Washington has spent the last week debating the government’s decision to publicise the Bush White House’s torture memoranda. These memoranda were the legal shields which the Office of Legal Counsel patched together so that “enhanced interrogation techniques” could be used against high-level detainees. In their rush to escape judgement, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have met the disclosure of the memos with a sanctimonious outrage that is breathtaking, even by their own exalted standards. Cheney, who once referred to waterboarding as a “dunk in the water” has basically said that torture helped to keep America safe and that Obama will have to shoulder the blame if there is another terrorist attack. Rove has warned that the Obama administration could end up looking like a “Third World regime where the incoming junta of colonels [holds] show trials of their predecessors over policy differences.”
Rove’s image slyly puts forward the idea that advisers who wrote memos were earnestly exploring a different policy rather than knowingly facilitating an international crime. But careful accounts of what actually happened – by Jane Mayer, Philippe Sands and others – have shown quite clearly that this was not the case. Even Philip Zelikow, policy representative to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has written that when he circulated a critique of the “grave weakenesses” in the memos’ legal reasoning that the White House “attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.” Hardly the response, one imagines, of disinterested seekers of truth.
Obama has offered immunity to torturers who acted on the advice contained in these memos but the publication of the documents themselves still leaves open the prospect of senior members of the Bush administration being tried for war crimes. The response of the US media to this scenario has been very revealing. Far from calling for the trials of Addington, Bybee, Gonzalez and Yoo, the issue has been recast as a question of whether the administration will choose to look backwards or move on. David Frum, the Bush speechwriter behind the Manichean phrase “axis of evil,” has warned that such trials would be “one of the most dangerous decisions of [Obama’s] administration – and very possibly one of the most dangerous in the history of the American republic.” Frum’s view seems to have become the mainstream US media’s position: that it is better to let those who circumvented the constitution and deliberately allowed torture to become American policy rather than hold trials which could “plunge into a cycle of partisan reprisal.”
Those who live outside Washington’s hall of mirrors could be forgiven for thinking that this is fantastical nonsense. Why, they might ask, do politicians who make so much noise about being “tough on crime” lose all sense of righteousness when it comes to the torture of foreigners? Have they misunderstood the implications of what was done in their name?
In his belated apologia, Philip Zelikow points out that the legal rationale of the memos in effect argued that “the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.” Would the Congress, and the US media, remain so passive if they were confronted by a scenario in which, in Zelikow’s words, “Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest – if the alleged national security justification was compelling”? Perhaps not. Furthermore, does one need a lawyer’s opinion to know that beating someone, slamming them into walls, forcing them to stand in stress positions, soil themselves in diapers and endure simulated drowning is torture? Surely not.
Torture is an all or nothing proposition. If the only criterion for its usefulness is whether it makes a suspect give up information, then it works perfectly, for who would knowingly remain silent when threatened with the prospect of great pain and humiliation. What gets lost in the overheated “ticking bomb” scenarios, however, is that real intelligence work is hardly ever gathered in such dramatic fashion. There is no evidence, whatsoever, that torturers extract more or better information than skilled interrogators who stay within the limits set by the US constitution and the traditional laws of war. It is dishonest of those who would defend America’s torturers to suggest otherwise.
Officials in the Obama administration who fear the plunge into partisanship that Frum warns against should steel themselves with an alternative view of these matters, one which the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr offered to Jane Mayer when she asked him, over lunch at a “genteel Upper East Side French restaurant” what he thought of President Bush’s policy on torture. “With his trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and finally said, ‘No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.’” Surely that is closer to the truth.
