Defenders of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques have tried for years to suggest these methods belong to a gray area just short of torture. It was always a desperate excuse, and now it’s deeply offensive.
on the CIA’s handling of terrorist suspects, released Tuesday, dispels all doubt about the degree to which the agency relied upon brute force, humiliation and life-sapping treatment to pressure suspects.
It was torture. It was torture no more edifying or ambiguous than what has been practiced for hundreds of years in squalid cells around the globe. To be sure, the CIA only wanted to protect Americans from further attacks after 9/11, and its agents were operating in an atmosphere in which Congress and the White House were demanding results, but
Some “detainees were kept shackled in complete darkness and isolation, with a bucket for human waste, and without notable heat during the winter months,” the report says. At least one may have died of hypothermia. Some were subjected to “rectal hydration” to bring them to heel, or to sleep deprivation “for days or weeks at a time.” Waterboarding amounted to “near drownings.”
The Senate report goes to great lengths to make the case that torture failed to produce useful intelligence — a claim the CIA, , emphatically denies. But this debate is a sideshow. It stands to reason that torture will produce both good and bad information on occasion. As it happens, torture is not banned because it is ineffective. It is banned because it is a brutal artifact of the past that the civilized world is trying to leave behind.
A far more important question is how officials in the CIA and Justice Department could conclude that these interrogation methods were legal. Torture is outlawed not only by U.S. law and military doctrine, but by international treaties. A number of CIA personnel themselves had qualms about the techniques, the report reveals, with one calling the program a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.”
Apparently the law against cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners needs to be still clearer, however, so that even the most obtuse government attorney understands.
Meanwhile, the Senate committee’s full report should be declassified and released as well. If this nation is going to understand the truth about what happened, it should be the entire truth.
