Torture, and its attendant euphemisms (‘stress positions,’ ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘waterboarding,’ ‘enhanced coercive interrogation’), is back in the news. A new book by the British law professor Philippe Sands sets out in prosecutorial detail the complicity of senior members of the Bush administration in the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and beyond. Another book, by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, has revealed that last year the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned the CIA that its methods in the interrogation of a high-ranking al-Qaeda suspect were “torture” (not “tantamount to torture” as had been reported). Since torture is a criminal act under both American and international law, the Red Cross explicitly “warned [the Bush administration] that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
Sands and Mayer cannot be dismissed as legal or political malcontents. They make their cases with great care and both corroborate their charges extensively. After a condensed version of Sands’s allegations appeared in a recent edition of Vanity Fair, Douglas Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, claimed that he had been misquoted – unaware, perhaps, that Sands had taped their interview. Writing in the Washington Post, Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, also points out that Mayer’s sources are mainly “military officers, intelligence professionals, ‘hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system’ and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.” In other words, witnesses whose testimony will likely prove unanswerable in a court of law.
Beyond the myriad legal, moral and philosophical arguments that condemn torture, there are also sound practical reasons to avoid its use. Because a tortured person will often say anything to escape more pain, many seasoned intelligence officers disapprove of the practice because it generates misleading confessions and false leads. The most infamous instance of this, so far, is the information that Egypt’s torturers extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an alleged al-Qaeda commander. In the New York Times, Frank Rich notes that al-Libi’s “fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical WMD — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two FBI officials told Ms Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: ‘They were killing me. I had to tell them something.’”
Torture also tends to deepen the enemy’s resolve. Professor Sands recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that the British had learned this lesson at great cost in Northern Ireland. “On all military accounts,” Sands noted, “it extended the conflict by between fifteen and twenty years, because it creates such resentment in the community that is associated with the people who are being abused that it served to generate further opposition and people moving to violence.”
There is strong and growing evidence that the Bush administration’s decision to embrace torture has had similar consequences. Its manifold intelligence errors – many of which have been acquired through a willingness to rely on torture – have been disingenuously used to excite further support for the ‘war on terrorism,’ confusing America’s efforts to sort out real and present dangers from those which merely haunt the neoconservative imagination. Conversely, large numbers of young Muslims, understandably outraged by the Abu Ghraib photographs and reports from Guantanamo, have become dangerously vulnerable to the jihadists in their midst. These are indisputable consequences of the administration’s decision to torture, and the US Congress should bear them in mind while it tries to establish the facts of the matter.
Up to now the blame for ‘detainee abuse’ – Washington’s preferred term – has fallen squarely on the shoulders of ‘rotten apples’ like the guards at Abu Ghraib. But as Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Philippe Sands and others have shown, the intellectual authorship of these crimes belongs much higher up the chain of command. In April, when asked by ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz about the CIA’s interrogation of high-value al-Qaeda suspects, President Bush said that he was “aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” If accurate, the remark ought to attract the attention of any legal body that concludes that the American government has indeed committed torture, and that those responsible should be prosecuted for war crimes.
