CIA能否从虐囚丑闻中全身而退
As part of their basic training, American soldiers are sent on a course that simulates being captured by the enemy, where they are taught how to withstand abusive interrogations. When the CIA started rounding up suspected members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2002, it called in two former instructors from the course to give them advice.
Reverse-engineering their insights on surviving torture, the two men recommended to the CIA a series of interrogation methods that included mock burials, standing in stress positions for long periods of time and the now infamous “waterboarding” to mimic drowning.
这两个人逆向运用如何忍受酷刑的知识，帮CIA设计出了一系列逼供方法，包括模拟活埋，让囚犯长时间保持痛苦姿势，以及如今臭名昭著的“水刑”（模拟溺水的感觉）。Over the course of the next six years, the two retired Air Force psychologists became the central figures in a CIA programme that detained more than 100 suspects in secret prisons around the world, subjected many of them to torture and opened up the biggest crisis at the agency in a generation.
在接下来的6年里，在CIA的一个在全球各秘密监狱关押了逾100名嫌犯的项目中，这两名空军退休心理学家扮演了核心人物的角色，让该项目的许多嫌犯遭受了刑讯，也为CIA带来了二三十年来最大的一场危机。
According to a report into CIA torture released this week by the Senate intelligence committee, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were present at many of the interrogations suggesting new techniques, while they also provided reports to the agency claiming that the use of torture worked.
根据美国参议院情报委员会(Senate intelligence committee)最近发布的一份CIA虐囚报告，詹姆斯•米切尔(James Mitchell)和布鲁斯•耶森(Bruce Jessen)参加了许多次审讯并提供新的审讯手段建议，两人还曾向CIA提供报告，称酷刑有作用。The report contained two other extraordinary claims about the psychologists. Despite their responsibilities, neither man had “experience as an interrogator, specialised knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in terrorism or any relevant regional, cultural or linguistic expertise”. Yet the company they formed was paid a total of $81m by the agency for its services. The CIA outsourced one of the most questionable programmes in its history to two men with questionable qualifications.
报告中还提到了关于这两名心理学家的另外两个不同寻常的事实。尽管责任重大，但两人都没有“担任审讯官的经验，不具备关于基地组织的专业知识，缺乏抗击恐怖主义的背景，也没有任何相关地区、文化或语言的专长”。尽管如此，CIA总共向两人创办的公司支付了8100万美元的服务酬劳。CIA将其历史上最具争议的项目之一外包给了两个资质可疑的人。With its mixture of amateurism, profit and casual brutality, the outsized role played by the two psychologists in the interrogations has become one of the most jarring symbols of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programme which was exposed in excruciating detailby the release of the 525-page Senate report.
参议院那份长达525页的报告详细曝光了9/11后CIA的虐囚计划，其中最触目惊心的地方在于，这两名心理学家业余、唯利是图、恣意残暴，却在CIA审讯中扮演了过重的角色。Based on internal documents, the report contains the most damning rebuke of the CIA since the early 1970s when a committee led by Senator Frank Church, who called the agency “a rogue elephant”, investigated its failed attempts to assassinate leaders, such as Fidel Castro, former Cuba president.
此次的参议院报告以CIA内部文件为基础，对CIA发出了自上世纪70年代初以来最猛烈的抨击。上世纪70年代初，参议员弗兰克•丘奇(Frank Church)领导的委员会调查了CIA一次次失败的领导人刺杀行动，比如刺杀前古巴总统菲德尔•卡斯特罗(Fidel Castro)。丘奇当时称CIA为“离群的野象”。Unlike the 1970s, the agency will probably be insulated this time from a shake-up because of the strong backing it retains from many Republican members of Congress. Prosecutions in the US of CIA officials remain unlikely.
与上世纪70年代不同，CIA这次很可能将幸免于重创，因为它仍然得到国会中众多共和党议员的支持。CIA官员仍然不太可能在美国受到起诉。Yet the report will have much broader ramifications. It will deepen anti-American sentiment around the world and potentially open up former CIA officials to international prosecution. It solidifies the image of an American intelligence establishment that obeys only its own rules. And with its rich documentation from inside the CIA, it will play an important role in framing the historical narrative about the post-9/11 period and the way the American political elite lost its moral bearings amid the trauma and panic that followed the attacks.
然而，报告有更广泛的影响。它将加深全球各地的反美情绪，还可能让前CIA官员在国际上受到起诉。它强化了CIA作为一个只遵循自己规则的美国情报当局的形象。此外，报告包含了丰富的CIA内部文件，在叙写后9/11时代的历史、和美国政治精英是如何在9/11袭击后的创伤和恐慌中失去了道德准绳方面，它将发挥重要作用。Tim Weiner, author of a celebrated history of the CIA, points out that before 9/11, every official at the agency had a handbook that insisted it did not engage in: “torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment or prolonged detention without charges or trial.”
一部讲述CIA历史的著名著作的作者蒂姆•韦纳(Tim Weiner)指出，在9/11事件以前，CIA的每个官员都有一本手册，强调CIA“不使用酷刑，以残酷、非人道和羞辱性的方式对待或惩罚嫌犯，或在未经指控或审判的情况下长时间拘留嫌犯”。He says: “They were so afraid after 9/11 about a second attack that they essentially threw out their own rule book, which was based on 50 years of experience that torture does not work.
他说：“在9/11事件后，他们是如此担心袭击会再来一次，以至于他们基本上把自己的规则指南抛到了一边，而这本指南的基础就是一条通过50年经验得出的结论——严刑逼供是不管用的。“We now find ourselves asking again: are we as Americans capable of running a secret intelligence service in an open democratic society?”
“如今我们不禁再次发问：我们美国人有没有能力在一个开放的民主社会开展秘密情报工作？”Legal fight
“合法”之争Five years in the works, the report was released by Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate intelligence committee until the end of this year. “The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our values and on our history,” she told the Senate.
这份准备了5年的报告，是由加州民主党议员、参议院情报委员会主席黛安娜•范斯坦(Dianne Feinstein)公布的。她对参议院说：“10年前CIA的行为，如今成为我们的价值观和历史上的一个污点。”范斯坦的任期截至今年底。Ms Feinstein had three specific objectives with the release of the report.
范斯坦发布这份报告有3个具体目的。First, she wanted to establish beyond doubt that the CIA did use torture. Even after a decade of revelations and after President Barack Obama acknowledged this year that “we tortured some folks”, former senior officials at the CIA insist that the interrogations did not constitute torture. Memos prepared by the justice department during the Bush administration argued that techniques such as waterboarding were legal, allowing the CIA to claim it was just following guidelines.
首先，她希望确定无疑地证明CIA确实进行了严刑逼供。即便10年来不断被揭露，巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)总统今年也承认“我们对一些人进行了刑讯”，但前CIA高层官员仍坚称他们在审讯中没有使用虐待手段。司法部在布什主政时期准备的备忘录称，水刑等手段是合法的，这使得CIA能够宣称它只不过是在遵循指南。The details in the report demolished such legal parsing. During one of the 83 times that he was waterboarded, Abu Zubaydah — a high-profile al-Qaeda suspect still being held at Guantánamo Bay — was “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth”. After a doctor intervened, he began passing “copious amounts of water”. Gul Rahman froze to death while being kept in a facility that CIA officials called “the dungeon”.
报告用具体事实驳斥了所谓合法的说辞。被83次施以水刑的著名基地组织嫌犯阿布•祖鲍伊达(Abu Zubaydah)，在其中一次被施以水刑时，“完全没有反应，他张着嘴，气泡从满是水的嘴里冒出来”。医生施救后，他开始吐出“大量水”。祖鲍伊达眼下仍被关押在关塔那摩湾(Guantánamo Bay)。古尔•拉赫曼(Gul Rahman)在被关押在CIA所谓的“地牢”里时被冻死。Two detainees with broken feet were “subjected to walling, stress positions and cramped confinement”. Another with a prosthetic limb was kept in a standing position for an “extended period of time”. A detainee called Majid Khan had his lunch of hummus, pasta, nuts and raisins “puréed . . . and rectally infused”. Another was subjected to “rectal feeding” that left him with “chronic haemorrhoids, an anal fissure and symptomatic rectal prolapse”.
两名足部骨折的囚犯“被施以墙刑(walling)、被迫保持痛苦姿势、并被拘禁于狭小空间里”。还有一名装有义肢的囚犯被迫“长时间”保持站姿。一个名叫马吉德•汗(Majid Khan)的囚犯，他午餐中的鹰嘴豆泥、意面、坚果和葡萄干“被搅拌成浓浆……给他灌肠”。还有一名囚犯被“直肠灌食”，使他患上了“慢性痔疮、肛裂，并有直肠脱垂症状”。Second, Ms Feinstein cast the CIA as an almost renegade agency that ran its torture interrogations in a slapdash manner and persistently misled the White House, Congress and the American public about what it was doing.
其次，范斯坦将CIA描绘为一个近乎变节的机构，随意地实施刑讯，在有关自己所作所为的问题上持续误导白宫、国会和美国公众。The report is particularly harsh on Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009. In one instance in January 2009, it says Mr Hayden gave a briefing to members of then president-elect Obama’s transition team which included examples of the effectiveness of the interrogations. “The examples provided were nearly entirely inaccurate,” the report said.
报告对2006年至2009年间担任CIA局长的迈克尔•海登(Michael Hayden)提出了格外尖锐的批评。报告称，在2009年1月，海登有一次向当时刚刚当选总统的奥巴马的过渡团队成员做简报，举了一些例子证明审讯非常有效。报告称：“他提供的那些例子几乎完全不准确。”In her speech, Ms Feinstein referred to a 2007 Senate hearing called after press reports claimed that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations.
在讲话中，范斯坦提到了2007年的一次参议院听证会，在那次听证会之前，有媒体报道称CIA已销毁审讯过程的录像带。“Director Hayden said the CIA had concluded that the destruction of videotapes was acceptable because Congress had not yet requested to see them,” she said. “But, of course, the committee had not known that the videotapes existed.”
“海登局长表示，CIA认为销毁录像带的行为是可以接受的，因为国会当时还未要求查看录像带。”她说，“但当然了，委员会当时根本不知道那些录像带的存在。”In an interview with Politico, Mr Hayden said the report was unfair to him because most of the detainees had been held under his two predecessors and because procedures were much tighter by the time he took over.
在接受Politico采访时，海登表示这份报告对他并不公平，因为大多数囚犯都是在他的两位前任任期内被关押的，当他接手时，程序已经变得严格得多。“I’m the dumb son of a b — who went down [to Congress] and tried to lay out this program in great detail to them,” he said. “I did not lie.” (Ms Feinstein had a different style of rebuke for the current CIA director John Brennan. While he gave a press conference on Thursday defending the agency, the 81-year-old senator took to Twitter to rebut his comments using the hashtag #ReadTheReport.
“我是个傻叉，跑到（国会去），试图向他们详细解释这个项目。”他说，“我没有撒谎。”（范斯坦对现任CIA局长约翰•布伦南(John Brennan)进行了另一种方式的抨击。他日前召开记者招待会为CIA辩护，而81岁的范斯坦则在Twitter上反驳他的话，并用了#请读报告#的话题标签。）Good cops and bad cops
好警察与坏警察It is Ms Feinstein’s third objective, to show that torture was ineffective, that has created the most political heat. She had hoped the report, with its copious footnotes from internal CIA communications, would establish as fact that torture does not work.
引发最大政治争议的是范斯坦的第三个目标，即证明严刑是无效的。她希望这份包含丰富CIA内部交流记录的报告能够证实一点：严刑是没有用的。It includes 20 case studies of interrogations that used torture, including the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and claims that in each example the valuable intelligence was gleaned from conventional techniques rather than after the use of torture. The report also indicates false intelligence that was produced by torture, including claims that formed part of the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
报告列举了20个使用了虐待手段的审讯案例，包括追捕奥萨马•本•拉登(Osama bin Laden)行动。报告称，在每一个案例中，有价值的情报都是通过常规手段（而非虐待手段）得到的。报告还指出，逼供曾逼出过假情报，在2003年美国入侵伊拉克所依据的情报中就有这类假情报。However, former CIA leaders and some Bush administration officials have taken to the airwaves in recent days to aggressively dispute this claim. In its own response, the CIA insisted that information from the interrogations played a role in the hunt for Bin Laden.
然而，前CIA领导人和布什政府的一些官员近日在电视和广播上激烈反驳这一说法。CIA本身的反应是，坚称从审讯中获得的情报在追捕本•拉登行动中发挥了作用。“This program was effective in getting information that led to the capture of additional senior operatives that stopped plots that would have killed Americans,” said Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA. “I have no doubt about that,” he said.
“这个项目对获取情报是有作用的，这些情报让我们俘获了更多高级别特工、并粉碎了一些原本会导致美国人被杀的阴谋。”CIA前副局长迈克尔•莫雷尔(Michael Morell)说，“我确信如此。”Mr Brennan tried to present a more nuanced position at his press conference, suggesting it was “unknowable” if what he called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were the reason detainees later provided useful information.
布伦南在记者招待会上试图表达一个更模棱两可的观点，称“无法确定”他所谓的“高级审讯手段”是不是嫌犯后来提供有用情报的原因。Mr Mitchell, one of the psychologists, made a similar argument in an interview with Vice News. Citing a confidentiality agreement, he refused to comment on the Senate report other than to say it was incorrect. However, he said the point of aggressive interrogation was not to produce information immediately but to make later conventional questioning easier. The goal was “a bad cop that is bad enough that the person would engage with the good cop”, he said.
两名心理学家之一米切尔在接受Vice News采访时发表了类似的看法。他以保密协议为由拒绝对参议院的报告发表评论，只说这份报告是不正确的。然而，他表示，激进审讯手段的意义不在于马上获取情报，而在于让后来的常规审讯变得更容易。他说，目的是制造一个“足够坏的警察，让这个人愿意跟好警察合作”。Amid pushback from the CIA, the political waters have also been muddied by sharp criticism of Ms Feinstein from many leading Republicans. John McCain, himself a torture victim, may have spoken in favour of the report but Richard Burr, who will replace her next year as chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said that “the only motive here could be to embarrass George W Bush”.
在CIA奋起反击的同时，许多共和党要人也对范斯坦提出了尖锐批评，进一步搅浑了政治局势。虽然作为一个曾经受过刑虐之苦的人，约翰•麦凯恩(John McCain)已表态支持这份报告，但将于明年接替范斯坦担任参议院情报委员会主席的理查德•伯尔(Richard Burr)表示，“这里唯一的动机可能就是让乔治•W•布什(George W. Bush)难堪”。In the short term, Ms Feinstein’s report has become another example of the partisan division in Washington. But over the long haul it will also provide a constant reminder of a dark period in modern American life.
简而言之，范斯坦的报告已成为华盛顿党派分歧的又一例证。但从长远来看，它也将持续提醒人们现代美国生活中曾存在这样一段黑暗时期。
