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A review by strickvl
The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
4.0
Not as coherent a read as the 9/11 report, but worth dipping into nonetheless. I've written up some general thoughts that I jotted down while reading, now reordered but still somewhat disjointed.
The book was a far more argumentative document than the 9/11 report. With the latter, the goal was (in part) to explain to the American public how this happened, what happened etc. As a result, they really tried hard to make it readable, accessible, and to give it some sort of narrative momentum. You can read all about this in the memoirs of the people who were involved with the 9/11 Commission. With the torture report, something far more legalistic seems to have been at the forefront of their goal and approach. It was far less generally expansive and expressive than I might have hoped, and there was *a lot* of repetition.
The repetition stems from how the document is structured. Quite often, because each section is making a different case, we have to revisit each separate interrogation. As a result, I feel like I read dozens of slightly different versions of the KSM or Abu Zubayda interrogation history.
The meat of the report/book shows (or, at least, seems to show; I'll come back to this) how the CIA misled, lied and manipulated throughout the post-9/11 period. Public congressional enquiries seem to have been invitations to lie and misrepresent, and the culture of leaking information to the media was embraced as a way of furthering this obfuscation. This seems to have extended to the extent to which the law was followed. Moreover, the compartmentalism (and sheer scale of the bureaucratic system) of government seems to have made it easy to lie, especially when there were low incentives for doing the hard work of checking up on what was happening.
I conclude from reading this report (in tandem with various other reports and stories in recent years) that, most likely, if the CIA or some other unnamed part of the US government wants to detain you and hold you (or kill you) without open legal process, they're probably going to go right ahead. Maybe this is an over-reading of the evidence, but it seems clear that the law is fluid and people in power will do whatever they want.
The legal standards -- and the debate within the system over the details of those standards -- don't seem to have been effective at provoking real reflections among those involved. The main thing they seem to have inspired was semantic squabbling and petty legalism to cheat the system. Internal feedback loops and voices of dissent seem to have been important in not allowing things to get worse, but they had no teeth so were ultimately ineffectual and unheard.
It seemed that the feeling of certainty and a belief of somehow being on the right path led to a variety of the mistakes and crimes described in the report. People pushed through their doubts, or tried to convince others that they just needed more time, or more waterboardings etc. Confirmation bias seems to have been a really serious issue, made all the more salient given the apparent lack of information or understanding at the time, and investigators followed up on a wide variety of lines of enquiry, often finding what they were looking for when subjects responded to their enquiries with information, information that later turned out to be false. As in all research work, you'll find what you're looking for. There should have been more value placed in avoiding these sorts of fundamental biases of analysis.
As a corollary, too much emphasis seems to have been placed on short-term gain to the exclusion of long-term considerations. This is systemic within our culture, it seems -- despite the valiant efforts of organisations like the Long Now Foundation [http://longnow.org/] -- and maybe this is accentuated because of the way our political systems function. Nevertheless, it seems more heed could have been given to thinking more strategically.
Two things were missing, I felt. Some sort of account of CIA anxiety and soul-searching at realising they had dropped the ball with regards to the 9/11 attacks would have helped balance out the report, and could probably help explain at least one factor in how things headed down the path that it did. I also feel that the report could have added some sense of doubt as to their conclusions. They had access to a lot of information and correspondence etc, but this wasn't a report or accounting from the inside of the CIA. Records were destroyed, not everything was written down etc. The actors responsible could have shed light on a bunch of things where the report itself admits it has no idea what happened.
I don't have the exact figures for how much the report cost to produce, but the FAQ suggests that it's in the order of tens of millions of USD, which just goes to show that proper study and historical explanation is worth its weight in gold. [http://opensocietypolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/SSCI-CIA-Torture-Report-FAQ.pdf]. The report is really well written, and even though I could have done with something that had more of a narrative flow to it (and much less repetition, I learnt a lot reading through it.
P.S. Melville House did a really great job making this text available in electronic format for ebook readers, taking the non-OCRed PDF and preparing it for publication over December 2014. A real public service.
The book was a far more argumentative document than the 9/11 report. With the latter, the goal was (in part) to explain to the American public how this happened, what happened etc. As a result, they really tried hard to make it readable, accessible, and to give it some sort of narrative momentum. You can read all about this in the memoirs of the people who were involved with the 9/11 Commission. With the torture report, something far more legalistic seems to have been at the forefront of their goal and approach. It was far less generally expansive and expressive than I might have hoped, and there was *a lot* of repetition.
The repetition stems from how the document is structured. Quite often, because each section is making a different case, we have to revisit each separate interrogation. As a result, I feel like I read dozens of slightly different versions of the KSM or Abu Zubayda interrogation history.
The meat of the report/book shows (or, at least, seems to show; I'll come back to this) how the CIA misled, lied and manipulated throughout the post-9/11 period. Public congressional enquiries seem to have been invitations to lie and misrepresent, and the culture of leaking information to the media was embraced as a way of furthering this obfuscation. This seems to have extended to the extent to which the law was followed. Moreover, the compartmentalism (and sheer scale of the bureaucratic system) of government seems to have made it easy to lie, especially when there were low incentives for doing the hard work of checking up on what was happening.
I conclude from reading this report (in tandem with various other reports and stories in recent years) that, most likely, if the CIA or some other unnamed part of the US government wants to detain you and hold you (or kill you) without open legal process, they're probably going to go right ahead. Maybe this is an over-reading of the evidence, but it seems clear that the law is fluid and people in power will do whatever they want.
The legal standards -- and the debate within the system over the details of those standards -- don't seem to have been effective at provoking real reflections among those involved. The main thing they seem to have inspired was semantic squabbling and petty legalism to cheat the system. Internal feedback loops and voices of dissent seem to have been important in not allowing things to get worse, but they had no teeth so were ultimately ineffectual and unheard.
It seemed that the feeling of certainty and a belief of somehow being on the right path led to a variety of the mistakes and crimes described in the report. People pushed through their doubts, or tried to convince others that they just needed more time, or more waterboardings etc. Confirmation bias seems to have been a really serious issue, made all the more salient given the apparent lack of information or understanding at the time, and investigators followed up on a wide variety of lines of enquiry, often finding what they were looking for when subjects responded to their enquiries with information, information that later turned out to be false. As in all research work, you'll find what you're looking for. There should have been more value placed in avoiding these sorts of fundamental biases of analysis.
As a corollary, too much emphasis seems to have been placed on short-term gain to the exclusion of long-term considerations. This is systemic within our culture, it seems -- despite the valiant efforts of organisations like the Long Now Foundation [http://longnow.org/] -- and maybe this is accentuated because of the way our political systems function. Nevertheless, it seems more heed could have been given to thinking more strategically.
Two things were missing, I felt. Some sort of account of CIA anxiety and soul-searching at realising they had dropped the ball with regards to the 9/11 attacks would have helped balance out the report, and could probably help explain at least one factor in how things headed down the path that it did. I also feel that the report could have added some sense of doubt as to their conclusions. They had access to a lot of information and correspondence etc, but this wasn't a report or accounting from the inside of the CIA. Records were destroyed, not everything was written down etc. The actors responsible could have shed light on a bunch of things where the report itself admits it has no idea what happened.
I don't have the exact figures for how much the report cost to produce, but the FAQ suggests that it's in the order of tens of millions of USD, which just goes to show that proper study and historical explanation is worth its weight in gold. [http://opensocietypolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/SSCI-CIA-Torture-Report-FAQ.pdf]. The report is really well written, and even though I could have done with something that had more of a narrative flow to it (and much less repetition, I learnt a lot reading through it.
P.S. Melville House did a really great job making this text available in electronic format for ebook readers, taking the non-OCRed PDF and preparing it for publication over December 2014. A real public service.