Torture as American Policy

Seymour Hersh has long been the conscience of America’s foreign and military policy. It has not earned him much credit with our military. Nor is his reporting always above reproach. But he has played a necessary, perhaps ever more necessary role.

In the June 25 New Yorker, Hersh zeroes in on the efforts of General Taguba to look into and report fairly on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and, by extension, at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Taguba had been asked by the Pentagon to investigate what went on in Abu Ghraib, and who knew what when.

Taguba’s conclusions were that events at Abu Ghraib were well known all along. In fact, they had brought an expert from Guantanamo to introduce some of the measures used at Abu Ghraib. There were copious photos available for people at many levels to see and they had been ignored or dismissed. His conclusion was that what went on at Abu Ghraib was part of a pattern and not an isolated aberration by underlings.

However, on repeated occasions, before committees of Congress and elsewhere, Taguba was contradicted, put down, and dismissed. The brass above him simply lied about what they knew and what had come up to their level months before it all became public. In spite of the fact Taguba had done exactly the job he was asked to do, he was sidelined for the next two years and asked to resign early. They do shoot the messenger.

But it is more than that. Top persons in the government, presumably including the President and the Vice-President, although Taguba’s research did not actually go to these levels, appear to have concluded early on that “do whatever you have to do” was to be the guiding principal behind interrogations. What we saw in the pictures was, at least in part, the result of an deliberate policy of getting the military police and jail keepers to “soften up” prisoners so that information could be more readily extracted from them. There was, incidentally, little or no attempt to investigate whether the individual prisoners softened up were at all likely to have the information that was to be extracted from them.

Our campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamists has been seriously compromised by our treatment of prisoners in the eyes of much of the world. This is not to say, that extreme situations do not require extreme solutions. It is to say that we must take much more seriously than we have the establishment and adherence to acceptable limits on the way in which we treat those who comes into our control.

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