Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again

I'm getting tired of the "debate" on torture. So many people, especially on the left, see this issue in black and white terms, and the leftists are particularly bothersome as they don't really care about the nuance of enhanced interrogation in the war on terror, because, frankly, they think we had it coming on 9/11.

Thankfully, Rick Moran - always a perceptive commentator - recently offered a clear interpretation of some of the issues surrounding torture, where he basically questioned the propriety of maintaining an absolute prohibition on torture:

There is no other issue in my lifetime except Vietnam that has elicited such passion in both defenders and detractors. At least with Vietnam there was, if not a middle ground, a gradation of opinion about our involvement and its legality. No such wiggle room exists on the torture issue. You either excuse it or condemn it. You either see the administration as blameless, trying to elicit information that would save us from another terrorist attack, or you believe war crimes have been committed in our name. Perhaps you see the application of torture as a matter of indifference or even justified during war time. Maybe you view the “enhanced interrogation techniques” as falling short of torture. Or maybe you believe that only a full investigation into detainee treatment followed by war crimes trials is the way to redeem the American soul.

Added to the opinion war now is a report issued (PDF required) by the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Even for those familiar with most of the details regarding Bush administration decisions about “enhanced interrogation” techniques, there is some new information as well as confirmation of the involvement of certain administration officials that directly implicates them in violations of U.S. law.

Read the whole thing, here. Moran's key insight at the passage is to suggest that perhaps there's some middle ground on the issue. As you may have noticed, he cites the Levin report, the "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody," available on PDF (here).

The Wall Street Journal argued last week that the issuance of the report was just a "formality," as the Bush administration's guilt has long ago been decided in left's Star Chamber of public opinion. But this passage on "the torture narrative" is worth citing at length:

Nearly every element of this narrative is dishonest. As officials testified during Mr. Levin's hearings and according to documents in his possession, senior officials were responding to requests from the CIA and other commanders in the field. The flow was bottom up, not top down. Those commanders were seeking guidance on what kind of interrogation was permissible as they tried to elicit information from enemies who want to murder civilians. At the time, no less than Barack Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, was saying that terrorists didn't qualify for Geneva protections.

This was the context in which the Justice Department wrote the so-called "torture memos" of 2002 and 2003. You'd never know from the Levin jeremiad that these are legal -- not policy -- documents. They are attempts not to dictate interrogation guidelines but to explore the legal limits of what the CIA might be able to do.

It would have been irresponsible for those charged with antiterror policy to do anything less. In a 2007 interview former CIA director George Tenet described the urgency of that post-9/11 period: "I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again . . . Plot lines that I don't know -- I don't know what's going on inside the United States." Actionable intelligence is the most effective weapon in the war on terror, which can potentially save thousands of lives.

We know that the most aggressive tactic ever authorized was waterboarding, which was used in only three cases against hardened, high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, including Abu Zubaydah after he was picked up in Pakistan in 2002. U.S. officials say the information he gave up foiled multiple terror plots and led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11. As Dick Cheney told ABC this week, "There was a time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from one source" -- KSM.

Starting in 2002, key Congressional leaders, including Democrats, were fully briefed by the CIA about its activities, amounting to some 30 sessions before "torture" became a public issue. None of them saw fit to object. In fact, Congress has always defined torture so vaguely as to ban only the most extreme acts and preserve legal loopholes. At least twice it has had opportunity to specifically ban waterboarding and be accountable after some future attack. Members declined.

As for "stress positions" allowed for a time by the Pentagon, such as hooding, sleep deprivation or exposure to heat and cold, they are psychological techniques designed to break a detainee, but light years away from actual torture. Perhaps the reason Mr. Levin released only an executive summary with its unsubstantiated charges of criminal behavior -- instead of the hundreds of pages of a full declassified version -- is that the evidence doesn't fit the story. If it did, Mr. Levin or his staff would surely have leaked the details.

Not one of the 12 nonpartisan investigations in recent years concluded that the Administration condoned or tolerated detainee abuse, while multiple courts martial have punished real offenders. None of the dozen or so Abu Ghraib trials and investigations have implicated higher ups; the most senior officer charged, a lieutenant colonel, was acquitted in 2006. Former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger's panel concluded that the abuses were sadistic behavior by the "night shift."

Now that Mr. Obama is on his way to the White House, even some Democrats are acknowledging the complicated security realities. Dianne Feinstein, a Bush critic who will chair the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, recently told the New York Times that extreme cases might call for flexibility. "I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible," she said (our emphasis). Ms. Feinstein later put out a statement that all interrogations should be conducted within the more specific limits of the U.S. Army Field Manual but said she will "consider" other views. But that is already the law for most of the government. What the Bush Administration has insisted on is an exception for the CIA to use other techniques (not waterboarding) in extreme cases.

As for Mr. Levin, his real purpose is to lay the groundwork for war-crimes prosecutions of Bush officials like John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Jim Haynes who acted in good faith to keep the country safe within the confines of the law. Messrs. Obama and Holder would be foolish to spend their political capital on revenge, but Mr. Levin is demanding an "independent" commission to further politicize the issue and smear decent public servants.

As Mr. Levin put it in laying on his innuendo this week, a commission "may or may not lead to indictments or civil action." It will also encourage some grandstanding foreign prosecutor to arrest Mr. Rumsfeld and other Bush officials like Pinochet if they ever dare to leave the U.S. Why John McCain endorsed this Levin gambit is the kind of mystery that has defined, and damaged, his career. We hope other Republicans push back.

Mr. Levin claims that Bush interrogation programs "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives." The truth is closer to the opposite. The second-guessing of Democrats is likely to lead to a risk-averse mindset at the CIA and elsewhere that compromises the ability of terror fighters to break the next KSM. The political winds always shift, but terrorists are as dangerous as ever.

Keep all of this in mind as you see the left ratchet-up its push for war crimes prosecutions in the weeks ahead. Vice-President Cheney's interview, not surprisingly, has been interpreted as fresh evidence against the "evil BushCo regime" among American antiwar communists. Democracy Now! has a new post up highlighting Representative Jerrold Nadler's call for for an independent counsel to investigate the administration, with quotations from Cheney's interview. But don't delay ... folks should go straight to Jonathan Karl's interview with Cheney at ABC News and read the facts for themselves. Not only has the U.S. violated no laws in domestic civil liberties, the international rights activists are using the outcry against American "human rights violations" as a nihilist cudgel to build the internationalization of law and the delegitimation of American great power sovereignty.

But note too: Even if we were to agree that rogue actions by aggressive U.S. service personnel were to fit the left's definition of torture, we must consider whether it's in America's national interest to condone and enforce an absolute prohibition against such practices. People must realize that there are circumstances in internationl life - times when a great many lives are placed at risk - when the question of enhanced interrogation efforts take on existential proportions. Why would any nation sacrifice its national survival, not to mention the protection of human life from the potentialities of enormous terrorist evil, when institutional structures are in place, and the bureaucratic regimes are capable, of establishing decision rules and procedures to regulate and legitimize the very procedures that are now being used to protect the homeland from the kind of destruction this country witnessed in 2001? To accept an absolute prohibition on such measures - which at this point have not been defined categorically as "torture" - would be to empower the antiwar forces who are de facto allies of America's most implacable enemies around the world.

This is the question that Barack Obama must consider upon taking office. People should get this straight in their minds right now: There will not be war crimes prosecutions against top-ranking members of the Bush administration. Even enthusiastic advocates of legal recourse against the administration realize that prosecutions are legally and political impossible (see Scott Horton, "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration").

What we should see for the next phase of the U.S. terror war is how the new Democratic administration can implement an effective domestic regime of enhanced interrogation short of an exclusive resort to rendition of terror suspects to allied nations overseas. How this can be done is legalistically complicated. But whether it shoud be done is now only a matter of debate among the hard-left antiwar contingents. If Barack Obama's defense and foreign policy appointments are so far any clue, we may very well see the consolidation of the vigorous tactics of intelligence gathering under the Democratic policy establishment in 2009.