On Sunday, the New York Times, published an Op-Ed piece by Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College, and author of “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.”
His essay, “Tales From Torture’s Dark World,” contains extensive excerpts from a “Confidential” report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, after interviews with detainees transferred from overseas CIA “black sites” to Guantánamo.
According to Danner, the ICRC’s stated goal was “to produce a report that would ‘provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,’ periods ranging ‘from 16 months to almost four and a half years.'”
It is not known how Mr. Danner came into possession of the report. But according to Mr. Danner, it was intended only for the eyes of senior CIA officials and, more ominously, “Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.”
This “authenticity” translates into all-too-graphic accounts of the most inhumane and degrading forms of torture and abuse—accounts which the reader can confirm for himself in Danner’s piece.
Aside from the repulsive accounts of such acts not worthy of our country, what grabbed my attention, raised my indignation, was Danner’s opening paragraph:
On a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.
“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”
Danner then says:
This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.
On this one claim, I have to respectfully disagree with Danner.
I believe that, even more important, even more historic, even more damming than that speech are the spirit-numbing, immutable images of our President assuring us—the American people—time and time again that “We do not torture.”
