A day without torture is like ...

Seems barely a day goes by without a dribble of info about our nation's continuing shameful descent into barbarism -- the condoning and ignoring of torture by our citizenry.

Yesterday's Times article Detainee Says He Was Tortured While in U.S. Custody tells one story.

This article from last week's New Yorker provides an excellent overview of the story:

OUTSOURCING TORTURE
by JANE MAYER
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07

The article specifically highlights the way our government hands over suspects to other regimes who will do the torturing for us.

The Senate intelligence committee might hold hearings, says this article: Senate May Open Inquiry Into C.I.A.'s Handling of Suspects but I am not holding my breath.

A review of of The Torture Papers is here. It begins:

As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison - the pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the hooded man with outstretched arms - hit the airwaves and newspaper stands, they became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the very embodiment of their worst fears about American hegemony.

They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the same time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served to bolster the "few bad apples" argument - the suggestion not only that the photographed abuses were perpetrated by "a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift," in one investigator's words, but also that the larger problem was confined, as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own.

"The Torture Papers," the new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration - decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.

Many of the documents here have been published before (most notably in Mark Danner's incisive 2004 volume "Torture and Truth"), but "The Torture Papers" contains some material not collected in earlier books. More important, the minutely detailed chronological narrative embodied in this volume, which has appeared piecemeal in other publications, possesses an awful and powerful cumulative weight. As one of its editors. Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, observes, it leaves the reader with "a clear sense of the systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms."

The book is necessary, if grueling, reading for anyone interested in understanding the back story to those terrible photos from Saddam Hussein's former prison, and abuses at other American detention facilities.

As this book makes clear, one of the premises that would inform many of the administration's decisions was an amped-up view of executive power - the notion, as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo put it shortly after 9/11 - that "the power of the president is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces," and that he has the authority "to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters" whether or not such entities can be "demonstrably linked to the September 11 incidents." Indeed, Justice Department memos suggested that in a war like the present one, presidential power can override both congressional laws and "customary international law": in short, that the president can choose to suspend America's obligation to comply with the Geneva Conventions if he wishes, authorize torture or detain prisoners without a hearing.

Finally, this letter regarding a review in last week's Times Book Review makes the link to Randolph Bourne that I have been talking about in my classes lately:

Of Terror and Torture
To the Editor:
Andrew Sullivan's powerful review of two books on torture (Jan. 23) makes clear the extent of responsibility for violations of the Geneva Convention and basic human rights. His admission that those like himself who supported the war for humanitarian reasons must share some of the blame is courageous. In this context it is worth remembering Randolph Bourne's devastating reply to intellectuals who, won over by Woodrow Wilson's idealistic rhetoric, supported American entry into World War I. In the illusory hope of promoting their own ''liberal purposes,'' Bourne wrote, intellectuals had allied themselves with ''the least democratic forces in American life.'' Those forces, not the humanitarian intellectuals, he predicted, would determine the war's conduct and consequences. Bourne's warning was vindicated when the Wilson administration unleashed the greatest assault on civil liberties in American history. The lesson — that the character of those who hold power determines how a war is conducted — remains valid today.
ERIC FONER

The next letter, however, points out that Sullivan's switch from pro-war to anti-torture is hardly as courageous as Foner generously contends:

To the Editor:
I am grateful to the Book Review for according such space and prominence to the review of my book ''Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,'' and to Andrew Sullivan for the seriousness with which he treats the issue of torture. I wonder if I might make two comments.

First, Sullivan several times refers to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, which include reports by F.B.I. officials who witnessed torture of detainees at Guantánamo, some of it months after the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public. He notes, rightly, that these are ''not provided in Danner's compilation,'' but neglects to add that this is so because the documents were not released until two months after the book was published. Readers will find a link to the A.C.L.U. documents, which are part of a river of evidence that can be expected to grow in volume and force during the next few years, at my Web site, markdanner.com.

Second, Sullivan, after solemnly regretting how ''political polarization'' might have contributed to the relative silence that has greeted the American turn toward torture, makes the observation that ''most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents — like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh — were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas.''

For my part — Hersh is well able to speak for himself — the first half of this statement is quite true. I thought invading and occupying Iraq a foolish and self-defeating step for my country to take and I said so, publicly and repeatedly. Simply put, I believed that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States was greatly exaggerated, and that the risks of invading and occupying that country were greatly understated. If these arguments constitute an ''agenda,'' events have sadly proved both of them true, with no help from me.

But if there is any evidence, beyond Sullivan's imputation of motive to me, that I was ''eager to use this scandal to promote'' my agenda — that is, to discredit the war — he does not offer it. In the thousands of words he writes I can find no criticism of bias, no fingerpointing at any exaggeration in the text or at any error of fact. Indeed, since Sullivan spends most of his review essentially restating as his own arguments I make in the book, one cannot escape the implication that when I write about torture and related issues it must be in order to discredit the war but when Sullivan writes about them he is simply performing a brave act of conscience. If there is an agenda being promoted here, it is a transparently self-serving one, and it is a pity Sullivan let it mar an otherwise eloquent essay.

I have been reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses for more than two decades, in Central America, Haiti and the Balkans, among other places. In some of those places, such as the Balkans, I believed that the United States should intervene; in others, such as Iraq, I believed that it should not. But I did not use massacres in Bosnia to promote my ''agenda'' any more than I did torture in Iraq.

As I hope I made clear in my book, I believe that the damage the United States is doing to itself by torturing prisoners transcends the Iraq war, and that the consequences will long outlive it. On this critical point Sullivan and I appear to agree.
MARK DANNER New York

Danner is right that many who came to the anti-war position late still blame the early war opponents for ideological or partisan Bush-hatred and don't allow that most of those who opposed the war from the get-go had ample reason to suspect and distrust.