CIA Agent Blows Whistle on Secret Prisons and Torture
My former colleague Spencer Ackerman has an interview with Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative who has written a new book about his experiences with that agency’s network of secret prisons and how detainees are sent to them with no oversight and tortured.
Distilled, that story, told in Carle’s new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle — like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator — to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA’s new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.
But CAPTUS doesn’t divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to “Hotel California” — an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.
Carle goes with him. Though heavily censored by the CIA, Carle provides the first detailed description of a so-called “black site.” At an isolated “discretely guarded, unremarkable” facility in an undisclosed foreign country (though one where the Soviets once operated), hidden CIA interrogators work endless hours while heavy metal blasts captives’ eardrums and disrupts their sleep schedules.
Afterward, the operatives drive to a fortified compound to munch Oreos and drink somberly to Grand Funk Railroad at the “Jihadi Bar.” Any visitor to Guantanamo Bay’s Irish pub — O’Kellys, home of the fried pickle — will recognize the surreality.
But Carle — codename: REDEMPTOR — comes to believe CAPTUS is innocent.
“We had destroyed the man’s life based on an error,” he writes. But the black site is a bureaucratic hell: CAPTUS’ reluctance to tell CIA what it wants to hear makes the far-off agency headquarters more determined to torture him. Carle’s resistance, shared by some at Hotel California, makes him suspect. He leaves CAPTUS in the black site after 10 intense days, questioning whether his psychological manipulation of CAPTUS made him, ultimately, a torturer himself.
Eight years later, the CIA unceremoniously released CAPTUS. (The agency declined to comment for this story.) Whether that means CAPTUS was innocent or merely no longer useful as a source of information, we may never know.
The interview begins after that. It’s a very interesting read, as I’m sure the book is too. And if you think that those prisons stopped existing when Obama signed his executive order banning torture, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
slc1:
April 9th, 2012 at 10:44 am
This is a demonstration why torture is a poor approach to obtaining information from a victim. I wonder how much bogus information CAPTUS provided in order to stop the torture?
Marcus Ranum:
April 9th, 2012 at 11:28 am
When Obama took over, he “closed” some of the CIA prisons and torture centers – by having the CIA turn control of them over to the local secret police. Of course the CIA officers still sit in the same desks; now they’re just consultants and observers that no longer “run” the place.
Marcus Ranum:
April 9th, 2012 at 11:33 am
questioning whether his psychological manipulation of CAPTUS made him, ultimately, a torturer himself
Yes. It did. What a ridiculous self-protecting figleaf that is. Now that it’s safely too late to do anything, to help your victim, seek self-absolution by publicly wringing your hands about it. I feel dirty just thinking about these horrible, cowardly human beings that chain others overpower them and break their minds.
The whole strategy of pondering, “I wonder whether I am guilty…” yeah, Eichmann played that card, too.
kermit.:
April 9th, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Marcus Ranum – it’s easy to be a moral agent after the fact, from the safety of your armchair, knowing the consequences of somebody else’s decisions. Put yourself in the line of fire some time, wait for it to turn dark, then see how easily and quickly you can extricate yourself.
According to Carle, the laws allowing torture were new; Carle tried to get Captus to talk without evil; when Captus was assigned to the black hole, Carle went with him, hoping no doubt to minimize the evil done to him.
He left after 10 days, not a long time (an eternity, perhaps, but a short one) after giving up on helping.
Part of the culture of torture is to create torturers, as well as victims.
Obama, on the other hand, has far less of an excuse, with more power and more time to not only escape it himself but to end it. There is more of Eichmann in him than in Carle.
So tell me, as a Yankee, will I contribute more to evil by voting again for Obama the Torturer in Chief, or the Republican candidate, who will likely be worse? I am thinking of voting Green, but wouldn’t that be a de facto vote for the greater evil? The moral path can be difficult to determine when the consequences of a decision are yet unknown.
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort:
April 10th, 2012 at 7:26 am
For how much are you selling this bridge?
uncephalized:
April 10th, 2012 at 10:48 am
@slc1: the efficacy of torture is largely irrelevant. It is a horrifically immoral act to torture a human being. Our government should never do it, period. I don’t care how many lives it saves, it makes us evil. The fact that our government regularly tortures people is one of the many reasons I resent being forced to pay taxes to it.
The fact that it doesn’t work is just ironic icing on the cake.
uncephalized:
April 10th, 2012 at 10:53 am
@Marcus Ranum. Oh please. You are just as human as he is and would have likely had just as much difficulty feeling your way through the morass of horror that is our Wur on Turrur if you were that deep in one of these agencies, too. The torturers are put in very difficult situations under enormous pressure. The evil ones are not the ones who realize they are doing evil and leave, and spread the word of the evil in the hopes of ending it. The evil ones are not even the ones who are not strong enough to leave. The real evil is at the top, IMO. And the (I hope) few real sadists and psychopaths who enjoy it.