There were two further developments on the torture front this week. The first was the release of a heavily censored Inspector General’s report on all the heinous shit the CIA did to its prisoners. The second was Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to open an investigation into these disgraces.
(Well, there was a third piece of “news” as well, though it hardly merits mentioning for anyone who has been paying attention to torture. However, because it cannot be repeated enough for anybody who is still unclear on this point, we’re all looking at you Mr. Ex-Vice President, I’m going to say it again: no useful information was ever produced by torture. I will now repeat that, in all caps: NO USEFUL INFORMATION WAS EVER PRODUCED BY TORTURE. That is not, despite what Dick Cheney says, an area that is any longer open for debate.)
There is still a great deal of confusion as to what exactly this investigation will entail, but the justifiably pessimistic speculation is rampant:
Perhaps worst of all, the Report notes that many of the detainees who were subjected to this treatment were so treated due to “assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — meaning there was no real reason to think they had done anything wrong whatsoever. As has been known for quite some time, many of the people who were tortured by the United States were completely innocent — guilty of absolutely nothing.
Manifestly, none of this happened by accident. As the IG Report continuously notes, all of these methods were severe departures from long-standing CIA guidelines (if not practices). This all occurred because the officials at the highest levels of the U.S. Government pronounced that this was permissible, the protections of the Geneva Conventions were “quaint,” obsolete and inapplicable, and the U.S. was justified in doing anything and everything in the name of fighting Terrorists. As stomach-turning as these individual acts of sadism are, it is far worse to consider that only low-level interrogators will suffer consequences while those who were truly responsible — the criminally depraved leaders and lawyers who ordered and authorized it — will be protected.
It would be yet another scar on our country, this one indisputably perpetrated by the Obama Administration, if a bunch of CIA agents face trial while the twisted masterminds of the whole affair are once again given a pass. There is some cause for optimism though, and it was inadvertently reinforced by this morning’s pre-Ted Kennedy lead story in the New York Times, “Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations”. The article itself is a re-hash of information that was largely confirmed, rather than originally disclosed, in the Inspector General’s report. Namely, that officials at CIA headquarters and in the White House avidly followed, from thousands of miles away, the progress of the torture they had authorized. The Times article tries to make the entire operation seem very precise and well controlled, one document cited even stoops to use the word “clinical”. What the article fails to mention is that such remote supervision is a bureaucratic impossibility.
People in cushy offices, of any variety, are notoriously ill informed about what’s actually going on “in the field”. This includes large corporations, non-profits and governments at war. From that many removes, that many layers of human interpretation and repetition, it’s impossible to have a solid grasp on just what was going on. Holder’s investigation presumes that there was defined control and that it will therefore be possible to sort the authorized torture (which they don’t want to prosecute) from the unauthorized torture (which they also don’t want to prosecute but don’t see a way not to). That neat distinctions of that kind exist at all seems highly unlikely and it will be even harder to make those distinctions in a legally clear way.
Are we to believe that one man is to be prosecuted because he used slightly too much water when torturing a prisoner but that another man will be protected because he measured his water better? The bureaucratic guidelines that were created to permit American torture never had a chance of being scrupulously followed for the simple reason that the guidelines themselves were monstrous. If you’re already crossing all kinds of lines of human decency and longstanding American tradition, why not press just a little bit harder? Indeed, ABC News is reporting that some of the censored information in the report is about deaths in American custody (which we already knew about) and the fact that the CIA simply lost some of these men. Just lost them.
Holder and company have a great big mess to clean up and they’ve got to do it with a Justice Department that was gutted and politicized for eight years. It is not an enviable task and so it’s understandable that they’re looking to limit the scope of their responsibility. But the neat lines that would let them do so probably do not exist and once they start digging it’s going to be very difficult to pretend that they do.
Special “Torture Is Not About Politics” Bonus: Glenn Greenwald humiliating Republican Congressman Peter King. Anytime you can make fun of a Republican torture apologist by quoting both Thomas Paine and Ronald Reagan it’s good times.
