Reports and photographs of prisoners tortured by American government employees have made the United States of America notorious (it should be mentioned that they all came from American, mostly official, sources). Now the US justice department has released a 2004 report that gives considerable detail on the use of torture, and justifies its use by citing information extracted from tortured prisoners. Most of the report has been blacked out; but even what remains reveals much.

All captors harass captives; the severity varies. Resulting death or injury leaves evidence and can cause outrage; so some democratic governments lay down rules about permissible and impermissible harassment. The report says nothing about torture used in conflicts up to the Vietnam war. Those who took part in that war retired or left the army and went to work in the private sector; they took their knowledge of torture with them. In the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency was working with Latin American governments who had leftist rebellions to deal with. After that there was a relatively peaceful period when the US was not involved in foreign wars. Again the torturers left government.

When the US intervened in Iraq, a new template had to be created. The need became urgent after Abu Zubaydah, a 30-year-old Saudi jihadi who had begun his career in Palestine, was caught in Faisalabad (old Lyallpur) with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in 2002. The CIA made a list of “permissible” techniques, and got the opinion of some psychologists that they would cause no permanent psychological damage.

They included the infamous “waterboarding”. It is described as tying a prisoner to a bench with head hanging down and immobilized, covering the head with cloth, and pouring water on the cloth to make him feel he was drowning. As the cloth got soaked, it would stick to the prisoner’s mouth and nose and he would feel he was suffocating. If he was not to be severely asphyxiated, the water pouring had to be stopped after 20-40 seconds. In actual fact, videotapes showed continuous pouring of water in waterboarding. Obviously, no one involved thought this was wrong; one of the “psychologists” said that the extreme waterboarding was “‘for real’ and… more poignant and convincing”. The report concentrates on three prisoners who were waterboarded: Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and not allowed to sleep for 180 hours in a month. Abu Zubaydah talked; Sheikh Mohammed did not disclose much. Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri was subjected to only two sessions before he talked.

Another technique was to lock up the prisoner in an awkwardly shaped box — for two hours if it was so small that he could not move, 18 hours if he could move his limbs — in the company of a “harmless” insect. A third one was to take hold of the prisoner by his shoulders and push him back into a “flexible” wall. Or the prisoner might be made to stay in a stressful position for hours — for instance, leaning on stretched hands placed on a wall 4-5 feet away. Manhandling was included. Not letting a prisoner sleep or go to the toilet or making him stand for three days, exposing him to loud and continuous noise as long as it did not make him deaf, and starving him moderately were called standard interrogation techniques.

Those above were the permitted procedures. There were no unpermitted procedures, but the report goes in detail into international and US law. Its essence is that anything was allowed as long as it did not cause “severe” pain; and severe pain too was all right as long as the interrogator did not inflict it. An interrogator gave a hooded prisoner the impression that he was cocking a pistol to shoot him; he switched on a pneumatic drill close to the prisoner. In another instance, interrogators faked an incident to give a prisoner the impression that they had just shot another prisoner dead. Interrogators blew cigar smoke into the face of a prisoner. When asked, they said they smoked cigars because the stench in the room was unbearable. One interrogator strangled a prisoner just enough to make him feel he was going to be throttled. When asked, he said huffily that he had years of experience and no one had ever told him how he might interrogate.

Cold showers were frequently used to torture prisoners. When questioned, an interrogator asked, “How cold is cold? How cold is life threatening?” To him, freezing a prisoner was all right as long as the prisoner did not die. In another case, an air conditioner was used; the report does not say what happened, but since the entire subsequent section has been blacked out, the consequence was probably horrible.

This is how the Americans treated people in their custody; it could be worse for others. One Afghan was suspected of being implicated in a rocket attack, and was sought. He himself went to an American army post. An “independent contractor” severely beat and kicked him, and locked him up; he died after four days. In another place, 200 schoolchildren were being questioned about a bomb that had killed eight guards. A teacher “smiled inappropriately”, upon which he was beaten up with the rifle butt.

The report details the information obtained from the three prized prisoners, and implies that the torture was worthwhile. It also includes long legal briefs justifying the torture; it is all within the four walls of American law. What struck me, however, was how the Americans were intent on dominating, and consequently, how alienated they were. They recognize enemies in the entire Islamic arc from Palestine to Indonesia. They bomb the Taliban; if a few innocent Afghan villagers are also killed, that is trivial collateral damage. They catch jihadis, and torture them over months to make them talk. But could they send fifth columnists into the ranks of the Taliban or Lashkar-e-Toiba? They would not know how.

This applies even more to India. We are not capable of operating officially abroad as the Americans do; we could not get Indonesians or Filipinos to catch terrorists for us, let alone the Pakistanis. We have no clout; it could not be proved more starkly than by the attack on Mumbai hotels. We fretted and fumed; we prepared big dossiers and sent them around. But when Pakistan just ignored them, all that Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee could think of doing was to make more statements. We are no tiger; we are a toothless elephant.

In those circumstances, covert operations behind the enemy lines become even more important. The only way we can foil attacks like the one on Mumbai is by having advance information, and the only way we can get that information is by having spies in Pakistan, especially in their terrorist organizations. Every summer our army reports infiltration of Pakistani terrorists into Kashmir. But it has no fifth columnists in those terrorists. We should collect a few thousand young people from Hindutwit organizations like the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Ram Sena, train them to be good Pakistanis and send them across the border. They would then be doing something useful.