Torture timeline: Dana Priest talks about the early days

Earlier today, I spoke with veteran Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. My question was simple: At what point did it become clear that the United States’ treatment of detainees in overseas prisons was harsh, and possibly illegal? (For more FP torture coverage, see here.)

Allegations of detainee abuse first started trickling out in January 2002 — in essence, as soon as detainees came into U.S. custody. But it wasn’t until eleven months later that Priest and fellow Post reporter Barton Gellman wrote the first definitive account of such abuse. On the day after Christmas, 2002, the Post described “stress and duress” tactics, extraordinary rendition to countries like Syria, and the harsh treatment of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda. The article used the word torture — saying that the United States harshly interrogated prisoners, and sent them to foreign prisons to gain the “fruits” of torture without having to do it themselves.

According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”

Back then, the CIA was Priest’s beat. She says her tip-off on the “stress and duress” story came when she noticed a separate, unmarked compound near the main Bagram holding facility. “It wasn’t in the military compound,” she says. “But it was surrounded with triple concertina wire,” the type used in high-security prisons. “I thought — they have a separate facility, so are they working under separate rules? I knew the CIA and military were working in teams together, but at what?”

She and a team of Post reporters, among them Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Barton Gellman, working in parallel and in competition to New York Times writers like Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall, started piecing the stories together. “Really, there were just a handful of reporters who could make inroads on the subject,” she says.

The reporting was painstaking. “It was a very decentralized thing. You weren’t even sure what the questions were,” she says. “We couldn’t connect it up. We couldn’t see the big picture. And there was no past reporting to go on. Everyone was making it up. We’d follow these little reports from Afghanistan, about people disappearing. That was it.”

Crucial to the success of the early reporting were the teams of lawyers at organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights struggling to glean information on detainees. “We were all getting little teeny scraps and putting it together painstakingly,” she says. “Nobody told you the whole story, or even a quarter of a story.” One Post article on an extraordinary rendition came together because a someone happened to write down the number on the tail of an airplane. “You needed to keep those little scraps in your head,” Priest notes.

Another big break — for which she won a Pulitzer Prize — came when she completed a story about the black sites, secret overseas prisons. The story took more than two years to report, and, she says, reporting on the subject still didn’t get much easier — it took years for Congress to devote as much attention to it as reporters and defense lawyers were.

“Congress did nothing,” she says, “until political winds had changed, and the Democrats were feeling a little more at ease in the world. It’s a new feeling for them. Because, before, there were Democrats in those meetings saying, ‘Do what you’ve got to do.'”

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