'Torture' Showdown
By all means let's have a debate over interrogating terrorists.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
Thursday, January 6, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The White House appears to be dreading today's confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales now that Democrats seem ready to blame the Attorney General nominee for Abu Ghraib and other detainee mistreatment. But this is actually a great chance for the Administration to do itself, and the cause of fighting terror, some good by forcefully repudiating all the glib and dangerous abuse of the word "torture."
For what's at stake in this controversy is nothing less than the ability of U.S. forces to interrogate enemies who want to murder innocent civilians. And the Democratic position, Mr. Gonzales shouldn't be afraid to say, amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament that is likely to do far more harm to civil liberties than anything even imagined so far.
The dispute here stems from the Bush Administration's decision, in early 2002, that Taliban and al Qaeda detainees didn't automatically qualify for prisoner of war status. This caused a fuss in some quarters. But it was in accord with the plain language of the original Geneva Conventions, which require POWs to have met certain criteria such as fighting in uniform and not attacking civilians. The Administration understood what critics don't want to admit--namely, that POWs may not be interrogated, period. The Geneva Conventions forbid even positive reinforcement such as better rations to coax them to talk.
This interpretation of the Geneva rules was hardly novel to the Bush Administration. It was a bipartisan consensus in 1987 when Ronald Reagan repudiated a radical document called Protocol 1--the so-called "international law" that the International Committee of the Red Cross now says requires POW status for al Qaeda. The New York Times praised the Gipper at the time for denying "a shield for terrorists," and the Washington Post also editorialized in support.
Viewed in light of that history, it was natural--and law-abiding--that in March 2002 the CIA asked the White House for guidance on permissible interrogation techniques, frustrated that the likes of al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah were refusing to give up information. Thus was born the misleadingly labeled "torture" memo, which did indeed discuss the outer limits of what the CIA might be able to do.
But to do otherwise--to not be "forward-leaning" as Mr. Gonzales is reported to have put it--would have been irresponsible of an executive branch whose primary duty is to defend the homeland. Remember, this was not long after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, and there were (and still are) real fears of dirty bombs, smallpox and even actual nuclear weapons. Remember also that well-known liberals like Alan Dershowitz were going even further and suggesting judge-issued "torture warrants."
And so things rolled along, successfully and uncontroversially, as interrogations of Zubaydah and other al Qaeda detainees played an invaluable part in helping round up the group's leadership, including the likes of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh. Then the Abu Ghraib scandal broke early last election year, and documents like the "torture" memo were leaked and alleged to have somehow "set the tone" or "created the climate" for what happened.
The charge was absurd from the get-go. This was an internal discussion, not a policy directive; only a handful of people were even aware of it; and it was about al Qaeda, not Iraq. And, sure enough, former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger's later report found the Abu Ghraib abuses not only bore no resemblance to any interrogation method contemplated for Iraqi prisoners, they weren't related to interrogations at all. It was sick behavior by individuals on the "night shift." Mr. Schlesinger concluded that the overall rate of mistreatment in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to be far lower than in past conflicts.
As for al Qaeda, let us describe the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever actually authorized. It's called "water-boarding," and it involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning.
Is that "torture"? It is pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior, but we are told it is also used to train U.S. pilots in case they are shot down and captured. More to the critics' apparent point, is it immoral, or unjustified, in the cause of preventing another mass casualty attack on U.S. soil? By all means let's have a debate; Mr. Gonzales should challenge a few Democrats to categorically renounce it and tell us what techniques they would tolerate instead.
If the Gonzales critics are really worried about civil liberties, they might ponder the domestic political response to another 9/11. Do they really think Roosevelt's internment camps and Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus were merely products of a less enlightened age, and that Americans wouldn't respond to a dirty bomb explosion in a major city with mass detentions of men with Islamic surnames, closed borders, or worse? This civil-liberties catastrophe is precisely what "water-boarding" is trying to prevent.
So far, the White House has done a perfectly awful job of explaining this. And it now seems to be making the mistake of trying to appease the Gonzales critics with a modest mea culpa for "over-broad" internal discussions. This retreat began last year with its attempt to distance itself from a legal memo written by some very fine lawyers who were doing nothing more than exploring America's options for defending itself. Predictably, this only emboldened the critics and opportunists, and it won't surprise us to see even Republicans of the McCain-Hagel stripe seize the chance to show their "independence" before this is all over.
The better alternative is for Mr. Gonzales to go on offense and defend his entirely defensible actions. What the other side is fundamentally asserting is that aggressive interrogations are impermissible under any circumstances and to even contemplate them is to "set the tone" for torture. This is dangerous both to American security and liberty.
Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
