‘Torture memos’: What do they really reveal?

President Obama has “acted courageously and wisely,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. By releasing—and repudiating—four Bush-era Justice Department memos that gave the CIA legal license to sadistically interrogate suspected terrorists, he has restored some of this nation’s lost “moral authority.” To read these “nauseating” documents is “to take a journey into depravity,” said The New York Times. In “the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history,” Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled that CIA interrogators could slam prisoners against walls, confine them in cramped, dark boxes, keep them standing with their arms handcuffed over their heads for endless hours of agony, and deprive them of sleep for up to 11 days. Waterboarding, the terrifying, simulated drowning technique favored by the Nazis, North Koreans, and medieval torturers, also was permissible, since no one actually was drowned.

If you actually read these memos in historical context, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online, they should be “a source of pride.” Carefully reasoned, the memos “represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms.” In all cases, Bush’s legal team mandated that the techniques not inflict “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” When detainees were “walled,” for example, the documents required that they be thrown against fake, flexible walls, with their necks buttressed by towels to prevent whiplash. “Not exactly Torquemada.” More important, the interrogation methods worked—and saved American lives, said former Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. The CIA has repeatedly reported that it obtained critical information through the harsh interrogation of top al Qaida operatives Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. Mohammed revealed details of a “Second Wave” of attacks that included a plot to fly a plane into a Los Angeles skyscraper, while Zubaydah provided a very useful list of al Qaida operatives and plots.

How do we know this is true? asked Dan Froomkin in Washingtonpost.com. Bush administration and CIA officials “in full CYA mode” are not reliable sources about what torture actually yielded, and their assertions about disrupted plots have been repeatedly disputed by other intelligence officials. Just this week, several intelligence officials told The New York Times that Zubaydah actually gave up everything he knew before the torture began. If waterboarding and torture were so effective, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com, why was Zubaydah ultimately waterboarded 83 times, and Mohammed 183 times? Well, now we know. Intelligence officials revealed this week that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were desperate for Zubaydah and Mohammed to provide “proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq” that would have justified the Iraq war. Alas, the al Qaida operatives could not help them, even when reduced to babbling, broken men pleading for their lives.

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To settle this debate, said Timothy Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, we need a bipartisan “truth commission” that can finally determine what information torture produced, and at what cost. Someday, terrorists will again attack this country. “If it occurs in the absence of a clear historical record of what the Bush/Cheney torture policies did or did not accomplish,” torture’s defenders will charge that “Americans died because their soft-headed countrymen were preoccupied with civil liberties and human rights.” So let’s get answers.