Psyche, Science, and Society

American exceptionalism redux: The New York Times on American torture

October 7th, 2007

The New York Times editorializes yet again about American torture:

On Torture and American Values
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation — had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.

The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability.

Mr. Bush and his aides were still clinging to their rationalizations at the end of last week. The president declared that Americans do not torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his detention policies.

Neither statement was true — at least in what the White House once scorned as the “reality-based community” — and Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious. He demanded all of the “opinions of the Justice Department analyzing the legality” of detention and interrogation policies. Lawmakers, who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values.

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.

Clinging to the administration’s policies will only cause further harm to America’s global image and to our legal system. It also will add immeasurably to the risk facing any man or woman captured while wearing America’s uniform or serving in its intelligence forces.

This is an easy choice.

Commendable as this editorial is, there are, of course, two problems with it.

The first problem is that it accepts American ideology at face value. The truth is that the United States has an extensive history of torture. Just think of the thousands tortured as part of Operation Phoenix during the Vietnam war. It is estimated that 20,000 were murdered by US forces. An unknown number were tortured. Or just ask those thousands upon thousands tortured throughout Latin America by US-trained torturers from the military, police, and US-armed paramilitaries. Think of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc., etc. Torture truly is as American as military aid. What is unique about the present situation is that the torture is not conducted behind that thin veneer of plausible deniability that seems to separate the “civilized” from the uncivilized” countries. It is a sign of the inability of Americans to accept the truth that the New York Times, like so many others, peddles this national myth of “goodness,” of American exceptionalism, as if it represents historical reality. We will not truly stop the US torture until we accept how committed to its commission our country has been.

The other problem with this editorial is that it does not discuss any punishment or reckoning for the torturers who direct our government. Impeachment is not to be discussed in polite society. Neither are war crimes trials for those of our leaders committing war crimes. Torture is not just an aberration, it is a crime. Torture is illegal in the United States and by treaty. To allow the Bush’s, the Cheney’s, the Gonzales’, the Rumsfelds to escape punishment is to say that we, as a country, really don’t care. The most horrendous crimes are nothing special, assuming those ordering them are high enough. The New York Times calls for “[r]estoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay.” While critical, this is far from enough. “Restoring the rule of law” is meaningless if those who ordered the lawlessness go free. Even if the US again returns to its plausible deniability about torture, the lack of any reckoning with those who brazenly ordered torture will put the lie to any claim that this countries gives any primacy to human rights.

Entry Filed under: Bush administration, CIA, Guantanamo, International Law, Interrogation, Law, Torture, War Crimes