BOWDEN ON TORTURE

He’s right, of course. Except in one respect. What has happened under Bush is not the predictable, occasional mistreatment of detainees that may well occur in every war. What has happened is that, for the first time, the commander-in-chief, instead of creating clear boundaries against abuse and mistreatment and insisting on complete compliance, gave the military confusing instructions, signed memos that would sanction abuse and outright torture, and then acted as if the metastasized pattern of abuse was somehow a function of a few “bad apples” at the bottom of the chain of command. You cannot understand Abu Ghraib without reading the Yoo memo that justified it or the policies at Gitmo that were transferred to Abu Ghraib by Genera Miller. It would comfort some to believe that the massive evidence of abuse we now have was and is merely a function of the kind of abuse inevitable in any conflict. No reasonable assessment of the evidence, however, could come to that conclusion. This president re-made the rules that made torture not just an emergency measure or an occasional failure – but a policy. Where torture was once tolerated, at worst, in some of our allies in the past, it has now come to be endorsed by the commander-in-chief of the United States as a policy inflicted by men and women in the uniform of the U.S.