"The Torture Report": Inspiring?

On the Media had a brief interview today with Larry Siems, the principle author of an ACLU project that hopes to create an accessible narrative about post-9/11 anti-terrorist activities from thousands of pages of documents the ACLU obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

When I heard about the project, I was prepared to be depressed--especially when I heard the title: The Torture Report. I expected something along the lines of Mayer's The Dark Side.

There's good reason to be depressed, of course. The Torture Report's first chapter--all that is written so far, I understand--begins its narrative with events of Sept. 17, 2001, the day that President Bush signed a secret directive authorizing secret interrogation facilities. Also, at that time, Bush Administration lawyers wrote a memo declaring that the president may use the military on U.S. territory--in defiance to Congress, who, while granting the president authorization to use force in Afghanistan, had just refused to grant him that power.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to hear Siems announce that he was, in fact, inspired by what he found when sifting through the mountains of documents: "There are an abundance of characters," he said, "who exhibit extraordinary courage and conscience along the way in this story--more than we ever knew."

In the interview, he reads the account of one interrogator, for example, who stood up to Special Forces troops who were harrassing--if that's quite the word for the fear they inflicted--a prisoner she was interrogating. This interrogator concludes her account with a defense of the Geneva Conventions: "if I don't honor it," she said, "what right to I have to expect any other military to do so?"

A month later, President Bush signed an order declaring that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners.

Siems' discovery--and the insight that I hope The Torture Report gets across--is that while a lot of really bad things were going on, there were, as Siems puts it, "so many people who looked at the same set of facts about the threats that we face and never moved in this direction, and when others moved in this direction they objected. We as a country owe it to those people to look at the whole story and to honor what they've done."

I want to hear more stories like this--not because I think people like Mayer are wrong (I reviewed her book favorably awhile back), or that they are focused on the wrong things, or anything like that. On the contrary, we need to look unblinking at what happened, in part to hold responsible parties to account, and in part to ensure that such abuses can't happen again.

But I do want to honor those who resisted the Dark Side. And I'm heartened to know that it was more than just a few brave people who did so.