Imago Dei And Torture

In an "epistle," the cover story in the new "Atlantic," Andrew Sullivan, who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calls on President Bush to be accountable for torture in the same way Reagan accepted responsibility for the Iran-contra affair and Lincoln for the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. In doing so, he appeals to his and Bush's shared Christian faith:

[T]orture has no defense whatsoever in Christian morality. There are no circumstances in which it can be justified, let alone integrated as a formal program within a democratic government. The Catholic catechism states, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions… is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.” Dignity is the critical word there. Even evil men are human and redeemable. Our faith demands that, even in legitimate punishment or interrogation, the dignity of prisoners must be respected. Our faith teaches that each of us—even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—is made in the image of God. To violate that imago Dei by stripping and freezing him, by slamming him against a wall, or strapping him to a board to nearly drown him again and again and again, to bombard him with noise and light until he loses his mind, to reduce a human being to a mental and spiritual shell—nothing can justify this for a Christian. Nothing. To wield that power is to wield evil. And such evil is almost always committed by those who believe they are pursuing good.

Torturing Grandma

Torture in America, less than a century ago: The brutal treatment of women protesting peacefully for the vote in front of Woodrow Wilson's White House, culminating in an almost unbelievable "night of terror" in November 1917. Hunger striker Alice Paul was tortured for weeks. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know about this before. Read about it here and here.

The Inconvenience Of "Rough Men"

Pat Buchanan makes the case against torture prosecutions of CIA personnel:

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres....

[Obama] and Holder may not like what was done...but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?

"Pro-Torture" Christians

Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent conservative voice against torture, rouses himself from his "summer bloggatical" to respond to yesterday's developments. In his post, he reiterates Matthew Yglesias's generalization about bloodthirsty evangelical Christians. I assume they have evidence to back their statements up. Sullivan's comparison of the attitudes of evangelicals and Iranian Muslims would take an exceptionally specific poll question, asked of both Americans and Iranians:

[M]uch of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs'. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

"We'll Kill Your Children" (Lest You Kill Ours)

A summary of the IG's report on CIA interrogation techniques. Every American should grapple with the fact that these things were done in our name -- without ever forgetting that the interrogators loved their families and country and were convinced their actions would help protect us against implacable and fanatical enemies.

The Reason JFK Named His Brother

I'm sure the President is acutely grateful, even in the midst of the massive bipartisan health care push that will help define his term, for his attorney general's tender conscience:

Aides said Holder himself was so troubled by some of the reports [of alleged abuses by CIA interrogators] that he felt a prosecutor might be needed – even though the move is likely to be viewed as an unwelcome distraction by the White House.

Nancy Can't Pull The Football Away This Time

Congressional leaders got 40 interrogation briefings over seven years.

No Fun With Dick And Nancy

Andrew Sullivan called for the prosecution of former Vice President Cheney because, he says, Cheney broke the laws against torture. Sullivan now says that if congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, knew about the alleged felonies but did nothing, they too should be held accountable. But he hasn't yet written that Pelosi should be indicted and prosecuted as an accessory to a felony.

I'm not accusing Sullivan of hypocrisy, because I don't think he has partisan motives for dogging the Bush administration so relentlessly over torture. But eventually he'll have to confront the preposterousness of prosecuting government officials. We now know that in the wake of Sept. 11, all three branches of government, including leaders from both parties, acted as though the U.S. was facing an existential threat. We're talking not about a lawless administration but a government-wide state of mind, reflecting the mentality and wishes of voters, in the face of a danger that felt and appeared virtually unprecedented in our national experience.

A truth commission to understand what happened and why in order to guide future Presidents, yes. Locking up a former VP and the woman who is second in line to the Presidency, no.

The Whats Vs. The Whys Of Torture

Andrew Sullivan skewers former Bush adviser Karl Rove for saying that the Bush administration didn't authorize torture even though he's said that John McCain was tortured in North Vietnam because he was left in a stress position, one of the techniques the Bush administration authorized. Under political and media pressure, the Bush administration itself banned the most controversial technique, waterboarding, which hadn't actually been used since 2003. But as for whether it amounted to torture, the word game that Rove and others are playing is unseemly and dangerous.

While its agents didn't maim and kill its prisoners, the CIA used extreme discomfort and pain to punish people or extract information. Perhaps Rove and other Bush advocates should call it "mild torture," "not the worst kind of torture you can imagine," or "not anything like what our enemies would do and have done to our guys if they got the chance." But they should stop acting as though it wasn't torture at all.

The first reason is that insisting otherwise is an Orwellian misuse of language. Besides that, after all these months the American people have every reason to believe that the fundamental issue in the torture debate is the definition of the word. If President Bush and his advocates are seen as losing the semantic argument, they risk losing the moral one as well. Better to cede the definition and invite the more important and far more complicated debate over how much latitude we are willing to give the government in times of apparent existential challenge. Bush and his advocates will stand taller in that conversation, and rightly so. One risks looking evasive and self-serving by arguing that torture isn't torture. If instead you say, "I might have gone too far to protect the people of the United States, and I have to say that I'd probably do it again," you don't look perfect, but you also don't look small.

Did Bush really go too far? He may have. Did he do so with the best intentions as well as with the knowledge of Democrats and Republicans in Congress? He did. Do future administrations have something to learn from this experience? Undoubtedly. Should the former President and his advisers be prosecuted? Only if we want to weaken the Presidency. Only if we're more interested in political retribution and advantage than in really understanding and learning from what went right and wrong.

Pelosi Knew

It's official: The Speaker of the House was briefed in 2002 on what President Obama calls torture.

Paula Jones Vs. Osama's Jones

The wheel of retributive political justice goes 'round: Jonathan Chait says Republicans are hypocrites for opposing torture indictments for members of the Bush administration after having impeached President Clinton for perjury. The rule of law applies equally to everyone, he argues.

The varying motives for the alleged crimes notwithstanding (protecting the United States vs. not getting in trouble with the First Lady), Chait overlooks an important event when he says:

This argument [that Bush's decisions on torture should be understood in the light of post-Sept. 11 anxiety] would carry more weight if Republicans had changed their thinking on torture and could be expected to follow the law the next time they won the presidency. Alas, they show little sign of intellectual progress.

As a matter of fact, the Bush administration's thinking changed enough that it decided to stop waterboarding in 2005. So if Chait is really saying that torture would have been understandable immediately after Sept. 11 if ultimately the U.S. learned that it probably shouldn't engage in such practices -- well, it did learn, because it stopped, and under Republicans. The pro-torture arguments Chait describes as being intellectually stunted are part of a political rather than a policy debate, since they're being made by those who are engaging in mortal combat over whether Bush officials should be prosecuted. No matter if their thinking has evolved or not, saying, "Now that you think about it, we really are war criminals" is probably not the best defensive move.

If the actions of the next administration, Republican or Democrat, are Chait's real concern, then an intensive blue ribbon investigation (but not leading to prosecutions) is the best way to go.

Relying On Politics, Not Word Games

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer doesn't try to make the case that waterboarding isn't torture. Instead, he rests his argument on two political realities. The first is that if the Bush administration overstepped its bounds, it was in order to protect the people of the United States. The second is that Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats knew what the administration was doing and didn't object.

A third reality -- rarely noted by his critics -- is that President Bush stopped the waterboarding in 2005 in response to media revelations and political pressure.

For the sake of the public's right to know and guidance for future Presidents, I say yes to full disclosure of what techniques were used, on whom, by whom, and to what effect, but only if it wouldn't endanger national security. To prosecutions of elected or appointed officials, attorneys, judges, or interrogators because of waterboarding and other extreme techniques, no.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

White House Burned By Hackosphere

It appears that someone at the White House gave President Obama Andrew Sullivan's post saying that Winston Churchill's government didn't use torture during World War II. During his press conference last night, Obama offered it up as authoritative evidence in favor of his no-torture position.

As it turns out, the record isn't so clear. Ben Smith has now unearthed evidence of British torture centers that was obviously beyond the reach of the resources of "The Daily Dish" and the Executive Office of the President, elusive evidence buried deep within the web site of the British Guardian, damning evidence available only to those who Google with exactly the right search words.

Sullivan now says that if it really happened and Churchill knew about it, then he's a war criminal, too.

Interestingly, if you capture the link to Sullivan's new entry, it says, "the-british-tortured," perhaps the draft headline for the entry. Someone changed the final "Dish" headline to "Three Mansions In London," which sounds like the title of a Moody Blues song. I thought that on this subject, we didn't like weasel words.

Whelan Dealin'

Andrew Sullivan apologizes twice -- the second time, abjectly -- to a constitutional scholar and high-powered lawyer, Edward Whelan, over an error in a post on torture. The second apology includes this touchingly empathetic note:

It must be distressing to deal with this while attending a family funeral (something I was unaware of), and I am indeed sorry for causing Mr Whelan any distress at this time.

Sullivan never apologized to Gov. Palin for repeating and amplifying the fabricated story that she and her minor daughter had engaged in a massive fraud to cover up the her infant son Trig's true parentage -- the most effective libel of the 2008 campaign. Mr. Whelan (or his lawyer) must've written one heck of a letter.

That Campaign Would've Been Torture

Former blogger Ross Douthat, the New York Times's latest new conservative, thinks Dick Cheney should have run for President last year instead of Sen. McCain so George W. Bush's interrogation techniques could have been adjudicated politically instead of legally.

Speaker In The Dock?

If waterboarding is found to have been illegal torture, if all all those who were complicit in breaking the law are impeached or indicted, and if Rep. John Campbell (R-Newport Beach) is telling the truth about a senior colleague in his April 27 e-mail to constituents, then we may end up short at least one constitutional officer (since the Speaker should've called the D.C. police as soon as she was briefed):

Speaker Pelosi and other Congressional leaders were informed of the decision to use the controversial interrogation method and did not protest at the time.

The New Knitters

While it's always dangerous to speculate about motives, Michael Barone's assessment of why some people want Bush officials prosecuted rings true:

Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques -- who thinks that captured al-Qaida leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the full truth? -- than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

Bush critics may well respond that their anger over torture isn't opportunistic. Instead, they'd say, the alleged abuses were the inevitable consequence of a mentality of lawlessness typifying the Bush administration from the beginning -- the original sin, of course, being the allegedly stolen 2000 election. In the same way, for many of Richard Nixon's most entrenched antagonists, the narrative that began with the Alger Hiss case was perfected in Watergate. It was in his nature, the argument goes. We should've known from the beginning. Why didn't they listen to us? As I've learned in a half-lifetime promoting the pro-Nixon nuances, it's almost impossible to dissuade those who have such fixed attitudes. Whether they should determine the structure and course of a sober national debate on torture is one of President Obama's many difficult tactical challenges.

Finding Out Exactly What Happened

In supporting a Sept. 11-style commission to study Bush administration decisions on alleged torture, former Bill Clinton adviser William Galston puts getting the truth first:

My own view is that everyone involved should be granted immunity from prosecution--and then be required to testify fully and under oath. No doubt this approach would leave many people dissatisfied; the desire to punish wrongdoers and reaffirm the rule of law is understandable. Nonetheless, getting to the fullest possible understanding is more important. The path of prosecution would put the legal fate of a handful of individuals ahead of the broader national interest in finding out exactly what happened and in preventing what cannot be justified from recurring.

A Word From Deacon Philip

Besides being a top official in the Bush State Department, Philip Zelikow was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission. His even-handed New York Times op-ed anticipates what the executive summary of a bipartisan fact-finding torture commission report (as opposed to a partisan get-or-save-Dick-Cheney free for all) might sound like:

A professional evaluation of the C.I.A.’s claims [about the effectiveness of the harsh interrogation techniques] would have to examine these cases to sift and weigh the contributions. The Senate Intelligence Committee is embarking on an important effort to sort out the claims and counterclaims.

What the committee may well find, after all the sifting, is that the reports were a critical part of the intelligence flow, but rarely — if ever — affected a “ticking bomb” situation.

That "rarely -- if ever" brings the reader up short. Tell us, please, if there was such a situation. But whether the techniques were effective or not, Zelikow argues that the U.S. Army's anti-al-Qaeda program in Iraq, which complied with international standards, was highly effective as well. As for the CIA's program, allies and even the FBI kept at arms length because they couldn't or didn't want to be associated with practices that smacked of torture. From studying Sept. 11 closer than anyone, Zelikow knows all too well what happens when intelligence gatherers aren't working togeteher.

Obama Obscura

John Dickerson at "Slate" wonders why the President asked for a torture investigation earlier in the week when he now says he doesn't want one.