So Torture Is Legal?
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A27
To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in
America's secret prisons, you don't need special security
clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect
the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content
of a few items now easily found on the Internet.
Item 1: The "torture memo." Written in August
2002 by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, at
the request of the CIA and then the White House, this memo
argues that it "may be justified" to torture al
Qaeda suspects. The memo, posted last weekend on The Post's
Web site, also speculates that international law, which
categorically prohibits torture, "may be
unconstitutional."
Item 2: The "Rumsfeld memo." This document,
unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, was written in March
2003 by a Pentagon working group. It declared not only that
the American president has the power to evade international
law and torture foreign prisoners but that interrogators who
follow the president's commands can, in addition, be held
immune from prosecution.
Item 3: The Abu Ghraib photographs. Remember what they show:
not just torture but guards who appear absolutely certain of
their legal and moral right to torture, as well as a large
number of unidentified personnel, standing around and
watching.
Item 4: The "dog testimony." Two Army dog handlers
assigned to Abu Ghraib have submitted sworn statements,
again obtained by The Post, asserting that military
intelligence officers told them to use dogs to frighten
prisoners. The Army had said that any use of dogs in
interrogations would have needed approval from the U.S.
military commander in Iraq.
As I say, connect the dots: They lead from the White House
to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to
military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White
House. They don't, it is true, make a complete picture. They
don't actually reveal whether direct White House and
Pentagon orders set off a chain of events leading to the
abuses at Abu Ghraib, prisoner deaths in Afghanistan or
other uses of torture we haven't learned about yet.
But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy:
Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has
an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should
go.
Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own
volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the
White House knew it: There's an election coming up. As if to
underline this point, the president ducked and dodged last
week when asked at a news conference about torture,
declaring that "the instructions went out to our people
to adhere to the law." But which law? The Geneva
Conventions? Or the law as defined by secret memos?
Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the
answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the
House has gone silent. On Monday some Democrats on the House
Armed Services Committee tried to call on the Defense
Department to hand over documents related to Abu Ghraib. The
Republican leadership quashed the move. Meanwhile, Sen. John
Warner's Armed Services Committee, conducting the only
active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a
leisurely pace. With only a few working days left before the
summer recess, it's hard to see how there will be much in
the way of a comprehensive report ready before the
elections.
The military is conducting its own inquiries, of course. But
without political support, the military alone will be unable
to push further, to uncover who, exactly, gave the military
its orders, and which political decisions created the
conditions that made abuse possible. The press is hard at
work too, at least that part of it that is not supporting
the idea that the Constitution somehow permits torture, and
always has. But articles, television reports and blogs are
useful only insofar as they move the public.
For in the end, it is public opinion that matters, and it is
on public opinion that the fate of any further
investigations now depends. Voters have some items of
information available to them, as listed above. Voters --
ultimately the most important source of pressure on
democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen,
their senators and their president for more. If they don't,
the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without
a real national debate, without congressional approval,
without much discussion of what torture actually means and
why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few
secret committees will have changed the character of this
country.
Indeed, if the voters can't move the politicians, and the
politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may
wake up one morning and discover that torture has always
been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative
philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the
triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." It looks
as if he was right.
applebaumanne@washpost.com
© 2004
The Washington Post Company
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