Walk On By

Freedom House board member Peggy Noonan, speaking on television, said that sometimes a great nation such as ours should just walk on by the revelations contained in the CIA torture memos. Here in Washington, there was more tsk-tsking about President Obama's release of the memos than the facts contained in them.

The conservatives fiercely defended the torture tactics to the point Karl Rove looked like he was going to cry to say "now these techniques won't be effective any more". The usual suspects argued that the release of the memos would weaken the CIA, despite the rousing welcome President Obama recived at Langley after the memo's release. Marc Thiessen defended the techniques in the Washington Post and Cheney's biographer Stephen Hayes did the same in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. Chuck Todd started to spin that President Obama was under pressure from leftists to prosecute those involved in the torture program.

We were treated to the ever-shrinking Dick Cheney giving an impassioned defense of the program to Sean Hannity. He claimed we knew very little about Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attacks and feared they were making contact with Dr. A.Q. Khan to acquire a nuclear capability.

The problem with his whole discussion was that the CIA during Clinton and Bush had a very active Al Qaeda office led by Michael Scheuer and was incredibly active in tracking Bin Laden. In fact, one of the first involved in the torture program was Cofer Black, who followed Bin Laden's activities in the Sudan. One wonders what Cheney meant by the Administration had little information on Al Qaeda.

One also wonders how small Dick Cheney's world has become by appearing on Sean Hannity as if this were a major interview forum. Cheney claimed to formally request that the CIA memos listing the benefits of torture be declassified. He actually did this through the National Archive and not the CIA. It would actually beneficial for them to be released.

As if to confuse matters, Admiral Blair, President Obama's intelligence chief, sent a memo to his staff where he said that the torture program produced some high quality intelligence such as a plot to bomb an office building in Los Angeles, a target that keeps surfacing in Al Qaeda's dream list.

Rush Limbaugh weighed in by saying the Left persuaded the Obama Administration that mild pressure on the detainees constituted torture.

The problem with the torture apologists is that it is not just the Left who want the allegations investigated and the personnel involved prosecuted, it is the Law. Conservatives have recently been a little lax when it comes to legal matters recently--from their bonehead suits against Obama's eligibility to the recent suit complaining about the Homeland Security report on the rise of extreme-right extremism. The United States ratified the Convention against Torture under Peggy Noonan's hero and boss, President Ronald Reagan, and passed the War Crimes Act in the late 1990s.

In addition, as one of the prime authors of the Geneva Conventions, the United States has a responsible to uphold them. One can argue about torture until the cows come home but the United States has had a policy since the revolutionary period of George Washington not to torture, "even under necessity" in the words of Abraham Lincoln. For its history, this policy has been a justifiable point of pride for the United States military.

In Washington, the river isn't the Potomac,it's Denial as pundits try to debate whether we practiced torture or "enhanced interrogation techniques". According to the Geneva Convention as ratified in the mid-1980s, the accepted arbiter of defining torture is the International Red Cross, which in its report on Guatanamo stated quite clearly detainees were subjected to torture. The chief of prosecutions at Gitmo herself dropped charges because she maintained the defendents had been tortured. She had been appointed the lawyer for the Pentagon under President Ronald Reagan and is a conservative Republican. Military defense attorney after defense attorney reported their clients had been tortured. So let's stop the pretend:detainees were tortured and it was a matter of policy.

Never one to avoid publicity for his work, Senator Levin released the Senate Armed Forces Committees lengthy and probably definitive report on the whole sorry history of the interrigation program as it went from Bagram Air Force Base to Gitmo and then to Abu Ghraib. In part, the extensive report puts added pressure on the Department of Justice to investigate the major players who were the architects of the policy. What the report raises is that these techniques were used prior to actually procuring legal justification from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice. The report also outlines the major services' reservations about this program's constitutionality and legality as well as raising the specter of prosecutions for all those involved. Instead of "a few rotten apples" as Donald Rumsfeld claimed when the abuses of Abu Ghraib became apparent, we discover that the whole project was a highly developed re-engineering of the SERE program to condition American soldiers to resist torture under capture.

The whole SERE program itself was developed from techniques used by the Communist Chinese and the North Koreans during the Korean conflict. As SERE trainers pointed out in the report, even they disagreed that this was a fruitful way to conduct interrogations. The FBI soon headed to the hills after attending the first such sessions, saying they were torture.

The worst is still to come. Federal courts have already ordered the release of the uncensored Abu Ghairb photos and videotapes as well as the nearly 3,000 pages of the CIA interrogations. The Abu Ghraib disclosures will provoke probably the greatest public backlash. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims the materials reveal rapes and murders. Speaking to the ACLU in 2004, investigative reporter Sy Hersh said that there were videos of boys being sodomized and women pleading to be killed after they had been raped. We also get to look forward to the DOJ report from the Office of Professional Responsibility, which will document the e-mail exchanges from the White House,including the Vice President's office to the lawyers responsible for drafting the torture memos.

Most media attention has been paid to water-boarding and walling as the techniques approved and the almost clinical, dispassionate discussions of them in the legal memos. But, for me the most horrifying memos contained the description and dismissal of sleep deprivation as a harmless technique for the treatment of detainees. As Alexandr Solzhenitzyn described in the Gulag "Sleeplessness was the worst form of torture because it left no marks." European sleep researchers, whose works were used to justify the torture regimen, have publicly rebelled at the Bradbury's memo that allowed for 180 consecutive hours of sleeplessness, saying their research was done on healthy humans without any additional pressure or deprivations and should never be used in an interrogtaion program.

The Senate Armed Forces Committee report documents the participation of both doctors and psychologists in both the design and implementation of the interrogation programs. For years, the human rights community has sought sanctions against those of the medical professions who participate in torture programs, the most dramatic recent case was Pinochet's Chile. The Physicians for Human Rights is again raising this issue with the revelations of its professions involvement in the Pentagon program. Several years ago, the American Bar Association passed denunciations of lawyers who argued for torture and other human abuses being conducted by the United States.

One early victim of the release of the Torture memos is the Ticking Time bomb scenario, whcih justifies the use of torture if there is an impending disaster unfolding. The man, who may be Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was waterboarded 183 times until he cooperated. As Cenk at the Young Turks quipped," after 90 times, don't you think he would know he wouldn't drown." By that time, the ticking timebomb would have exploded.

Most mysterious to me so far is that Abu Zubaida, once purported to be an Al Qaeda leader but later downgraded to being its tourist agent, was tortured after he talked. It was when he started talking about his contacts with the Saudi Royal family, even giving his interrogators their cellphone numbers for reference, that he was waterboarded.

And is Khalid Sheik Mohammed really the real man? Awhile back, Pakistani news agencies reported a joint American-ISI operation where Khalid Sheik Mohammed was allegedly killed, his body held at the local mortuary, and his family buried him. The story even gave quotes from his family about his character. Is this some spy novel twist or some intelligence gambit?

For years, Hannah Arendt was ridiculed for using the phrase "banality of evil" to refer to Adolf Eichman. But here, reading the memos one is struck by the rather ordinary cataloguing of possible abuses to be tolerated, with quaint directions for their proper administration, and rather fatuous musings on the degree of pain they will inflict. She was right all along, evil can be very banal and ordinary indeed.