President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.
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The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.

President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.

He might begin with Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror." Conquest wrote: "When there was time, the basic [Soviet Secret police] method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."

Conquest stated: "Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused -- often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect." He quoted a Czech prisoner, Evzen Loebl, who described "having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes. . . . If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture."

Conquest quoted a Polish prisoner, Z. Stypulkowski, from 1945: "Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above the freezing point make him tremble all the time. . . . After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton -- his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often convinced he is guilty."

The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.

How do you motivate a high level operative that you've captured? Carrots or sticks. Sometimes you don't have any carrots. You are ultimately going to seek a death sentence against your captive. Its unlikely that the administration is employing these methods for the ends described in this article. However, the reason you have these rules is that its impossible to tell. Laws aren't impossible to break. Its just hard, and for a reason.

The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.

The author here calls out President Bush for special ridicule, but the absence of outrage is sufficiently widespread that we are apparently reliant on Human Rights Watch to remind us of the consensus reached by our government.

I suspect the author is being theatrical when he suggests that Bush is "deceiving himself." Last week I flipped through OpinionJournal and found all sorts of people on the right, trying to argue that the new DoD rules are "soft on terror."

It should surprise no one that Human Rights Watch can write a persuasive anti-torture op-ed. However, as is often the case, there is more news in what's not in the papers than in what does appear. And what I don't see right now are op-eds from DNI Negroponte and DCI Hayden and the DDO telling us in no uncertain terms how essential these abusive practices are to their operational success. (Negroponte repeatedly says that the ability to conduct interrogations is essential, even if it is not a daily event, which is why he is pushing for additional "clarity" after the SCOTUS ruling.)

If those people were willing to write those op-eds, you can be quite sure that WSJ and others would run them. Instead you find Colin Powell saying that "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

From the DNI, what you will find is this, on Fox News yesterday:

WALLACE: Since the Supreme Court said in June that these interrogations are now covered by the Geneva Conventions, have any CIA officers refused to carry out any interrogations?

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NEGROPONTE: I think the way I would answer you in regard to that question is, that there’s been precious little activity of that kind for a number of months now, and certainly since the Supreme Court decision.

WALLACE: That has curtailed the kind of questioning that they have done.

NEGROPONTE: There just simply hasn’t been that kind of activity.

If you read between the lines of this interview, it becomes quite clear that the CIA is unwilling to stick its neck out on this any longer, especially now that DoD has come out and publicly abandoned the abusive practices. Actually, you don't even really have to read between the lines; it's pretty clear.