722 CIA cites Israeli court ruling to "justify" torture program

CIA cites Israeli court ruling to "justify" torture program

Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:35:36 -0800
From: Archer Frey <archerc@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Select materials regarding the Central Intelligence Agency's
Detention and Interrogation Program

Select materials regarding the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention
and Interrogation Program

Newsletter published on 14 December 2014

(1.) Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the
Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (Full
Report on line information (528 pages))
(2.) A History of the C.I.A.'s Secret Interrogation Program, NY Times
(3.) Torture Report. 7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report, NY Times
(4.) $80 million paid to Spokane [WA] firm for enhanced interrogation,
The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington)
(5.) CIA cites Israeli court ruling to "justify" torture program

(1.) Full Senate Report on line information (528 pages)
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and
Interrogation Program

http://cryptome.org/2014/12/cia-torture-report.pdf

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf

(2.) A History of the C.I.A.'s Secret Interrogation Program

By WILSON ANDREWS and ALICIA PARLAPIANO, DEC. 9, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/timeline-of-cias-secret-interrogation-program.html

A History of the C.I.A.’s Secret Interrogation Program

New York Times

DEC. 9, 2014

The Central Intelligence Agency used contentious interrogation
techniques, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, on dozens of
the 119 men it detained in secret prisons between 2002 and 2008. A newly
released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the
agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the program.
Related Article

2001

September

Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush gives the
C.I.A. authority to capture, detain and kill Qaeda operatives around the
world.

2002

February

Mr. Bush signs an executive order that says Common Article 3 of the
Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “mutilation, cruel treatment and
torture,” does not apply to Qaeda or Taliban captives.

March

Abu Zubaydah becomes the first detainee in C.I.A. custody, and his
interrogations are videotaped. The C.I.A. initially thought him to be a
Qaeda official but later retracted that view, according to the Senate
report.

August

A memo issued by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the Justice Department's
Office of Legal Counsel, gives the C.I.A. after-the-fact authority to
use harsh interrogation techniques.

August

C.I.A. officers use waterboarding at least 83 times against Abu
Zubaydah. The Senate report says he provided more information in the
first months of his interrogation — before the enhanced techniques —
than in the months when enhanced techniques were used.

September

Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee are briefed on the C.I.A.'s
enhanced interrogation techniques. Later in the month, leaders of the
Senate Intelligence Committee are briefed on the interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah. The Senate report says that the C.I.A. ignored requests for
additional information by Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida.

November

Coercive interrogations, including waterboarding, of Abd al-Rahim
al-Nashiri, a detainee, are videotaped.

November

Gul Rahman, another detainee in a separate facility, dies while being
held and interrogated.

End of the year

Videotaping of interrogations ends.

2003

January

C.I.A. inspector general begins an investigation of the program.

January

After 40 men had already been detained, formal guidelines for
interrogations and detention sites are issued by George J. Tenet, the
C.I.A. director, according to the Senate report.

February

The top lawyer at the C.I.A. informs the leaders of the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees about the interrogation tapes. Committee leaders
advise against destroying the tapes.

March

The C.I.A. uses waterboarding at least 183 times against Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks. The last official report of waterboarding was in March 2003,
but CIA documents suggest other waterboarding may have taken place.

September

Secretary of State Colin PowelI and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
are briefed for the first time on the specifics of the C.I.A.'s
interrogation program.

2004

May

The C.I.A. inspector general completes a report that challenges the
legality of some interrogation methods. He finds that interrogators were
exceeding the rules imposed by the Justice Department and questions the
effectiveness of the program. Mr. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, orders a
temporary halt to the harshest methods.

May

The top lawyer for the C.I.A. discusses the tapes with Justice
Department officials and White House lawyers. What the lawyers tell him
is in dispute, but they do not explicitly prohibit the destruction of
the tapes.

June

The 2002 Justice Department memo is rescinded by the new head of the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith. He resigns
that day.

December

Daniel Levin, the acting head of the Justice Department's Office of
Legal Counsel, issues a new memo denouncing torture and broadening its
definition. He is soon replaced.

Through 2004

According to the Senate report, at least 113 men were detained through
2004; after that, only six additional detainees were held under the program.

2005

May

The newly appointed head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel, Steven G. Bradbury, issues classified memos that endorse the
harshest interrogation techniques used by the C.I.A.

November

The Washington Post reports on the existence of the secret prison program.

November

Interrogation tapes are destroyed.

December

The House approves a Senate measure to outlaw cruel and inhumane
treatment of prisoners in American custody. The C.I.A. director writes a
memo to the White House saying that the agency would carry out no harsh
interrogations without new approval from the Justice Department.

2006

April

Mr. Bush receives his first C.I.A. briefing on the enhanced
interrogation techniques, according to the Senate report. The agency's
records state that he expressed discomfort with the "image of a
detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go
to the bathroom on himself."

June

The Supreme Court rules that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions
applies to all American detainees.

September

Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence other than the
chairman and vice chairman are briefed on the program on the day Mr.
Bush reveals it to the public in a speech.

September

Mr. Bush reveals the existence of the program and says it led to
information on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others who were eventually
captured. He announces the transfer of detainees to the prison at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After that, the C.I.A. holds a small number of
detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time
before also moving them to Guantánamo Bay.

October

Mr. Bush signs the Military Commissions Act, which creates new rules for
prosecuting and interrogating terror suspects. He says the rules would
enable the C.I.A. to resume the once-secret program.

2007

July

Mr. Bush issues an executive order allowing the C.I.A. to use some
interrogation methods that are banned for military interrogations but
that the Justice Department has determined do not violate the Geneva
structures. A legal memo is released in conjunction with the order.

November

According to the Senate report, the C.I.A. does not use enhanced
interrogation techniques after Nov. 8, 2007.

December

The New York Times reports on the destruction of the interrogation video
tapes.

2008

April

According to the Senate report, no detainee is held by the C.I.A. after
April 2008.

2009

January

Soon after being sworn into office, President Obama signs orders to
close the detention at Guantánamo Bay, end the secret prisons and ban
methods of physical pressure still used by C.I.A. interrogators overseas.

April

Justice Department memos written in 2002 and 2005 are released.

August

The 2004 C.I.A. inspector general report is released.

2012

April

Senate committee leaders reject claims that enhanced interrogation
methods helped the C.I.A. find Osama bin Laden.

(3.) NY Times, Torture Report. 7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-key-points.html

By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HANNAH FAIRFIELD, JOSH KELLER and PAUL VOLPE DEC. 9,
2014

7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report

By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HANNAH FAIRFIELD, JOSH KELLER and PAUL VOLPE DEC. 9,
2014

The report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
discloses new details about the C.I.A.’s torture practices.

1. The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed
more extensively than the agency portrayed.

The report describes extensive waterboarding as a “series of near
drownings” and suggests that more prisoners were subjected to
waterboarding than the three prisoners the C.I.A. has acknowledged in
the past. The report also describes detainees being subjected to sleep
deprivation for up to a week, medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” and
death threats. Conditions at one prison, described by a clandestine
officer as a “dungeon,” were blamed for the death of a detainee, and the
harsh techniques were described as leading to “psychological and
behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and
attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.”

  Waterboarding is called “a series of near-drownings” (Page 86)
  Detainees with psychological and behavioral issues (Page 114)

2. The C.I.A. interrogation program was mismanaged and was not subject
to adequate oversight.

The report cites dissatisfaction among intelligence officers about the
competence and training of interrogators. Those found to have violated
agency policy were “rarely held accountable.” The architects of the
program had never carried out a real interrogation. The report states
that the C.I.A. resisted congressional oversight, restricted access to
information, declined to answer questions about the program and “impeded
oversight” by the agency's inspector general by providing false
information.

  An officer with no previous experience conducting interrogations (Page 50)
  C.I.A. officers were "rarely held accountable" for death, injury or
wrongful detention. (Page 14)

3. The C.I.A. misled members of Congress and the White House about the
effectiveness and extent of its brutal interrogation techniques.

The report says that the C.I.A. provided false and misleading
information to members of Congress, the White House and the director of
national intelligence about the program’s effectiveness. It asserts that
a review of cases, in which the agency claims to have collected
“actionable intelligence” it would have been unable to obtain by other
means, calls into question the connection between the information and
any “counterterrorism success.”

  How the C.I.A. represented the program’s effectiveness (Page 172)
  Examples of inaccurate C.I.A. testimony (Page 462)

The report includes dozens of examples from C.I.A. Director Michael
Hayden's April 12, 2007, testimony to the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence that highlight how his statements directly contradicted
internal C.I.A records.

Hayden’s Testimony

“Now in June, after about four months of interrogation, Abu Zubaydah
reached a point where he refused to cooperate and he shut down. He would
not talk at all to the FBI interrogators and although he was still
talking to CIA interrogators no significant progress was being made in
learning anything of intelligence value. He was, to our eye, employing
classic resistance to interrogation techniques and employing them quite
effectively. And it was clear to us that we were unlikely to be able to
overcome those techniques without some significant intervention.”

C.I.A. Records

C.I.A. records do not show that Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with
interrogators. He had provided information on Qaeda activities,
leadership and training, but had not given information about future
attacks on the United States, which the C.I.A. believed he was
witholding. He was put into isolation for 47 days when the interrogation
team traveled, and during his next interrogation, the team used enhanced
techniques, including waterboarding.

4. Interrogators in the field who tried to stop the brutal techniques
were repeatedly overruled by senior C.I.A. officials.

C.I.A. personnel reported on multiple occasions to being “disturbed” by
waterboarding and concerned over its legality. Officials, including the
program’s architects, described the interrogation as a “template for
future interrogation” of detainees. In one instance, a senior official
pushed back against concern over the “legal limit” of brutal
interrogation techniques by stating that the “guidelines for this
activity” had been “vetted at the most senior levels of the agency.”

  C.I.A. personnel concerned over waterboarding (Page 44)
  Counterterrorism official pushes back on questions of legality. (Page 43)

5. The C.I.A. repeatedly underreported the number of people it detained
and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques under the program.

The report states that the C.I.A. never produced an accurate count or
list of those it had detained or subjected to brutal interrogation
techniques. The agency said it detained “fewer than 100 individuals,”
but a review of agency records indicated that it held 119. It also
underreported the number of detainees who were subjected to torture.

  C.I.A. director “instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98”
(Page 15)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html#p44

The report includes the names of the 119 people detained from 2002 to
2008. Orange bars are those who were subjected to the enhanced
interrogation techniques. [...]

6. At least 26 detainees were wrongfully held and did not meet the
government’s standard for detention.

The report found that at least 26 detainees “were wrongfully held,”
including an “intellectually challenged” man who was used as “leverage”
to obtain information from a family member, two former intelligence
sources and two individuals identified as threats by a detainee
subjected to torture. Agency records were often incomplete and, in some
cases, lacked sufficient information to justify keeping detainees in
custody.

  Of 119 detainees, at least 26 were “wrongfully held.” (Page 14)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html#p43

7. The C.I.A. leaked classified information to journalists, exaggerating
the success of interrogation methods in an effort to gain public support.

The report found that the C.I.A. provided classified information to
journalists but that the agency did not push to prosecute or investigate
many of the leaks. C.I.A. officials asked officers to “compile
information on the success” of the program to be shared with the news
media in order to shape public opinion. The C.I.A. also mischaracterized
events and provided false or incomplete information to the news media in
an effort to gain public support.

  Overview of representations to the media (Page 401)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html#p430

(4.) $80 million paid to Spokane firm for enhanced interrogation

From: Michael Hoffman <hoffman@revisionisthistory.org>
To: Archer Frey <archerc@sbcglobal.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 11:54 AM
Subject: CIA's thug-"psychologists" who were architects of torture

Dear Archer

Yesterday's NY Times has a rather thin account of the civilian
contractors (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who are alleged to be
architects of the CIA's torture program. Here's a more in-depth exposé
from a local newspaper in Spokane, Wash. where the "psychologist"
thugs were based. It deserves national syndication.

Sincerely,

Michael Hoffman

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/dec/10/shawn-vestal-80-million-paid-to-spokane-firm-for/

$80 million paid to Spokane firm for enhanced interrogation

Shawn Vestal

The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington)

December 10, 2014

Shawn Vestal
(Full-size photo)

Related stories

Torture report blames CIA for brutality, deceit December 10, 2014

It’s long been known that a pair of former Fairchild Air Force Base
psychologists helped develop and personally implement the CIA torture
program following the 9/11 attacks.

A new Senate report details how much money they made doing it.

More than $80 million in taxpayer money went to Mitchell, Jessen &
Associates, the Spokane company formed by James Mitchell and Bruce
Jessen to carry forward the work of waterboarding, mock burials and
other so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques the United States
adopted starting in 2002. The Senate report said the firm had a contract
for up to $180 million, but the interrogation program was disbanded in
2009.

The new report – a blistering and controversial critique of the Bush-era
torture program that paints a picture of a sloppy, poorly run program
propped up by consistently false claims that torture produced useful
information or prevented attacks – spends a lot of pages detailing the
participation of Mitchell and Jessen.

The two are former Fairchild survival school psychologists who formed
their Spokane company in 2005 to continue their interrogation work as
paid contractors. Their central role in developing and promoting the
torture techniques has been a matter of public record for years. The men
took the survival techniques taught to soldiers and airmen to learn how
to resist illegal torture and “reverse-engineered” them as techniques to
produce intelligence. The Senate report is the latest of many
evaluations that conclude the approach was, in addition to being illegal
and inhumane, ineffective.

An experienced interrogator and former Fairchild colleague of the men,
Col. Steven Kleinman, has said they were in over their heads. “I think
they’ve caused more harm to American national security than they’ll ever
understand,” Kleinman said in 2012.

The new report includes details about Mitchell and Jessen’s role that
have not been previously reported, including their involvement in an
interrogation that left a prisoner dead and in the “reckless”
waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Their consistent claims that
their work had disrupted terror plots and provided crucial information
was among the information CIA officials and others have used in claiming
the torture was effective; the Senate report examines each of these
instances closely and concludes that the program was “not an effective
means of acquiring intelligence.”

The report never names Mitchell and Jessen, instead using the pseudonyms
Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar. But it is clear from the context –
and compared against a past Senate report as well as reporting by
several other journalists – that they are the psychologists in question.

The report reveals that deep concerns about Mitchell and Jessen’s
involvement were debated from the start of their involvement, in 2002.
The men, who had no firsthand interrogation experience, were considered
by some on the front lines to be ill-equipped for the job. One email
from a CIA staff psychologist said “no professional in the field would
credit” their judgments. Another said their “arrogance and narcissism”
led to unnecessary conflicts in the field. The director of
interrogations for the CIA called their program a “train wreck” and
complained that they were blending the roles of doctor and interrogator
inappropriately.

A medical officer painted a stark picture of a grotesque
conflict-of-interest inherent in their roles, saying “the same
individuals applied an (enhanced interrogation technique) which only
they were approved to employ, judged both its effectiveness and detainee
resilience, and implicitly proposed continued use of the technique – at
a daily compensation reported to be $1,800/day.”

Attempts to reach Mitchell and Jessen were unsuccessful. The former
number of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates now rings to another company.
Jessen was appointed as a bishop in his Spokane ward of the Mormon
church but resigned soon after the news of the appointment was reported.
Mitchell has apparently moved to Florida. In an interview with the
Guardian of London earlier this year, he said, “I’m just a guy who got
asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of
government, and I did the best that I could.”

The pair issued a joint statement defending their work several years
ago, insisting their work was legal and ethical, and saying, “We
resolutely oppose torture.”

The executive summary of the Senate report is a long, detailed
examination of the torture program, and it is comprehensively sourced
and footnoted. Among the report’s comments about Mitchell and Jessen:

• When the CIA was developing its interrogation program in early 2002
and considering harsh interrogation techniques, the only research used
was an analysis of an al-Qaida manual by Mitchell and Jessen. “Neither
psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have
specialized knowledge of (al-Qaida), a background in terrorism, or any
relevant regional cultural or linguistic expertise.”

• The men pushed for the adoption of the techniques. A footnote in the
report says, “the CIA did not seek out (Mitchell) and (Jessen) after a
decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques; rather,
(Mitchell) and (Jessen) played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt
such a policy.” A past Senate report describes the men as “pitching”
their program to government officials.

• Neither man had any direct experience with the waterboard, as it was
not used in Air Force survival training. Nevertheless, they described it
as an “absolutely convincing technique” that was needed to overwhelm a
suspect’s ability to resist.

• In 2002, the interrogation program was being developed in a rush,
built around the capture of Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida member who was
caught and moved to a secret prison in Thailand. FBI interrogators
worked with Zubaydah initially, and would later claim that their
rapport-building techniques produced the most useful information. The
CIA took over from the FBI and began using the “enhanced techniques”
proposed and personally employed by Mitchell and Jessen, months before
any training or guidelines – let alone formal approval – were in place.
Among the tactics used, Zubaydah was isolated for 47 days.

• CIA headquarters approved waterboarding on Aug. 3, 2002, under the
conditions that only Mitchell and Jessen “were to have contact with”
Zubaydah, and CIA officials would simply observe. Over the next 19 days,
Zubaydah was subjected to enhanced interrogation on a “near
24-per-hour-per-day basis.” He was slammed against walls, struck,
hooded, placed in a coffin-like “confinement box” – and waterboarded for
hours on end. By the sixth day, CIA officials decided that the
techniques were not producing the information about future attacks and
were not likely to. The interrogations continued. Observing these
sessions run by Mitchell and Jessen had a “profound” effect on CIA
personnel, “some to the point of tears and choking up,” the report
quotes one CIA employee saying. Zubaydah was eventually waterboarded 83
times. The report concludes the interrogations were “brutal and far
worse than the CIA represented” to officials and the public. At one
point, the report says, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with
bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

• At the end of the interrogation, the CIA concluded Zubaydah did not
have information about terrorism threats after all. The committee report
concludes that virtually all useful intelligence came from the FBI
interrogations, without the use of torture. Mitchell and Jessen
concluded in a memo that their techniques were useful, not because
Zubaydah provided information on terror threats, but because he did not:
“We additionally sought to bring subject to the point that we
confidently assess that he does not … possess undisclosed threat
information.”

• Jessen assisted in the November 2002 interrogation of Gul Rahman, a
suspected Islamic extremist. The interrogation included a wide range of
harsh techniques. Jessen left the detention site and offered suggestions
to the CIA officer about how to use further “enhanced measures.” Rahman
was shackled in a way that required him to sit on a concrete floor
wearing only a sweatshirt; he was discovered dead the next day of likely
hypothermia, a CIA autopsy suggested.

• The men also assisted in the 183 waterboardings of Mohammed in 2003,
perhaps the most well-known of all the torture cases. Among the
assertions in the report is that the two men threatened the lives of
Mohammed’s children on the first day of their interrogations. At one
point, as the intensity of the waterboarding sessions increased, they
used their hands to maintain a 1-inch pool of water around his mouth. At
another stage, they would wait for him to begin speaking, then pour
water into his mouth.

• The report concludes that the waterboarding provided no useful
intelligence – contrary to oft-reported claims by the CIA and
administration officials.

• In January 2003, Jessen arrived at a detention site where another
detainee had been interrogated unsuccessfully. He developed an
interrogation plan including waterboarding and said this would require
additional support from Mitchell. The CIA’s chief of interrogations told
several colleagues that he had “serious reservations” about the program
and its effect on the detainee, and would be retiring. He wrote, “this
is a train wreak (sic) waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell
off the train before it happens.” His superiors chose to go forward.

• The CIA outsourced almost all of its “enhanced” interrogations by
2005, and most of those contracts went to Mitchell and Jessen. In June
2007, the men briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the
interrogation program in an attempt to win her support.

The report describes the scope of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates’
enterprise. The number of employees at the firm was blacked out in the
report, but it says the firm hired former CIA workers. The firm provided
interrogators and security personnel at black sites – secret prisons; it
served as intermediary between the governments of other countries and
the CIA; it worked on a project to identify the “terrorist mind set.”
The firm’s contract also called for “writing the history of the CIA’s
Detention and Interrogation Program.”

• The CIA also authorized payments for Mitchell, Jessen & Associates –
identified as “Company Y” in the report – for “countersurveillance” of
its officers when the program was being written about in the press, and
for a $5 million indemnification contract, which included expenses
associated with any criminal prosecution. The CIA spent $1.1 million on
legal expenses for the men between 2007 and 2012. “Under the CIA’s
indemnification contract,” the report says, “the CIA is obligated to pay
Company Y’s legal expenses through 2021.”

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com.
Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.

(5.) CIA cites Israeli court ruling to "justify" torture program

Submitted by Rania Khalek on Wed, 12/10/2014 - 10:33

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/cia-cites-israeli-court-ruling-justify-torture-program

CIA cites Israeli court ruling to “justify” torture program

Submitted by Rania Khalek on Wed, 12/10/2014 - 10:33

The CIA repeatedly cited an Israeli high court decision to justify
torture, according to the long-awaited US Senate report on the agency’s
torture program.

This latest disclosure comes just months after revelations that the
Obama administration relied on an Israeli high court ruling to justify
targeted killings of American citizens without trial.

Released Tuesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after
months of stalling, the nearly 600-page report discloses new details
about the atrocities that took place at the CIA’s network of rendition
and torture sites created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001
attacks.

The CIA’s torture techniques — which included water-boarding, sleep and
sensory deprivation, sexual torture, threats to kill and rape loved
ones, mock executions, electrocution and medically unnecessary “rectal
feeding” — were far more gruesome and pervasive than the agency let on.

Furthermore, the report explicitly states that the CIA lied about the
torture program’s effectiveness, falsely claiming its techniques
successfully extracted information that thwarted terrorist plots,
including a fabricated attack “in Saudi Arabia against Israel.”

As the CIA engaged in a deceptive propaganda campaign to mislead the
American public about the program’s lawfulness and effectiveness, it
relied on Israeli precedent as a legal defense.

How to legalize torture

As early as November 2001, CIA officials began brainstorming possible
legal justifications for torture techniques they were already employing
at black sites around the globe, culminating in a draft memorandum
described by the Senate report as follows:

On 26 November 2001, attorneys in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel
circulated a draft legal memorandum describing the criminal prohibition
on torture and a potential “novel” legal defense for CIA officers who
engaged in torture. The memorandum stated that the “CIA could argue that
the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical
harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the
harm,” adding that “states may be very unwilling to call the US to task
for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

According to the corresponding footnote, the November memo “cited the
‘Israeli example’ as a possible basis for arguing that ‘torture was
necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons,
where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.’”

The “Israeli example” was invoked again the following year in an
official memorandum to the White House Office of Legal Council to the
President on 1 August 2002, which “include[d] a similar analysis of the
‘necessity defense’ in response to potential charges of torture.”

Israeli loopholes

The “Israeli example” is a reference to the 1999 Israeli high court
decision that supposedly outlawed the use of torture — the Israeli
euphemism for which is “moderate physical pressure” — to extract
confessions from Palestinian prisoners, a longstanding and widespread
practice up until that time. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem
celebrated the ruling at the time, declaring it a victory for democracy.

In reality, the decision was filled with obvious loopholes and merely
limited the circumstances under which torture techniques could be
legally employed. (Israel’s high court is also known as its supreme court.)

Till this day Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners remains
widespread and no Palestinian is immune, not even children, who are
systematically subjected to solitary confinement, sensory deprivation
and stress positions in Israeli custody.

Last winter, Israeli cruelty reached new heights when its prison
services placed Palestinian child detainees in outdoor cages during one
of the most severe winter storms to strike the region in years.

As the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) has argued,
not a great deal has changed since the 1999 ruling due in large part to
the high court’s inclusion of the “necessity defense” — a loophole that
immunizes interrogators who use torture techniques from being held
criminally liable based on the argument that they had to do it out of
“necessity” to prevent loss of or harm to human life.

Such loopholes have led to absolute impunity for Israeli torturers. Of
the more than 800 complaints of torture submitted by Palestinian
prisoners since 2001, exactly zero have led to criminal investigations
despite the state corroborating at least 15 percent of the torture
allegations, according to PCATI.

It is also notable that even the CIA methods revealed in the Senate
report bear striking similarity to long-standing Israeli torture
techniques documented by human rights organizations, among them sleep
deprivation, exposure to extreme cold, confinement in very small spaces
and painful “stress positions.” These are techniques that are thought to
inflict maximum suffering while minimizing the risk that they will leave
tell-tale signs of torture on the victim’s body.

A ticking time bomb fiction

Strangely, even notable anti-torture liberals have been duped into
believing that Israel banned torture.

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has cited the Israeli high
court decision on torture as an exemplary ban the US should emulate.

“The police think that a suspect they have apprehended knows where and
when a bomb is going to go off,” Ginsburg told The New York Times. “Can
the police use torture to extract that information? And in an eloquent
decision by Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel, the court
said: ‘Torture? Never.’”

According to Ginsburg, the Israeli ruling sent the message “that we
could hand our enemies no greater victory than to come to look like that
enemy in our disregard for human dignity.”

Ginsburg’s takeaway from the Israeli decision is as erroneous as her
racist portraryal of a Palestinian “enemy” lacking in “human dignity.”

Far from banning torture altogether, the Israeli decision includes an
unambiguous exemption for the hypothetical scenario Ginsburg lays out.

In the event of a “ticking time bomb” scenario, the Israeli decision
states that “necessity defense” gives Israeli interrogators discretion
to employ torture to extract information to stop an explosive from
detonating.

It should be noted that even the Senate report concedes that the
“ticking time bomb” so often invoked by torture enthusiasts has no basis
in reality.

But even if it did, Article 2 of the Convention against Torture and
Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states: ”No
exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat
of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency,
may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Turning to Israel for inspiration

In a desperate bid to keep the torture program alive amid growing
(albeit weak) pressure from Congress in 2005, a CIA official once again
turned to Israel for inspiration and a legal rationale:

The CIA attorney described the “striking” similarities between the
public debate surrounding the McCain amendment [a proposed ban on
torture] and the situation in Israel in 1999, in which the Israeli
Supreme Court had “ruled that several … techniques were possibly
permissible, but require some form of legislative sanction,” and that
the Israeli government “ultimately got limited legislative authority for
a few specific techniques.”

The corresponding footnote adds:

The CIA attorney also described the Israeli precedent with regard to the
“necessity defense” that had been invoked by CIA attorneys and the
Department of Justice in 2001 and 2002. The CIA attorney wrote that the
Israeli Supreme Court “also specifically considered the ‘ticking time
bomb’ scenario and said that enhanced techniques could not be
pre-approved for such situations, but that if worse came to worse, an
officer who engaged in such activities could assert a common-law
necessity defense, if he were ever prosecuted.”

This suggestion was adapted into a 20 July 2007 memorandum authored by
then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal
Counsel Steven G. Bradbury, who argued that based on the Israeli court
case, CIA torture is “clearly authorized and justified by legislative
authority.”

Sharing values

It should come as no surprise that the US is following Israel’s lead on
torture given that the two nations feed off of one another’s atrocities.

When Palestinian prisoners launched a hunger strike earlier this year to
protest their indefinite detention, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu attempted to push through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, a
bill that would permit the force-feeding of prisoners. According to
human rights groups, force-feeding amounts to cruel and inhumane punishment.

To excuse his demand for the implementation of the excruciatingly
painful technique, wherein a tube is shoved through the nostril into the
stomach, Netanyahu pointed to US force-feedings at Guantanamo Bay.

When it comes to torture, few people understand the shared values that
unite the US and Israel better than Rasmea Odeh.

The 67-year-old Palestinian American activist was convicted last month
of immigration fraud for failing to disclose a 1969 Israeli military
court conviction based on a confession extracted under weeks of Israeli
sexual torture.

At the behest of the Obama administration’s Justice Department, the
trial judge barred the jury from hearing evidence about Odeh’s torture,
protecting and ultimately legitimizing Israel’s system of abuse.
Meanwhile, Odeh was subjected to further torture, this time at the hands
of the US government, which placed her in solitary confinement for
twelve consecutive days for no apparent reason until a judge ordered on
Monday that she could be released on bail.

While the depth of collusion between the US and Israeli torture programs
has yet to be fully unearthed there is reason to suspect that some US
methods were modeled on Israel’s.

Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US has fashioned much of its
counterterrorism strategy on Israel’s decades-long suppression of
Palestinian resistance to its colonial ambitions.

Invented by Israel for use against Palestinian leaders, extrajudicial
targeted killings are now the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s
counterterrorism policy.

Like its targeted killing policy, Israel has spent decades perfecting
torture techniques on Palestinian prisoners, designed to maximize the
suffering while leaving behind few visible scars.

So, how much did Israel influence the CIA? Perhaps the answer can be
found in the original 6,000-page, still-classified Senate torture report
that Tuesday’s release is based on. It makes one wonder what is being
left out of the public record.

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this post stated that Rasmea Odeh
was released from US detention on Monday. It since been corrected.