President Obama made the difficult decision today to release four "Torture Memos" - documents which reveal the extent to which the Bush Administration went to construct a secret torture program and hide its existence from the world. The details are as gruesome and horrifying as one would expect, and paint a depressing picture of how completely our government strayed from our core values in the elusive pursuit of security.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote that language was the "ultimate weapon" in its power to mask and mislead. In the novel, a totalitarian regime slowly replaced English (which they called Oldspeak) with "Newspeak", an exercise in linguistic trickery that obscured the truth in words and created new terms, sometimes words that had contradictory meanings, leading to what Orwell termed "Doublethink".
Thus did President Bush change to "torture" to "enhanced interrogation techniques," waterboarding and hypothermia to "alternative set of procedures," and so on, in an effort, in Orwell's prophetic words, "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
The memos paint a chilling picture. The specific instances of torture are sickening. A prisoner locked in a "confinement box" with an insect he was told would sting him, because officials believed he suffered from an insect phobia. Prisoners deprived of sleep for up to 11 days and nights, leading to hallucinations and other physiological conditions that necessitated the wearing and frequent changing of diapers. Prisoners subjected to what was termed "walling," a "technique" where they were thrown against a wall, or their heads were slammed against a wall, with a thick towel or collar tied around their necks to prevent whiplash and concussion. And, of course, waterboarding:
"Water is applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. The cloth is lowered until covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual's blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breathe. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of "suffocation and incipient panic," i.e., the perception of drowning. The individual does not breathe any water into his lungs. During those 20 to 40 seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches. ...[T]his procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning."What is much more depressing is the banality with which the counsel's office and Administration officials succeeded in convincing themselves that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" were safe, not torture, and morally justifiable. This was the intent of the memos. To find every possible legal justification for torture. To find those legal justifications, these people, from Dick Cheney to John Yoo to Steven Bradbury to Jay Bybee to George W. Bush himself - these human beings, had to morally justify it to themselves first.
Bradbury, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, argued that EIT's were acceptable because procedures were in place to prevent serious harm. 11 days of sleep deprivation were OK, as long as you gave the prisoner 2 nights' rest to recover. Waterboarding was OK, as long as you didn't perform it more than twice in any 24-hour period.
Why did they do this? Andrew Sullivan writes:
The core point of this, one infers from the memos, is to create a sense among the prisoners that their assumptions about the West, the US, and countries constructed on the rule of law are without any basis whatever. The torture techniques were all the more brutal in order to push back against the reputation of the US even in the minds of Qaeda or alleged Qaeda members. What Mukasey and Hayden are arguing for today is a scheme whereby, in secret, the US government credibly allows captives to believe they are in an endless, bottomless pit of extra-legal terror. This is the state of mind they are trying to construct by torture. That's the point of the sensory deprivation, the disappearances, the sequestering from the Red Cross, the endless solitary confinement, the IRFing, the hoods, the nudity, and all the other sadism. It is precisely to persuade the barbarians that we are as bad as they are and have no limits and no qualms in doing to them whatever we want.This brings us to Barack Obama. My first feeling is relief - that Obama won, not McCain, or Romney, or, God forbid, Guiliani. Imagine what such a well-constructed secret torture machine might have perpetrated under them. My second feeling is one of concern: Is Obama's decision not to "lay blame" the right one? Yesterday, the President wrote:Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
At a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future. The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.We should not underestimate the political courage it took for Obama to release these Torture Memos. As Glenn Greenwald of Salon writes:
In the United States, what Obama did yesterday is simply not done. American Presidents do not disseminate to the world documents which narrate in vivid, elaborate detail the dirty, illegal deeds done by the CIA, especially not when the actions are very recent, were approved and ordered by the President of the United States, and the CIA is aggressively demanding that the documents remain concealed and claiming that their release will harm national security. When is the last time a President did that?I also agree with his decision not to prosecute the actual perpetrators of these acts, the rank and file CIA and military operatives who carried out the "enhanced interrogation techniques." It is critical that our soldiers and operatives function with complete confidence in the chain of command. Such a decision would also have a serious chilling effect on future actions, and impede our soldiers and operatives on the front lines. But that is precisely why the decisionmakers, the authorizers and champions of this torture regime must be brought to a swift and harsh justice.
Obama argues that now is not the right time to prosecute these people for war crimes, that the process would harm and divide the country precisely at a time when we need harmony and unity. He is being criticized heavily by the left for this decision. Here's Keith Olbermann yesterday:
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It is indispensable to the restoration of our core values that this entire episode be examined comprehensively, and all the decision makers - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Gonzalez, Bybee and Bradbury, be subject to prosecution. Perhaps Obama is just waiting for the right moment. Time will tell.
