Torture – debated

They call it a “debate” like there’s anything to debate. As if international law and Dick Cheney’s snarling are both equally valid. As if torture “working” makes it defensible.

Despite the former Vice President sounding more and more like a cornered wolverine being poked with sticks as he hits talk show after talk show to make the case for his administration’s tactics, the cries are growing louder for investigations into the decisions that made locking a man in a box with a bug crawling over him sound like the best way to get information. The Senate Armed Services Committee Lord of the Flies the movie released a report Wednesday, April 22, which, among other things, lays out a chilling timeline for the interrogation decisions. It also completely disproves Cheney’s “ticking time bomb” scenario argument.

Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post notes:

The new report includes testimony from an Army psychologist at Guantanamo Bay who described increasingly relentless pressure from Washington in the summer of 2002 to use harsher methods on detainees. “[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq,” Army Maj. Paul Burney told investigators. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link…there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

So torture was not used to save American lives, despite the common argument. Instead, it was used to force detainees to provide the link to Iraq that the Bush administration had already decided must exist.

The techniques used to try and find this link came not from interrogators with experience in the field, but from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training programs, devised to help American servicemembers survive capture and torture by regimes that were unbound by the ethics the U.S. claims to uphold.

The Senate report reads:

“Exemplifying the disturbing nature and substance of the training, the SERE instructors explained “Biderman’s Principles” – which were based on coercive methods used by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to elicit false confessions from U.S. POWs during the Korean War – and left with GTMO personnel a chart of those coercive techniques.”

As Malcolm Nance, a veteran of the Navy SERE school, notes, the U.S. government knowingly used techniques created by totalitarian regimes to create the intelligence it wanted to hear. They knew these techniques were used to create false evidence and used them anyway.

(And Susie Bright tells a painful personal story of just what SERE training—done by U.S. servicemembers to U.S. servicemembers, with safe words and support—did to her high school boyfriend. It’ll break your heart.)

These techniques were disturbing enough when it was argued that they were used in a “ticking time bomb” scenario. It’s just that much more disturbing to know that they were used not out of desperation to save lives, but desperation to get the answer the Bush administration was looking for.

The report also draws the line from the CIA torture techniques to Abu Ghraib and other military sites. Former Brigadier GeneralJanis Karpinski, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, pointed out the irony of punishing enlisted soldiers like Lynndie England for participating in mistreatment of detainees while vowing not to prosecute CIA agents who carried out the techniques detailed in the memos.

But as Rachel Maddow said Wednesday night on her show, “These systems link not at the bottom, but at the top. They link in Washington.” The people who should be investigated, in other words, are the people at the top. And Obama seems to have changed his tune—or clarified it, depending on how much credit you’re inclined to give him, saying Tuesday that he would not rule out a nonpartisan commission to investigate interrogations.

The decision to prosecute, though, ultimately rests with the Justice Department. Under Bush, we criticized the tendency to politicize the Justice Department, which is supposed to be the most independent of all the Cabinet positions. We must remember that the decision is not Obama’s to make. It should rest with Eric Holder and the Justice Department prosecutors.

Congress also has a role to play, one that it may be working on—or may be blowing hot air, according to Ari Melber. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy has been talking a lot about holding hearings, but only his House counterpart, John Conyers, has actually done something about it.

Obama has repeatedly stated that he wants to move forward, not look back, which has triggered anger among those who want to see prosecutions. Yet Cheney and other Republicans—as well as “independent” Joe Lieberman—will attempt to paint any commission or prosecution as a partisan witch-hunt. Obama doesn’t want to end up like Gerald Ford, a one-term president because he excused the sins of his predecessor, but nor does he want to see health care reform and his budget go swirling down the drain because of partisan rancor dredged up over interrogations.

Still, to call this a “debate” over whether the interrogation techniques were torture is manifestly beside the point. The true debate, as the Senate report and Cheney’s own admissions show, is between those who think the ends justify the means—that torture is excusable if it worked—and those who are concerned with right and wrong, not to mention the U.S.’s standing in the world and the treatment of any American citizens who might be captured overseas.

Let’s be clear: these techniques are not excusable no matter what results they got. They violate basic human rights. That is not up for debate.