The Guardian view on the CIA torture report: there is a second scandal here

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/10/guardian-view-cia-torture-report-second-scandal

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Buried deep in the US Senate’s report on CIA torture is an account of how often brutal interrogation was outsourced to a private company in receipt of huge sums of US taxpayers’ money. The CIA transferred a total of $81m to a firm set up by two psychologists involved in the interrogation programme. The value of the CIA’s contract with this firm reached $180m in 2006, though in fact only $81m was paid out before the contract expired in 2009. In 2007 the CIA provided that same company with a multiyear indemnity arrangement to protect it and its employees from legal liability. The agency later paid out a further $1m in connection with this agreement.

All this gives a fascinating glimpse into how private business interests became enmeshed in activity – the interrogation of suspected terrorists – that we would normally regard as the exclusive preserve of the state, namely the safeguarding of national security. If it is a scandal that the CIA tortured, it is another scandal that it hired a private business to do that work on its behalf.

It was of course a state decision taken at the highest political level – the relevant presidential memorandum of notification was signed by George W Bush on September 17 2001 – that led to the CIA programme. But in the workings of the operation, there was also a commercial aspect – something the Senate report clearly intended to expose.

The involvement of this private company was not a lateral feature of the programme but a key feature of it. The report says that the psychologists not only “devised” the interrogation techniques but then went on to play “a central role” in the programme’s “operation, assessment and management”. They even conducted the interrogations of some of the most significant detainees themselves.

The report leaves no doubt that “by 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the programme”. We also learn that “contractors made up 85% of the workforce for detention and interrogation operations”. The company provided interrogators, operational psychologists, debriefers, and security personnel at CIA detention sites. It is in this context that waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture were conducted, in the frenetic belief that information would be extorted for the fight against al-Qaida.

There are reasons why the CIA turned to outsourcing. Few of them are good. The CIA had no experience in running detention centres. It was handed this mission abruptly a few days after 9/11. The Senate report stresses how “unprepared” it was. So it sought assistance from outside its ranks. The psychologists asked to conceive a set of “coercive interrogation techniques” had previously worked at a US Air Force school, training pilots to withstand the treatment they might face if taken prisoner or hostage. This was the basis on which they won this grim contract.

It seems this was one side-effect of what President Barack Obama once called the “decade of war”: the degree to which the US government ended up farming out to private entities highly sensitive activities related to national security. Indeed the very conduct of the “war on terror” started taking on an increasingly mercenary dimension. There were millions to be made from America’s wars, as the role of Halliburton and others has demonstrated. Western private security firms flourished in the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq. They guarded military bases, protected officials and went on patrols. In 2007 a massacre of unarmed civilians by a group of Blackwater employees in Iraq exposed, and brought international opprobrium, on this phenomenon.

To be clear, it was not because it relied on a private firm that the CIA tortured. Nothing here diminishes the responsibility of the agency and the US administration which made the key decisions. But what has to be stressed is that the interests of the state are rarely identical with those of a profit-making business. Some functions are better served by keeping them within the public realm. This surely applies to issues central to national security and the respect of fundamental values. Private sector involvement is not the core scandal: the scandal is the torturing. But it was very much part of the problem.