The Harm Initiative - Slate

[Solly Mack]

How we got hoodwinked into tolerating abusive interrogations.

By Dahlia Lithwick

A few years ago I wrote about the connection between the torture photos taken at Abu Ghraib and the congressional debate over detainee treatment rules. I argued that the leaked photos, along with memos from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that redefined torture in appalling new ways, were not in fact a public relations blow to the Bush administration, but a sort of foot in the door for looser torture standards—a way to begin desensitizing the American people to the kinds of abuse that had been going on in secret. Two years after the images surfaced, Congress enacted a law essentially permitting the acts depicted. And just as those images paved the way to our broader torture policy, the CIA torture tapes now stand to do the same thing for water-boarding in particular.

An investigation is currently underway to determine who authorized the destruction of those CIA interrogation tapes. But as Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced this month, there will be no investigation into the water-boarding depicted in the tapes, because it's not illegal, or it wasn't at the time of the interrogations. Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That's the road we're headed down with water-boarding. We've gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it's becoming legal. How convenient.

Last week, a team of faculty and students from Seton Hall Law School—the folks who've worked tirelessly for years to document the government's best evidence (PDF) against the Guantanamo prisoners—released a new report suggesting that the government has recorded all of the interrogations at Guantanamo. Using documents prepared by the government and obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the team established that all of the 24,000 interrogations conducted at the camp since 2002 were taped. This jibes with reports from the detainees themselves, who came forward to dispute CIA Director Michael Hayden's claim last winter that the videotaping had been halted in 2002.

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What has changed several times since 9/11 was the secret legal line on torture. And with the withdrawal of one torture memo and its replacement with another, tapes made to prove the innocence of interrogators morphed into evidence of their guilt. The tapes are a problem because the secret legal line did not yet match up with the official line or with the public consensus. But that may be changing"