Mark Benjamin has some interesting things to say about the evolution of extreme forms of interrogation within the CIA.
When the CIA set up the interrogation program in early 2002 it turned to two psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. Last June, Salon reported that two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were central to the genesis of that program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.
Mitchell and Jessen had been affiliated with the military survival school that teaches elite U.S. soldiers to resist stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, sexual humiliation and waterboarding.
Attorneys familiar with the interrogation issue told Salon that in recent months the CIA has moved to hire expensive private counsel to deal with mounting legal concerns over interrogations. The CIA would not confirm to Salon whether the agency would pay for private attorneys to represent the two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who were employed as contractors by the agency. But CIA spokesman George Little said, "Quite apart from any specific instance, it should not surprise anyone that the CIA would, in appropriate cases, assist with the legal fees of those who have worked with the agency."
The brutalizing of detainees in U.S. custody has been incredibly frustrating to experienced interrogators from outside the agency, who say decades of experience show that rapport-building leads to the best intelligence. "It is out of ignorance if you ask me," Steve Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator, told Salon recently about the CIA program. "They seem to have bought into this erroneous presupposition that it works and that [physical] coercion really is an effective way of getting information."
Given the weakness of the Democratic majority in Congress (and most notably, the senior Democrats like Reid and Pelosi), we aren't just lazy cynics if we believe nothing much will happen. As Benjamin says, "It is unclear if the destruction of the tapes will now prompt a serious investigation from Congress, whose interest in digging into the administration's post-9/11 interrogation activities has been tepid. Still, congressional Democrats expressed outrage on Friday. 'What would cause the CIA to take this action?' Ted Kennedy asked on the Senate floor. 'The answer is obvious -- coverup.'"
Andrew Sullivan sees capitulation and a frightening disregard for the law in the very real possibility that the White House, Justice, and the CIA will get away with torture and coverup.
We have no independent evidence that it has solved anything, or saved any lives, except the self-serving statements of those who authorized it. And the truth is: we will probably never know. If they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy incriminating tapes, they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy any evidence within the executive branch that could prove that their torture policy has failed. If this isn't a form of tyranny, annexed to torture, what is? And if the executive branch can simply get away with it, and have serious commentators defend the president's trashing of the Constitution as necessary to fulfill his oath of office, we really have left the rule of law behind in the ditch.
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