Bush's Redacted Reality

by Tom Engelhardt and Karen Greenberg
by Tom Engelhardt and Karen Greenberg

Imagine a government in which the names of those who worked as key aides in the office of the second (if not, arguably, the first) most important official in the country were not available. Oh gosh, there is such a government – and it's ours. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss set out to do a report for the American Prospect magazine on the various individuals Vice President Cheney had gathered to help him run the most powerful vice-presidency in American history – functionally, his own shadow National Security Council – and when he called, asking for those names and their positions as well as possible interviews with them, here's what ensued:

"His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no – nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president's office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. ‘We just don't give out that kind of information,' says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney's ‘angels.' She won't say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. ‘It's just not something we talk about.' The notoriously silent OVP [Office of the Vice President] staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. ‘They're tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,' says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney's office doesn't bother returning his calls when he's updating the limited information he manages to collect."

We're talking, of course, about the official to whom no major media outlet assigns a regular reporter, because the Veep's office releases, with great determination, no news to cover. Dick Cheney is, in this way, the poster boy for the Bush administration's most essential "sunshine" policy – if at all possible, offer nothing to anyone, any time, anywhere, for any reason.

Such examples of Bush administration secrecy can be multiplied more or less in the direction of the infinite. Stories of information suppression of all sorts are legion, but sometimes one image is worth a thousand examples of what's being kept from us. In this case, the image comes from Karen J. Greenberg, co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, who follows the endless stream of investigations and reports that have come from inside the U.S. government and the military in response to the plethora of scandals about torture, abuse, mistreatment, kidnapping, secret prisons, and the like. ~ Tom

The Color of "Transparency" Is Black

Imagine my disappointment. Two long-awaited Pentagon reports on detainee policy had finally reached public view: the Jacoby Report on Afghanistan and the Formica Report on Iraq, available as a result of Freedom of Information Act suits, like thousands of other pages of government reports on the war on terror. As the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, a collection of the memos, reports, and interview logs related to Bush administration detainee policy, I was naturally eager to see those parts of the story that were unfortunately still classified at the time of the book's publication in December 2004.

Both reports promised to contain new information about detainee policy. In June of 2004, Brigadier General Charles H. Jacoby, Jr. had submitted the results of his investigation into detainee operations and standards of detainee treatment in Afghanistan. In November of that year, Brigadier General Richard P. Formica had delivered his findings on command and control questions and allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq. Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez, Commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq and the military officer connected to the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib, had commissioned Formica to determine whether or not U.S. forces in Iraq were in compliance with Department of Defense guidelines on detainee treatment.

Now, a mere two years or so later, I began skimming through the introductory matter and the boldface headings of the Jacoby Report. I stopped first at "Detainee Operations Standard Operating Procedures." Here it would be in black and white – or so I thought. But, as it happened, I was only half right. Startling amounts of the report were redacted or blacked out. Where there should have been text against white space, there was section after section filled with nothing but solid black blocs. Even some subsection titles were missing. Pure ink. Meant not to be read.

For example, when I reached the subsection entitled, "Interrogation Techniques," there was but a black blot of ink, two pages long. I couldn't help myself. I automatically lifted the paper to check if there weren't some way to see beneath the overlay of ink. But of course that was a hopeless thought. Whatever information had been there was gone, eradicated, tossed down the public memory hole that has eaten so much of the detail that I, along with many others, have been trying to discover for two years now.

Still, I plowed doggedly on. The deeper I went, the more redacted sections there were, leaving me with two "reports" that lacked, by my rough estimate, at least 50% of their contents.

Blackened page followed blackened page; introductory sentences led nowhere; subsection titles introduced nothing; elaborating details were rendered invisible along with most of each report's conclusions. If one were to treat the pages of each report like a flip-book, visually the story line would be a solid mass of black.

Not surprisingly, then, when it came to informational value, the offerings were slim indeed. And yet, the Pentagon has touted these very offerings as yet another sign "that the department is committed to transparency," echoing President Bush's recent remarks, delivered in Europe, that "We're a transparent democracy. People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open. We've got a legislative process that's active."

But there is nothing "transparent" about these reports. They are quite literally opaque documents; and, in this respect, they differ from earlier releases such as the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, the Fay-Jones Report, and the Mikolashek Report, all dealing with detention policy, all of which were made public in 2004.

The eleventh and twelfth Bush administration reports on detainee policy, the Jacoby and Formica Reports, held onto until now, are in a league with other recent administration releases which have been notable for the information they hide rather than reveal. Witness, for example, the Schmidt Report, the Inspector General's report on Guantanamo, which was released in April of this year. More than 50% of it, too, is redacted.

And only days ago, the long-awaited Church Report appeared. As with Jacoby and Formica, Naval Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert Tom Church III completed his report on Defense Department interrogation policies from Afghanistan and Gitmo to Iraq back in 2004. Though a brief summary was released, the report itself was held for two years and, like its most recent predecessors, its tale, though tantalizing, has largely been reduced to blackened page after blackened page.

The Pentagon claims that these massive redactions occur for technical and legal reasons, as cited in code numbers placed in the margins where text is missing, each representing a category of explanation for a deletion. Facts need to be deleted, for example, if they reveal installation locations or intelligence gathering unit names, or if they come from parts of inter- or intra-agency memos. Apparently justified by these code numbers, here is some of what you can't learn from the Jacoby and Formica reports.

On the Jacoby investigation into detention in Afghanistan, the birthplace of the War on Terror's interrogation policies, you cannot learn: the full definition of the category of "detainees," detention criteria, interrogation techniques used, approved interrogation strategies, guidelines on the protection of detainees from harm by a third party, full guidelines for the use of force, and so much more.

What you cannot learn from the Formica Report investigating prisoner treatment in Iraq is: Its assessments of policies regarding "command and control," or what processing guidelines for detainees are, or even what average length of detention is. Also hidden from sight are the discussion sections on the "adequacy of facilities and treatment of security detainees" and "Interrogation methods and procedures," among many other matters.

Withdrawal of information has been a deeply rooted tactic of the Bush administration. The urge not to tell, never to reveal, has been at the heart of its approach to government, whether what's at stake is court records, statistics on Iraq, or information about detainees. In 2001, 8 million government documents were classified per year. That number has now expanded to 16 million. Moreover, the rate of declassification has decreased significantly. On average, only one-sixth as many documents are declassified each year as during the Clinton administration.

As the administration endlessly reminds us, we are in a time of war and information that could actually harm national security does need to be classified. But the nature of what appears in the Formica Report, for example, might make us wonder about what it is that the Pentagon is redacting in the blacked out half of the document. For instance, you can still read – between the non-lines, so to speak – about allegations of abuse and torture that proved (according to the report) unfounded in American facilities in Iraq. These include sodomy, electric shock, dog bites, and more. If what we can read are the "unfounded" charges, you can only wonder whether those solid black areas of the report contain allegations of abuse and torture that simply turned out to be accurate.

Given a blank space, the mind naturally has the tendency to fill it in – and these latest reports in their blankness are nothing but invitations to invent the details yourself based on what is already well known. There is little question that censorship produces rumors, while secrecy keeps the swirl of rumor alive and unchecked.

Although the Formica Report insists repeatedly that "detainees generally make false statements," the Jacoby Report does also point out, in a readable passage, that "training in detainee operations as opposed to EPW (Enemy Prisoners of War) is a relatively new concept for the Army" and that military personnel have apparently been regularly placed in circumstances that lead to abusive behavior. "If a TIC [Troops in Contact] results in detention, an opportunity for abuse arises as a result of the stress and emotion." From what can be discerned, it does look like training and expectations for the holding of detainees just didn't match the grim reality in the field.

The odd thing about the increasing rate of redactions is that they are coming at a time when there have been signs from elsewhere in the administration that a change of policy is needed and, at least when it comes to Guantanamo, might be limping its way toward us. President Bush has finally said that he'd like to find a way to close Guantanamo. The Supreme Court has called the classification of the detainees into question by stating that the Geneva Conventions apply even to al-Qaeda. Only days ago, the Department of Defense revised its Guantanamo detainee policy to adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Meanwhile, the detainees are being cleared of accusations and released at a more rapid rate than previously. Two weeks ago, for instance, fourteen Saudis were released from Guantanamo and sent back to Saudi Arabia, bringing the number of prisoners cleared and released from Guantanamo to nearly three hundred. Internal military concerns for making Gitmo a humane and legal prison have grown. In the past several months, the military has instituted a ban on the use of dogs and a new policy of religious sensitivity with regard to the detainees.

And yet on this, as on so much else with the Bush administration, if it weren't for angry, frustrated, or horrified leakers from within the military, the intelligence community, and the federal bureaucracy generally, we might truly be plunged into informational darkness. Part of the aura of secrecy the Bush administration has created around its own behavior involves the insistence that only agreed-upon administration officials can tell the story and only their way – and often only as a last resort.

It's not surprising then that the more reports appear on the treatment (or mistreatment) of detainees around the world, the less they bother to offer us the light of day; and the more all-black pages that enter the world, the less the public knows – except about the nature of the Bush administration itself. Shrouded in secrecy and adamant about the right not to reveal, the administration stands defiantly behind its darkened pages. And so here we stand, too, the text of our world becoming increasingly unreadable as words turn into massive inkblots, and black spaces overcome white ones. The dark, it seems, continues to swallow the light.

July 21, 2006

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture. Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security, the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor of The Torture Debate in America.

Copyright © 2006 Karen J. Greenberg

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