So, at long last, torture has become part of the national conversation. Too bad the press would never talk about it when it was more relevant, but that does nothing to diminish the fact that we've got to have it out as a nation: how far do we want our military-intelligence program to go in our names?


A review of some notable news items:

• The CIA waterboarded self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, March of 2003.
• The NYTimes reports that a large consenus on torture regimes for the CIA was possible, largely because no one involved "investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate." For example, no one rummaged around to find out that the program they were modelling after "had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans." Nor did they look into the history of waterboarding long enough to learn that "waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition."
• WaPo reports that "intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval to use such methods--and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect."
• And perhaps worst of all, McClatchy reports that "the Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime". A former senior U.S. intelligence official is quoted as saying, "'But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.'"

And that's to say nothing of these oldies-but-goodies:

• A June 2007 piece in Salon demonstrates that psychologists and physicians were part of the effort to prolong the experience of torture.
  
• A December 2008 piece in Vanity Fair quotes FBI Director Robert Mueller as saying that he is unaware of any attacks having been disrupted by what the administration was then calling "enhanced interrogation techniques."
  

It's clear that torture was a premeditated policy that originated from the highest levels of the Bush administration. And yet here are some of the responses coming from the loony Right:

• Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan went on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” to make the following comments about Obama administration's release of torture memos: “Some things in life need to be mysterious”; “Sometimes you need to just keep walking [as in, with blinders on]”; "It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.”
• Former VP Darth Vader went on Fox "News" to make the claim "that the interrogation methods were 'enormously valuable' in thwarting terrorist attacks."

Meanwhile, MediaMatters does a piece showing how "media outlets continue to cite Dick Cheney's criticism of President Obama for releasing previously classified Justice Department memos authorizing the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques while ignoring Cheney's self-acknowledged role in authorizing the use of those techniques" (emphasis added).

Isn't torture something better left to Nazis and Spanish Inquisitors? I'm baffled as to why people think there's any room for debate on this--especially since there is no reason to believe that torture yields actionable results. That methodological question mark might be raised if one were to wonder why it took 183 times to waterboard Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. And it's especially troubling that this is one of the primary methods used to forge the claim that Iraq and al Qaeda were in cahoots in the planning of the September 11th attacks.

And that's to say nothing of the moral questions...

Update: Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, says here that the primary impetus for the Bush administration to advance the torture agenda was to help bolster the claim that Iraq was working with Al Qada on the 9/11 attacks. The so-called "interrogation" program's "principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson said.

So not only was torture used to make the bogus link that led us into a disastrous mistake (I feel like "mistake" doesn't begin to cover the problem, but I lack a better synonym), but it also was in use well before the Justice Department claims having authorized it. It leads one to wonder if the Justice memos were post-hoc justifications of what was already going on. That certainly seems to be what this NPR story is getting at: " It is clear that increasingly abusive interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee, in the months between his capture and the first Justice Department memo authorizing harsh interrogations. But the legal guidance that authorized those early interrogations remains shrouded in secrecy. Zubaydah was picked up on March 28, 2002. The Justice Department issued its first memo on torture four months later on Aug. 1."

Update: The media frenzy continues. If only this conversation had been aired out during the emergence of the torture policies. Here a Salon columnist identifies the 13 people responsible for the torture policies, in order of culpability.