Bush and the CIA Cook Up Ways To Continue Torture

If the Bush administration forces the CIA to drop “tough” interrogation techniques like waterboarding, the agency will probably fall back on a brutal method that leaves no physical marks.

By Mark Benjamin
Salon

According to news reports, the White House is preparing to issue an executive order that will set new ground rules for the CIA’s secret program for interrogating captured al-Qaida types. Constrained by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which contains a strict ban on abuse, it is anticipated that the order will jettison waterboarding and other brutal interrogation techniques.

But President Bush has insisted publicly that “tough” techniques work, and has signaled that the CIA’s secret program can somehow continue under the rubric of the Military Commissions Act. The executive order will reportedly hand the CIA greater latitude than the military to conduct coercive interrogations. If waterboarding goes the way of the Iron Maiden, what “tough” techniques will the CIA use on its high-value detainees?

The answer is most likely a measure long favored by the CIA — sensory deprivation. The benign-sounding form of psychological coercion has been considered effective for most of the life of the agency, and its slippery definition might allow it to squeeze through loopholes in a law that seeks to ban prisoner abuse. Interviews with former CIA officials and experts on interrogation suggest that it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law. The technique has already been employed during the “war on terror,” and, Salon has learned, was apparently used on 14 high-value detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay.