Torture from the Top Down
By Scott Horton
In a series of hearings, Congressional leaders are trying to get to the bottom of a simple question:
who initiated torture techniques in the “war on terror”? What was the process by which it was done? On whose authority was it done? The use of torture techniques became a matter of public knowledge four years ago. In response to the initial disclosures,
the Bush Administration first decided to spin the fable of a handful of “rotten apples” inside of a company of military police from Appalachia and scapegoated a handful of examples in carefully managed and staged show trials.
When further disclosures out of Bagram and Guantánamo made this untenable, they spun a new myth, this time suggesting that the administration had responded to a plea from below for wider latitude.
In fact at this point
the evidence is clear and convincing, and it points to a top-down process. Figures near the top of the administration decided that they wanted brutal techniques and they hammered them through, usually over strong opposition from the ranks of professionals.
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But most curiously, he’s forgotten all about the role played by the Justice Department and its Office of Legal Counsel. He’s forgotten about the torture memo itself. Why?
The August 2002 torture memo is a smoking gun that shows torture being introduced top-down, as a project of the Cheney–Addington team of which Jim Haynes was a proud member. It refutes the whole administration narrative about torture practices coming on the strength of an appeal from below. And it puts the lie to John Yoo’s claims never to have influenced the abuses that occurred in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Guantánamo. In fact the Yoo–Bybee memorandum unleashed the abuses, and was used by Jim Haynes just for that purpose. Once more, Jim Haynes is protecting his friends and protecting himself. Once more, Haynes gives not the candor and openness he owes to a Congressional oversight body, but the code of silence that more typically binds the participants in a criminal scheme.
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Yes, the conversation starts with wide recognition that
the techniques which were to be introduced were criminal under federal law. And it progresses to concern about avoiding criminal liability. Throughout the documents, military officers recite the litany of reasons why these techniques should not be used. They seem to expect that the matter will work its way up to senior levels and be shot down. There is a sort of horror in the creeping recognition of the moral and ethical vacuum that has taken hold at the highest echelons of government.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003099
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