James Downie at the Washington Post has two good questions for the “torture defenders”:
First, Downie asks, “[i]f the program was successful, then why hide it and lie about it? The CIA repeatedly ‘impeded’ oversight from Congress, the White House and even the agency’s own inspector general.”
Second, he asks, “Why wouldn’t the president or his subordinates want to know about the program, and why wouldn’t the CIA want to bring it to their attention? One would think that, at the very least, if the program was as successful at preventing terrorist attacks as the CIA (misleadingly) claimed, they’d be eager to share the success with the White House.”
We will probably never know the true and complete answers to these questions, but Downie quickly — and rightly so — rejects some of the non-answers already being bandied about by the torture defenders.
The “it was classified” defense doesn’t work, he says, “since the agency had (and still has) no problem leaking classified information to the media when doing so suited its purposes, ‘including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.’”
The “blowback” defense (the fear there would be reprisals) also doesn’t work, Downie says, and he gives two reasons:
First, the agency was quick to obstruct even oversight that took place behind closed doors, and second, as Dan Drezner says, “there is no shortage of U.S. foreign policy actions and inactions in the region to inflame enemies.” With or without the torture program becoming public, al-Qaeda was going to find recruits. Compared with these excuses, it makes more sense that the CIA hid the program because officials knew it was wrong both morally and constitutionally, but the agency’s people and its allies didn’t want to be called to account.
More specifically, on the second question, Downie mentions David Ignatius’ suggestion that these abuses “were ordered by presidents or their henchmen, who didn’t want to know the dirty details.’”
Since we are “suggesting” answers, I would like to suggest that we stop suggesting excuses for the men and women in the White House who — while they may have been spared the dirty details of rectal rehydration — knew darn well that human beings were being tortured at their behest, contrary to the law of the land, contrary to American morals and values and contrary to the infamous “We do not torture.”
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graphic via shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.