Way back in the day, the Bush administration claimed that we didn't abuse or mistreat prisoners. Then, when the horrors of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004, they claimed that any instances of abuse or mistreatment of prisoners were the result of some "bad apples" running amok.Lately, in the wake of the release of the now-infamous Bush torture memos, the justifications have included claims that any abuse or mistreatment: (1) was approved by lawyers and therefore legal; (2) did not constitute torture; and, most laughably, (3) was not illegal because Bush authorized it.
The most disturbing justification to emerge in the last few weeks runs along the lines of "Sure, we tortured people but that's okay because the torture we used got us some high-value information."
There is a new must-read piece in the New York Times this morning that calls into question that latter notion that "torture works". From the article:
Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005...Read the whole article. It recounts a bitter fight during 2005-2007 over whether to re-authorize torture after 2005, which involved the President, Vice President, Justice Department, CIA, State Depatment and National Security Agency.
Without getting into all the back-and-forth that went on inside the Bush administration, I think the piece raises a much larger issue. If "torture [allegedly] works", why did the Bush administration stop using it back in 2005? If, as Dick Cheney and others are now claiming, torture "saved American lives", why did they stop using it years before Obama took office?
As Harry Shearer writes:
If, as the article reports, the Bush administration, due to rampant internal debate, had stopped waterboarding and walling and all the other repellent practices by 2005, what is Dick Cheney doing in 2009 saying that the Obama administration's rejection of those practices is making us less safe?
Of course, Cheney's resort to old-style Republican "the Democrats hate America" rhetoric is amusingly disturbing in any case. But if he's re-fighting an internal argument he lost four years ago, what's the point?
Of course, I don't expect any arguments coming out of the GOP these days to make any kind of logical sense. But isn't this a fundamental point that anyone with half a brain can grasp? It's pretty sad that GOP operatives are able to successfully peddle their nonsense to the mainstream media that Obama is somehow making the country "less safe" because he refuses to leave the door open to the torture that was committed under the Bush administration's 2002-2005 "enhanced interrogation" program. Especially considering that the Bush administration itself allegedly stopped using the practices back in 2005!
No matter how it's done, we need to get to the bottom of the atrocities that were committed in our name. Our standing overseas and our moral authority to call out abuses by other countries depends on it.
