THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE
I was a johnny-come-lately to the idea that the severe interrogation techniques being employed against some prisoners held by the US crossed the line of legality and constituted illegal torture. Chalk it up to excessive partisanship. Or ignorance. Or perhaps fear of going against the grain of conservative opinion in the blogosphere.
The fact is, for more than a year after I began blogging, I either excused or ignored evidence that proved the Bush Administration was guilty of sacrificing our most cherished values in order to protect us. It wasn’t until early November of 2005 that I offered a somewhat rambling discourse on why torturing prisoners besmirched our nation’s good name and made the Bush Administration complicit in violations of American and international law. Despite being troubled by the evidence previous to that, I said nothing, wrote nothing, except the usual talking points still found, it pains me to say, in most conservative and Republican internet salons today.
What changed my mind? I tried to reconstruct my thought process by going through my archives and it turns out that there were two people whose writing finally opened my eyes to the illegalities being practiced by the Bush Administration - two writers who I rarely read today for reasons not related to the torture issues but who I must give credit for forcing me to look at the horror and reach the same conclusion they had; John Cole and Andrew Sullivan.
To those who are now nodding their heads with a knowing smirk on their face I will only say this; outright dismissal of views based solely on a writer’s ideological or even political leanings is the mark of the incurious and the ignorant. A grain of salt or two is helpful to be sure. Skepticism, the philosopher/educator Thomas Dewey remarked, is “the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.” And I am no doubt as guilty as the next blogger of being too quick with the snark when it comes to evaluating the case being made by an ideological opponent rather than using reason and logic to demolish an odious point of view.
Be that as it may, those two gentlemen’s writings were seminal in changing my opinion about what the Bush Administration was doing in our name. The fact that they believed sincerely they were doing it to protect us is not a valid excuse or justification. The idea that American military trainees also are forced to endure some of the “enahanced interrogation techniques” is the reasoning of a sophist. The trainees are not in United States custody and therefore, the officers responsible for these exercises are not subject to the same laws that military and intelligence professionals were required to follow with detainees - as were all officals in the Bush Administration. And whether you believe the Geneva Convention applied in the case of “enemy combatants” is also beside the point; no one repealed American law under which the Bush Administration was required to operate. As the Bybee memo proves beyond any reasonable doubt, the Administration was seeking a legal fig leaf in order to skirt that law as well as international treaties of which we are a signatory that clearly defines torture.
IN OUR NAME: The newly released torture memos are cold-blooded and clearly client-driven - the lawyers knew the answers they wanted and reasoned backwards.
The same could be said of the Yoo memos when the Bush Administration was seeking legal justification for their torture. Yoo knew full well what the Administration wanted - a sort of “Get out of jail free” card that would cover their behinds if anyone ever found out what they were doing. While this is true, there is another dynamic at work that seems to get short shrift by Bush Administration critics -a dynamic that, in some ways, makes the lawbreaking even more chilling.
Sure, they wished above all else to protect America from another attack. The sincerity of their beliefs must be granted them else one wanders off into territory reserved for kooks who believe Bush was a sadist and enjoyed torturing people. That they displayed enormous hubris in giving the middle finger to the law and proceeding marks them as cynics of the highest order.
Again, Maguire:
The US concern about actually harming someone comes through on every page. In fact, at one point (p. 36 of .pdf) the legal team wonders whether it would be illegal for the interrogators to threaten or imply that conditions for the prisoner could get even worse unless they cooperate. I suppose these memos will provide welcome reassurance of our underlying civility to both the world community and the terrorists in it.
The same holds true when discussing the “insect war” being fought on the internet today. The news that the Administration considered using one detainee’s fear of insects to extract information by locking him in a small box and telling him a stinging bug was in there with him is being derided on the right and used as proof that Bush was inhuman on the left. Both sides are wrong on this one. Using the threat of a stinging insect on someone with a phobia knowing it will terrorize him is clearly psychological torture and violates both US law and the Geneva Convention. But please, let’s not exaggerate or use wild hyperbole to make this any more than it is; one more example of the law being tossed aside - and not a particularly egregious example at that. The technique was never used.
Andrew Sullivan, who ridiculously complained yesterday when, a couple of hours after the memos had been released, some conservative writers had not commented on them, nevertheless reaches into the past to get to the heart of what the airing of this chapter in American history means:
Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true.
Sullivan and many on the left have raised the specter of the Gestapo and Nazi Germany when discussing the techniques used on detainees but I think that misses the point. As Maguire points out, the Administration seemed torn about actually injuring even the worst of the terrorists they wished to single out for this treatment. Rather, it is the chilling, cold blooded legalese used by Bybee and the others that Andrew correctly judges as “the banality of evil.” It is reminiscent of the minutes that were found after World War II from the Wannsee Conference - the meeting of high level SS officers and Nazi party officials that developed “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” The bureaucratic language of murder far surpasses in evil what the Bybee memo reveals. But the tone is the same - a detatched, unemotional accounting of various torture regimes, whether they would hurt too much, whether the subject would be in any danger, how much psychological damage would be done by employing these techniques, and what kind of legal exposure interrogators would have. (Another, less apropos parallel but still relevant, would be some of the memos from I.G. Farban to the extermination camp commandants where the mass gassing of human beings using Zyklon-B was touted in language that must be read to be believed.)
No, Bush is not like Hitler nor is his Administration or Bybee fascist or Nazi. But when reading the Bybee memo (I have read only one of the Bradbury memos), you feel unclean - as if you were reading something that might be contagious. What in God’s name got into these people? You wonder what the hell the gentleman was thinking when he wrote it. Did he grasp the fact that he was in the process of justifying the deliberate infliction of pain on another human being? I suppose lawyers can do just about anything - defending Bin Laden in an American court if it comes to that - but Bybee, like a good little bureaucrat, followed orders issued by his superiors and what emerged from his mind and pen puts a terrible coda on Bush era policies that broke American and international law.
President Obama, required by law, released these memos and then appropriately gave a pass to the men and women who operated under their legal guidelines. Overall, he is showing a sensitivity to the issues that most of us on the right are not giving him much credit for. He has not recommended prosection of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other high level Administration officials - yet. It could be he is waiting to see which way the political wind blows. It could be he is reluctant to distract the country from what he considers more important business. It could even be that he may wish to employ some of the same techniques against high value targets in the future and doesn’t want to close down any of his options. I believe, like myself, he really doesn’t know how to proceed. Will there be war crimes trials? A special prosecutor? A blue ribbon, “non-partisan” truth commission? I doubt whether he even wants to make that decision which means he will leave it to the Democratic Congress. If so, I have little hope that anything useful will emerge from anything the rabid Bush haters, who spent 8 years undermining the policies of a Republican president, can come up with.
I am done writing trying to convince conservatives that I am right by arguing nits. I came to the conclusion that despite what I see as clear evidence of lawbreaking, others on the right sincerely believe otherwise. But if there are any conservatives out there reading this who are continuing to defend these actions by President Bush and his people but nevertheless feel troubled and unsure, I urge you to take a fresh look at the issues - if only to buttress your own defense. There is no shame in changing your opinion if you expose yourself to new facts, new insights and look at the issue from a new perspective.