There are a number of important revelations in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee treatment, and Spencer Ackerman has the details on how torture migrated between the DoD and the CIA, while being approved by senior administration officials in the interim. But the basic conclusion of the report is this: higher ups in the Bush DoD sought information on exploitative interrogation techniques from the segment of the armed forces that trains soldiers to resist torture in December of 2001, months before they had captured any high-level detainees or claimed to have had trouble getting them to talk. They were planning to torture people from the beginning. The decision to go to the "dark side" wasn't a tactical one -- it was a moral one. We were going to get them for what they did to us.
But there's another bombshell in the report that undermines the "good faith" argument that administration officials were just trying to protect the country. Mark Benjamin notes that Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the report as saying, "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq. ... The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." Despite repeated warnings that torture would produce unreliable results, the Bush administration kept torturing detainees in an effort to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq that justified going to war.
In a country where the law was not sensitive to political considerations, there would be a great deal of people in danger of prosecution right now. The report suggests that an extraordinary amount of people in the administration were well aware of the legal barriers to using torture and chose to ignore them and freeze out those who warned this was the case. At this point, the network of people responsible for the use of torture may be so large that prosecution would be politically impossible. We actually live in a country where a substantial number of people believe that war crimes are justifiable to prevent terrorism. Maybe the report's findings about how incredibly counterproductive the use of such methods are in the long term -- and the knowledge that they played a part in getting us mired into a six-year long war in Iraq will change people's minds. But I don't know.
-- A. Serwer
