The Policy of Torture

It was a headline that begged for an adequate infusion of caffeine, which I hadn’t had, but who could resist the improbably headline in The New York Times, “Pardon Bush and Those Who Tortured.” Even more implausibly, the article—rather, editorial—was written by the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero. Why was he adopting such a stance? Well, let him explain:

But with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

Remember Abu Ghraib and all those appalling photos of naked soldiers forced to simulate sexual acts, or piled naked while a female soldier gave the thumbs up sign? Or the man, standing blindfolded on a box, connected to wires, which would “electrify” him if he fell? Well, I’m not going to show you them, nor even hyperlink them, and why is that?

They are completely irrelevant.

The story was that it was just a bunch of bad apples, and in fact, some conservatives didn’t find anything bad about them in the least. Here’s Rush Limbaugh:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''

It’s an attractive narrative, this idea that a few bad apples got a little outta hand over there in the hellish condition that is war, but it misses the point. The point is that the United States had a clear—albeit sometimes hidden—policy justifying torture.  Here’s Romero of the ACLU again:

…George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

And no less than our current president came out and said it:

“We compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

Yeah? Read that sentence again, and pay special attention to the verb tenses.  And then ponder this quote, from The New York Times:

For 13 years, the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has operated as a legal black hole, imprisoning hundreds of men without any charges or meaningful access to the courts.

If government officials have their way, that blackout will include graphic videotapes of guards force-feeding inmates who have been on a hunger strike for as long as 21 months to protest their endless detention.

Oh, and the date of the article? December 7, 2014. Two days ago, as I write. And what’s in these tapes?

The 11 hours of recordings — which one military official said guards review like “an N.F.L. team watching video of the previous week’s football game” — show guards dragging a disabled Syrian man, Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, from his cell twice a day, strapping him to a chair and forcing a tube up his nose and into his stomach. The procedure has caused some strikers to vomit or defecate on themselves. According to lawyers for Mr. Diyab and other detainees, there may be thousands of similar tapes.

And so sometime today—wait, this just in:

Have I read it? No, nor have I read the article entitled:

Well, odd that Bush didn’t see that cover of Time magazine that I saw, and distinctly remember shuddering at, one Thanksgiving when we were in—I believe—Dominica. It had the famous photo of the hooded, about-to-be-hooded man with the cover title running something like, “Does the United States Torture?”

I’ve looked for the magazine online, and could I find it? No, but I did come across Susan Sontag, and her article, “On the Torture of Others.” And she makes it clear:

The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that.

I’d go further: the torture of prisoners was not an aberration. It was policy. And everyone who crafted that policy?

Ever heard of the Hague?