This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The things that come out of Donald Trump's mouth are often disturbing but sometimes ephemeral — he may say the exact opposite tomorrow, so it may not be worth getting too freaked out before we see whether his thoughts are translated into action. But here's a case where one of Trump's most horrifying impulses is on its way to becoming policy :

"An executive order apparently drafted by the Trump administration calls for a policy review that could authorize the CIA to reopen "black site" prisons overseas and potentially restart an interrogation program that was dismantled in 2009 after using methods widely condemned as torture.

"The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, would revoke former President Barack Obama's decision to end the CIA program and would require national security officials to evaluate whether the agency should resume interrogating terrorism suspects.

"The unsigned draft represents the clearest signal from President Trump that he intends to at least explore ways to fulfill campaign vows to return the CIA to a role that supporters claim produced critical intelligence on al-Qaida but that ended in a swirl of criminal investigations, strained relationships with allies, and laws banning the use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics."

We should remember that the black sites were set up by the Bush administration specifically for the purpose of torturing prisoners in places that would be beyond the reach of U.S. law and U.S. courts. They were torture dungeons, and that's what the Trump administration is considering bringing back.

Just so we understand what we're talking about, here's an excerpt of a Senate Intelligence Committee report that was made public in 2014:

"CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a 'dungeon.' Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique. At times, the detainees at COBALT were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. Other times, the detainees at COBALT were subjected to what was described as a 'rough takedown,' in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched."

Something like this is what Trump and his aides might bring back. One of the things that Republican voters found thrilling about Trump was that he made the implicit into the explicit, taking things that other politicians would only imply and shoving them right in your face with no ambiguity. Whether it was saying Mexicans are rapists or proclaiming "I'm, like, a smart person," it required no inference to figure out what he was trying to communicate.

So it is on torture as well. You'll recall that the Bush administration invented an absurd legal rationale for why torturing prisoners wasn't actually "torture," arguing among other things that if the torture you were inflicting wasn't severe enough to cause organ failure, then it wasn't really torture. They also invented a euphemism, "enhanced interrogation," which in addition to its intent of concealing the brutality involved was also meant to imply that these torture methods were somehow super-effective and clever, when in truth they were devised by a couple of incompetent outside psychologists who had zero experience in interrogation.

But Trump never bothered talking about "enhanced interrogation." Instead, he just called it what it is, one of the few times where his preference for the explicit provided some useful clarity. "As far as I'm concerned we have to fight fire with fire," he said in the insane interview he did with ABC News yesterday, citing as he often has before the fact that ISIS chops off people's heads. Which I guess means we should start chopping off people's heads, or that as a general rule we should sink to whatever moral depth our enemy resides at.

But here's a question that doesn't ever seem to get asked: Who exactly does Donald Trump want to torture?

It isn't as though we're holding a bunch of ISIS operatives who have information on "ticking bomb" plots that are already in motion, and if we subject them to enough sessions of waterboarding and stress positions (a time-honored torture technique designed to produce excruciating pain, which we used on suspected Al Qaida members) then they'll cough up the plans. That's not the nature of the conflict with ISIS — they don't carry out intricate 9/11-style plots directed from central command. We're working with allies in the Middle East to push them out of the areas they control in Iraq and Syria, and they encourage their followers to carry out low-tech, "lone wolf"-style attacks wherever they can. Even if you thought the use of torture was justified against Al Qaida, this is a fundamentally different kind of conflict.

Trump, however, doesn't seem to have given that any thought. He just knows that he wants to get tough, and torture is tough. Which is why he was shocked and amazed when his pick for Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, told him that torture is both ineffective and immoral. After all, he seems to have chosen Mattis mostly because he has a cool nickname ("Mad Dog"). That conversation happened some time ago, and Trump is still marvelling at it. In his interview with ABC, he said, "I have a general who I have great respect for, General Mattis, who said — I was a little surprised — who said he's not a believer in torture."

So Trump doesn't know who he wants to torture, and he doesn't know what information he wants to get from torture, he just thinks maybe we should torture somebody. For now, he says, he's going to take the recommendation of Mattis and new CIA director Mike Pompeo not to restart the torture program. But meanwhile his aides are circulating plans to reopen the black sites (or build new ones).

For their parts, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell say they're happy with the law on torture as it is, which means the 2015 law that mandated that interrogation of prisoners has to comply with the standards set out in the Army Field Manual, which forbids mistreatment of detainees. But given that like almost all Republicans they enthusiastically signed on with the Bush administration's torture program, I wouldn't expect them to stand up against Trump in some kind of profile in courage if he should get his wish on torture.

Which means whether America starts torturing prisoners again will probably depend on Donald Trump's whims. Isn't that encouraging?