The T Word

It's been a busy week on the news front, with record oil prices, a renewed call for offshore drilling, the protracted national grief over the loss of Tim Russert. 

 I find some of the most interesting news items for me are the revelations over the CIA's involvement with the torture issue, specifically as it relates to our captives at Abu Graib and Guantanamo and tangentially with the CIA's use of rendition and third party torturers like Syria.

This week, memos came to light from the CIA to the Pentagon that said that anything done to prisoners short of killing them was not torture. I was always curious as to why we paid so much attention to the Army Field Manual and to vetting the actions of our serviceman in regards to torture when we basically give the CIA carte blanche to do anything they consider necessary.

Now reasonable people can and do disagree on what is acceptable when we are in national crisis and dealing with a nefarious enemy that hacks people like Daniel Pearl's head off. I understand this way of thinking.

In one document, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, discussed how interrogators could use the “wet towel” technique, also known as waterboarding, against detainees to extract information.

“It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,” Fredman said in October 2002 during a meeting with military officials where specific techniques were discussed, according to a copy of the meeting minutes released by the Armed Services Committee.

Fredman added that the “wet towel” technique would only be defined as torture “if the detainee dies.”

“It is basically subject to perception,” Fredman said, according to the minutes of the meeting. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”

Fredman’s comment during the October 2002 meeting prompted Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, then the chief military lawyer at Guantanamo, to respond “We will need documentation to protect us.”

Following the October 2002 meeting, Beaver drafted a legal memo that authorized military personnel at Guantanamo to use some of the harshest methods during interrogations at the facility.

Beaver testified Tuesday that she was surprised the Defense Department implemented the interrogation methods contained in her legal opinion.

“I did not expect that my opinion, as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, would become the final word on interrogation policies and practices within the Department of Defense,” Beaver said. “For me, such a result was simply not foreseeable. Perhaps I was somewhat naive, but I did not expect to be the only lawyer issuing a written opinion on this monumentally important issue.”

At the same meeting, Beaver discussed hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC visited Guantanamo to ensure interrogators were complying with the Geneva Conventions. Beaver, according to the minutes of the meeting, urged interrogators to "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around."

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver is quoted as saying, according to minutes of an Oct. 2, 2002 meeting between the CIA and military officials. "It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."

This lack of accountability appears to go all the way up the hierarchical line past General Haynes, to Secretary Rumsfeld and on to Cheney and Bush's laps. Addington and Yoo deserve to be jailed for their hand in this, as do countless others.

Now I just want to make the point that a reasonable person would assume that sometime, somewhere in the future, an American serviceman or citizen is going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and subsequently tortured. And I am afraid that all of our national protestations will fall on deaf ears. Once we have lost the moral high ground and principle that has guided our country all these many years, it becomes very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It's like virginity - once its gone its gone.

In exigent circumstances I can see the need to get dirty with people at times, I am not naive. The guy with the dirty bomb in his possession that will blow up the capitol. But not systematic torture, never. Not with many people like Masri who were proven innocent or the people that were turned into the Americans in Iraq to settle petty tribal vendettas.

It is always easy to demonize an entire people, harder to put yourself in their place. If you were an innocent Iraqi, how do you think that you would feel about our continued occupation? How would you feel if members of your family had been tortured and in many instances, sexually violated and humiliated?

And in the case of torture, something that has been independently verified as occurring on our watch by countless high ranking military figures, will we ever be able to forgive ourselves for what we have become? Not much different than our most brutal enemies...