In light of President Bush's amazing reversal today, acknowledging the existence of CIA "black sites," granting Geneva protections to the desaparecidos held in them and transferring 14 of them to Guantanamo Bay, it's important to reconstruct the full grand narrative of the past five years of his regime's terror tactics. From the first reported murder of a detainee held at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2002 through the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling this summer, Eric Umansky has written a remarkable piece for the Columbia Journalism Review tracing both the evidence of the administration's policy of deliberately abusing detainees during interrogations and media coverage of those revelations.
"Ghost prisoners." The Kafkaesque legal definitions of "torture" and "humane treatment." "Secret renditions." Lynndie England. The (in)famous McCain amendment. It's all there, and it's well worth reading the entire (lengthy) piece.
It tracks the remarkable investigative reporting which, long before Abu Ghraib was made famous, suggested that the administration's policies, written and executed at the hands of Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, et al., specifically condoned the use of physical abuse that had resulted in detainee deaths. At the same time, it also tracks how various parts of the media repeatedly failed to make it clear to Americans the crimes their government was commiting, and most importantly, how the Bush administration ran an extremely clever counter-media campaign to prevent this shocking revolt against common American decency from ever turning into the scandal it deserved.
Complicating matters has been the Bush administration’s savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist. ...
In shaping the debate, the administration moved not only to distance itself publicly from those of its policies that abrogated the restrictions on abusive treatment, but also to keep those policies from being uncovered. Appearing in congressional hearings soon after the so-called torture memos were leaked, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to discuss, release, or even acknowledge the memos and insisted that the administration had never approved torture. (The insistence that the U.S. didn’t engage in “torture” would often trip up many reporters, who weren’t aware that the administration defined “torture” exceedingly narrowly.) With the administration now refusing to acknowledge its policies of coercive interrogations, the debate on torture was reframed as a debate about whether there was a need for a debate.
The argument by the White House and its allies that there wasn’t a need for a debate was aided by many news organizations’ habit of presenting both sides of a story as if they were equal, regardless of the underlying reality. The result was a kind schizophrenic coverage: aggressive investigative pieces showed the extent to which policy had underwritten many abuses, while political and other stories passed along the administration’s assertions that abuse was the work of a few bad apples, without offering key context — namely that the facts suggested those assertions were untrue.
As the administration blocked attempts to create an overarching, independent investigation into abuses, a head-snapping number of reports of varying quality and focus by military officers — Taguba, Schlesinger, Schmidt, Fay, Hood, Church, and Green, among others — surfaced. None of them were tasked with looking at the role policy played in abuse. The reports did provide clues anyway — the details, if not the official conclusions, of the Taguba and Schlesinger reports were particularly strong. But the administration also worked to keep the details from the public.
The president's announcement today comes coupled with the long-awaited release of the new Army field manual, containing explicit rules for interrogation of prisoners—rules which are now required by law to be followed by all Department of Defense employees and in all facilities run by the DoD.
Much to the pleasant surprise of many, the new manual clearly and simply promises the protections required by law of the Geneva Conventions for all detainees, eliminating any "double standard" where some detainees were protected and others were not, and contains no "classified" secret list of interrogation techniques.
This news is to be cheered, but also raises questions. Members of the Bush administration and their allies have spent the past five years arguing that the threat posed by al-Qaida required that our forces "take the gloves off" and brutalize detainees for our safety.
Are they claiming now that, contrary to all available evidence and common sense, the flames of war and chaos in the Middle East have sufficiently calmed down the terrorist threat that we are no longer in such danger?
Or are they tacitly admitting that, in fact, there was never any need to resort to brutality at all?
--Ethan Heitner |
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 1:09 PM
