When I did this Q&A with Daphne Eviatar last week on JSOC's classified detention facilities in Afghanistan, I was hoping to preempt a little bit of the alarmism I suspected might emerge from the AP story on the subject, which shoehorns facts (we know very little about how people detained by JSOC are treated) into a preconceived narrative (Obama is a total hypocrite!) in which they do not fit. In his response to my piece, Robert Chesney writes:
What would have been interesting is if AP reported that (i) the ICRC was being denied access to these detainees, (ii) that U.S. personnnel were using interrogation techniques other than those contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual, or (iii) that persons captured outside Afghanistan were being taken to any U.S.-controlled facilities. But the story makes no such claims.
Right. None of this is to say human-rights groups shouldn't be worried about what's happening in those facilities, that some of what remains in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual isn't problematic, or that the government shouldn't be more transparent about how it treats people in its custody. But the narrative "Obama is doing what Bush did" is so often true on national-security matters that we lazily assume it's accurate even when it isn't.
