Guantánamo

  36 See Convention III, Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 12 Aug. 1949, available at www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/7c4d08d9b287a42141256739003e63bb/6fef854a3517b75ac125641e004a9e68.

  37 Neely, The Guantánamo Testimonials Project. Neely’s report of an absence of standard operating procedures at Guantánamo is confirmed by Specialist Luciana Spencer of the Sixty-sixth Military Intelligence Group. “When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their SOP was for detainee treatment. They informed me that they had no SOP.” R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White, “General Granted Latitude at Prison,” Washington Post, June 12, 2004.

  38 See Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux, “Report on Guantánamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees Through Analysis of Department of Defense Data,” Seton Hall University Law School, 2006, available at law.shu.edu/publications/GuantánamoReports/Guantánamo_report_final_2_08_06.pdf.

  39 Neely, The Guantánamo Testimonials Project.

  40 Quoted in Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), 24.

  41 Department of Defense News Briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers, Jan. 11, 2002, available at www.defenselink.mil. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself seems to have remained vague on the extent to which the Geneva Protocols informed the Guantánamo operation through at least the end of January 2002. Asked by a skeptical press whether it wouldn’t be wise to allow for some media access to the Guantánamo camp, a Rumsfeld suddenly solicitous of Geneva responded that “there is something in the Geneva Convention about press people around prisoners; that—and not taking pictures and not saying who they are and not exposing them to ridicule, which is the genesis, as I understand it, of the convention requirement.” Department of Defense News Briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld, Jan. 22, 2002, available at avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/dod_brief139.asp.

  42 Memorandum for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Jan. 19, 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 80. See, for example, Rumsfeld’s press conferences on January 16 and 20, at www.defenselink.com.

  43 This is the source of the criticism of retired Marine Corps colonel Ann Wright. See www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?id=1335.

  44 Memorandum for William J. Haynes II from John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty (Yoo is known to be the principal author) on the Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees, Jan. 9, 2002, U.S. Department of Justice, in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 38–39.

  45 Author interview, John Yoo, Oct. 18, 2010, Berkeley, Calif. As well as the following; see, for example, Colin L. Powell to Counsel to the President, undated, “Draft Decision Memorandum for the President on the Applicability of the Geneva Convention to the Conflict in Afghanistan,” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 122–25. Cf., John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff, “The Roots of Torture,” Newsweek, May 24, 2004, available at www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/157/26905.html.

  46 Your Draft Memorandum of Jan. 9, William H. Taft IV to John C. Yoo, Jan. 11, 2002, National Security Archives, available at www.torturingdemocracy.org/documents/20020111.pdf. For a scholarly perspective on the Yoo memo, see Stephen P. Marks, “International Law and the ‘War on Terrorism’: Post-9/11 Responses by the United States and Asia Pacific Countries,” Asia Pacific Law Review 14, no. 1 (2006): 42–74, esp. 61.

  47 Taft to Yoo, Jan. 11, 2002. Addington is acknowledged to be the author of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s Jan. 25 memo to the president (actually written by David Addington) entitled “Decision re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 118–21.

  48 Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 289.

  49 Romig quoted in Lasseter, “Day 4”; author telephone interview, Thomas Romig, Oct. 10, 2010.

  50 Yoo interview, Oct. 18, 2010. Despite continued objections from Secretary of State Colin Powell and his legal advisor William H. Taft, Yoo’s Jan. 9 draft on Geneva was formalized by three subsequent memos. See Jay Bybee, Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales and William J. Haynes II, Jan. 22, 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 117; Gonzales, “Decision re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 119–20; and President George W. Bush, Memorandum for the Vice President et al., on “Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees,” February 7, 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 134–35.

  51 In a recent book, Karen Greenberg argues that the first one hundred days or so represented salad days at Guantánamo compared to what it would become over the next several years, before administration of the camps was transferred out of the hands of General Michael Lehnert and into the hands of Generals Michael Dunlavey and Jeffrey Miller. That may be; I suppose it is a matter of perspective. But life is not experienced from Archimedean heights, and many individual detainees and guards remember things very differently. Compare the following discussion to Greenberg, The Least Worst Place, 213–14 and passim.

  52 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 434. Rejali calls the informal pattern of torture proliferation as “the apprenticeship hypothesis.”

  53 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 580–91. Just who ordered the “habitual” torture of Filipinos in the U.S.-Philippine War, 1899–1902, is not clear, though it is clear that high government officials knew about it; see Paul Kramer, “The Water Cure,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, available at www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer. For more on the United States and torture, see Alfred W. McCoy, CIA Interrogation: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 5–20 and passim.

  54 Evidence of abuse at Bagram and Kandahar is overwhelming and undeniable. See Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 135–37; Mayer, The Dark Side, 224–47. Cf. National Security Archive interviews of detainees Bisher Al-Rawi, Moazzam Begg, and Shafiq Rasul, available at www.torturingdemocracy.org, as well as Moazzam Begg, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment in Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar (New York: New Press, 2007).

  55 U.S. soldiers quoted in Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 433–34. As astounding as this may seem in the case of MPs, more astounding still are the statements of senior CIA officials that “case officers aren’t actually trained in interrogation techniques”—that they never encountered “anyone who was a ‘professional interrogator’ in the agency.” “We’re not trained interrogators,” one CIA official told Rejali; “to be honest, in those situations I really had no idea what I’m doing and I’m not the only one who has had this experience.”

  56 Greenberg, The Least Worst Place, 146–53.

  57 On Dunlavey, see Sands, Torture Team, 37–39, 42–44; and Greenberg, The Least Worst Place, 164–68.

  58 Greenberg, 172.

  59 Neely testimony available at humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-Guantánamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimonies-of-military-guards/testimony-of-brandon-neely.

  60 Sands, Torture Team, 43.

  61 Dunlavey quoted in Sands, Torture Team, 44; see also 43–45.

  62 Mayer, The Dark Side, esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Sands, Torture Team, 94–97, 227–29, and passim.

  63 John Yoo, Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Aug. 1, 2002, on Standards of Conduct for Interrogations under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A, in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., Torture Papers, 172–217.

  64 Critics quoted in Mayer, The Dark Side, 152; Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 90–91. For succinct critiques of the memo, see Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 90–95; and David Cole, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York: New Press, 2009), introduction, esp. 20–25. Cf. Sands, Torture Team, 74–76, and Mayer, The Dark Side, 151–52.
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  65 Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing: The Origins of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques, available at www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=299242. On the Haynes JPRA discussions initiated in the immediate wake of 9/11, see note 28 about the first Haynes-JPRA discussion known to have taken place.

  66 Again, high-level Bush administration officials insist that the idea for these techniques bubbled up from below; the evidence has come back to haunt them. Sands, Torture Team, 75–77, 224–32; Mayer, The Dark Side, 220–24.

  67 Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log available at ccrjustice.org/files/Al%20Qahtani%20Interrogation%20Log.pdf.

  68 Bob Woodward, “Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official,” Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2009, available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011303372.html?hpid=topnews).

  69 For a description of these lethal assaults, see Margulies, Guantánamo, 137.

  70 Sands, Torture Team, 144–48.

  71 Johnston interview, Oct. 8, 2010.

  72 James Yee, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005), 47–48.

  73 Ibid., 51.

  74 Ibid., 52.

  75 Ibid., 66.

  76 Ibid., 73–74.

  77 Ibid., 45, 85–88.

  78 Army judge advocate Thomas Romig, celebrated in liberal circles for opposing Bush administration detention and interrogation policy, shared the MPs’ suspicion of the Muslim chaplain. Telephone interview, Thomas Romig, Oct. 10, 2010.

  79 James Yee, For God and Country, 115–22.

  80 Ibid., 122–23.

  81 Erik Saar, Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantánamo (New York: Penguin, 2005), 46, 59, 71, 99.

  82 Ibid., 55.

  83 Ibid., 72.

  84 Ibid., 73.

  85 Ibid., 74–75.

  86 Ibid., 65.

  87 Ibid., 66–67.

  88 Ibid., 90–95.

  89 Ibid., 108.

  90 Ibid., 151.

  91 Ibid., 153.

  92 I experienced this firsthand, on a tour of the prison in the autumn of 2008.

  93 Romney quoted in Martha T. Moore, “Guantánamo Puzzles Candidates,” USA Today, June 19, 2007, available at www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-06-18-gitmo-candidates_N.htm. Romney’s pandering pales by comparison to that of Duncan Hunter, who came back praising the “honey-baked chicken” and “lemon-glazed fish”; Otto Kreisher and Toby Eckert, “Hunter Says Menu from Guantánamo a Proof of Good Care,” San Diego Union-Tribune, June 14, 2005, available at www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050614/news_1n14gitmo.html. On a more serious note, see the Schmidt Report, a so-called investigation on allegations by the FBI of detainee abuse, available at www.cfr.org/publication/9804/schmidt_report.html. On the more general “pattern of deceit” at Guantánamo and elsewhere, see Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, chap. 8; and Stafford Smith, Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Other Side, chap. 5.

  94 Saar, Inside the Wire, 159–63.

  95 Ibid., 164–65.

  96 Ibid., 166–73. Saar recounts other examples where intelligence and patience build trust, which generates information; e.g., 177–85.

  97 Ibid., 220–28.

  98 Eric Schmitt, “There Are Ways to Make Them Talk,” New York Times, June 6, 2002, C1.

  99 Katharine Q. Seelye, “Guantánamo Bay Faces Sentence of Life as Permanent U.S. Prison,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 2002, A1.

  100 Neil A. Lewis, “Detainees from the Afghan War Remain in a Legal Limbo in Cuba,” New York Times, March 25, 2003, A21.

  101 Sands, Torture Team, 118.

  102 U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General Report, May 2008, 126.

  103 Sands, Torture Team, 121, 126–27.

  104 Ibid., 118.

  105 Michael Isikoff, “We Could Have Done This the Right Way,” Newsweek, April 29, 2009, available at www.newsweek.com/id/195089.

  106 Testimony of Ali Soufan before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, May 13, 2009, available at judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3842&wit_id=7906. The contractors Soufan refers to are Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the retired psychologists who imported SERE techniques into military interrogation and who shunted Soufan and McFadden aside in the questioning of Abu Zubaydah after he was picked up and taken to Thailand in March 2002. Among other treatment, Zubaydah was confined in a coffin-like box, slammed into walls, and waterboarded eighty-three times by Mitchell and Jessen, long after he had surrendered the information he had to Soufan and his associates. See Mayer, The Dark Side, 155–81; Shane, “Soviet-style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation,’ 3; and Scott Shane, “2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake,” New York Times, August 11, 2009, A1, 12.

  107 See, for example, Steven Keslowitz, The Tao of Jack Bauer, iUniverse.com, 2009.

  108 Anne Applebaum, “The Torture Myth,” Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2005, A21.

  109 Herrington interview, “TV Torture Changes Real Interrogation Techniques,” Fresh Air, NPR, Oct. 10, 2007, available at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15148243.

  110 See Dan Eggen and R. Jeffrey Smith, “FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantánamo Bay,” Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2004, A1.

  111 These events are described in Sands, Torture Team, 150–55; Mayer, The Dark Side, 224–37; and Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 105–109.

  112 Mora quoted in Mayer, The Dark Side, 219; cf. chap. 9.

  113 Mayer, The Dark Side, 66–68, 229; Sands, Torture Team, 17–20, 212–213; Greenberg, The Least Worst Place, 46–47.

  114 Mayer, The Dark Side, 228–33. In opposing Yoo’s new memo and an accompanying new working group report, Mora was in good company.

  115 See the written objections of Major General Jack L. Rives, USAF, Deputy Judge Advocate; Rear Admiral Micheal F. Lohr, USN, Judge Advocate General; Brigadier General Keven M. Sandkuhler, USMC, Judge Advocate General; and Major General Thomas Romig, USA, Judge Advocate General, available at www.torturingdemocracy.org/documents/20030205.pdf.

  116 Mayer, The Dark Side, 228–32.

  117 See previous chapter, and Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, June 21, 1993, available at www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-344.ZO.html.

  118 Rasul v. Bush, June 28, 2004, available at www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-334.ZO.html.

  119 Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 162–64.

  120 Associated Press, “Kuwaiti Ordered Released from Guantánamo Bay,” New York Times, Sept. 26, 2009, A15.

  121 Andy Worthington, “The Guantánamo Whistleblowers,” Counterpunch, July 2, 2007; see also Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America’s Ille (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

  122 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Supreme Court of the United States, June 29, 2006, available at www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-184.ZS.html.

  123 Boumediene v. Bush, United States District Court, D.C. District, Nov. 29, 2008, available at ccrjustice.org/files/2008-11-20%20Boumediene%20ORDER%20-%20release%205%20of%206.pdf.

  124 Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, 214.

  125 From Rules of the Road, a Navy publication, quoted in Tom Miller, “The Sun Sometimes Sets,” 97–100; 186–88.

  EPILOGUE

  1 On this paradox, see David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), introduction and passim; William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Andrew Bacevitch, American Empire: Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 19; and Jonathan M. Hansen, “American Empi
re as a Way of Life: The Search for Historical Alternatives,” in Kenneth Christie, ed., United States Foreign Policy and National Identity in the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2009), chap. 8.