TORTURE

Well, we’re getting closer to understanding what’s been going on. Here’s a nugget from Newsweek:

White House officials told reporters that such abstract legal reasoning was insignificant and did not reflect the president’s orders. But NEWSWEEK has learned that Yoo’s August 2002 memo was prompted by CIA questions about what to do with a top Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, who had turned uncooperative. And it was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush’s chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel, who discussed specific interrogation techniques, says a source familiar with the discussions. Among the methods they found acceptable: “water-boarding,” or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect’s face, which can feel like drowning; and threatening to bring in more-brutal interrogators from other nations.

This kind of tactic was designed specifically for a few top al Qaeda captives; but it was apparently transferred to Abu Ghraib as well. That last transition is murky. How did those new relaxed rules get moved from Guanatanamo against high-profile Qaeda terrorists to people dragged in off the street in Baghdad? We don’t yet know. But we do know that the administration debated various methods of torture – because Rumsfeld signed off on some and then had a change of heart and restricted some of the more horrifying methods. It’s also clear that there was considerable internal debate about the new regulations. The CIA won out against the FBI most of the time. The reason I’m concerned about this is not simply because it is horrifying that the United States now uses forms of torture on captives. I’m concerned because, as Hitch has written, we are about to find out much more about Abu Ghraib, where rape and murder of inmates occurred. As John McCain has put it, “It’s just incredible. Why doesn’t every nation in the world now have a green light to do everything it thinks is necessary to combat a ‘terrorist threat’?” I guess some will dismiss McCain as a wuss when it comes to terror. But I don’t. He has a point about another notch downward in America’s reputation. And I’m sick of being told that worrying about this is a sign of faint-heartedness in the war. It is a sign of basic decency. Torture is not only horrifying for the victim; it corrupts the perpetrator. I don’t want to see America become indistinguishable from some Latin American police state in the way it treats its inmates in this war on terror. There are limits. How we conduct this war is as important as winning it. We cannot lose our soul in the process.