Bradbury testifying before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in Washington, DC, in 2013.Mother Jones illustration; Cliff Owen/AP
Two decades ago, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Steven Bradbury wrote a series of memos justifying waterboarding that former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called “permission slips for torture.”
Now, Bradbury is Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary.
When it comes to writing about why the United States can torture, Bradbury is less well-known than his former Justice Department colleague John Yoo. Still, he played a key role. Bradbury wrote three top-secret legal memos in 2005 that were essential to providing the Central Intelligence Agency with legal cover for subjecting detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. In the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 “torture report,” Bradbury’s name and memos appear 178 times.
In 2017, Trump picked Bradbury to be general counsel at the Transportation Department. After Trump left office, Bradbury served as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and played a key role in shaping the section of Project 2025 that covers the Department of Transportation. The president is now giving him a promotion. (The White House and Bradbury did not respond to requests for comment.)
Bradbury was confirmed in 2017 over the vehement objections of McCain, who was infamously tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The late Arizona senator argued about Bradbury’s legal opinions in a passionate floor speech in which he made that clear that the memos “provided a legal framework for the use of methods including waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture in which the victim suffers the terrible sensation of drowning.”
“We are speaking of an interrogation technique that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and has been a prosecutable offense for over a century,” McCain continued. “It is among the crimes for which Japanese war criminals were tried and hanged following World War II and was employed by the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.” McCain stressed that “a more meticulous justification for torture is still a justification for torture—and arguably a more pernicious one.”
Bradbury included an often sickening level of detail to support his conclusions in the memos, one of which ran 46 pages. It sanctioned thirteen interrogation techniques including “Dietary manipulation,” “Nudity,” “Cramped confinement,” “Stress positions, “Sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours,)” and “Waterboard.” There is also a paragraph largely devoted to justifying the CIA’s decision to force detainees to wear only an adult diaper:
If the detainee is clothed, he wears an adult diaper under his pants. Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary. The use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.
CIA records tell another story. They make clear that a central “purpose” of the diapers was to “cause humiliation” and to “induce a sense of helplessness,” according to the Senate torture report.
Bradbury also signed off on the CIA’s policy of forcing detainees to remain awake for potentially more than one week at a time. He concluded that forcing detainees to appear naked before male and female interrogators was acceptable partly because “it is very unlikely that nudity would be employed at ambient temperatures below 75°F.” Bradbury wrote that giving detainees only “bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete” foods was permissible partly because detainees were weighed weekly to ensure they were not losing too much weight. The amount of time detainees could be doused with 41-degree water—an excruciatingly low temperature—was calculated down to the minute following a review of the medical literature on hypothermia. About waterboarding, Bradbury’s memo explained:
We understand that the effect of the waterboard is to induce a sensation of drowning. This sensation is based on a deeply rooted physiological response. Thus, the detainee experiences this sensation even if he is aware that he is not actually drowning. We are informed that based on extensive experience, the process is not physically painful, but that it usually does cause fear and panic.
In blending a desire for order and cleanliness with a willingness to sanction almost unspeakable acts, Bradbury evoked some of the most shameful chapters of modern history. As Marguerite Feitlowitz writes about Argentina’s Dirty War in her book A Lexicon of Terror, “Language helps to ritualize torture; it lends structure, provides a ‘reason,’ an ‘explanation,’ an ‘objective.'” She continues, “Moreover, the special idiom provided categories for practices otherwise out of bounds. It was enabling.”
In another memo, Bradbury took on a different legal question: If the 13 interrogation techniques did not count as torture when used on their own, did it constitute torture when they were used in combination? No, Bradbury concluded. It did not.
Bradbury went on in the memo to write about using “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling and, at least at times, with use of a diaper), and dietary manipulation” to bring detainees to “‘a baseline dependent state.’” He frequently refers to his other writing in italicized shorthand: “As we discussed in Techniques…In Techniques, we recognized…In Techniques, we explained.”
He was using the royal we. Only Bradbury’s signature appears at the bottom of both memos.
McCain made his repulsion clear in his 2017 Senate speech. “The memos that bear his name made it possible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—a monster and a murderer, to be sure, but a detainee held in US custody under the laws of armed conflict—to be water-boarded 183 times,” the senator said. “This technique was used so gratuitously that even those applying it eventually came to believe that there was no reason to continue. They were ordered to do so anyway.”
He continued: “The memos that bear Mr. Bradbury’s name also made it possible for a Libyan detainee and his wife to be rendered to a foreign country, where that woman was bound and gagged while several months pregnant, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched…I am told that picture still exists, somewhere in the archives that record this shameful period in our history.”
