It’s Torture!

Like Tito, Michael, Jermaine, and Marlon, the New York Times is putting on its fancy dance steps and wailing out “Torture”. But, like the Jacksons, it’s mostly flash and little substance. Here’s the real nut of the story, where the Times both does and undoes itself.

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Watch the fancy dance steps after the jump.

Slaps to the head? Loud music in a cold cell? Folks, that isn’t torture, not by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. You could make a case that waterboarding might fit, but it’s not a case that I’d believe. Breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, twisting your arms behind you so tightly that your shoulders dislocate and your elbows meet – those things are torture. Sticking a wet cloth over a guy’s mouth and pouring water on it to make him think he’s drowning, when he’s nowhere near drowning isn’t even remotely close to torture, period. It may be harsh. It may make us wince. But it’s not torture and putting it in that category dimishes the actual torture that is occurring around the world right now. Like, say, in Mad Mahmoud’s prisons or the secret dungeons in Burma. It is true that “many…say” that our techniques are less efficient. Many others disagree. It’s disingenuous of the Times to represent only one side of the argument. Their bias hides behind the weasel word “many”.

It’s also pretty misleading to say that the United States had never “authorized” such treatment before. It’s true that the Bush administration was the first to clearly codify what interrogators could and could not do. They did that, not to “authorize” torture, but to give the folks who did interrogations clear guidelines on what would and would not likely land them in prison. The administration built the guidelines so that we could safely interrogate terrorists and other prisoners with nice clear lines about what would and would not be allowed. Before that, our interrogators had been working with only the most basic guidelines abuot what might or might not be appropriate, consistent with the Geneva Conventions. The problem with that is that the terrorists we had in custody weren’t (and still aren’t) specifically covered under the Conventions. They’re not members of an army who can be taken as POWs nor are they simple civilians. They’re hostile combatants without uniform or authority who hide among civilians and use them as both shields and weapons.

So came the new guidelines. Contrary to the implication in the Times’ piece, the guidelines were necessary to protect our people from misguided prosecution and also to provide a solid set of guidelines with which we could train new interrogators. The Times itself proves that point by anecdote.

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”

So, the guidelines, which never existed before, had to exist in order to safeguard the security and professional reputations of the people who were doing very necessary, though distasteful, work.

The rest of the piece is the usual history, as the Times presents it. Noble dissenters spoke out to prevent helpless men of unknown extraction from horrible torture at the hands of a President run amok. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. What I do find interesting is that one of the noble dissenters, who took on the evil John Yoo, is one of the people most demonized by the left during the early years of the administration, John Ashcroft. I wonder how many on the left will praise him now after heaping steaming mounds of ridicule on him the entire time he served as Attorney General. I wonder how many on the right now wish we had someone of his keen competence and forthright demeanor back after watching Alberto Gonzalez bumble his way around the Justice Department.

Here is the real nut of the story. The Bush administration was faced, in late 2001, with a situation no administration had ever faced. We had been attacked, not by another nation-state, but by a large group of fanatics bent on our destruction organized into cells and supported either materially or in spirit by many nation-states. Our traditional means of getting intelligence, of handling captives, of fighting the war that they had been waging without pretense and out in public against us for years were all woefully inadequate. We needed brand-new ways of doing things that we had never done before. It would certainly have been nice had the last administration, who had eight years to lay some groundwork in the face of frequent attacks, done anything worthwhile but, unfortunately for us, that President decided to kick the ball to the next guys in the White House. So, in late 2001, George Bush was playing catch-up and delay meant more dead Americans. In many ways we are still playing catch-up. More than a few members of Congress aren’t at all serious about the war we’re in. Indeed, more than a few of them refuse to concede that we’re even in a war at all. Our MSM has abdicated its role and had gone over to advocacy, opinion, and lobbying disguised as objective reporting.

What would you or I do if in that role? I’ll tell you exactly what we’d do. We’d do what the President did. We’d assemble our experts, listen to what they had to say, and make the best decision we could with the information we had. Anyone who says otherwise is simply fooling themselves and trying to pull one over on you, too.

There’s one last gem right at the end of the piece that’s worth addressing, too. Here’s the quote.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.

I wonder if Mr. Hutson can give one example of a time when such protest did any good at all. I’m sure he knows very well that our prisoners have been subject to real honest-to-God torture regardless of our position on the subject. Our good behavior has never been a deterrent to bad behavior. Our prisoners were tortured in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Islamists have been torturing and murdering our soldiers and civilians since well before 9/11. It has never mattered to our enemies how we treated their soldiers, except where we have been able to apply direct force (not necessarily military force) on them. Mr. Hutson seems worried about our ability to “protest”. I think he’s naive for believing that a protest is worth a plugged nickel.

(via memeorandum)

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, The Long War Here At Home