"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.

Confirmed: The Dark Side

About a month ago, I blogged a bit about Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. I was convinced by her argument, but one always wonders about them there journalists and their godless liberal agendas....

Enter the U.S. Senate’s Report of the Committee on Armed Services, dated Nov. 20, 2008 – about four months after Mayer’s book was published – which was just put up on the Senate’s website.

I’ll need some time to slog through the 263-page document, but I found this nugget in the Executive Summary. There’s a lot packed into one short paragraph, so savor it:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

This is pretty much Mayer's thesis.

Score one for the journalist....

Book Review: The Dark Side

Jane Mayer sums up her book on "The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals" with the opinion of Phillip Zelikow, a historian and lawyer who had been Executive Director of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and then aide to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. His view:

In time, [Zelikow] predicted, the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools." (335)

The Dark Side describes this "descent into torture." It's a disturbing look at the way "zealots and fools" in the Bush Administration – folk like Cheney, Addington, and Rumsfeld, along with a slew of people seduced or bullied by their rhetoric (it's hard to say where Bush falls in this list – driving policy, or seduced by it) – created quasi-legal justifications for the use of torture against suspected terrorists – many, if not most, of whom were innocent, sometimes obviously so – and then subverted Congress's and the Supreme Court's attempts to reign in the abuses.

Mayer's title comes from an appearance by Cheney on Meet the Press just a few days after 9/11 (Sept. 16, 2001, to be precise):

"We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney explained.... "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies – if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh , so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objective." (9-10)

I'm embarrassed to admit that in the immediate shadow of 9/11, I wouldn't have been too dismayed by such rhetoric. The "fear and anxiety" that Zelikow points to, and the sense of helplessness, made it easy to want a strong response, even one that dealt with the bad guys on their terms. But, like many, I (finally!) grew increasingly uncomfortable when bits and pieces of what this "dark side" comprised found its way into the press: the "black sites" (secret CIA prisons), "extraordinary rendition" (exporting suspects to countries know to use torture), Guantánamo and its lack of due process for "unlawful enemy combatants," and – of course – Abu Ghraib.

Even so, I had no clue about the breadth and depth of the Administration's disregard for the rule of law. The problem is that any one of these issues, though raising serious concern, could be dismissed as a mistake, maybe even a right-minded one. But Mayer's book brings all these issues together, building a narrative that demonstrates a concerted expansion and abuse of executive power that flouted international law – not to mention U.S. law and the Constitution that executive power is supposedly sworn to uphold.

Waterboarding offers a good case study for what I'm talking about here. There was lots of discussion – in Congress, in the press – about whether or not waterboarding should be considered torture. Some people decried the practice unequivocally; for example, though I'm not a fan, John McCain made his opposition perfectly clear, even while other Republican candidates waffled around him:

All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today [in Myanmar].... It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." (171)

Others supported waterboarding, in theory and/or practice, arguing that – in carefully supervised conditions, or with a short enough duration, or with the right motives – it does not rise to the level of torture and should therefore be part of U.S. interrogators' arsenal.

Mayer's book, though, suggests that this focus on waterboarding actually served as a distraction. Alberto Mora – General Counsel of the Navy and, in fact, a strong Bush supporter – reviewed transcripts of one interrogation and concluded that the media "focused too narrowly" on allegations of torture, especially on waterboarding (the "sine qua non of criminality"). The problem, for Mora, is the notion of "state-sanctioned cruelty":

"If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationships of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America – even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles." (219)

Focusing attention on waterboarding drew attention away from larger, more important issues, both at a macro and a micro level. At the micro level, it drew attention away from the (appalling) laundry lists of sanctioned interrogation techniques, in which each item might pass muster, but in combination with others – often the practice – clearly crossed the line. (I must emphasize that each item might pass muster; many items in these lists are decried by human rights groups as being clearly examples of torture.) And at the macro level, it drew attention away from deeper human rights questions about whether we even want to be playing in the neighborhood of what Mora called "cruelty" – and not cruelty in an abstract, touchy-feely sense, but as a Constitutional issue of human rights.

As with the issue of waterboarding, it's easy to get lost in individual issues – losing sight of the forest, as the cliché goes, for the trees. Mayer's book brings the forest into focus, highlighting patterns that can only materialize when seen in relationship to a larger set of issues.

In the end, Mayer convinced me that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is right:

When asked what he thought of President Bush's policy on torture, he peered over his glasses and paused [ah, purple prose!]. Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency had described Richard Nixon as pushing the outer limits of presidential power.... With his trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and finally said, "No position has done more damage to the American reputation in the world – ever." (9)