Must Read: The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

[BurtWorm]

Painful as it is, if you want to know why Abu Ghraib happened, and why torture is suddenly in the vocabulary of everyone who talks about the US response to 9/11, you should read this book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521853249/104-4628404-8616725?v=glance&n=283155

It's not a light read in any sense (the book weighs at least 5 pounds), and you probably (if you're like me) will not be able to read it from cover to cover. But even a careful perusal is eye-opening. The essays by Anthony Lewis and editors Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel put the rest of the hundrads of pages of memos, reports, faxes and letters in context. You will want to follow the threads from John Yoo's explorations of the extent of presidential power in the post-9/11 world through the DOJ's sophist arguments explaining why detainees are not entitled to Geneva convention protections to and the DOD's exploration of "aggressive" interrogation techniques being sought by CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM (Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo jurisdictions?) for use against "difficult" cases to the Red Cross and Taguba commission's reports on how those techniques were actually put into use. Behind their Pentagon desks, the war planners might have been able to fool themsleves into believing untrained GIs would know how to push the envelope without exceeding the limits placed on them by the federal War Crimes Act. In any case, the GIs seem to have believed they were only following orders.

I was lucky to find this disturbing but important book in my local library. It's also available for $20, which is an amazing price for such a wealth of information (if you can stomach it) about the degredation of American values at the top.

[BurtWorm]

1. kick

[BurtWorm]

2. Anthony Lewis makes many of the same points in The Nation (12/ 26):

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051226&s=lewis

Not one of the major actors in the torture story has been effectively called to account: not Rumsfeld, who loosened the rules on interrogation of prisoners; not Alberto Gonzales, now Attorney General, who as White House Counsel approved the torture memorandums; and not the Justice Department lawyers who wrote them.

Among those officials there is no sign of repentance. One of them has indeed become a kind of preacher of the legitimacy of using pressure on suspected terrorists. He is John Yoo, who was a lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 and is now a professor at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. In frequent television appearances and public forums he argues a theme of those torture memos: that President Bush as Commander in Chief is empowered by the Constitution to order what treatment he wishes for detainees in the "war on terror." His constitutional argument, that the Framers of the Constitution intended to clothe the President with the war powers of a king, conflicts with the near universal understanding of the constitutional text, with its careful balancing of executive, legislative and judicial power.

A New York lawyer who has contributed greatly to exposure of the torture phenomenon, Scott Horton, has suggested that Yoo's views echo those of a German legal thinker of the period between the world wars, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that when it came to degraded enemies like the Soviet Union, the idea of complying with international law was a romantic delusion. The enemy, rather, must be seen as absolute--stripped of all legal rights.

Those who want to relax the laws against torture often make the "ticking bomb" argument: that if a prisoner may know the location of a bomb set to go off shortly, torturing him is justified to save lives. If captors believe that, they may well resort to forceful interrogation. But to write such an exception into the rules invites the systematic use of torture. I had a lesson in the danger of the ticking-bomb argument years ago in Israel. I was interviewing Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine publisher who was imprisoned and tortured by the military regime that for a time took over Argentina. (Intervention by the Carter Administration saved Timerman's life; on release from prison he immigrated to Israel.) Timerman turned the interview around and asked me questions about torture, positing the ticking-bomb situation. I tried to avoid the question, but he pressed me to answer. Finally, I said that I might authorize torture in such a situation. "No!" he shouted. "You must never start down that road."