the treatment of detainees. The behaviour of gaolkeepers should fall inside the constraints of the sum of these various instruments, not step outside certain ones as convenient. However, awareness of all such items requires a substantial level of education. This is where the guidance factors, though it depends on the honesty and integrity of the entities interpreting the sum of these codes. Action taken in ignorance of the obligations outlined in the sum of this guidance can be somewhat excused on the grounds of that ignorance: guidance given to those ignorant of the various laws and treaties that knowingly contradicts the sum of jurisprudence cannot. This is true whether the guidance given was given in somewhat less ignorance, or whether the guidance is in deliberate attempt to circumvent the letter and/or spirit of that jurisprudence, though the latter case is more egregious than the former and should be viewed as a more serious breach.

Last, and most importantly, interrogation should never be a process with which one is comfortable. The critics imply broadly that there will be a level of uncertainty in the intelligence community as to what is or will remain acceptable: for some reason the critics see this as unwise. Interrogation is a dangerous, morally challenging thing. It should always contain a certain level of discomfort: anyone involved in it who loses that runs the very great risk of becoming the kind of monster illustrated in countless tales of incarceration in places like Vietnam, North Korea, Nazi Germany and the like. For the critics to imply as they do that an interrogator can cheerfully go back to whatever inmate s/he was interrogating with a completely clear conscience after being given approval for the techniques being used is the pinnacle of impropriety.

Critics of the memo release have not created a straw man to argue for continued secrecy in interrogation techniques. However, they have sought to misdirect the concern away from the government that designed, approved and advocated some of the most horrendous practices in recent memory and toward the footsoldiers of the interrogation community tasked with applying them. This is dishonest, misleading and counterproductive.