Memoes are released, disgusting behavior is highlighted, debate heats up, and investigations are ordered. But what about what is in the little nooks and crannies of these reports?

The first thing to recognize is that the CIA-OIG report is 5 years old. It was done for George Tenet. Before Porter Goss, before Michael Hayden, before Leon Panetta. Two years before the Democrats became the majority in the Congress. The year of the Hamdi and Rasul decisions, before the Hamdan decision, long before the Boumediene decision, when most of the country had never heard of common Article 3 or Uighurs, back right after Hassan Ghul was captured. The year Uzair Paracha was put on trial in New York. Four years before Aafia Siddiqui was shot and rendered to New York. The year before most of the names of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay became known. While the black sites were still two years away from supposedly being closed. Back when Jack Goldsmith was rescinding John Yoo’s memo.

So it isn’t surprising the tone it takes towards opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel. They were still regarded as somehow impartial and circumspect, even though, on page 11, the footnote reads, "DoJ takes the position that as Commander-in-Chief, the President independently has the Article II constitutional authority to order the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants to gain intelligence information."But the parts that will probably fail to grab public attention come not from the electric drills or threats of death or sexual abuse, but from the "standard interrogation" section, the "effectiveness" section, and the memoes, the release of which was sought by Dick Cheney and other torture defenders, which "justify" the program and show its "effectiveness". Here we can learn something truly awful, and truly more damning about the perversion of American rule of law.First, the so called Standard Interrogation. On page 6 of the OIG report, footnote 6 explains the difference between a "debriefer" and an "interrogator", as follows:

Before 11 September(9/11) 2001, Agency personnel sometimes used the terms interrogation/interrogator and debriefing/debriefer interchangeably. The use of these terms has since evolved and, today, CTC more clearly distinguishes their meanings. A debriefer engages a detainee solely through question and answer. An interrogator is a person who completes a two-week interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify, and certify a person to administer EITs. An interrogator can administer EITs during an interrogation of a detainee only after teh field, in coordination with Headquarters, assesses the detainee as withholding information. An interrogator transitions the detainee from a non-cooperative to a cooperative phase in order that a debriefer can elicit actionable intelligence through non-aggressive techniques during debriefing sessions. An interrogator may debrief a detainee during an interrogation; however, a debriefer may not interrogate a detainee.

Just how important is this footnote? I would argue that this is the whole ball of wax in many ways. It distinguishes aggressive from non-aggressive sessions, clearly delimits the procedures that "transition the detainee from a non-cooperative to a cooperative phase", and absolves the subsequent "debriefing" of being information taken under torture or duress. This separation is reflected as well in the delineation of "standard techniques" from "enhanced interrogation techniques" (paragraphs 63,64, and the "box text" on page 15), the latter may only be applied by those who have been through a week of classroom and a week of "hands-on" training, and have to go through the "Seventh Floor" (p.31), meaning the office of the Director of Central Intelligence. We knew about this distinction from the Yoo and Bradbury memoes released in April, sleep deprivation, isolation, dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, noise and light sensory deprivation techniques are "standard". Presumably, "debriefings" may be carried out during the use of these, and the only weighing in by the OMS (the CIA’s medical unit) was that the noise shouldn’t damage ears and if the period between sleep deprivations had been brief that notes needed to be taken.

They mix somehow with the enhanced interrogations, since we have known for some time that sleep deprivation was implemented by using stress position shackling to prevent sleep. For this purpose, people were allowed to be positioned standing for 72 hours straight (which led to at least one detainee death in Afghanistan), and we learn in this document for the first time that when they wrote and used the guidelines saying that hands were to be shackled not higher than shoulder height that this meant while handcuffed behind the detainee’s back. In essence, this is strappado if the prisoner falls asleep, and we see documented one instance when someone "expressed concerns that Al-Nashiri’s arms might be dislocated from his shoulders" (paragraph 97), once when they were having trouble putting him in position. We aren’t told whether or not the stress positions that a prisoner is in to implement the "standard interrogation technique" of sleep deprivation are considered "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Consider these distinctions: What was done to break a prisoner, together with all deprivation techniques, were considered normal, and the interrogation was temporally separated from the torture and performed by a different agent. This runs throughout the whole interrogation system for "terrorists". We see it at Guantanamo, where lawyers for those charged before the military commissions complained that the prisoners broken by isolation and "frequent flyer" and other programs and tortures were then questioned by "rapport building" later by FBI agents in preparation for their trials. A prisoner who has broken can be questioned by legal techniques as some kind of "clean room" technique that isolates the information gathered from the fact that it is gathered by first breaking a human being by torture. The concerns that the FBI had in 2002 during the initial questioning of Abu Zubaydah (see the DOJ-OIG report on FBI behavior at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan), disappears.

And it fails to ever come to court. The efficacy document listed at the Washington Post as the "Detainee Report" proudly reports (p.12),

Soon after his arrest, KSM described an Ohio-based truck driver whom the FBI identified as Iyman Faris, and who was already under suspicion for his contacts with al-Qa’ida operative Majid Khan. The FBI and CIA shared intelligence from interviews of KSM, Khan, and Faris on a near real-time basis and quickly ascertained that Faris had met and accepted operational taskings from KSM on several occasions. Faris is currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiracy and material support to a terrorist organization.

KSM’s revelation in March 2003 that he was plotting with Sayf al-Rahman Paracha — who also used teh name Saifullah al-Rahman Paracha — to smuggle explosives into the United States for a planned attack in New York prompted the FBI to investigate Paracha’s business ties in the United States. The investigation also involved questioning Paracha’s son, Uzair Paracha, in New York and resulted in designating in May 2003 Sayf al-Rahman Paracha an enemy combatant. Sayf al-Rahman Paracha entered into U.S. custody in July 2003, and Uzair was indicted in the Federal Court in Manhattan. Sayf al-Rahman Paracha remains in detention at Guantanamo Bay.

But the document "Khalid Shaykh Muhammad" also at the Washington Post, says that KSM only was forthcoming with details about a Heathrow Airport plot upon capture, because he knew that Ramzi bin al Shibh was already in custody, and the CIA-OIG further informs that,

On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of the information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad received 183 applications of teh waterboard in March 2003.

For those who are unaware, those provided the initial links to Majid Khan, the Parachas, Iyman Faris, Aafia Siddiqui, Amman al Baluchi, and others. It is not an accident that the name Aafia Siddiqui shows up nowhere, even in discussions of the initial plot she was supposed to have participated in, in these documents. Linda Moreno, Charles Swift, and Elaine Sharpe should get their hands on the unredacted documents as soon as they can, and question the entire terrorist framework that is being built around their client, Aafia Siddiqui. Evidence procured through torture is inadmissible to any court whatsoever.

And interrogations, whether characterized as "debriefings", or as "standard interrogation techniques", or as "interviews", that use third degree tactics, lights, restraints, long interrogations, sleep deprivation, or underlying threats and coercions (like interrogating a prisoner while in restraints in a hospital for more than two weeks day in and day out while she has no idea about the whereabouts of her children, and believes the interrogators can affect those children’s treatment) are no cleaner when done by rapport building by the FBI in Craig Field Hospital than they are when done at a black site by telling KSM, "We’re going to kill your children."

While we’re calling on Eric Holder to expand the scope beyond a handful of bad apples, we might also consider asking him to investigate the use of information derived from torture in U.S. courts of law. Even if it lacks the headline grabbing ambience of an electric drill.