I had mostly forgotten about Clinton-impeachment manager Asa Hutchison until he showed up a few weeks ago as a shill for the National Rifle Association. At that point, my impulse was to vomit on his face. But I see that he is a little more complicated than I thought. He has teamed up with James Jones, a Democrat and former ambassador to Mexico, to issue a non-partisan report condemning the Bush administration for torture.
Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.
“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.
“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”
He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”
Well, we’ve ratified a treaty that says that we won’t torture, so I suppose it would be a good idea if we didn’t.
In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.
But we can avoid fulfilling our responsibilities under the Convention Against Torture by simply refusing to call what we did torture.
The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.
I think that if Asa Hutchison, who tried to remove President Clinton from office for lying about an affair and who served in multiple positions in President Bush’s administration, can admit that we tortured people that the “new organizations” can drop the pretense that this is an open question.
But, of course, that would have certain logical and legal implications. Wouldn’t it?