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Published on Thursday, January 6, 2005 by New York Times 
    
We Are All Torturers Now 
    
by Mark Danner 
    
    
At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain 
story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, 
adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level 
wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes 
are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the 
final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.

When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee 
today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the 
United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The 
senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush 
administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed 
the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to 
one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely 
overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and 
abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they 
have never really stopped. However much these words have about them the ring 
of accusation, they must by now be accepted as fact. From Red Cross reports, 
Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R. Schlesinger's 
Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other government and independent investigations, we have in 
our possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" 
treatment - to use a phrase of the Red Cross - "tantamount to torture." 

So far as we know, American intelligence officers, determined after Sept. 11 
to "take the gloves off," began by torturing Qaeda prisoners. They used a 
number of techniques: "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is stripped, shackled 
and submerged in water until he begins to lose consciousness, and other forms 
of near suffocation; sleep and sensory deprivation; heat and light and dietary 
manipulation; and "stress positions." 

Eventually, these practices "migrated," in the words of the Schlesinger 
report, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where for a time last spring the marvel of 
digital technology allowed Americans to see what their soldiers were doing to 
prisoners in their name. 

Though the revelations of Abu Ghraib transfixed Americans for a time, in the 
matter of torture not much changed. After those in Congress had offered 
condemnations and a few hearings distinguished by their lack of seriousness; after 
the administration had commenced the requisite half-dozen investigations, none 
of them empowered to touch those who devised the policies; and after the 
low-level soldiers were placed firmly on the road to punishment - after all this, 
the issue of torture slipped back beneath the surface. Every few weeks now, a 
word or two reaches us from that dark, subterranean place. Take, for example, 
this account, offered by an unnamed F.B.I. counterterrorism official reporting 
in August, more than three months after the Abu Ghraib images appeared, on 
what he saw during a visit to Guantánamo:"

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee 
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or 
water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left 
there for 18-24 hours or more...When I asked the M.P.'s what was going on, I 
was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and 
the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion...the detainee was almost 
unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently 
been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." 

This is a fairly mild example when judged against the accounts of the 
"abuses" that have entered the public record. I put quotation marks around the word 
"abuses" because most of these acts - as the F.B.I. agent acknowledged ("the 
interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment") - were in fact 
procedures, which would not have been possible without policies that had been 
approved by administration officials. 

In the next few days we are likely to hear how Mr. Gonzales recommended 
strongly, against the arguments of the secretary of state and military lawyers, 
that prisoners in Afghanistan be denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions. 
We are also likely to hear how, under Mr. Gonzales's urging, lawyers in the 
Department of Justice contrived - when confronted with the obstacle that the 
United States had undertaken, by treaty and statute, to make torture illegal - 
simply to redefine the word to mean procedures that would produce pain "of an 
intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death 
or organ failure." By this act of verbal legerdemain, interrogation techniques 
like water-boarding that plainly constituted torture suddenly became 
something less than that. 

But what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, 
are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales 
is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is 
unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next 
attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that 
he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while 
the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that 
as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his 
client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because 
he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from 
a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the 
country claims to stand.

On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Mr. Gonzales be confirmed. The 
system of torture has, after all, survived its disclosure. We have entered a 
new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and 
investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. 
Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, 
and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last 
week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in 
torture." And there the story ends. 

At present, our government, controlled largely by one party only 
intermittently harried by a timorous opposition, is unable to mete out punishment or 
change policy, let alone adequately investigate its own war crimes. And, as 
administration officials clearly expect, and senators of both parties well 
understand, most Americans - the Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon 
forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a repellent subject - 
are generally content to take the president at his word.

But reality has a way of asserting itself. In the end, as Gen. Joseph P. Hoar 
pointed out this week, the administration's decision on the Geneva 
Conventions "puts all American servicemen and women at risk that are serving in combat 
regions." For General Hoar - a retired commander of American forces in the 
Middle East and one of a dozen prominent retired generals and admirals to oppose 
Mr. Gonzales - torture has a way of undermining the forces using it, as it did 
with the French Army in Algeria.

The general's concerns are understandable. The war in Iraq and the war on 
terrorism are ultimately political in character. Victory depends in the end not 
on technology or on overwhelming force but on political persuasion. By using 
torture, the country relinquishes the very ideological advantage - the promotion 
of democracy, freedom and human rights - that the president has so 
persistently claimed is America's most powerful weapon in defeating Islamic extremism. 
One does not reach democracy, or freedom, through torture.

By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature 
our enemies have sought to make of us. True, that miserable man who pulled out 
his hair as he lay on the floor at Guantánamo may eventually tell his 
interrogators what he knows, or what they want to hear. But for America, torture is 
self-defeating; for a strong country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. 
After Mr. Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order and propriety 
- will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.

Mark Danner is the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the 
War on Terror."  
    
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0106-26.htm

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