Mark Follman

A long article about CIA director Leon Panetta in the June 22 issue of the New Yorker has prompted a flurry of media attention for comments Panetta made in reaction to Dick Cheney’s latest fear mongering over terrorism and U.S. national security. “It’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point,” Panetta said of Cheney, according to the article. “I think that’s dangerous politics.”

Cheney pushed back on his “old friend Leon” on Monday, according to Fox News. John McCain also jumped in, defending Cheney’s motivations and playing up discord among rank-and-file spooks: “By the way, I hear morale is not at an all-time high over at the CIA under Mr. Panetta’s leadership,” McCain said. Joe Biden weighed in on the talk-show circuit.

The back and forth is politics in the wake of dueling speeches from Obama and Cheney, but it’s a sideshow. Perhaps the famously secretive Cheney’s inner thoughts can’t really be known, but his hand in brutal interrogation policy couldn’t be better known. As I wrote about here recently, paramount for Cheney is protecting his political legacy and seeing his national security policies vindicated. (The essence of Panetta’s point.) The real news in the New Yorker article, buried deep into its 7,600 words, is the continuing absence of accountability for those who carried out Cheney’s vision to horrific ends.

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)

That’s just the tip of the black iceberg, if you add in the numbers involving U.S. military operations — entwined with CIA operations — under Bush and Cheney. As I reported for Salon back in 2005, by then 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody since the start of the so-called war on terror. At least 26 deaths were deemed criminal homicides. Who knows if additional bodies piled up since.

As was also reported long ago, medical doctors and mental health professionals were involved in the torture, too, although the extent of their roles remains buried. Citing recently declassified Justice Department memos, Nathaniel Raymond, who works with the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, says that medical personnel working for the CIA were “the designers, the legitimizers and the implementers” of interrogation using torture. “We still don’t know how many detainees were in the black sites, or who they were,” Raymond says in the New Yorker. “We don’t fully know the White House’s role, or the C.I.A.’s role … This is arguably the single greatest medical-ethics scandal in American history. We need answers.”

If the accountability picture remains grim (both in terms of the operators and the policy overlords) there is one positive development detailed in the New Yorker piece: Panetta has ambitious plans for a new kind of legally acceptable interrogation capability. A task force led by Harvard Law professor Philip Heymann has been advising Panetta on a proposal to create an elite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best CIA, FBI and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists and other scholars. According to the New Yorker, Heymann describes it as an effort to create “the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world,” the equivalent of “a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort” for human-intelligence gathering.

Without a doubt, America would benefit much from recruiting more Ali Soufans, while throwing its “Big Steves” behind bars.