The tangled web unravels

Following last week's release of the torture-justifying memos, two reports out today shed more light on how this came to be and raise even more troubling questions.

Senator Carl Levin says of his Senate Armed Services Committee report:

In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse . . . to low ranking soldiers.

The truth is that, early on, it was senior civilian leaders who set the tone. On September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that the United States turn to the "dark side" in our response to 9/11. Not long after that, after White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Conventions "quaint," President Bush determined that provisions of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to certain detainees.

And yet, when the shocking photos from Abu Graib were made public, the administration dismissed it as the work of "a few bad apples."

This congressional report is supplemented by an article in The New York Times that thoroughly traces how the torture techniques came to be adopted by the president and his highest cabinet officers, with very little understanding of the history of the techniques and no heed paid to the warnings from top military and civilian advisers. It's worth reading in full:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned. . . . they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
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The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II . . . They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective.
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Bush administration officials say it is easy to second-guess the decisions of 2002, when they feared that a new attack from Al Qaeda could come any moment.If they shunned interrogation methods some thought might work, and an undetected bomb or bioweapon cost thousands of lives, where would the moral compass point today?

The debate rages, and I do not believe it will just go away.

Ralph