Will the Bush torturers go free?

FORMER VICE President Dick Cheney is outraged--outraged!--that anyone would question the Bush administration's use of torture to break detainees in the "war on terror."

In an interview with a fawning Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, just days after Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of CIA interrogations, Cheney repeatedly justified the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"--the Bush administration's euphemism for actions like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exposure to freezing temperatures and worse.

"I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the past eight years, successfully," Cheney said. "And it won't take a prosecutor to find out what I think. I've already expressed those views."

The actions that Cheney is so "proud" of include a litany of torture and abuse detailed in two previously classified CIA memos and portions of a 2004 CIA Inspector General's report that were released to the public by the Justice Department on August 24. The heavily redacted 109-page report in particular offers stomach-turning details about the abuses detainees were subjected to by their U.S. interrogators.

AMONG THE revelations are details about how detainee Abd al Rahim Al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, was menaced with mock execution and a power drill by his interrogators. The report states:

Sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003, the debriefer used an unloaded semi-automatic handgun as a prop to frighten Al-Nashiri into disclosing information. After discussing this plan with [redacted], the debriefer entered the cell where Al-Nashiri sat shackled and racked the handgun once or twice close to Al-Nashiri's head. On what was probably the same day, the debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. With [redacted] consent, the debriefer entered the detainee's cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.

The same debriefer also threatened to rape Al-Nashiri's female relatives, telling him that if he did not talk, "We could get your mother in here," and, "We can bring your family in here." The report notes, "It was widely believed in Middle East circles that [redacted] interrogation techniques involves sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee."

Alleged al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was told that if there was another attack on American soil, the CIA would "kill your children." His young sons were in the custody of Pakistani and American authorities at the time.

Detainees were also repeatedly brutalized physically. One detainee was choked by his interrogators to the point of passing out, according to the report:

In July 2002, [redacted] operations officer, participated with another operations officer in a custodial interrogation of a detainee [redacted] reportedly used a "pressure point" technique: with both of his hands on the detainee's neck, [redacted] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee's carotid artery.

The detainee, who was shackled, would "nod and start to pass out" before being shaken to awaken him. This happened several times in succession.

In other cases, detainees were doused with water for 15 minutes at a time, were forced to wear diapers or had smoke blown in their faces until they vomited. The description of waterboarding concluded that at least one CIA interrogator:

continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique differed from that used in [military] training, and explained that the Agency's technique is different because it is "for real," and is more poignant and convincing.

After the report's release, it was reported that several of the redacted passages may have detailed the deaths of at least three detainees while in U.S. custody. Several other alleged al-Qaeda suspects "just got lost, and the CIA does not know what happened to them," one anonymous official told ABC's Brian Ross.

While not surprising given past revelations about the U.S. torture of detainees, the report does add new details to the picture of how the U.S. "war on terror" has been conducted--and to what effect.

Despite months of repeated claims by Dick Cheney that the CIA memos would prove waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques were vital to obtaining information that prevented further terrorist attacks, the inspector general's report instead said it would be nearly impossible to tell the effects of enhanced interrogation versus other legal methods.

In more than a dozen instances in which the memos explain how specific information was obtained, it was through standard interrogation techniques, not torture.

What's more, many of the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques were subsequently released from U.S. custody because they were innocent.

THE USE of torture techniques was illegal under international law, and those who participated in them or okayed them should stand trial. But that will likely not happen, if the Obama administration has its way.

Even as the Justice Department released the Inspector General's report (it was forced to because of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union), Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would appoint a federal prosecutor to "review" cases of prisoner abuse and "whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations."

This review is, by design, limited to asking only whether interrogators and others who interacted with detainees may have committed crime, without examining the actions of Bush administration officials who put the policies allowing torture into place--including Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who worked at the Office of Legal Council (OLC) under Bush and authored memos laying out the legal justification for torture.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald noted,

The scope of the "review" is limited at the outset to those who failed to "act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance"--meaning only those interrogators and other officials who exceeded the torture limits which John Yoo and Jay Bybee "approved." Those who, with good faith, tortured within the limits of the OLC memos will "be protected from legal jeopardy." (Greenwald's emphasis)

This sets the stage, as Greenwald and others have noted, for a replay of the Abu Ghraib prosecutions--where those at the top who designed the policies are never brought to justice, while a few lower-level personnel might face prosecution.

Holder's promise that the Justice Department "will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance" sets up a perverse framework in which those who tortured detainees the "right way" (under guidelines laid out by the Bush administration) and who therefore thought they had legal justification, will not have to answer for their crimes.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has represented many Guantánamo detainees, commented in a statement:

Responsibility for the torture program cannot be laid at the feet of a few low-level operatives. Some agents in the field may have gone further than the limits so ghoulishly laid out by the lawyers who twisted the law to create legal cover for the program, but it is the lawyers and the officials who oversaw and approved the program who must be investigated.

Incredibly, despite the very limited scope of the Justice Department review, Dick Cheney has already stated that he might not cooperate with Holder. "It will depend on the circumstances, and what I think their activities are really involved in," Cheney stated on Fox News Sunday.

The decision to hold the review, Cheney said, is a "political" one and raises "doubts about this administration's ability to be responsible for our nation's security."

Certainly, by now it's no surprise to hear Cheney justify torture in the name of fighting "terrorism."

But the Obama administration's refusal to open a real inquiry into the torture condoned and committed by those under Bush suggests that the White House want to have it both ways: to claim that it rejects such policies and supports human rights, while also quietly reserving the right to use some of the same tactics when expedient.

That's why, even as Holder announced the Justice Department's review of CIA interrogations, the Obama administration quietly admitted it would continue to use "extraordinary rendition"--the process of shipping detainees to foreign countries for interrogation there.

Under the Bush administration, detainees who were rendered to countries like Egypt or Syria often faced torture--the logic being that if the U.S. wasn't able to use torture outright (at least not without a public outcry), then foreign security services could get the job done.

The Obama administration is pledging that it will "closely monitor" detainees' treatment, but this begs the question of what reason remains for detainees to be rendered.

The announcement makes another broken promise from Barack Obama, who, as a presidential candidate, wrote in Foreign Affairs:

To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people...This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.

Today, President Obama needs to be reminded of these words--and pushed to uphold them.