This was done in my name, your name, our names.Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”
As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.
The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.
A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.
Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”
Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Bush is a war criminal. Obama is heading down the same path. America's moral authority has collapsed.
We are a rogue nation. History will not be kind to us. Already, the present isn't being too kind to us as it is.
I'm not sure America ever had moral authority. I mean, go back to our beginnings and we were pretty casual about killing whoever got in our way.
ReplyDeleteI have mixed feelings on torture. I totally understand the anti arguments. But... but. If one person held the knowledge to save dozens, or hundreds of lives, I also understand that sometimes you do what you gotta do, and it's a dirty job.
And the whole notion of "well, we'll have war but we'll do it by rules" doesn't work. War means you fight until the other side loses, and there's always someone willing to throw the rules out the window to get the job done. And unfortunately, those are usually the guys who win.
Again, not sure how I feel about it, but what would be done in a perfect world and what needs to be done in this world are often two different things.
Then we need to stop pretending we don't torture. Then we need to have a full accounting on what's being done in our name.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Jack Bauer scenario just doesn't exist. Under that logic, we should kill criminals and kill their families because there's a chance that they may cause harm.
Once you accept the notion that "War means you fight until the other side loses, and there's always someone willing to throw the rules out the window to get the job done" then you cannot draw the line. You have to exterminate the enemies, and anyone who might then be your enemies in the future.
Once you've dehumanized the enemy to "the end justifies the means" then there is no means you cannot justify.
We did that in August 1945. The Japanese are our allies and trading partners now, as are the Germans.
But at what cost victory?