A month after Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the US Senate’s select committee on intelligence gathered behind closed doors to hear a preliminary report on the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists. Bush and his officials had, of course, long insisted that such prisoners were treated humanely, according to international law. But in fact this was not the case. What the members of the committee heard that day induced it to authorise its staff to attempt to uncover the truth about the CIA’s interrogation programme.
Six years later, following the examination of 6m documents, the committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Dianne Feinstein, duly published its 6,770-page report. Not only did this reveal the appalling extent of what could only be described as torture, it also suggested that, contrary to the CIA’s claims, no intelligence had been gathered by these means that couldn’t have been discovered using other, legal methods.
The Torture Report is Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s graphic adaptation of the 576-page summary of the committee’s 2014 findings (the full document has never been made public, and will remain restricted for at least 12 more years) – and yes, it does feel odd to be writing about it here. This column tries to send beautiful, enriching books your way, and The Torture Report is nothing but ugly and misery-inducing. Nevertheless, I feel I must. As investigative journalist Jane Mayer notes in her introduction, the issue hasn’t gone away. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump, calling for the return of waterboarding, boldly dispensed with all the usual euphemisms. Suspects, he said, plainly and wrongly, would “talk a lot faster with torture”.
Jacobson and Colón, who also collaborated on The 9/11 Report: a Graphic Adaptation, a New York Times bestseller, take a careful, straightforward approach to the material: for reasons of clarity, these strips are extremely verbose. Somehow, though, this only serves to make their stark black‑and-white drawings of prisoners being crammed into tiny boxes, mock-executed, deprived of sleep for days at a time, and waterboarded into unconsciousness all the more horrifying.
Away from the stress positions and black sites, there is, moreover, a morbid fascination to be found in such wordiness. What amazes, even now, is the extent to which the CIA attempted to cover its tracks, knowing full well that its activities were illegal, not to mention its sheer incompetence in terms of its management (two unqualified psychologists were hired to design its programme of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, for which they were paid $80m).
As you may have gathered by now, even before we get to Trump’s attitude to those he likes to refer to as “bad people”, this somewhat unlikely book speaks loudly to the times. How chastening it is. The fact that such futile barbarity went on unchecked for so long is a powerful reminder of just what can happen when the state department is too credulous, the justice department too pliant, the media too weak-willed, and the people’s representatives too craven.
• The Torture Report is published by Nation Books
