Fight Fire With Compassion
By DONALD P. GREGG
Published: June 10, 2004
Recent reports indicate that Bush administration lawyers, in their struggles to deal with terrorism, wrote memos in 2003 pushing aside longstanding prohibitions on the use of torture by Americans. These memos cleared the way for the horrors that have been revealed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo and make a mockery of administration assertions that a few misguided enlisted personnel perpetrated the vile abuse of prisoners.
I can think of nothing that can more devastatingly undercut America's standing in the world or, more important, our view of ourselves, than these decisions. Sanctioned abuse is deeply corrosive - just ask the French, who are still seeking to eradicate the stain on their honor that resulted from the deliberate use of torture in Algeria. French soldiers had been tortured in Vietnam, in some cases revealing valuable information to their Vietminh captors. Senior French officers decided that the same tactics might work for them. As Alistair Horne put it in "A Savage War of Peace," use of torture may have won the battle of Algiers for the French, but it cost them Algeria.
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For the only time in my C.I.A. career, I disobeyed orders. I went to the chief bodyguard of President Park Chung Hee and told him that I found it difficult to work with the South Korean spy agency because it seemed more interested in stifling domestic dissent than in working against North Korea. I made clear that I was speaking personally, and that I had not been instructed to register a protest against their actions, of which the bodyguard was fully aware.
A week later, the powerful director of Korean intelligence was fired. He was replaced by a former justice minister, whose first action was to prohibit torture by the agency's officers.
Donald P. Gregg, national security adviser to George H. W. Bush from 1982 to 1988 and ambassador to Korea from 1989 to 1993, worked for the C.I.A. for 30 years. He is chairman of the Korea Society.more
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