These posts are either "jump pages" for my weblog or posts-in-process that will eventually appear there. For what it's worth, here's an archive of these random bits. The picture to the left is by a famous comic book artist.
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Last page of Paul Berman Salon interview (where he disses Chomsky and calls antiwar movement appeasers):
I'm sure this one line in your book will infuriate some and surprise others -- especially Europeans. You wrote: "In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky." What do you mean by that?
Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.
It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds -- not seriously anyway -- that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.
All this is part of your belief that good people can end up supporting horrible movements if we're not vigilant.
People ought to think coldly about it. There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians. There's a long history of this. To look into your own heart and ask yourself if you're good and honest and to examine yourself to see if your own analyses are moral and well-intended is not enough. You may have the best of intentions and the purest of hearts and the warmest of feelings of solidarity for other people and yet be led by some failure of imagination to end up more or less aligned with the baddest of bad guys.
Example?
There's a long history of this kind of thing. The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it -- that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement. They didn't want to believe that a mass pathological movement had taken power in Germany, they wanted to be open-minded to what the Germans were saying and to the German grievances of the First World War. And the French socialists, in their open-minded, warm-hearted effort to avoid seeing anything like the First World War occur again, went out of their way to try and find what was reasonable and plausible in the arguments of Hitler. They really did end up thinking that the greatest danger to world peace was not posed by Hitler but by the hawks in their own society, in France. These people were the antiwar socialists of France, they were good people. Yet one thing led to another, they opposed France's army against Hitler, and many of them ended up supporting the Vichy regime and they ended up fascists!
Where's the parallel to today?
It's not impossible to see something like that today. People want to avoid a war in the Middle East, they say they're not for Saddam but yet they don't really want to do anything against Saddam. They see Iraqi liberals and Kurdish democrats struggling against Saddam, and they really don't want to help these people. They see pathological movements in Palestine and elsewhere engaging in acts of random murder for the purest of irrational reasons and these people, the warmhearted, good-souled antiwar socialists of the Western countries, fall all over themselves in finding ways to justify the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and find ways to prevent themselves from showing solidarity with the victims.
We do see some of the same things. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.
So what should the left's position be today? If your argument is that we are facing a totalitarian threat similar to those of the first part of the 20th century, what do you suggest?
The true model of what the left should be doing here is shown by the other wing of French socialism, that of Léon Blum, an antifascist who was willing to fight and did fight. This ought to be the real goal of the left in the Western countries -- to be antifascist, to be in favor of liberating the people who are suffering under these regimes which are threats not only to their own citizens but to us.
Instead, we have the Bush administration's "realist" approach, which is propelling us to war.
Yes, it's the so-called realist policies of the American conservatives that ultimately got us into this situation. We, the United States, have followed the most cynical policies in the Middle East. We've aligned with reactionary feudal monarchies of the worst sort, backing the most horrendous right-wing tyrants and dictators, thinking that liberal values ought to play no role at all in formulating American policy. All this has especially been the doctrine of American conservatism. It's what I call the Nixonian tradition. It was certainly the policy of Bush the elder and it was the original instinct of the present Bush, although now he appears to be confused.
This has simply been catastrophic for people in the Middle East and ultimately for ourselves. What we need is a politics as I describe in my book, a new radicalism which is going to be against the cynical so-called realism of American conservatism and traditional American policy, in which liberal ideas are considered irrelevant to foreign policy. And also against the head-in-the-sand blindness of a large part of the American left, which can only think that all problems around the world are caused by American imperialism and there's nothing else to worry about.
What we need is a third alternative -- a politics of liberal solidarity, of anti-fascism, a politics that's willing to be interventionist when tyrants or political movements really do threaten us and the people in their own countries, a politics that's going to be aggressive in spreading and promoting liberal ideas and values in regions of the world where people who hold those values are persecuted. A politics of active solidarity, not just expressions of solidarity, but actions of solidarity with liberal-minded people in other parts of the world.
It's scandalous to me that large parts of the political spectrum aren't acting on this now. Where are all the universities and human rights foundations and trade unions and all the other civic associations in the United States? Where are those groups now? Why aren't those groups acting now to establish links of solidarity with people of the Middle East and Muslim world? To try to foment movements, or even revolutions, on behalf of liberal ideals?
But it seems impossible to work for such ideals under the current administration.
We don't need Bush to lead us to do that, we can do that without him. Even if Bush does the wrong thing, which he's bound to do, we can act on those ideas ourselves. The notion that we, the high-minded people of the left, ought to confine ourselves to marching against Bush is a very foolish idea. There's much that we can do.
That's what I call for. It's vastly needed in Europe too. Why aren't the Germans doing this? The Germans are pacifist-minded, they don't want to participate in the war, but there's a lot Germany could do. They should have people all over the Middle East promoting liberal ideas, they should be spending billions of dollars to engage in solidarity with the liberal movements in those countries. They are not doing that. All they appear to be doing is opposing Bush but not taking on a very large role themselves, though they do have peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and Kosovo. But there's much more that Germany and France could be doing.
Even people who think that Bush is making a blunder with his military approach can try to undo that blunder themselves in some way by going ahead and doing the things that ought to be done -- promoting liberal ideas. Promoting liberal ideas, finally, is the only real way to oppose the totalitarian movements that threaten us and threaten people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether they're Baathist or Islamist.
I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?
I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.
At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.
So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.
Are you apprehensive?
I'm scared out of my mind! Only a lunatic could be calm and confident at such a moment.
But you do think we're doing the right thing this week?
You're trying to pin me down. I'm not going to endorse Bush's policy. I'm saying that he went about it in the wrong way but I want the U.S. to do it thoroughly. No goodhearted person should imagine that it would be a bad thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But we have to do it well.
Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?
A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.
But we can imagine the devastation in Baghdad as well.
We have no idea what it is. Like anybody I'm hoping for the least amount of suffering. The war could certainly end up achieving the opposite of what its goals should be. History offers more than one example of that.
By which you mean? Is this campaign what you expected, for the most part? War is war?
Well, no. If it turns out that out bombs have ended up slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians, that would be a horror. But we don't know what's happened. We won't know for a while.
So what's particularly struck you has been some of the protests.
Yes, because the role of the left ought to be to express solidarity with the Iraqi people, to hope for the defeat of the fascist tyrant and to see their freedom and our own self-defense. This in fact became visible today, when some Iraqis at least, celebrated their liberation.
Kodachrome Moment: How William Eggleston's revolutionary exhibition changed everything.
By Jim Lewis
Posted Monday, February 10, 2003, at 9:38 AM PT on Slate.
Late last year a revolution was commemorated, and hardly anyone noticed—a telling sign of the utter transformation it brought about. In October, the Museum of Modern Art reprinted an exhibition catalog that, in its original incarnation, had sold out quickly and then disappeared into legend, to be hawked by rare-book dealers for $500 or $600 and seen by those of us with shallower pockets rarely, if at all.
The book was called William Eggleston's Guide. Its creator was a somewhat eccentric Memphis native in his mid-30s who had come up to MoMA with a box full of slides [in 1967, according to a "Brilliant Careers" profile in Salon] and managed to convince that august and deliberate institution to grant him [nine years later] their very first one-man exhibition of color photography.
The show was a milestone, an annunciation of the coming of color; thereafter, black and white would come to seem slightly quaint and precious—evocative, as it is in, say, Cindy Sherman's film stills, of a distant past. New art photography would be almost all chromatic: Nan Goldin, Mitch Epstein, Richard Prince, and Andreas Gursky all owe the ready acceptance of their work—though not their work itself—to Eggleston's breakthrough.
Now, I'll ask you to guess what year all this happened—and bear in mind that color movies became common in the '30s and color television was first broadcast in 1955. So the first one-man show of color photographs at the high temple of modern vanguard photography was … ?
1976.
This is astounding, if you think about it. By 1976 color was everywhere—on every magazine cover, in movie houses, and on televisions. Warhol's commercial-colored Campbell's soup paintings had appeared in 1965. Dan Flavin was putting colored neon light sculptures in galleries as far back as 1966. But photography was still almost all black-and-white, guided by aphorisms like Walker Evans' declaration that color was "vulgar" [recanted by the '70s, when Evans was using a Polaroid SX-70] and Robert Frank's insistence that "black and white are the colors of photography."
It's difficult, in retrospect, to understand just what was so contemptible about Kodachrome up until the mid-'70s. Part of it, I suspect, was simply the anxiety, attendant upon photography since its inception, that the medium wasn't really an art form at all but a quasi-scientific technique. In this regard, the unreality of black and white was reassuring, as if it provided an aesthetic guarantee by removing the colors of the world. Part of it was simply that color images were a tacky bit of business, associated with magazines and billboards and the snapshots that ordinary people took of their vacations and weddings. The medium seemed almost inherently superficial: Where black-and-white photos revealed essential forms arranged in uninflected space, color caught all the surfaces and, therefore, required an entirely different approach to composition.
Then, too, using color halved photographers' control over their art. Since very few people had the expertise (or could afford the equipment) to develop and print their own color work, the artist was transformed into little more than a shutterbug—dependent upon technicians in commercial labs to fashion the works that their public would actually see.
And part of it, to be fair, was simply that color film hadn't reached the technical level of its black-and-white counterpart; it wasn't anywhere near as sensitive to light, for example, or as sharp, which meant that pictures had to be taken outdoors or under strong artificial light. [Also, color wasn't and still isn't, lighfast, because it relies on quickly fading dyes. That's probably the single biggest reason that collectors (including museums) avoided it for so long. Now there's a conspiracy to call a color photo a "c-print" and just ignore the longevity problem.]
Against this roiling mass of resentment, hidebound dismissal, and genuine technical inadequacy, Eggleston made his singular way, emerging out the other end as the Father of Color Photography. In truth, to grant him such a title is to foreshorten history a little: Paul Outerbridge and Eliot Porter had worked in color, and so had Eggleston's contemporary, Stephen Shore. But Eggleston, more than anyone, legitimized the medium, for what he did was to take color's perceived vices and, by pushing them a little farther along the axis of their failings, turn them into virtues, thereby liberating the process to work on its own terms.
And so the pictures seem to be as casually framed as snapshots, their elements arranged in odd spirals, achieving an unlikely balance that seems more fortuitous than planned. The subject matter is often as banal as can be, pictures of folks who mean nothing to you unless you know them, engaged in activities as meaningless as possible. They're not even those archetypes of humanity—the staring poor, the rushing urbanite, the glamour wannabes—that occupied photographers of the past. Here, instead, we have the irreducibly singular, as if what the camera caught had never happened before and will never happen again in precisely the same way: a young boy lying on the floor of a garage, a woman strolling down the side of a road, a pink-tongued dog drinking from a puddle.
And yet some of the images are positively lurid, as if the artist were declaring, "Take that"—and then producing a photo of a furnace-red brick building, a sordidly green-tiled shower stall, an elderly woman whose garishly patterned dress clashes with the equally garish daybed on which she's sitting. A photograph of a tree at night is washed out by the photographer's flash, leaving only a distant red stop sign to keep the entire composition from being almost insufferably unbalanced and shot through with glare. Nowadays, when it's not unusual to see manifest grain, or light flaring uncontrollably off a glass surface, or even red-eye in pictures on gallery and museum walls, you might think that what Eggleston did seems rather tame. But many of these images—see, for example, the infamous Red Ceiling—still have the power to shock.
Certainly, they were shocking at the time; in 1976, when the Guide was first exhibited, it received notoriously nasty reviews. (Hilton Kramer—then, as now, absolutely wrong about absolutely everything—called the show "Perfectly banal … Perfectly boring.") In retrospect, the show was both necessary and beautiful, and with the catalog's reprinting, it can and should be seen by everyone.
In a way, Eggleston did for color photography what the Dutch Masters of genre did for painting in the 16th and 17th centuries: He took it out of the hands of the wealthy institutions that had sponsored it (fashion magazines and advertising agencies in the one case, the church in the other) and turned it into an expression of the everyday. [Oh, come on! As if every American didn't own a color camera in 1976. The problem was that curators thought color was too everyday--a point Lewis makes earlier in the essay. What's with this "wealthy institutions" stuff? This is a strained art historical metaphor.] It is not so far, after all, from the vulgar to the vernacular: Eggleston bridged the gap, and in doing so delivered color back into the hands of art. [Surely Eastman Kodak, if anyone, took color from wealthy institutions and put it into the hands of ordinary people. What Eggleston did, supposedly, was then legitimize that banal enterprise as capital-A art. Except he didn't really--his printing, scale, and attention to detail made it a different level of activity than snapshots dropped off at the drugstore. Also, "bridging the gap between the vulgar and the vernacular" is about as meaningful as "bridging the gap between the naked and the nude."]
U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations
'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret
Overseas Facilities
Dana Priest and Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writers
December 26, 2002; Page A1
Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism -- captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders. Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.
Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.
In the multifaceted global war on terrorism waged by the Bush administration, one of the most opaque -- yet vital -- fronts is the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. U.S. officials have said little publicly about the captives' names, numbers or whereabouts, and virtually nothing about interrogation methods. But interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials -- including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners -- provide insight into how the U.S. government is prosecuting this part of the war.
The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.
While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.
"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."
The off-limits patch of ground at Bagram is one of a number of secret detention centers overseas where U.S. due process does not apply, according to several U.S. and European national security officials, where the CIA undertakes or manages the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Another is Diego Garcia, a somewhat horseshoe-shaped island in the Indian Ocean that the United States leases from Britain.
U.S. officials oversee most of the interrogations, especially those of the most senior captives. In some cases, highly trained CIA officers question captives through interpreters. In others, the intelligence agency undertakes a "false flag" operation using fake decor and disguises meant to deceive a captive into thinking he is imprisoned in a country with a reputation for brutality, when, in reality, he is still in CIA hands. Sometimes, female officers conduct interrogations, a psychologically jarring experience for men reared in a conservative Muslim culture where women are never in control.
In other cases, usually involving lower-level captives, the CIA hands them to foreign intelligence services -- notably those of Jordan, Egypt and Morocco -- with a list of questions the agency wants answered. These "extraordinary renditions" are done without resort to legal process and usually involve countries with security services known for using brutal means.
According to U.S. officials, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and their supporters have been detained worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001. About 625 are at the U.S. military's confinement facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some officials estimated that fewer than 100 captives have been rendered to third countries. Thousands have been arrested and held with U.S. assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners, the officials said.
At a Sept. 26 joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Cofer Black, then head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, spoke cryptically about the agency's new forms of "operational flexibility" in dealing with suspected terrorists. "This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11 the gloves come off."
According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." Some countries are known to use mind-altering drugs such as sodium pentathol, said other officials involved in the process.
Abu Zubaida, who is believed to be the most important al Qaeda member in detention, was shot in the groin during his apprehension in Pakistan in March. National security officials suggested that Zubaida's painkillers were used selectively in the beginning of his captivity. He is now said to be cooperating, and his information has led to the apprehension of other al Qaeda members.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment earlier this week on CIA or intelligence-related matters. But, he said: "The United States is treating enemy combatants in U.S. government control, wherever held, humanely and in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949."
The convention outlined the standards for treatment of prisoners of war. Suspected terrorists in CIA hands have not been accorded POW status. Other U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that interrogators deprive some captives of sleep, a practice with ambiguous status in international law.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the authoritative interpreter of the international Convention Against Torture, has ruled that lengthy interrogation may incidentally and legitimately cost a prisoner sleep. But when employed for the purpose of breaking a prisoner's will, sleep deprivation "may in some cases constitute torture."
The State Department's annual human rights report routinely denounces sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. In its 2001 report on Turkey, Israel and Jordan, all U.S. allies, the department listed sleep deprivation among often-used alleged torture techniques.
U.S. officials who defend the renditions say the prisoners are sent to these third countries not because of their coercive questioning techniques, but because of their cultural affinity with the captives. Besides being illegal, they said, torture produces unreliable information from people who are desperate to stop the pain. They look to foreign allies more because their intelligence services can develop a culture of intimacy that Americans cannot. They may use interrogators who speak the captive's Arabic dialect and often use the prospects of shame and the reputation of the captive's family to goad the captive into talking.
In a speech on Dec. 11, CIA director George J. Tenet said that interrogations overseas have yielded significant returns recently. He calculated that worldwide efforts to capture or kill terrorists had eliminated about one-third of the al Qaeda leadership. "Almost half of our successes against senior al Qaeda members has come in recent months," he said.
Many of these successes have come as a result of information gained during interrogations. The capture of al Qaeda leaders Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan, Omar al-Faruq in Indonesia, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait and Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen were all partly the result of information gained during interrogations, according to U.S. intelligence and national security officials. All four remain under CIA control.
Time, rather than technique, has produced the most helpful information, several national security and intelligence officials said. Using its global computer database, the CIA is able to quickly check leads from captives in one country with information divulged by captives in another.
"We know so much more about them now than we did a year ago -- the personalities, how the networks are established, what they think are important targets, how they think we will react," said retired Army general Wayne Downing, the Bush administration's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism until he resigned in June.
"The interrogations of Abu Zubaida drove me nuts at times," Downing said. "He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were in a classic counter-interrogation class: They were telling us what they think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."
In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA's overseas interrogation facilities are off-limits to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services.
Free from the scrutiny of military lawyers steeped in the international laws of war, the CIA and its intelligence service allies have the leeway to exert physically and psychologically aggressive techniques, said national security officials and U.S. and European intelligence officers. Although no direct evidence of mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody has come to light, the prisoners are denied access to lawyers or organizations, such as the Red Cross, that could independently assess their treatment. Even their names are secret.
This month, the U.S. military announced that it had begun a criminal investigation into the handling of two prisoners who died in U.S. custody at the Bagram base. A base spokesman said autopsies found one of the detainees died of a pulmonary embolism, the other of a heart attack. Al Qaeda suspects are seldom taken without force, and some suspects have been wounded during their capture. After apprehending suspects, U.S. take-down teams -- a mix of military special forces, FBI agents, CIA case officers and local allies -- aim to disorient and intimidate them on the way to detention facilities.
According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance.
The take-down teams often "package" prisoners for transport, fitting them with hoods and gags, and binding them to stretchers with duct tape. Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, "our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath."
Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that "pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing."
The CIA's participation in the interrogation of rendered terrorist suspects varies from country to country.
"In some cases [involving interrogations in Saudi Arabia], we're able to observe through one-way mirrors the live investigations," said a senior U.S. official involved in Middle East security issues. "In others, we usually get summaries. We will feed questions to their investigators. They're still very much in control."
The official added: "We're not aware of any torture or even physical abuse."
Tenet acknowledged the Saudis' role in his Dec. 11 speech. "The Saudis are proving increasingly important support to our counterterrorism efforts -- from making arrests to sharing debriefing results," he said.
But Saudi Arabia is also said to withhold information that might lead the U.S. government to conclusions or policies that the Saudi royal family fears. U.S. teams, for that reason, have sometimes sent Saudi nationals to Egypt instead.
Jordan is a favored country for renditions, several U.S. officials said. The Jordanians are considered "highly professional" interrogators, which some officials said meant that they do not use torture. But the State Department's 2001 human rights report criticized Jordan and its General Intelligence Directorate for arbitrary and unlawful detentions and abuse. "The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions and extended solitary confinement," the 2001 report noted. Jordan also is known to use prisoners' family members to induce suspects to talk.
Another significant destination for rendered suspects is Morocco, whose general intelligence service has sharply stepped up cooperation with the United States. Morocco has a documented history of torture, as well as longstanding ties to the CIA..
The State Department's human rights report says Moroccan law "prohibits torture, and the government claims that the use of torture has been discontinued; however, some members of the security forces still tortured or otherwise abused detainees."
In at least one case, U.S. operatives led the capture and transfer of an al Qaeda suspect to Syria, which for years has been near the top of U.S. lists of human rights violators and sponsors of terrorism. The German government strongly protested the move. The suspect, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, holds joint German and Syrian citizenship. It could not be learned how much of Zammar's interrogation record Syria has provided the CIA. The Bush administration maintains a legal distance from any mistreatment that occurs overseas, officials said, by denying that torture is the intended result of its rendition policy. American teams, officials said, do no more than assist in the transfer of suspects who are wanted on criminal charges by friendly countries. But five officials acknowledged, as one of them put it, "that sometimes a friendly country can be invited to 'want' someone we grab." Then, other officials said, the foreign government will charge him with a crime of some sort.
One official who has had direct involvement in renditions said he knew they were likely to be tortured. "I . . . do it with my eyes open," he said.
According to present and former officials with firsthand knowledge, the CIA's authoritative Directorate of Operations instructions, drafted in cooperation with the general counsel, tells case officers in the field that they may not engage in, provide advice about or encourage the use of torture by cooperating intelligence services from other countries.
"Based largely on the Central American human rights experience," said Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general, "we don't do torture, and we can't countenance torture in terms of we can't know of it." But if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."
Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a narrow definition of what counts as "knowing" that a suspect has been tortured. "If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" said one official conversant with recent reports of renditions.
The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations.
After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.
"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."
Staff writers Bob Woodward, Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, and
correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin, contributed to this report.