Portland attorney and former interrogator Travis Hall talks about what interrogation once was, and what it should be again
Earlier this month, a federal appellate court ruled that former U.S. Attorney General John Ashscroft could be held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of detainees in the war against terrorism. The move exposes Ashcroft to civil lawsuits, and comes on the heals of lawsuits filed against former Bush adminstration attorney John Yoo, author of some of the so-called torture memos.
And in August, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder launched a preliminary investigation into the possible illegal use of torture by CIA interrogators.
These actions are the latest course taken by the Obama administration and civil libertarians in their pursuit of accountability in the detention and torture of suspects, and it takes another step closer in finding a resolution in the nation’s tragic exploration into torture.
Travis Hall is a former Army interrogator and an associate with the law firm Bateman Seidel in Portland. He also practices military law, representing active duty, reserve, and National Guard service members in adverse administrative proceedings and courts-martial. Hall also is a member of the Amnesty International Working Group for the Counter Terrorist with Justice Campaign.
Prior to joining Bateman Seidel, Hall was a captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the Army. He was a trained interrogator in military intelligence. In his six years with the JAG Corps, Hall represented soldiers with the most complex legal challenges, including one of the soldiers charged in the case that later became the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side. “
After 9/11, the Army assigned Hall as one of the legal planners for the invasion of Iraq, focusing on the reconstitution of the Iraq legal system. He was one of the first judge advocates deployed in Baghdad in 2003, and he conducted the initial surveys of the Iraqi criminal courts, jails, and prisons.
We started the conversation with Hall’s own training and experience as an interrogator.
Travis Hall: When I went through interrogation school, it was just as the Cold War was winding down and counterinsurgency actions were starting to pick up and Bosnia was one of the first modern campaigns that dealt with interrogation for a low intensity conflict that involved cells verses a large organized armies. Initially, interrogation practice deals with training to exploit prisoners of war on the battlefield to provide intelligence to commanders to take action. At the interrogation school, the first week is spent exclusively, eight hours a day, for the first five days, on the Geneva Conventions, and you’re tested before you even conduct a mock interrogation, with regard to interrogating prisoners of war. And anybody who deviated from those rules at the school was kicked out of the program. In fact, I specifically remember that there was a discussion about how torture is counterproductive, principally because during the history of conflict, most individuals willingly cooperate without using any enhanced interrogations techniques. And there are a number of reasons for that. The second reason is that with the right amount of stress, either physical or psychological, a person is going to tell you what it is that they perceive is going to stop the abuse, and that information may or may not be true, and oftentimes is completely inaccurate.
Third, information obtained through coercive techniques, you can’t use on the battlefield. Because you can’t rely on the information, intelligence information has to be corroborated by two sources before you can take any action on it. So information obtained under duress is completely worthless information. Maybe as an interrogator you think you’re getting somewhere. In reality you’re wasting your time. And once you cross that line into using coercive techniques, that individual is not going to willingly cooperate with you, period, or anybody else who wears the uniform.
A.Q. Former vice president Dick Cheney maintains that many lives were saved because of these enhanced interrogation techniques. Do you believe any of that?
T.H.: Absolutely not. The ACLU recently received the CIA inspector general’s report that debunked that. And Amnesty International, from a Freedom of Information Act request, it obtained other memoranda that showed that those claims are just absolutely not true. And let’s for the sake of argument say that through using coercive techniques that maybe they solved one riddle. Well, because this is such a public country, where information is almost impossible to suppress for a long period of time, how many more terrorists have we created through using coercive techniques, because they now use that as a propaganda tool. I think we’ve done more harm than good.
J.Z.: What impact is there that the legal cover (provided in the torture memos) is merely poorly written legal arguments that don’t hold water and are not consistent with your own training?
T.H.: Who said the system was broke to begin with? We had years and years and years of training, and they said essentially, now we’re serious. The gloves are off. What, we weren’t serious before? If you’re in a war with the Soviet Union, I would think that would be pretty serious, and the techniques that were sufficient to interrogate Soviet prisoners of war seems to me to be sufficient to interrogate al Qaida suspects. I don’t think the system was broke to begin with.
J.Z.: Then why did they do this? Why did they change the rules?
T.H.: I have a good reason why I think they changed it and some speculative reasons, too. Just after 9/11 I went to an intelligence law conference in Virginia, and then there was a topic about interrogation that this gentleman gave. He was among the interrogators in Afghanistan. We talked and had some conversations off to the side. And he was present during some conversations with members of the intelligence community, who right after 9/11 thought that the Army interrogators were a bunch of Boy Scouts. If the perception was that Army interrogators were Boy Scouts the reason was we created this mythos that al Qaida are super human and that the normal rules of interrogation don’t work for zealots. But in every single conflict, the enemy are portrayed as zealots. The Viet Cong were portrayed as zealots, the Japanese — and guess what: They all talked at a 90 percent or more rate.
All of us saw what happened on 9/11, and we knew instinctively that the world as we knew it was going to change on some level. And there’s always an overreaction — the pendulum swings too far the other direction, but that’s why we have national leaders who are supposed to rein in that tendency to overreact and I think on the executive level we just didn’t have those personalities in office at the time.
J.Z.: You’ve said that pursuing accountability isn’t necessarily a professional choice, that when it comes to torture and the Geneva Conventions, there’s an obligation in play.
T.H.: When it comes to the convention against torture, which the U.S. signed and ratified, and is the law of our land, it requires mandatory investigation of torture, and if torture is substantiated, then prosecution is not discretionary.
J.Z.: Where does that responsibility lie, and what happens if it is not pursued?
T.H.: The primary jurisdiction is the country that has custody control of the individual who allegedly tortured people. That’s the nation that has the responsibility. Now, if a country refuses to investigate or prosecute, there is universal jurisdiction. So theoretically, if some of these individuals were to travel overseas and they were arrested, then those countries would have jurisdiction to prosecute those individuals.
Somebody needs to take the bull by the horns and start investigating this. As a judge advocate, I would teach every year soldiers about the law of war. It’s mandatory in the military. And the example I would always tell soldiers, I try to explain to people that you have to understand that these are the actions that do not go away. If we think about World War II, people still remember and talk about, write books about, make movies and study human-rights abuses. If you look back on our history there are lots of areas that are still very much unresolved in segments of our population, whether it’s Native American rights, or the issue of slavery, or the Civil War. These issues don’t disappear. The longer you let them go and allow them to linger and fester, the larger our problem is. I suspect that they know this is going to open up to a much larger issue, but they’re taking it a step at a time, they’re being measured.
A.Q.: You think that it’s wise to approach the investigation with who actually conducted the interrogations and see where that leads?
T.H.: I think so. You have to start somewhere. The problem I have with Abu Ghraib is that the people prosecuted deserved to be prosecuted, but it shouldn’t have ended there. There was a command element at Abu Ghraib and that was never really fully explored. So I hope it isn’t the same thing where they (investigate) the interrogators and that’s the end of the story.
A.Q.: If Obama goes after higher-ups, there is the political accusation that he is scapegoating, that he is going on a political witch-hunt of his opponents. Politically he’s in a very difficult position, but from a legal perspective it doesn’t seem like there would be many options for him to back away.
T.H.: He has a job that I don’t want. The decisions he has to make are ones I can’t even contemplate having to make. But we need to walk the walk. If we say we trust our judicial system to weed out people who are responsible and who are not responsible. And if we trust our democratic government to make decisions that are based on general consensus, as time goes on as these investigations move forward or don’t move forward, the decision making will open up and become more obvious what those decisions should be. We just have to trust the process.
J.Z.: Is this the right time to do it, while we are still facing hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and detainees and interrogations are still very much in play?
T.H.: On the one hand you don’t want to create a division in your society while you still have troops that are counting on having everyone’s support. Troops need to know that what they are doing matters and that people value their sacrifice, because they’re asked to do a lot of things that thank goodness most of us don’t want to do. The CIA and FBI, we want them to protect our citizens. … At the same time, this isn’t something that’s going to go away and you don’t want to pass it on to the next generation. As time goes on, you lose information, people’s memories fade, documents get lost - we saw what happened to some of the interrogation videos, they were purposely destroyed, or not. Nonetheless, they’re not there anymore. Our war on terror requires international help. We want our allies and potential allies to support us in this effort, and I think that taking now, a measured response to take corrective action to hold people responsible for clear violations of international law will go a long ways to building up that support, also take away the propaganda tool for al Qaida recruitment. I think ultimately it will result in a quicker resolution in our efforts in the war on terror.
By Alejandro Queral and Joanne Zuhl
