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The Torture Party: Why Republicans Defend the Most Sadistic Government Program in Recent History
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/torture-party-republicans.html?mid=googleIf George W. Bush’s fervent insistence that his government did not engage in torture does not define and haunt him forever—like Richard Nixon insisting he was not a crook, or Bill Clinton denying he had sexual relations with that woman—it will only be for the paradoxical reason that he insisted as much too many times for any one clip to supply the iconic denial.
The Bush administration’s supporters, operating under the assumption that its most brutal “enhanced interrogation technique” was waterboarding, spent much of the past decade defending this singular practice. Waterboarding did not amount to torture, they insisted, because Navy SEALS allegedly undergo the same treatment as part of their training. Anyway, it happened just a handful of times. Marc Thiessen, the Bush administration’s torture point man, later insisted, “We waterboarded in the CIA—the CIA waterboarded three terrorists. Just three.”
The torture regimen turns out to have been carried out on a vastly broader and more depraved scale than the administration’s defenders, or even its critics, ever imagined. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, released this week, describes practices few conservative politicians or intellectuals had prepared themselves to justify. Men were shackled to walls or ceilings for days, in diapers, locked in coffins, rectally violated, subject to days of sleep deprivation, beaten, and (in one instance) murdered. Several intelligence staffers reported being traumatized by the experience.
That is more than one can say for the torture apologists. Having dug in to mount an extended, pointillistic defense of waterboarding, they have found their position suddenly overrun, and have retreated to new ground. “Every civilized nation agrees that torture is wrong,” Senator Ted Cruz complained after the report was released, but, “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W. Bush’s fault.’ ” To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion. Senator Marco Rubio insisted on Twitter, “Those who served us in aftermath of 9/11 deserve our thanks not one-sided partisan Senate report that now places American lives in danger.” Rubio’s previous tweet boasted that the Senate has passed “our bill imposing sanctions against human-rights violators” in Venezuela. The cognitive dissonance surely whooshed right over Rubio’s elegantly coiffed head.
The Bush administration’s supporters, operating under the assumption that its most brutal “enhanced interrogation technique” was waterboarding, spent much of the past decade defending this singular practice. Waterboarding did not amount to torture, they insisted, because Navy SEALS allegedly undergo the same treatment as part of their training. Anyway, it happened just a handful of times. Marc Thiessen, the Bush administration’s torture point man, later insisted, “We waterboarded in the CIA—the CIA waterboarded three terrorists. Just three.”
The torture regimen turns out to have been carried out on a vastly broader and more depraved scale than the administration’s defenders, or even its critics, ever imagined. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, released this week, describes practices few conservative politicians or intellectuals had prepared themselves to justify. Men were shackled to walls or ceilings for days, in diapers, locked in coffins, rectally violated, subject to days of sleep deprivation, beaten, and (in one instance) murdered. Several intelligence staffers reported being traumatized by the experience.
That is more than one can say for the torture apologists. Having dug in to mount an extended, pointillistic defense of waterboarding, they have found their position suddenly overrun, and have retreated to new ground. “Every civilized nation agrees that torture is wrong,” Senator Ted Cruz complained after the report was released, but, “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W. Bush’s fault.’ ” To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion. Senator Marco Rubio insisted on Twitter, “Those who served us in aftermath of 9/11 deserve our thanks not one-sided partisan Senate report that now places American lives in danger.” Rubio’s previous tweet boasted that the Senate has passed “our bill imposing sanctions against human-rights violators” in Venezuela. The cognitive dissonance surely whooshed right over Rubio’s elegantly coiffed head.
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