We Need The Whole Story On Torture

I'm against torture (who isn't?) in any but the most exigent situations, namely everyone's favorite hypothetical, the highly unlikely scenario of having someone in custody who otherwise won't say where the ticking nuclear device threatening hundreds of thousands of lives is hidden. But as the Obama administration releases the Bush-era memos providing legal justification for severe interrogation techniques, I just don't share the passion of Andrew Sullivan and others who favor prosecution of top officials.

To be more precise, I share their concerns but not their anger. After all, the Bush administration calculated that the U.S. faced an existential threat after Sept. 11. They promised the American people that they'd do anything in their power to protect us, and by and large, we were happy to hear it. Allegations that in the process of keeping the promise, the government put itself in the same moral position as Nazis, or even that our democracy was measurably eroded, seem discredited by the results of the 2008 election.

Had there been another attack on the scale of 2001's, we would not be looking at these memos, and we would probably have a different President. Did George W. Bush overestimate and lawlessly overreact to the threat? Or did he meet it so successfully that we now feel safe enough to scapegoat him for his tactics?

There's no question that the memos sound weasel wordy and opportunistic. This image of waterboarding from a museum detailing the crimes of the genocidal Khmer Rouge is especially ironic.

Still, if the Bush policies have been rolled back by his freely elected successor, what exactly is the purpose of a legal witch hunt? Instead, I'd favor a blue-ribbon panel of some kind, given the charge of guiding future administrations. But its members, and to the extent possible the public, should see evidence of all the plots that were thwarted or didn't succeed for some other reason. Ideally, we should know everything Bush knew before we decide he went too far while protecting us. We have a responsibility to make sure we know what was done in our name, legally or not. We also have the right to know why.

Erasing Cambodia's Memory

A poignant feature by Seth Mydans in the New York Times about how most young people in Cambodia don't know about the communist genocide that killed 1.7 million between 1975-79. Various possibilities are explored. Then, buried in the story:

[Prime Minister] Hun Sen was a mid-level Khmer Rouge commander, though there is apparently no evidence that he committed major crimes. Several ranking members of his ruling party and the military are also former members of Khmer Rouge.

Because of these cross-currents in recent Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge period has not been taught in school...

Oh, we get it. The government lies about or covers up recent history. No wonder younger people are ignorant. But if Nazis had been in the German government in the 1970s and were covering up the Holocaust, is this the kind of story we'd be reading?

Duch In The Dock, Pointing Outward

Kaing Guek Eav, a prison commander charged with torturing and killing 17,000 during the genocidal reign of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia beginning in 1975, blames his crimes on the Nixon administration. Known as Duch, the defendant says that the Khmer Rouge (who murdered nearly two million Cambodians before being driven from power in 1979) gained strength only after the United States supported the regime of Lon Nol, whose second stint as prime minister began in 1969 and ended with the communist victory. Though it has not yet attracted much media coverage in the U.S., Duch's testimony may well reopen a debate among policy makers and historians akin to a theological discussion about the origin of original sin.

In 1968, the fanatical Khmers launched a guerrilla war in Cambodia with support from China and North Vietnam, whose troops had been using Cambodia's supposedly neutral territory as a safe haven for years. Cambodia's head of state, the mercurial and undependable Norodom Sihanouk, wouldn't take on the communists. In 1970, Lon Nol, with the support of the nation's legislature, deposed him and adopted a strong anti-communist line, which the U.S. naturally affirmed, whereupon Sihanouk went to work lending his considerable prestige in the countryside to building up the Khmer Rouge's already muscular insurgency.

Duch's dubious assertion that the Khmers were in tatters until Richard Nixon stepped in fits in neatly with William Shawcross's contention in 1979's Sideshow that the U.S. secret bombing of North Vietnamese positions inside Cambodia in 1969 (tacitly supported, ironically, by Sihanouk) turned the Khmer Rouge into a going concern. Writing in the "American Spectator," the late Peter Rodman, a former Kissinger aide, engaged in an epic exchange with Shawcross during the early 1980s which, as you may imagine, RN and HAK followed with considerable interest.

The tactical side of arguments such as Shawcross's and Duch's is rooted in the law of unintended consequences. If the D-Day invasion had failed and the Nazis killed all the French people who assisted the Allied forces, then FDR and Eisenhower, according to one way of looking at it, would've been responsible for the slaughter. In that kind of analysis, it's entirely up to the observer to identify the sine qua non. If you pick Nixon, then you're saying that the communists' policies while in power are the result of his having essentially spent his Presidency to keep them out. Is it too easy to say that the fault lies instead with the Khmers themselves, for actually envisioning their horrific acts of internal ethnic and socio-economic cleansing (and, of course, with those in Beijing, Moscow, and Hanoi who helped pay for it)?