A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy

Author:Alfred McCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2009-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

With the end of the 2004 presidential campaign and its curious silence about Abu Ghraib, the political fight over torture redoubled in intensity. But now, in place of political fumbling and mixed messages, the Bush White House focused on burying the prison scandal. This attempt at a cover-up, ironically, served to strengthen resistance by the civil-society coalition, which began to demand an independent inquiry. Although the battle was clearly unequal, the opposition delivered some unexpected blows, pressuring the White House to repudiate its most extreme claims of executive powers and complicating its efforts to conceal the full extent of torture.

The battle produced yet another set of images, one whose meaning is obvious yet elusive. In the nation’s 24/7 news cycle, America’s top propagators of torture are seen walking, talking, and dismissing, almost brazenly, any accountability for what occurred at Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo. As if empowered by their capacity to inflict insufferable pain on detainees in dark corners of the globe, the Bush administration’s torture advocates strut across television screens and down the corridors of power. In less powerful nations, the process of self-exculpation by those who ordered and practiced torture is called, with a sharply pejorative connotation, “impunity.”

Despite photos proving torture and documents identifying those responsible, the White House has denied culpability while protecting, even promoting, almost all the architects of its policy—Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, William J. Haynes II, Jay Bybee, Stephen Cambone, and Timothy E. Flanigan. The White House counsel who derided the Geneva Conventions as obsolete, Alberto Gonzales, was confirmed as attorney general in February 2005, while avoiding anything akin to an apology at his Senate hearings and defending his earlier statements dismissing the Geneva accords as “absolutely the right decision.” The defense secretary who implemented the torture directives, Donald Rumsfeld, survived a cabinet reshuffle and remained for a second term. The Pentagon legal counsel who approved Rumsfeld’s expanded interrogation procedures, William Haynes, was nominated for the federal bench, although his appointment was blocked by the threat of a Democratic filibuster. The author of the Justice Department’s now notorious August 2002 memo, Jay Bybee, was confirmed as federal judge for the Ninth Circuit in March 2003 with lifetime tenure in the U.S. courts. After Paul Wolfowitz became head of the World Bank in March 2005, Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence who had pushed the harsh interrogation policy, was proposed as Rumsfeld’s deputy—although the nomination was withdrawn, without explanation, a few weeks later. In July 2005, the administration nominated Timothy Flanigan, who had helped frame torture policies as White House deputy counsel in 2002, for deputy attorney general, the second-ranking post in the Justice Department.18

Even those who were not rewarded remain unrepentant. To cite the most prominent example, John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the interrogation memos, is back at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where he waved away critics of the White House torture policy. “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?” Professor Yoo asked.

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