New details are emerging about the role of senior members of the cabinet in approving our use of torture. The CIA has already admitted to waterboarding 3 detainees. And we know they sought and acquired the approval of the Justice Department. And we know that the OLC offered legal language to justify torture. What we didn’t have a glimpse of is a picture of the executive deliberations that approved the whole shebang.
Until now. ABC News reports that a ‘principals committee’ met often to deliberate on and ultimately approve particular uses of harsh or 'enhanced' interrogation tactics. The committee consisted of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft. The CIA was evidently nervous about the legal boundaries of these tactics, and each time it sought the direct approval of the committee and Bush.
After many iterations of this approval process, the report asserts that Rice (who was National Security Advisor at the time) told the CIA that “This is your baby. Go do it.” This meant that the CIA had the implicit and general approval of the committee and no longer required explicit approval.
Approval by committee does not mean of course that each member of the committee approved. We know for other reasons that Dick “It’s a no brainer” Cheney and Rumsfeld categorically approved of such measures. However, the report suggests that Powell expressed reservations. Sadly, however, those reservations were not moral, but were rather grounded in the ‘image’ of the US abroad. That is, we would look bad to the world if we approved torture. Indeed.
Now, the article paints these deliberations against a background of “great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent.” My historical memory is bad, but I don’t recall any talk of an imminent threat in the Spring of 2002. Does anyone else? We know that one fruit of these interrogations was the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. (For some that alone would justify torture.) But, against this background, we might wonder whether revenge for 9/11 played more of a decisive role in these deliberations than preventing an imminent attack.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Deliberating about torture
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2 Comments:
Its been called into question whether torture was instrumental in the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. According to an interesting discussion by Raymond Bonner (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21257), the CIA has suggested that Abu Zubaydah gave up the whereabouts of KSM under torture. But there has never been any supporting evidence of this offered. There is, however, evidence that it is dubious. Experts at the FBI and the CIA have concluded that Zubaydah is insane and that he was not an important figure in al Qaeda. Under torture, Zubaydah told of plans to attack all manner of things but investigators were never able to verify any such threats. Its also unclear whether anything learned from Zubaydah was gathered or could have been gathered without the use of torture.
Any claim that torture has led to some good, no matter how many times its repeated, ought to be met with suspicion.
Yes, Graham, I unthinkingly wrote that sentence. I learned subsequent to writing my post that the capture of KSM was only tenuously (at best) related to the interrogation of Zubaydah. Apparently, they extracted KSM's nickname from him--but some claim that the CIA already possessed that piece of information.
But I guess my point was not to assert that torture is potentially fruitful, but to raise the suspicion that torture in this case was motivated by revenge and not national security. Torturing an insane Zubaydah makes the revenge motive even more plausible.
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