Donald Rumsfeld
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Donald Rumsfeld was U.S. Secretary of Defense during the post-9/11 torture program and one of the two department heads John Kiriakou identifies as driving the invasion of Iraq.

Sleep deprivation and the standup desk

Kiriakou recounts that Rumsfeld famously doubted sleep deprivation was a real technique, pointing to his own standup desk, he used to brag about having no chair in his office, and to a habit of working two or three days straight without sleep. In an earlier version of the remark, Rumsfeld joked that he stood on his feet longer than the al-Qaeda prisoners were made to, a comparison Kiriakou calls simply laughable.

That was not what the program did: prisoners were stripped naked and chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so they could not get comfortable, and kept awake not for two or three days but for twelve or fourteen. Kiriakou's figures for where the damage begins vary between tellings, day seven for losing one's mind in some accounts, day nine in others, with deaths beginning around day nine or day twelve, but the endpoint does not: the insanity is often permanent, and the United States now holds prisoners subjected to the technique who are unable to participate in their own defence, which is itself illegal. The technique Kiriakou pairs it with is the cold cell, which killed prisoners more than once without anyone being prosecuted.

The push for war in Iraq

Inside the pre-war deliberations, Kiriakou describes clearly drawn battle lines. The war was pushed by the Office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney, who personally chaired the classified video teleconferences held almost every morning, with Scooter Libby or David Addington standing in, together with the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Rumsfeld, "completely joined at the hip with Cheney on Iraq," and the National Security Council. Opposed were the CIA, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The agency's institutional posture, as it was explained to Kiriakou, was that it might be a mistake but it was the policy, and supporting the policy is the job.

That structure is what made Ahmed Chalabi useful. The CIA had rejected him and carried a burn notice against him, so he simply routed around it, activating his own network of intelligence operatives, appearing regularly at Georgetown parties, at the Pentagon and at the vice president's office, and reporting directly to Cheney's staff and to Rumsfeld's staff and chain of command. Everyone knew he was a liar who cared only about becoming president of Iraq. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear, none of it based in truth, on an explicit quid pro quo: the intelligence needed to sell the war to the American people and Congress, in exchange for the presidency of Iraq afterwards.

Kiriakou places Rumsfeld's "old Europe versus new Europe" framing, the new Europeans were with Washington and the old Europeans could lump it, in the same posture: an increasing comfort with a unipolar world that he considers wrongheaded and that offended countries which might otherwise have been willing to work with the United States.

The 1983 Saddam handshake

Kiriakou describes Rumsfeld's famous 1983 photograph shaking hands with Saddam Hussein as a presidentially directed visit: Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad on the president's instruction to meet Saddam and privately promise U.S. intelligence on Iran, while Washington was simultaneously and secretly promising Iran intelligence on Iraq during the Iran,Iraq War.

Accountability

Kiriakou's stated position is that George W. Bush, Cheney, George Tenet and Rumsfeld are war criminals who in any other country would be prosecuted, and that Rumsfeld in particular should be charged with crimes against humanity. He draws a line at the case officer in the field, who is not an attorney and who received a cable saying the Justice Department had approved the techniques, but not at those who conceived the policy, papered it over, or killed and sexually assaulted prisoners in custody.

The reason the architects have gone all in and still insist the program was right, good and successful, in his reading, is legacy: when they die their obituaries will identify them as the leaders of the torture program, and for the rest of their lives they will try to convince the American people that it was the right thing to do and that it worked.

Prosecution has been attempted only from outside. Under universal jurisdiction any country may prosecute a violation of international law, the Geneva Conventions or the Convention Against Torture, and groups of lawyers in several countries, a large one in Canada among them, have discussed charging Bush, Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, and have tried to get local prosecutors to arrest Bush and Cheney on arrival. Bush once cancelled a trip to Switzerland because papers were being prepared to serve him.

See also

- Sleep deprivation
- Cold cell
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Dick Cheney
- Ahmed Chalabi
