Why We Need to Know

There is more than just curiosity at the heart of the need to know what tactics were used by the CIA, military, and private contractors when interrogating detainees in the Bush "war on terror." I don't like to go to the efficacy argument, because what makes Dick Cheney so desperate and offensive is his glib dismissal of American ideals in favor of pragmatism. And according to the military unit charged with SERE, the interrogation program favored by Bush-Cheney, well, it doesn't work anyway.

So if it isn't curiosity, why are there so many people so insistent that we learn what was done in the name of protecting the American people from future attacks?

America has tortured before, that we know from survivors of the right wing dictators of Latin America. But what makes this so different is that the orders to torture came directly from the White House, where Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, Addington, Rumsfeld and more involved the Office of Legal Counsel, subverting its role, to justify their decisions. (Somehow when they were in power, everything was secret, and any leakage was treason, now Cheney suddenly wants everything released.)

Propublica.org is a privately funded investigative journalism site where reporters have been partnering with NPR and The New York Times to bring some light to issues like TARP, the "war on terror," and the economic crisis. Read the comparison between the SERE guidelines, authorized by the various torture memos and the recounts collected by the RED Cross in interviews with former detainees.

Congressional hearings will be a distraction, but not a grand jury and criminal trials.

What We Know and What To Do With It

It's taken a long, long time, but finally there is a flood of scholarship that admits the German people knew that the "Final Solution" meant rounding up Jews from throughout Germany and the occupied territories and sending them to their deaths, whether in mass graves, work camps, or gas chambers.

There were just too many witnesses to the arrests, confiscation of property, cramming people onto cattle cars (if they were lucky) or into ditches if they were shot on the spot. These acts were carried out by human beings, German soldiers, some of whom kept diaries, wrote letters, and spoke with colleagues and family. Rail stations had ticket sellers and conductors. The witnesses had nightmares, too.

Read the book reviews in the May issue of The Atlantic, Hitler's Co-Conspirators, for the details of when and how German citizens knew of the "Final Solution," and how that knowledge made them complicit in the exterminations.

The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans, Penguin

Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche, Harvard

Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IX: German Wartime Society 1939–1945, Oxford

Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, by Ian Kershaw, Yale

I'm not saying that the Bush administration's "war on terror" reached the level of the Holocaust. And I resent folks who offer such hyperbolic comparisons. But here is where I do find a parallel: in the complicity.

Now we know. Well, we've known that the White House Principals were obsessively involved in tracking the interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world. Those stories were leaked back in 2004. So when former CIA director Michael Hayden defends the use of torture on, where else but Fox News, we know we are at a turning point.

President Obama, I know it's hard, it's painfully hard to withstand the criticism of authorizing an investigation into just what was done in our names from 2001-2009.

It was torture, no matter what Jay Bybee, John Yoo, or Steven Bradbury called it.

Read this post from Sheri Fink, a medical doctor on propublica.org. It's still torture if it's done in front of doctors:

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.

So now we have knowledge, and with that knowledge comes complicity, just like the Germans during World War II, if we don't do anything. That isn't a pleasant comparison, it's uncomfortable. But now that Dick Cheney isn't running the American government, we don't have the same fears of retribution either, not like the fear that silenced the Germans during WWII.

How will we use this knowledge?

The Real Meaning of Presidential

Some presidents are certainly more hands on than others. In reading through the latest torture memos, it is sickening to read the level of detail that was included in the Office of Legal Counsel analysis of what constituted torture, in the case of the August 2002 memo, of one specific individual.

By hijacking the Office of Legal Counsel, intended to provide neutral and dispassionate advice to the executive branch, Bush has blood on his hands now, too.

Last night I saw Mary Stuart, a revived translation of Frederick Schiller's original, about the prolonged incarceration and eventual beheading of Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, at the hand of her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I. After years of being held in prison, isolated from her people and her religion, Mary is still perceived as an enemy by her cousin. Mary was implicated in the death of her last husband, she had three, and in several plots to overthrow Elizabeth and restore Catholicism to England. Elizabeth swears out a warrant for her death and when it is carried out, and her cousin, after nearly twenty years is freed from the horrors of her imprisonment, Elizabeth recants and arrests her own advisers for releasing the warrant that led to Mary's death.

These torture memos were not intended to reach the public although they were intended to provide cover to the CIA, military, private contractors, and eventually the White House Principals. The Bush administration, working most probably through Dick Cheney and David Addington, authorized these memos so that if ever there was an investigation into the use of torture on "war on terror" detainees, they could claim that they were operating under legal counsel. Now that the memos have been released, we know that first, some of the memos were written after the torture began, and second, that the factual narratives contained in the memos is blatantly false, and was known to be false at the time of the writing. Like a recalcitrant, arrogant Elizabeth, the Bush Principals cannot claim innocence, they cannot claim they were acting in the best interests of their country. They subordinated and perverted the rule of law, and got rich at the same time.

President Obama can't walk away from prosecuting those responsible for bringing the United States so close to its own destruction. This isn't a matter of morale. This is a matter of compliance with international treaties that prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This is a matter of the US historical stand against torture. This is about honoring those men and women who risked everything and said NO, when they learned what was happening in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

We have no choice but to investigate and truly close this horrendous chapter in our history.

Read through some samplings on what other folks are saying about the torture memos.

Use the Rule of Law to End the Lawlessness

Four more Bush era memos authorizing the use of torture on detainees held by the US in the "war on terror" were released yesterday by the Obama administration. Download the memos here. Before the documents were distributed, only one of which was redacted to any real measure (taking out mentions of agents who participated in the inhuman and degrading behaviors), Obama differentiated between the agents who did the dirty work, and it was disgusting, and the officials who promoted and authorized it:

According to the New York Times: "Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty."

Reading through one of the memos yesterday, written by now federal appeals court judge Jay Bybee, I was horrified at the detailed descriptions of the techniques--walling, sleep deprivation, stress positions, slapping, confinement in small cages, use of insects, and of course, waterboarding. That the Office of Legal Counsel was hijacked to write particularized authorizations for the use of inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques is evidence enough of the abuse of authority conducted by Dick Cheney, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, at a minimum. The role of George Bush himself is less clear.

Consider the Bybee memo on sleep deprivation, which held that it wasn't torture to keep Abu Zubaydah, an allegedly high-ranking al Qaeda member (but he wasn't and they knew he wasn't) awake, so long as it didn't last for more than eleven days: Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual's ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of such sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep. You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation. Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction. You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

One memo admits that the technique of waterboarding was used too often and too violently: Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

Immediately Senator Patrick Leahy called for a full investigation. America needs more. We need investigations and prosecutions of the principals who authorized and promoted the use of torture. I agree that the agents themselves shouldn't be prosecuted; they should lose their jobs, however. We don't need those kinds of men and women working for our country. But the officials responsible for ordering the abuses, well, they deserve the full force of the rule of law, which they denied to others, in search of the truth.