Torture 

Torture

I'm not going to go through all of Glenn Reynolds' arguments on torture at Instapundit. I gather he is against torture; he does not think the Bush administration has ever authorized actual torture; he thinks cases of torture such as Abu Ghraib were aberrations, contrary to orders; and the debate about torture should not be used to undermine the war effort.

At one point (I can't find it quickly) he quoted with approval a reader or blogger saying: why does it seem the only choice is between the impractical and the unacceptable? "Impractical" means: all sane people know that torture might be "necessary" at times--that is, a decision would likely be made to use it in desperate circumstances, to save one's own people from a lot of suffering and death. And this is true whether or not there is good evidence that torture actually works in the sense of producing reliable information. "Unacceptable" means: we must proceed by recognizable and defensible standards and laws.

I find it hard to improve on Dahlia Lithwick. "Consistently throughout yesterday's testimony, Gonzales chose to be irresponsible, forgetful, and unaccountable on issues that warrant serious intellectual scrutiny."

Lithwick says if the U.S. actually had a senior Al Qaeda leader in custody, and were convinced he actually had information about an impending attack on the U.S., it would make sense to torture him. This implies, however, that the circumstances in which this is true are extremely limited--and so far, presumably, hypothetical. It does not seem that there are very many Al Qaeda people in Iraq; it does not seem that if they can be found, they have necessarily had anything to do with attacks on the U.S. There is all too much evidence that people have been rounded up, willy-nilly, and subjected to "abuse" (at a minimum) in the hope that they would say something useful about the war. The need for this amateurish operation arises from problems with the whole Iraq war: shortage of friendly people who know a lot about the country; shortage of people serving the coalition who speak Arabic or Farsi; inability to tell friend from foe, etc. Does all this amount to a justification for torture?

Senior U.S. officials go back and forth between saying they are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, and saying they are fighting "insurgents" who are basically Sunni Iraqis who are loyal to Saddam, or trying to hang on to power that they know will be lost under any kind of democratic rule. If the U.S. is basically intervening in a civil war that has been kindled or re-kindled by the U.S. invasion, which went beyond "decapitating" the regime of a corrupt tyrant and destroyed much of the infrastructure of government, is this a justification for torture?

Lithwick says Alberto Gonzales had an opportunity to explain what the Bush administration is doing the other day. If he had simply said: we know we have terrible enemies out there, and if we find them, it may be some of them must be tortured--he would have received a standing ovation. Instead he hedged on exactly what Bushies will do, in what circumstances. Of course, the President won't necessarily comply with an Act of Congress--but there shouldn't just be pronouncements that "we know better." Of course it isn't simply a matter of complying with the Geneva Conventions, or international law. But what are they saying?

For me this is part of the inarticulateness of the Bush administration. The president himself must be one of the most inarticulate leaders in the history of the English-speaking world. One thing that makes comparisons to Churchill and Lincoln ludicrous is that they were arguably the most articulate such leaders. Bush needs translators like Tony Blair or friendly pundits. So far, they have failed to explain the torture doctrine.

There is a clear sense that the President has very little interest in briefings or full, complex debates on issues. This is not unusual for decision-makers, but he may be at some kind of extreme--especially when you consider what seems to be his complete lack of knowledge of U.S. history, world history, geography, etc.

Lithwick again:

One of Gonzales' most plausible defenses of the "torture memos" is that they represent mere hypothetical speculation--a handful among many radical ideas that were batted around in a broad attempt to arrive at a national policy. On its face, this argument makes sense. No one should be judged on the contents of a single policy memo, devoid of context, prepared at the request of another. We've all written stupid arguments. But one of the tragic flaws in the Bush administration's fantasy "information-gathering" sessions is that the only ideas that get "batted around" come from an echo chamber of lock-jawed evangelists for unlimited executive powers. As the Washington Post pointed out again this week, key administration, State Department, and military officials were routinely precluded from batting around their ideas about wartime exigencies and presidential powers. This wasn't legal theorizing; it was a Federalist Society pep rally.


With a president who is notably incurious, and wants reassurance, the ideologues are able to set up, and then control, an echo chamber. They want maximum flexibility--even if that means flexibility to act without a good or sufficient reason.

UPDATE: As the last link (Wolcott via Atrios) indicates, there is now evidence that the Bushies are considering something like the death squadsor terror squads that were used in Central America in the 80s. The idea would be to intimidate the Sunni population at large, which has proven too pro-insurgency, or insufficiently pro-coalition. Bush defenders seem to be saying: there is no way we would do something terrible like that, but it's perfectly OK if we do.

UPDATE cont'd: Here is the link. As various sites indicate (Hit and Run among others), here is the nut graph on the need to terrorize the whole Sunni population--and after that, I guess, liberate them:

Maj. Gen. Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service...said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, 'are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.' He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. 'The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,' he said. 'From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.'


UPDATE II: Kaus seems to think there is a good case that the pro-torture memos circulating around the White House were quite separate from the chain of command at Abu Ghraib--which quite independently broke down, leading to lots of discipline problems in addition to the mistreatment of prisoners. Kaus also thinks torture actually works. He takes fairly seriously the stories that post-Abu Ghraib, the U.S. military is actually officially hamstrung in its interrogations--precluded even from using "good cop/bad cop." But he also asks: if bad things happen (only) when orders are disobeyed--how frequent an occurrence is this? One might add: do conditions on the ground make it more likely?

UPDATE III: Kaus graciously links to Marty Lederman, who is more criticalof a certain Heather MacDonald article (defending the Bushies) than Kaus is.

Lederman says it makes sense that it was the CIA that requested guidance on "how far they could go" with Al Qaeda suspects who were held somewhere other than on foreign soil, and thus triggered the pro-torture memos. If so, at least one of Gonzales' statements at his hearing is "increasingly implausible." The military normally function under far more restrictions, when it comes to torture, than the CIA, most notably the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Contrary to what MacDonald says, it's pretty clear the Pentagon then adopted the CIA guidelines. MacDonald, according to Lederman, fails to explain how practices that have been proved on the part of U.S. personnel are consistent with the law, including the UCMJ; indeed, "she fails even to mention the UCMJ."

The Bushies refuse to explain exactly what they are doing, to whom, for what reason, and how their practices match the laws they profess to be defending and indeed spreading around the world.

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