So the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee has released a summary of its study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. It's a hefty read, yet even at more than 500 pages, the summary is less than 10% of the committee's full report, which may never be declassified in our lifetime.
We've heard a lot about what the report says. But I'd like to focus on one thing the report doesn't say: That the U.S. kidnapped and detained noncombatant children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq and used them as leverage against family members in CIA and U.S. military custody.
On the top of page 117 of the 525-page document, we find this:
KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was described as "[t]ired and sore," with abrasions on his ankles, shins, and wrists, as well as on the back of his head. He also suffered from pedal edema resulting from extended standing. After having concluded that there was "no further movement" in interrogation, the detention personnel hung a picture of KSM's sons in his cell as a way to "[heighten] his imagination concerning where they are, who has them, [and] what is in store for them."
And that is the only mention of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's two sons, who were taken by the CIA in September 2002, when they were seven and nine years old.
What happened to Yusuf and Abed al-Khalid?
In September 2002, the CIA and Pakistani security forces attempted to capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in an apartment in Karachi. Initial reports claimed that Mohammed was killed in the raid but that his wife and at least one of his children were taken by a U.S. agency and interrogated to gain information about possible future attacks by al Qaeda.
But the following spring, new headlines proclaimed that Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003. Photos of a disheveled man in an ill-fitting t-shirt were splashed across the media, and within days there were media reports featuring quotes from U.S. intelligence officials boasting that the they were using "a little bit of smacky-face" and other "stress and duress" methods of interrogation.
But tucked away in one of those articles was also this:
U.S. authorities have an additional inducement to make Mr. Mohammed talk, even if he shares the suicidal commitment of the Sept. 11 hijackers: The Americans have access to two of his elementary-school-age children, the top law-enforcement official says. The children were captured in a September raid that netted one of Mr. Mohammed's top comrades, Ramzi Binalshibh.
When pushed for more information, the U.S. assured journalists that everything was copacetic.
"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."
And that's the last we heard of Yusuf and Abed al-Khalid from U.S officials.
Mohammed himself brought up the issue of his children at his Combat Status Review Tribunal Hearing in March 2007, during which he primarily spoke for himself in English:
"They kill wife of Dr. Ayman Zawahiri and his two daughters and his son in one bombardment. They have a report that is his house be. He had not been there. They killed them. They arrested my kids intentionally. They are kids. They been arrested[;] for four months they had been abused."
But there has been no more word about those children since then.
The Senate's report summary mentions the family of others detained and tortured:
- one detainee's "intellectually challenged" family member, whose recorded sounds of piteous crying were played to the detainee to coerce him into confessing (without information on how U.S. interrogators got the developmentally disabled family member to cry so hard for so long);
- several detainees were told that their mothers would be brought to the detention facility and raped in front of them;
- one detainee was led to believe that his children had been slaughtered and fed to dogs.
But it wasn't just the CIA that was kidnapping and exploiting family of those detained. There were reports throughout the initial phases of the Iraq War that U.S. military leaders on the field routinely kidnapped family members of Iraqi military leaders to ransom them for an easy surrender. (After which surrender, by the way, the man in question was subjected to the new U.S. terms of detainment and interrogation -- with no word about whether his family members were released or were likewise detained.)
So now the U.S. does this. We kidnap and detain noncombatant children without oversight, without transparency, without even telling the International Committee of the Red Cross or reporting the tactic to any humanitarian organization whatsoever. We do this for years and years, and nobody ever finds out what happens to those children.
We release studies that conveniently elide the practice and the very lives of the children we've kidnapped. Those children just ... disappear.
Do we want to live in a country that "disappears" children?
Please call your senator or a member of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee to ask why this information was conveniently left out of the committee's report on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.