The Grand Inquisitor 2

We are finally getting to the heart of the matter.

Michael Totten wrote in response to an Andrew Sullivan post:

I won�t climb down an inch in my opposition to torture. And I�m not talking
about make-believe �torture,� I mean real actual torture, the kind

Andrew Sullivan is talking about here:

Let's retire at the start the notion that the only torture that has been
used by the U.S. has been against known members of al Qaeda. This is not
true. Many innocent men and boys were raped, brutally beaten, crucified for
hours (a more accurate term than put in "stress positions"), left in their
own excrement, sodomized, electrocuted, had chemicals from fluorescent
lights poured on them, forced to lie down on burning metal till they were
unrecognizable from burns - all this in Iraq alone, at several prisons as
well as Abu Ghraib. I spent a week reading all the official reports over
Christmas for a forthcoming review essay. Abu Ghraib is but one aspect of a
pervasive pattern of torture and abuse that, in my view, is only beginning
to sink in.

If someone were to ask me where I think we ought to draw the line while
interrogating prisoners, I couldn�t answer. I don�t know. A question like that
isn�t exactly a no-brainer. Reasonable people can argue about it and, most
likely, come up with a reasonable compromise. But I will say this: raping,
electrocuting, and crucifying boys (or girls or adults or anyone else)
absolutely is over the line.

Although Michael Totten claims he can't draw the line on interrogating
prisoners he plainly knows where to start. Most people would agree that the acts
described above are torture; that they are abhorrent to national values
and anyone guilty of perpretrating them should be punished. These are the
acts which should be ruthlessly proscribed in clear and pointed distinction from
activities like putting panties over people's heads, playing loud music, forcing
suspects to drink whiskey to loosen their tongues or imposing sleep deprivation.
By having the moral sense to recognize torture so clearly Mr. Totten rescues us
from being blinded by the merely legal perspective.

Michael Ledeen points out that the most questionable interrogation method of
all is process called rendition, which is unlikely to be examined by the
committee examining Mr. Gonzalez.

A week or so back, I criticized the Washington Post for giving a lot of
space to an article that basically "outed" a CIA aircraft, and only in passing
raised what I took to be the main issue, namely the transportation of captured
terrorist suspects to countries where they could be interrogated more
vigorously than in the United States. The Post journalist had briefly quoted
Michael Scheuer, the recently retired CIA officer who became a best-selling
author writing under "Anonymous," to the effect that the philosophical
subleties of this issue would not have disturbed his former employers. They
would simply have saluted and done what they were told by the White House.

I doubt anyone in this administration -- which, remember, already retreated
from its earlier positions on interrogation methods permitted against captured
terrorist suspects -- is going to point out that the most controversial and
ethically questionable method of all was developed during the Clinton
administration in direct response to orders that came directly from the White
House. "Rendition" was a Clinton creation, and was approved by Clinton's
lawyers, with no apparent cries of pain either from the Justice Department or
from anyone in Congressional "oversight" committees. Gonzales might quietly
make that point if anyone yells at him. It won't register with the Democrats,
but it might help the public understand the real world a little better.

Here, returned to earth, it should be plain that whatever the letter of the
Geneva Convention, rendition and raping boys should be classed as like
abominations while photographing prisoners or putting women's underwear over
their heads should be left out of the reckoning altogether. The real task is to
create a practical and ethically acceptable regime for interrogating prisoners
while strengthening the safeguards against real torture -- two sides of the same
coin, for we are charged by the spirit of humanitarian law to safeguard not only
prisoners, but all protected persons. We are adjured to prevent the torture of
Margaret Hassan no less than Abu Musab Zarqawi, and in so doing must give the
troops such means as can be countenanced by our moral values. This process
should not be cheapened by the tacit understanding that no embarassing questions
will be put to Roberto Gonzalez if none will be be addressed to William
Jefferson Clinton.

Addendum

Heather MacDonald at City Journal describes the evolution of the Pentagon's
interrogation methods after finding that its preexisting "16 approaches" didn't
work. (Hat tip:

Rick Ballard)

But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They
divulged nothing. �Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost
effortlessly,� writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account
of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their
captors �not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate.
They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of
details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.� Some of the
al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that
Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure
to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and
certainly no risk of torture�a sign, gloated the manuals, of American
weakness.

Attempts were made to adapt the doctrine by pushing the envelope of the
Geneva Conventions focusing on stress and sleep deprivation techniques. But the
Pentagon was not the only organization looking for answers. The CIA, having been
assigned the hardest cases, wanted more.

In response to the CIA�s request, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee
produced a hair-raising memo that understandably caused widespread alarm.
Bybee argued that a U.S. law ratifying the 1984 Convention Against Torture --
covering all persons, whether lawful combatants or not -- forbade only
physical pain equivalent to that �accompanying serious physical injury, such
as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,� or mental
pain that resulted in �significant psychological harm of significant duration,
e.g., lasting for months or even years.� More troubling still, Bybee concluded
that the torture statute and international humanitarian treaties did not bind
the executive branch in wartime.

Here was the smoking gun, the administration's opponents argued: the
philosophical underpinning for Abu Ghraib was the presumed Presidential power to
authorize any force that stopped short of producing "organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death".  A Presidential license to torment.
MacDonald makes the point that the Abu Ghraib violations flowed, not from the
Bybee memorandum, but from entirely different causes, but were unfairly
presented in the same narrative. Yet in a sense they were part of the same
narrative because the Bybee Memorandum represented the Executive Branch's
attempt to answer the question: what is torture and what is allowable under
interrogation. But Bybee's advice was rejected and the Presidential license
refused. In June, 2004 a

New York Times article reported:

At a White House briefing Tuesday, Gonzales specifically disavowed the part
of the memorandum discussing the president's authority as commander in chief,
saying it was "irrelevant and unnecessary." Senior Justice Department
officials took a broader view, saying the entire memorandum would be
withdrawn.

Still the doubts remained. The

Washington Post records this exchange between Senator Leahy and Roberto
Gonzales.

LEAHY: Do you think if the Bybee memo had not been leaked to the press --
because it had never been shown to Congress, even though we'd asked for it --
do you think it would still be the overriding legal opinion?

GONZALES: Sir, that I do not know. I do know that when it became -- it was
leaked, we had concern about the fact that people were assumed that the
president was somehow exercising that authority to engage in torture. And we
wanted to clarify the record that the president had not authorized or condoned
torture, nor had directed any actions or excused any actions under the
commander-in-chief-override that might otherwise constitute torture.

LEAHY: Well, do you think there's any connection whatsoever between the
policies which actually you helped to formulate regarding the treatment
interrogation of prisoners, policies that were sent out, Department of Defense
and elsewhere, and the widespread abuses that have occurred? ...

GONZALES: I believe that is a very good question, Senator. And that is why
we have these eight completed investigations and these three pending
investigations. And while we've had four hearings involving the secretary of
defense, you've had 18 hearings involving the deputy secretary, undersecretary
of defense, you've had over 40 briefings with the Congress, because we care
very much about finding out what happened and holding people accountable.
Unlike other countries that simply talk about Geneva, if there is an
allegation that we've done something wrong, we investigate it. We're very
serious about our commitments, our legal obligations in Iraq. And if people
have done things that they shouldn't have done in violation of our legal
obligations, they are going to be held accountable.

Yet despite the fact that everyone went home and felt good after such
assurances, no one was nearer an answer. Heather MacDonald described that by
attempting to push the limits the military found itself with fewer licit
interrogation techniques than it had before.

Reeling under the PR disaster of Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon shut down every
stress technique but one -- isolation -- and that can be used only after
extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to
question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy.
Even the traditional army psychological approaches have fallen under a deep
cloud of suspicion: deflating a detainee�s ego, aggressive but non-physical
histrionics, and good cop-bad cop have been banished along with sleep
deprivation.

Timidity among officers prevents the energetic application of those
techniques that remain. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the
way up through the Pentagon by officers who have never conducted an
interrogation in their lives. In losing these techniques, interrogators have
lost the ability to create the uncertainty vital to getting terrorist
information. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the military has made public
nearly every record of its internal interrogation debates, providing al-Qaida
analysts with an encyclopedia of U.S. methods and constraints. Those
constraints make perfectly clear that the interrogator is not in control. �In
reassuring the world about our limits, we have destroyed our biggest asset:
detainee doubt,� a senior Pentagon intelligence official laments.

Donald
Sensing has a long post on the recent destruction of a 36-ton Bradley in
Iraq resulting in the death of all 7 occupants. If a suspect is found, what
technique should be be used to discover where the other mines are planted? The
ridiculous "16 approaches" method reviled by Heather MacDonald's interviewees,
even now watered down? Or the rapes and crucifixion system which by common
consent is torture? Is there is nothing in between? How did we get to where the
only choices are between the impractical and the inadmissible? Possibly by the
route of partisan politics; at hearings where you may either recite the Boy
Scout Pledge or the Green Lantern Oath; where the failure to supply answers
never got in the way of uttering a good platitude; where votive candles burn and
still burn before the letter of Geneva and the practice of rendition; and people
weep at a grave alone.