Tortured Truth
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“Why are we talking about this at the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
—Attorney General John Ashcroft
Mark Danner’s 14,000-word scoop in the April 9 New York Review of Books will turn your coffee cold. Read it anyway. He got a copy of the Red Cross report on torture at CIA black sites and wants to ruin his readers’ day with blood and shit and shame. Abu Ghraib was amateur hour.
Americans hoped this had all been packed off to Texas with an unlamented ex-president. But Danner drags it out: “the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.”
Back when George W. Bush announced, in a show of public cleansing, that “high-value detainees” shuttled between secret facilities would be sent to Guantanamo where the Red Cross could vouch for their wellbeing, did he think they wouldn’t mention their lost years? The similarity of the prisoners accounts’ attests to their veracity.
In some cases, the lack of predictable gore disorients. Strapped to a bed in a very white room. Bright light. Freezing cold. Loud music. Nakedness. Time suspended. “I could not sleep at all the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face.” A ticket to madness is surely more legal but is it less cruel than physical pain?
There was plenty of that too. Daily beatings. “A towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall.” Forced standing with arms shackled overhead. Confinement in tomb-like boxes. We already knew about the waterboarding. “A doctor was always present, standing out of sight behind the head of [the] bed, but I saw him when he came to fix a clip to my finger which was connected to a machine. I think it was to measure my pulse and oxygen content in my blood. So they could take me to [the] breaking point.” At every way station, the White House signed off on this “alternative set of procedures”—while reassuring that we do not torture.
Danner isn’t naive: “These men almost certainly have blood on their hands, a great deal of blood. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. … From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished.”
Now they can’t be. As he pointedly notes, “The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits…”
After too many episodes of “24,” we’ve convinced ourselves that a single mastermind holds the key to disarming a ticking bomb if only we can pry it from him. But intelligence work isn’t tailored to fit an hour of primetime. Khaled Shaik Mohammed told the Red Cross, “During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill treatment stop. … I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent … wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red alerts being placed in the U.S.”
Surely he offered up some actionable tips, but were they worth it? Tally the cost. Vindication of our enemies’ nasty caricature. The moral, legal, and political mutations required to press a policy against our creed. And perhaps worst of all, Danner’s essential insight: an inability to prosecute men who probably deserve far worse than bright lights and loud music because we let pique outrun justice.
Filed under: War
In the words of Bill Clinton, “I feel your pain.”
You get a guy who is hiding explosives under a baby’s bed, and who is firing rockets from the back porch of an elementary school, while the children are in class, and you say you have reason to believe that he has killed thousands of people.
While he is being interrogated, both during the “good cop” phase, and during the “bad cop” phase, he is giving us false information.
Later, he is accusing his enemy of mistreating him, and his information is 100% reliable.
Works for me.
In the 60’s, under President Johnson, we were Green Berets. Those of us grunts saw our mission as two-fold: First, the US government thought that the campuses throughout America were going to erupt with communist-inspired riots. We spent a lot of time practicing non-lethal crowd-control. One day, half of us would wear civvies, and be the “college students”, and the next day we would be in uniform, trying to control our buddies.
Second, we laughed at the popular press, who thought that Green Berets were some sort of “marine-like” soldier. Our reason for being was to teach people from third-world countries to be terrorists, and teach them the science and survivability of disruptive actions. We were making it expensive for the Ruskies to control much of the world behind that impenetrable Iron Curtain.
We would sometimes go through “mock torture”, to teach us how to delay the transfer of information, and we would be teaching these techniques to the same folks we were training as terrorists.
If you asked Old Sarge, “How far should we go, if ever in battle?”, he would compare it to college hazing. The idea is to create fear and physical discomfort, but to not do permanent damage, physically. That was the 60’s. We knew that was our self-imposed limit, but not the enemies’.
We would ask Old Sarge about why we supported dictatorships. He would explain how we were in a global “life or death” battle between three or more countries, each of which had the power to extinguish human life on this planet. We had to prop up our friends, even if we dispised them, so as to be politically correct about not imposing our political and moral ideals upon them.
Then we would ask Old Sarge, “But what if they go rouge, or switch sides?” Then he would answer, shaking his head sadly, “We’ll probably have to go back and clean up after ourselves. It would be the right thing to do.”
If terms like “honor” and “American Exceptualism” are foreign to you, then you won’t have the foggiest idea what I am talking about.
Tom, I too was in the Army during Vietnam as an intelligence officer and absorbed the same wisdom you ascribe to your mentors. Remember the old attach the field telephone wires to the genitals trick? There wasn’t a course at Ft. Holabird telling us how to do it, but plenty of Old Sarges around who knew the ropes and passed on the technique. Problem was then and now that a lot of people who had nothing to do with terrorism or subversion were subjected to our ministrations. Once you start, it’s hard to stop, which I think is the point Kara is making and the line between good guy and bad guy becomes very blurry indeed. The other problem is that the guy who is the ticking bomb doesn’t really exist, except on television and in folklore. I know of no case where torturing someone actually saved anybody’s life, which is not the same as saying that I think the guy who has been caught in flagrante and is being tortured is Mother Teresa.
I was listening to a radio talk show the other day, and a pleading voice was asking that “we all just give Obama a chance”.
I thought: Yeah, right. Like you gave Bush a chance, calling him a vote-thief and a stupid public speaker, in the hours before his swearing-in ceremony. Like right after 9-11 when we thought there should be a pause, and we all pull together, but instead you were pretty sure Bush actually bombed the towers himself. Like we all laughed when Whoopie compared the President of the United States to her pubic hair.
When I hear the slogans, I remember the comedian who said you could just assign a number to different jokes. Then someone shouts out “42″ and nobody laughs, because some people just can’t tell a joke.
“Bush 41″, and people laugh. “Bush 43″ and people laugh, and curse.
But there’s a lot of room for factual and logical error when you hide behind those coded jokes.
“…a copy of the Red Cross report on torture…”
Is that the same outfit that was so upset about Sadaam’s boys running entire junior high school classes of girls through their rape-rooms? About hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in Iraqi mass-graves? Must have been a different outfit.
“Abu Ghraib was amateur hour.” Excuse me? Abu Ghraib was a criminal act, that we QUICKLY corrected. Was there evidence of a “cover-up”? There better have been. We are at WAR and that information would help the ENEMY if some US-hating person were to release it before we had a chance to bring to trial the people who did this. It is everything that decent Americans hate. Only people who hate us will believe that we condone such actions.
“Mark Danner’s 14,000-word scoop… Read it anyway.” I read EVERY word.
“The similarity of the prisoners accounts’ attests to their veracity.” Unless of course, they were coached by the same crooked attornies. Unless, of course, we believe there was “rendition”, in which case each prisoner would have very DIFFERENT experiences, if interrogated by different countries.
Do I believe BUSH when he says, “We don’t torture.”? Yes, I do. Supported by the fact that you, and other Bush-hating people, can ask THEM questions now, some years later.
How many words did Mr Danner expend in describing them having their heads pounded against a wall? Are you as upset by a 15-yearold girl’s self-inflicted scars on her forearms, as you are about the non-existent scars on these people’s faces? I have permanent, lifetime scars on my face from highschool football helmets.
Does McCain believe they were tortured? Yes. I don’t like him, but I respect him as a decent American. Does his opinion make my government criminal? No. Does he hold that opinion in order to aid the enemies of the US? No.
You, and Mr Danner, and Mr Leahy, need to take a lesson from Mr McCain.
Philip, you left some tricks out. Remember the old trick of doing a lot of dope first?
Then you get invited up into a helicopter, and they grab a tied up guy and hold him in the door, and begin asking him questions, until he pauses for breath, then they drop him out, and grab the next guy in line… …and they may or may not come back down with any prisoners.
Remember the unctious little Vietnamese officer who hands you the pistol, and asks if you want to put a bullet in the head of the prisoner?
Remember the VA Therapy rooms where you heard these stories, and the stories of the rape that ended with a bullet in the head of a 14 year old girl?
Philip, if you are real, then I respect you. But you are blurring the distinction between criminal acts and the Bush-hating crowd who are trying to invent a picture of a criminal Government waging a genicidal war against Israel-haters.
Go stand beside McCain, or Wesley Clark, or Colin Powell. But DON’T stand with liars and haters.
‘Later, he is accusing his enemy of mistreating him, and his information is 100% reliable.
Works for me.’
Reliable if corroborated, which it was. I understand your point and it sure looks a bit strange as you describe it but the situation is not exactly as you describe it. No one simply took a terrorists word that he was mistreated.
Torture happens because there is no consensus about the meaning and origins of the concepts that we use in government.
What is Law, and what is it’s purpose? The present working definition seems to be that law is a mechanism used by the state to prevent bad outcomes and ensure good ones. Thus, when extralegal methods become more attractive, the switch is easily made. The people in charge are above the law, since they believe that they have created it from nothing to serve their purposes.
A better, more historically Christian definition would be to say that Law is a limited human attempt to replicate God’s character. God embodies truth and consistency, so Law must first concern itself with those qualities before ever even thinking about potential outcomes. Justice, which might actually be said to be an outgrowth of truth and consistency, is a public good, but it isn’t a good so trivial that it can be traded off on the market of potential outcomes.
It is better for some people to die than for the whole community to be deprived of consistent Law. That’s the thinking that made this country a good place to live, that’s the thinking that’s implied in Constitutional oaths of office, and that’s the thinking that would have prevented the American Government’s torture problem from ever developing.
“The ICRC is concerned that any information it divulged about its findings in places of detention could easily be exploited for political purposes. It deplores the fact that confidential information conveyed to the US authorities has been published by the media on a number of occasions in recent years. The ICRC has never given its consent to the publication of such information.”
This is what they said at their official site, a few days ago.
http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/united-states-detention-faq-240209
Anyone want to bet that Mr Danner simply doesn’t care that he is interfering with the Red Cross’s ability to provide oversight?
Wow… a fine post, but TomT cranks up the crazy in comments. I had no idea “American Conservatives” were huge fans of torturing people.
This discussion was about the different and changing definitions of torture, and, about the tendency of some to fling charges of criminality and insanity at their political enemies.
NOBODY from either side of the discussion expressed a desire to see anybody tortured.
Why oh Why – what a perfect bookend to such a discussion, your comments make.
[...] to obey new congressional restrictions on torture—as Bush did with the 2006 McCain Amendment—or secretly violating the old ones for years? The latter, clearly. At least a signing statement puts you on [...]
[...] to obey new congressional restrictions on torture—as Bush did with the 2006 McCain Amendment—or secretly violating the old ones for years? The latter, clearly. At least a signing statement puts you on [...]