Secrets, Politics and Torture
by digby
I wrote about last night’s Frontline documentary called “Secrets, Politics and Torture” for Salon this morning. It’s well worth watching online if you missed it. Here’s an excerpt:
The Frontline film takes a detailed look at the torture program and the saga of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report, the summary of which was finally released last December. (The 6,000 page report remains classified.) We know about the waterboarding and confining of prisoners in a tiny box for days, the sleep deprivation, the beatings and the grotesque depravities like “rectal feeding” from the Senate report. It reads like a bureaucratic version of the Marquis de Sade’s “20 days of Sodom.” Seeing all that put in context with the lies and the coverup lends it a new layer of horror.
Of particular interest in this film are the interviews with top CIA officials John Rizzo, the agency’s legal counsel, and John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director at the time, both of whom excuse any alleged shortcomings in the torture regime as a result of the agency being tasked with something it wasn’t trained to do. The film does make it clear that the members of the interrogation team, in the beginning at least, were sickened by what they were doing, but were told to continue by the people in Washington who insisted they keep doing it.
Rizzo is a complicated character who explains that he didn’t see his duty as one requiring him to question the morality of the program, but simply to find ways to protect the agency from legal exposure. And he cleverly did that by getting buy-in from the Department of Justice, members of Congress and the White House. He is a creature of the CIA, and is loyal to the agency. But he admits to being shaken when he went to John McCain, after the program had been revealed, to try to convince him that it was highly controlled and effective — and Mccain simply said, “it all sounds like torture to me.” Rizzo was also obviously upset that CIA Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez took it upon himself to destroy tapes of the first horrific interrogation, the revelation of which served as the catalyst for the Senate Torture Investigation.
But if Rizzo comes off as at least somewhat ambiguous about the whole thing, John McLaughlin reveals himself as one of the most chilling characters in recent American history. You wouldn’t assume that this rather bland looking fellow would look menacingly into the camera and hiss, “We were at war. Bad things happen in war,” as if he were in a Clint Eastwood movie. But he does just that.
He also specializes in fatuous nonsense like this:
The CIA faced a real dilemma here: On the one hand, we knew this program would be contentious. On the other hand, we asked ourselves: Wouldn’t it be equally immoral if we failed to get this information and thousands of Americans died? If there was another 9/11? How immoral would that be? That’s the dilemma we were up against. And we felt a moral commitment to protect the United States.
That’s very stirringly heroic, but it ignores the fact that despite his insistence otherwise, there’s simply no evidence that their program was effective at all, much less any more effective than other means that didn’t require the United States of America to twist itself into a pretzel to try to justify its immoral behavior. And you have to wonder: with that kind of logic are there any limits to what we can do? It doesn’t sound like there are.
One thing I failed to mention in that piece, was a revelation in the film that I had never heard before. Ryan Cooper in The Week describes it like this:
The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was a colossal stain on Bush’s legacy, and by late 2005 much of the administration had turned against the CIA program. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a push inside the administration to announce an official stop to the program. At a high-level meeting in the White House, everyone but Cheney agreed with Rice, and she seemed to have won. A speech was arranged.
But as happened so often in the Bush administration, Cheney went to Bush personally afterward, and convinced him that Rice was wrong. Rice went to the speech expecting Bush to disavow “enhanced interrogation,” but instead he embraced it, and claimed it had produced valuable intelligence (it hadn’t).
He didn’t just embrace it. He came out swinging in defense of it and demanded that the congress legalize the practice. It’s impossible to know what Cheney told him, but it seemed to galvanise his support. The film shows the incredulous look on Condi Rice’s face as she listened to the speech — and the grimace grin of Cheney sitting a few seats down. Bush and Cheney walked away from the podium together, back into the White House. It’s quite stunning.
And I can’t help but wonder what in God’s name it would have taken for any of these people to resign? Powell says he was misled by Cheney and the CIA but he stayed on through the first term nonetheless. Condi Rice and the entire National Security team in the White House was lied to by the president who went out and publicly did exactly the opposite of what he told them he was going to do. And yet they stayed on.
Lies to justify war. Lies to justify torture. They knew. They did nothing.
This episode continues to haunt me and I think it will haunt the nation for a very long time. And I have little doubt that if there were another terrorist attack on American soil or any other major threat, the government would do it again without question.
The previous consensus, agreed upon after two epic global conflagrations in the last century, on preventive war, war crimes and human rights is dead and buried. And America is the country that killed it.
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