If you’ve been watching the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, it has no doubt come to your attention that the Republican Senators, when they ask their questions of the various witnesses are all reading from the same script. And it is also apparent that they could care less what answer they get back. Many of their questions are purely rhetorical, and are asked only to present the arguments as to why the Bush adminstration was right to do what it did when it authorized the use of what the Gestapo first called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to claim that they didn’t do anything immoral when they interrogated prisoners harshly.
The problem for many of these Republicans is that their questions expose justifications for torture that are inconsistent and inaccurate. So for the benefit of anyone still in doubt regarding the criminality of what the Bush/Cheney regime ordered CIA and military interrogators to do to obtain “actionable intelligence” lets go over those arguments one by one, shall we? Let’s begin with the one that former Bush officials originally used to coerce/convince the CIA and the military that what they were being ordered to do was legitimate.
1. It’s Not Really Torture
This is the argument that the infamous torture memos written by John You, Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury while they served as lawyers for the Office of Legal Counsel (i.e., the OLC) during the Bush years tried to make, presumably with a straight face. The enhanced interrogation techniques, or EIT, discussed in therein were all allegedly legal so long as the interrogators stayed one smidge from crossing some arbitrary line (which in many cases was pretty vaguely described). Well, it’s bull, of course. Just read the Bush OLC memos which approved the use of EIT, if you haven’t already. You’ll be appalled if you have any conscience at all.
(cont.)
Then recall that after WWII we tried and convicted the Nazis and members of the Japanese military for employing the very same “enhanced interrogation techniques” which the Bybee memo described. These are the same “techniques” which were condemned when they were practiced by the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Vietnam, etc. on their own people and on captured US soldiers as a violation of both human rights and the Geneva Conventions against torture and abusive treatment.
Remember also that the use of waterboarding employed by a Texas sheriff and his deputies to coerce a confession from a suspect in their custody was prosecuted as a crime by the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice in 1983. The sheriff was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. In other words, US attorneys appointed by President Reagan, a Texas jury and the judge in the case held that the use of waterboarding was a crime.
Finally, we know that the Bush administration solicited a torture “wish list” from the military which used SERE (i.e., Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training to prepare US soldiers for the possible torture they might undergo if captured (the SERE program was developed after we saw the effects of the torture employed by the Communist Chinese against American POWs in the Korean War to obtain false confessions). We know that the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, or JPRA, the military department which runs the SERE program, warned the Bush administration in 2001, and again in 2002, that the techniques used in SERE training constituted torture.
We also know that the Bush administration saw fit to classify the torture memos written by its OLC lawyers as top secret. We know that some members of the Bush administration wrote memos which dissented from the view expressed by OLC lawyers Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury that EIT was not torture, and the Bush administration had those dissenting memos destroyed. And we know for years that top Bush administration officials openly lied to the public that we were using these torture techniques to obtain intelligence information.
These are not the actions of people who sincerely believed or trusted that what they were doing was legally not torture. Quite the contrary. These are the actions of people who know that what they ordered would be considered war crimes by the vast majority of legal scholars and ordinary people around the world.
To sum up, this is not a a very convincing argument to make, considering the history of how such “techniques” were treated under both American and international law. Nonetheless, we continue to hear former Bush officials such as Vice President Cheney, Republican Senators and Representatives, Fox News analysts and “entertainers” like Rush Limbaugh continue to assert what is clearly false: that EIT did not legally constitute torture. Because they do.
2. The Democrats Knew about Torture and Did Nothing.
The next line of attack you often hear from Republicans is that senior Democrats knew about the torture the Bush administration was using against detainees but did nothing. The principle figure at which this argument is directed is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It’s claimed that she was fully informed about the EIT and made no objection, a charge, which she continues to insist is untrue, even going to the extent of claiming yesterday that the CIA lied to her about what its interrogators were doing to detainees and when they did it.
To me this is the most laughable, farcical argument the Republicans raise. It’s the equivalent of that famously ineffective childish retort “I know I am, but what are you?” Think for a minute. Attacking Democrats like Pelosi for their alleged knowledge about the Bush/Cheney torture program completely undercuts the argument that the EIT was not torture, that it was all perfectly legal. For this charge to have any weight at all, one must admit that torture was being employed by the CIA and the US Military against detainees at Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in secret CIA prisons around the world. Otherwise, what is so damning? If EIT practices weren’t torture, if they were necessary and effective and legal, then the knowledge or lack thereof of the Democrats is irrelevant.
This argument, to have any impact, must implicitly accept what so many of us on the left and the right have been saying for years: that what Bush ordered the CIA to do was torture, plain and simple. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats not objecting to these EIT practices. Only if one admits that these “techniques” were morally and legally indefensible as torture does this claim taint senior Democrats who had knowledge of what the Bush administration, the CIA and the Pentagon were doing to obtain information.
Second, the whole concept that knowledge alone by a passive observer of an illegal activity excuses the actions of those who carry out that crime is absurd. In some cases we hold individuals guilty for failing to act to prevent a crime, but that never excuses the perpetrators who actively take part in the criminal conduct. For the purposes of argument, let’s assume the worst case scenario: that the Bush administration fully disclosed the details of their torture program to Pelosi and Senator Bob Graham and other elected officials in the Democratic Party, and that these individuals gave their full and complete, unqualified consent to what President Bush’s authorized to the CIA and the military to torture detainees in their custody.
To be clear, the uncontested facts as we know them do not support that contention (we know, for example, that Rep. Jane Harmon did object in writing to the use of torture when she replaced Pelosi as the senior ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee), but let’s ignore that for the moment. Let’s also ignore the fact that under the law as it currently exists, Pelosi and other Democrats who were briefed on torture were sworn not to disclose this information to anyone. What does this disclosure of the use of torture by the CIA, etc. mean for those who ordered and justified the torture of detainees in the Bush/Cheney “War on Terror?” Does it excuse their actions. Does it magically exonerate them from any charge that they committed a war crime by ordering the use of torture? Does it have any effect on their culpability for this crime against humanity (and under US law) in any way, shape or form?
Of course not. It is simply an attempt to distract us from the debate we should be having, which is whether former Bush officials should be investigated and/or indicted for ordering the use of torture in violation of US and international law. The complicity of certain senior Democrats due to their alleged knowledge of this torture is irrelevant. These Democrats could not and did not control the actions of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others in the decision to employ torture. Nothing they did or did not do had any influence whatsoever on the decisions of these former senior Bush officials to justify and authorize the use of torture in violation of US law, our treaty obligations and their moral obligations to refrain from acting no better than the Nazis, the Japanese militarists, and various monarchs tyrants, dictators, despots and other despicable characters throughout history.
To argue other wise is absurd.
3. Torture Works and Saved Lives.
This is the final fallback position for the torture apologists in the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement. And I must confess, that I agree with the first part of this claim. Torture does work. It works incredibly well. It has been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years by various groups, states and others authorities (see, e.g., the Inquisition) because there is no better method of obtaining a false confession from an individual.
Want to condemn someone as a witch? Torture them. Want to make US military officers confess they committed war crimes? Torture them. Want to condemn prisoners as enemies of the state who deserve imprisonment or execution? Torture them. Want to prove that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein with respect to the 9/11 attacks, despite the fact that the two were mortal enemies? Torture an Al Qaeda operative until he gives you what you want: a confession that “proves” Saddam helped Al Qaeda, thus helping to justify a war against Iraq.
So yes, it works if you want to validate a predetermined outcome or preordained assumption, or obtain evidence to justify a decision you have already made, such as the decision to invade and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
But does it also work to provide valuable intelligence that one can not otherwise obtain, specifically intelligence that saved American lives? Not according to what we know now. Indeed, experts in the art of interrogation almost unanimously contend that torture provides very unreliable intelligence and is a very ineffective means to obtain information because the person being subjected to torture will say anything, confess to anything, to make it stop, even when they know that their confession will be used to justify their own execution. As Jesse Ventura so eloquently stated the other day on Larry King:
I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
Dick Cheney may be guilty of a lot of things, but the Tate murders are probably not one of them. But then, how many people who have been tortured were guilty of the crimes to which they confessed? You cannot know, just as you cannot know that anything which comes out of the mouth of a tortured man or woman is the truth or merely what he or she believes the torturer wants to hear from them. It certainly doesn’t work as well as other, far more effective interrogation methods still being taught today which seek to build rapport and establish trust between the interrogator and the person being interrogated.
So, in the end, what do these arguments amount to? A amalgamation of lies, spin, and finger pointing that proves nothing other than how low Republicans will go to justify the crimes committed by former President Bush, Vice President Cheney and all the other individuals in the Bush administration who participated in destroying the reputation of our country as a nation of laws, not men, as a civilized nation, as a nation that would not stoop to violating fundamental tenets of human decency. Apparently Republicans want to sweep this whole mess under the rug and ignore that crimes against humanity were committed by a President of their party in order to limit the damage done to their party’s future political prospects. Or maybe they want to lay the groundwork for blaming for the next terrorist attack on Democrats. Or maybe they simply want to reverse the progress this country and much of the world has made in the area of human rights by putting torture and aggressive war back on the menu of acceptable practices for nation states to employ in the pursuit of their interests. Frankly, God only knows what it is they think they are accomplishing.
But one thing is clear to me, and I hope to everyone who reads this essay. What they haven’t managed to do is justify or excuse the practice of torture either as a necessary evil in wartime, or a practice that is or should be legal and acceptable in a “Post 9/11” world. Their continued attempts to do so only call down further opprobrium upon themselves and their party. Let us all hope that most Americans come to see through their lies and obfuscations to the immoral nature of the actions they are taking in defense of the indefensible.
