'These People Fear Prosecution': Why Bush's CIA Team Should Worry About Its Dark Embrace of Torture

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted April 11, 2009.

And what seemed to really catch the eye of the people I was interviewing who were familiar with what was in the report was just the horribleness and the power of the United States government focusing everything that had been learned over the past couple decades on how to break a person down psychologically as well as physically. All that focused on just a couple dozen people who were just basically being tormented in a way that was just kind of unimaginable.

So, people who I interviewed who knew about what was in the report were really upset about it -- really, really upset -- and it certainly caught my eye as a reporter. So I then started to try very hard to see if I could get the report. And I never succeeded. I got close enough to be able to piece together what was in it. And that's what's in The Dark Side. And I'm gratified to see that my sources -- who I consider to have been very brave to tell me what they were able to -- were completely accurate.

So you'll see there are whole scenes from the report that are in The Dark Side and many, many details, including the news that [the treatment of detainees] was considered torture by the ICRC -- not "tantamount to torture," but actual torture.

But, you know, reading the report itself, finally -- there's just no comparison to seeing the actual document.

LS: Is there anything in the report in particular that has struck you that you didn't know before?

JM: One of the things that caught my eye last night was that it's clear that the CIA -- and I think you'd have to guess the Department of Defense -- lied to the Red Cross. They told the Red Cross when it visited Guantanamo [in 2002] that it had seen all of the detainees. But what the report says is that some of the detainees -- some of the high-value detainees -- realized when they were finally sent to Guantanamo in 2006 that they'd been there before. They were there. And yet the Red Cross was not allowed to see them. The Red Cross was told they'd seen everybody.

So the CIA and DOD lied to the Red Cross. There were some hidden prisoners in Guantanamo. That's an overt act; lying to the Red Cross, hiding prisoners from them. So, that's interesting to me.

There are also some specific details [about the torture] I didn't know. I didn't realize they used hospital beds to waterboard people, with motorized reclining backs, which is hideous.

I knew there were doctors there -- I mean, people will tell you that there were doctors there, and it's in the book -- but there's still something so specifically terrible about reading that they would attach some kind of modern monitor that could monitor oxygen to the finger of a prisoner while they were busy depriving him of oxygen.

They told him -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed (and this was in the New Yorker stories I did and it was in the book) -- that they would take him to the brink of death and back but they wouldn't kill him. So, they used sort of the most modern medicine to make sure they did exactly that. Its kind of a horrible combination of modernism and the Dark Ages all in one.

LS: Do we have any idea who these doctors are?

JM: Well, I'm glad people are asking that question, because, really, since the beginning, one of the things that has obsessed me is: Who were the doctors? What kind of doctors would do this? Some of them are described as literally working in ski masks to cover their faces so that people wouldn't know their identity.

LS: Like executioners.

JM: Yeah. So people have to find out, there just absolutely has to be some more accountability about this. Who were the doctors -- and what does the profession say about this? I mean, there's been a tremendous debate about this within the psychiatric profession and within the psychology profession, but there really has not been a similar debate within the medical profession.

I've already heard from one friend who's a doctor this morning, saying "God -- something's got to happen with this." Things will happen, I think.

LS: I wanted to ask you about accountability. It seems like every other day we're hearing about how Obama's Department of Justice is standing up in court and defending some Bush administration practice, or else the administration is making a statement that suggests that there's not going to be any move for accountability. Yet House Judiciary Chairman Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., just released a 540-page report reiterating the allegations against the Bush administration and calling for a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder. What would it take for that to happen?

JM: What would it take for that to happen? It would take Obama. It would take Obama weighing in on this. And, you know, it seems that his general style is to try to find consensus rather than to isolate people and confront them. I think that an early tip-off to his thinking was when he described possible accountability as "witch hunts" and said we're not going to have witch hunts.

See more stories tagged with: cia, torture, al qaeda, dick cheney, bush administration, guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, barack obama, rendition, department of justice, khalid sheikh mohammed, waterboarding, secret prisons, black sites, ron ridenhour, jane mayer, the dark side, icrc report, cia torture, ridenhour prize

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights & Liberties Special Coverage.

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