NYTimes: "Interrogating Ourselves"

[understandinglife]

Interrogating Ourselves



By JOSEPH LELYVELD
Published: June 12, 2005
I. The Silence After Abu Ghraib

In order to get to the nub of the question of what we as citizens really expect and require of American interrogators facing supposed terrorists -- how far we're prepared to allow those asking the questions to venture into the dark realm of brutalization and coercion -- let's for argument's sake put aside the most horrific, shameful cases, those of detainees who died under interrogation: that of Manadel al-Jamadi, for instance, whose body was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice when it was carried out of an Abu Ghraib prison shower room a year and a half ago, where he'd been handcuffed to a wall; or Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who, elsewhere in Iraq, appears to have been thrust headfirst into a sleeping bag, manhandled there and then, finally, suffocated. By anyone's definition of torture -- even that of the Bush administration, which originally propounded (and later withdrew) a strikingly narrow definition holding that torture occurs only when the pain is ''of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure'' -- these cases answer the question of whether torture has been committed by our side in what's called the global war on terror. No one steps forward to condone what's plainly illegal under United States and international law. And although we've seen no indication that blame will attach to any official or command officer at any level for these killings, there are small signs that conclusions have been drawn somewhere between the Pentagon and White House, signs of an overdue housecleaning, or maybe just a tidying up. By the coldest cost-benefit calculation, a dead detainee is a disaster: he cannot be a source of ''actionable intelligence,'' only fury. So there's now a new policy, ''Procedures for Investigations Into the Death of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the U.S.,'' that was duly conveyed last month to the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations body, in a subsection of a longer report. The subsection's heading even carried a whiff of contrition. It was ''Lessons Learned and Policy Reforms.'' Also, the Pentagon has let it be known that it's preparing a new manual for interrogators that prohibits physical and psychological humiliation of detainees. What interrogation techniques it does allow are listed in a classified annex as, presumably, are any hints of what can happen when those techniques fail to produce the desired results. Can the detainee then be handed over to another agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, that may not be constrained by the new directives? Or to units of a foreign government like the counterterrorism units now being financed and coordinated in Iraq by the United States?

In other words, if there has been a housecleaning, to how much of the shadowy counterterrorism edifice constructed since Sept. 11 does it now apply? The cases we know about, after all, are mostly old cases, even if we recently learned about them. We've been told little about what's now going on in interrogation rooms at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib -- what the limits are now supposed to be. While Defense Department investigators are still kept busy looking into detainees' complaints of abuse in Iraq, it has to be acknowledged that we've yet to hear of any fatalities under interrogation in 2004 or 2005.

<snip>

I found myself bouncing back and forth between the two positions -- the unattainable ideal that brooked no compromise of the law and the unattainable compromise. Since both were unattainable, it didn't seem to matter where I came out. I preferred the ideal, but if coercive force was inevitable under both regimes, I had to admit, not being a lawyer, to a sneaking regard for the one that acknowledged as much. But, of course, the position that rules doesn't get hung up on intellectual tests. It says we'll do what we have to do: don't ask, don't tell. Even when clear evidence of the effectiveness of torture lite is hard to come by, democracies threatened by terrorism shrink from laying down the weapon. Should the threat ever pass, we can be expected to repress any memory of its use as we now try to do in daily life while it persists. Then we'll discover how much gratitude or resentment has accrued to us in the places where we've operated, among the descendants of those we've detained.

More at the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/magazine/12TORTURE.html?hp

[annabanana]

1. It will be interesting

to see what kind of a response this article will get. (and how it may play if those new images from Abu Ghraib are released)

[AX10]

2. The Third Reich had similar means of doing things too.

[understandinglife]

3. It is interesting that this article and Frank Rich's Op-Ed appears ...

... in the same issue of the NYTimes.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3836428&mesg_id=3836428

Peace.


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