We've been told repeatedly that the U.S. abandoned waterboarding, one of its constellation of brutal interrogation methods, in March 2003. We've seen some of the memos documenting how frequently the method was used and on whom.
Several former Bush/Cheney officials have risen to the defense of waterboarding, claiming that it was effective -- and even that it protected the U.S. from a specific attack or series of attacks.
If it was effective, why was its use stopped? Where are the memos telling us when and why the U.S. stopped waterboarding, and on whose advice and orders?
When the U.S. first invaded Iraq, Iraqi military members surrendered to any Americans they could find. They surrendered to supply convoys -- they even surrendered to journalists.
But the rate of surrender waned as the invasion turned into a harsh occupation. Just ten weeks after the U.S. began its armed "assistance" to rid Iraq of a brutal dictator, internationally condemned tactics cropped up that had previously been used "successfully" on such hardened enemies as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose children had been kidnapped in September 2002 and held by the CIA even after Mohammed himself was captured in spring 2003.
Just as with family members of Mohammed and a few other al Qaeda leaders, children and other family members were kidnapped by U.S. forces in Iraq and held as leverage to get resistant military leaders to surrender.
Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later.
Not long after, surrender stopped being something Iraqis were eager to do. By January 2004, more than 70,000 Iraqis had been detained in harsh and oftentimes inhuman conditions -- despite U.S. admissions that 90% of the detainees were innocent and were eventually released without charge. According to U.S. detention standards, Iraqi civilians could be held is prisons such as Abu Ghraib for as long as six months without any charge. Yet it was not until months-long brutal treatment of these detainees was exposed that the U.S. moved to change the way it treated detainees (including those who willingly surrendered).
Would you surrender to an enemy that treated people that way? Or would you choose instead to fight to the death, to the very last man, to avoid becoming just another photographic souvenir on someone's memento CD of their time tormenting Iraqis?
At some point before the U.S. began importing its brutal interrogation and detention methods to Iraq, however, the CIA and Pentagon had already made the determination to discontinue some of those practices. Or so they claim. It's claimed that waterboarding stopped after March 2003 -- after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Why? And why was it determined to continue the other brutal interrogation techniques and import them to Iraq -- tactics such as "walling," shackling, dog attacks, sexual humiliation, "caloric modification," sleep deprivation, and other practices?
We need to see those memos -- the memos that use empirical data from earlier torture of al Qaeda suspects to make decisions about later torture. And the memos that demonstrate authority to carry over kidnapping practices from intelligence operations against al Qaeda to the battlefield and anti-insurgency operations in Iraq.