RESPONSIBILITY

One large question all these studies raise is, of course, the issue of responsibility. This in turn breaks down into issues of causal, legal and moral responsibility. If we start with the (apparently) simplest matter of causes and ask who started the process off and who maintained its momentum and suppressed those who sought to question and resist it, Mayer's book is an invaluable study of the power plays involved. As suggested above, and in her title, Vice President Cheney was the crucial driving force and 'dominated the entire national security apparatus'. No less important was David Addington, his chief lawyer and 'the war on terror's indispensable man'. Addington constantly reappears throughout her story as the persistent hard man on the issue of interrogations who 'talked endlessly about the President's prerogatives' but had, as she writes, 'a completely tin ear when it came to understanding the politics of the Supreme Court or, for that matter, politics in general'. Another important figure was University of California at Berkeley Professor John Yoo, author of the infamous torture memo signed by Bybee. Interestingly, Jaffer and Singh accord a larger role than does Mayer to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. It seems, however, from Mayer's account that Rumsfeld, although he signed off early on extremely tough procedures, was a passive collaborator concerned with deniability. Mayer tells an intriguing story of Condoleeza Rice making repeated attempts to get Rumseld to attend meetings to discuss this 'nettlesome topic'.In an effort to entrap him, Rice secretly appended the subject onto a meeting about another issue in which Rumsfeld had an interest. 'OK, we're switching to detainee issues', she announced, at which point Rumsfeld got up to leave. 'Don', she asked, 'where are you going?'
'I don't do detainees', he said, walking out.

The President appears only intermittently and reactively in these accounts. He was, Mayer writes 'all but invisible on these issues'. It was not until September 2006 that he finally, under pressure, admitted that the USA had been holding secret prisoners for years, without charges and beyond the reach of authorities, subjecting them to 'an alternative set of procedures', while defending the programme as 'one of our most vital tools in our war against terror' and insisting that everything done had been legal.

What is clear is that, as Jaffir and Singh write, 'the contention that the abuse of prisoners was attributable to the transgressions of "rogue soldiers" is largely false'. Here Gourevitch and Morris are most revealing. For example, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, the commander in Guantanamo was ordered by Rumsfeld to 'Gitmoise' Abu Ghraib (according to Janis Karpinski, in charge of detention facilities there, and subsequently dismissed under a cloud). Miller visited Iraq and ordered Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces there to place military intelligence officers in charge of prison operations, advocated using military police officers working as guards to participate in interrogations and recommended using military dogs. Gourevitch and Morris record that Sanchez, obeying these instructions, never distributed any rules to the police officers and so, as one of them recalled, 'They couldn't say that we broke the rules because there were no rules ... our job was to stress out the detainees, and help facilitate information to the interrogators, and save the lives of other soldiers out there'. And it is highly instructive to read in succession the accounts by Mayer and by Gourevitch and Morris of the killing by interrogators of Manadel al-Jamadi, whose body was packed in ice and bound with tape. The police officers were told that he had died of a heart attack and indeed the next morning a medic inserted an intravenous in Jamadi's arm and the body was taken out of the prison on a stretcher as if he were still alive. The body was photographed by Charles Graner with specialist Sabrina Harman stooping over it smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. Harman explains to Morris: 'The mind-set over there, I'd say, would be numb. I mean, when you are surrounded by death and carnage and violence, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it absorbs you'. But later that evening Harman went back to take many detailed photographs of the corpse: 'I just started taking photos of everything I saw that was wrong, every little bruise and cut ... I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos. It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack'.

This story raises in acute form the tangled issues of legal and moral responsibility. Plainly, there was a systematic avoidance of legal responsibility by

'The view within the Administration and in the CIA, however, was that torture works'

everyone higher up the chain of command. As Mayer reports, Jamadi's main interrogator Mark Swanner remains unprosecuted and lives 'a quintessentially middle-class suburban life' in Northern Virginia 'in a colonial-style house with a front-porch and swimming-pool on a cul-de-sac'. The other person in the room during Jamadi's interrogation, an Arabic-speaking translator for the CIA, was given immunity from criminal prosecution for his co-operation. Mayer comments: 'To some extent Swanner, like the abusive soldiers at Abu Ghraib was a victim himself of circumstance. Poorly trained, placed in an unclear legal framework, and facing enormous pressure to help save American lives, he was only one of many responsible' for what then happened.

CONSEQUENCES

A second large question that arises when reading these studies is the issue of torture's consequences. First, there is the classic question of its effectiveness in eliciting information. In Mayer's account, the FBI interrogators were appalled by what became the practices of the CIA, from which they were blocked. Indeed, she tells the remarkable story of al-Libi, the first big prize in the war on terror, the chief of Bin Laden's Khalden training camp, from whom FBI agents were obtaining much useful information, through flattery, cajoling, the offering of rewards and even joint prayer sessions: 'Once he got started, he just talked and talked'. But, several days into what the FBI viewed as winning his trust, the CIA grabbed him and rendered him to Egypt, where he was tortured. There, in the crucial months prior to the invasion of Iraq, al-Libi told his interrogators that Al-Qaeda was co-operating with the Iraqis in developing nuclear weapons and provided further details about anthrax and other biological weapons – all of it made up to please his interrogators and which he subsequently recanted. On the basis of this false information, President Bush announced in October 2002 that 'We've learned that Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases' and Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations cited 'a senior terrorist operative responsible for one of Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan' is support of similar claims, assuring the world that 'every statement' he made was 'based on solid intelligence ... from human sources'. According to two FBI officials, al-Libi later explained his fabrication thus: 'They were killing me. I had to tell them something'.

The view within the Administration and in the CIA, however, was that torture works. John Yoo, in an aside at a book-signing in Washington, said: 'It works – we know it does. The CIA says it does and the Vice-President says it does'. But countless professionals in the military and law-enforcement worlds disagree as confirmed in Chris Mackey and Greg Miller's (2005). Mayer, for instance, cites the FBI agent Coleman: 'Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who's been deprived of his clothes? He's going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He'll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back ... Brutalization doesn't work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul'. And she cites a disillusioned CIA agent on the techniques used by the agency in Afghanistan invented 'by people who had no understanding of Al-Qaeda or the Arab world. You hear all this hubbub about hanging people upside down. But the key to interrogation is knowledge, not techniques. We didn't know anything. And if you don't know anything you can't get anything. Moreover, as the head of the CIA Bin Laden unit reflected, once a detainee's rights have been violated, you can't reinstate him into the court system and you 'can't kill him either. All we've done is create a nightmare'. And in Schulz's book, Darius Rejali rebuts the claim that in Algeria torture worked, claiming that 'no rank-and-file soldier has related a tale of how he personally, through timely interrogation, produced decisive information that stopped a ticking bomb'.

The Algerian story is relevant to the second respect in which torture's consequences are an issue: namely what Schulz calls its 'dynamics,' and in particular the corrupting effects of its practice. Rejali comments that it led to a politics of extremes, 'destroying the middle class that had co-operated with the French', to the collapse of the judicial system, with judges and prefects unable to deny warrants to armed men who tortured and killed for a living, to the corruption of doctors, the compromising of the military, and a headlong drift into 'sadism, continuing long after valuable information could be retrieved'. This drift has, without doubt, occurred within the US military and intelligence community. Navy General Council Alberto Mora (one of Mayer's resisters from within) referred to what he called 'force drift' – 'the danger that once [an] initial barrier against the use of improper force [has] been breached', it will 'continue to escalate'. Interrogators permitted to use some force will use more and more, and thus torture will spread. And indeed the metaphors of contagion and the slippery slope recur throughout these books. Moreover, Jaffir and Singh comment that, rather than attempting to check this escalation of force, 'civilian and military leaders encouraged it – sometimes tacitly, sometimes expressly'. According to Mayer, by the spring of 2008 more than 600 US military and civilian personnel were involved in abusing more than 460 detainees, and these numbers, of course, only reflect the known cases for which evidence can be cited. Meanwhile, Guantanomo remains in being and a prison outside Kabul is being expanded. Finally, of course, the wider consequences of all this increasingly visible abuse of detainees is disastrous geopolitically, given the current radicalisation of the Muslim world. It is, without doubt, a powerful factor reinforcing and generating anti-Americanism there and across the world. And corrupt and repressive states, including Egypt, Sudan and Zimbabwe have, as Mayer observes, 'all justified their own brutality by citing America's example'. It is an extraordinary turnaround from the worldwide sympathy evident in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

JUSTIFIED?

The third large question is the issue of justifiability of torture. This returns us to the Vice President's remarks on the Sunday after 9/11. Are we to dismiss his argument that it is a 'mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there' and that to prevail, we have to use 'any means at our disposal'? And if so, on what grounds? Why isn't the use of torture just another instance of the issue of 'dirty hands' in political life – the need for the Prince, as Machiavelli put it, to learn how not to be good, the need, in short, to engage in the 'lesser evil' for the sake of the public good, in this case, our security, even survival? According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005, when respondents in the US were asked whether torture can ever be justified, 15 per cent said 'often,' 31 per cent said 'sometimes' and 17 per cent said 'rarely'. So is torture a 'means at our disposal,' which, contrary to the Vice-President's view and that of 63 per cent of Americans, should never be used?

'Why isn't the use of torture just another instance of the issue of "dirty hands" in political life?'

Never? Those who object to the absolute prohibition of torture typically cite the famous 'ticking bomb'. Suppose you could save numerous lives – hundreds, say, or thousands by torturing the one who knows where the bomb is. If you could, why wouldn't you do it? One answer, strongly reinforced by reading these books, is that suggested above. The victims will tell torturers what they want to hear (and, as in the case of al-Libi, with possibly disastrous, history-changing consequences)? So, we may say, Professor Yoo is wrong: torture is always ineffective. Always? The Phenomenon of Torture reprints the famous article by Alan Dershowitz, civil liberties lawyer and Professor at Harvard, which asks us to envisage that non-lethal torture might save multiple lives. (He cites a couple of cases – one involving a bus bombing in Israel that, according to the Israeli secret services might have been stopped by torture, the other a terrorist plot allegedly foiled by Philippine torturers.) His well-known proposal is to build in a 'principled break' to the slippery slope by instituting 'torture warrants' issued by judges that would allow for 'nonlethal ... torture limited to convicted terrorists who had knowledge of future massive terrorist acts'.

I believe that Dershowitz is to be commended for asking us to address the question of whether torture is always ineffective, since, after all, we cannot know for sure whether it is or not. The ethical issue is one of principle. Should there be an absolute prohibition even if in a given case torture would save, let us say, multiple lives? As it stands, the matter is a settled one in international law – both human rights law and humanitarian law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the four Geneva Conventions are all unequivocally absolutist, as indeed is the US Army Field Manual. Yet, of course, we know that torture is practiced across the world, not least by (if not in) the United States. Should we not recognise this fact and, as Dershowitz suggests, seek to regulate and thereby confine it? Doesn't this legal absolutism represents a kind of hypocrisy, especially when we are faced with the threats of terrorism conducted by fanatics who are themselves undeterrable by threats?

I can only report that the reading of these four books inclines me strongly to resist this argument. They show how easy it has been to bypass these legal barriers and how fast the descent can be. These prohibitions are, moreover, not just a set of protections, which it took decades to construct. As Henry Shue argues in The Phenomenon of Torture, torture is an assault upon the defenceless which 'sinks below even the well-regulated mutual slaughter of a justly fought war'. When the authorities of a state enter the dark side by allowing, let alone encouraging, its practice, the moral fabric of the society they are defending begins to unravel.

References

1. Danner, M. (2004) Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, New York: New York Review Books.
2. Gourevitch, P. (1999) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, New York: Picador.
3. Greenberg, K. (ed.) (2005) The Torture Debate in America, New York: Cambridge University Press.
4. Greenberg, K. and Dratel, J. (eds.) (2005) The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, New York: Cambridge University Press.
5. Hersh, S. (2004) The Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, New York: Harper-Collins.
6. Levinson, S. (ed.) (2006) Torture: A Collection, New York: Oxford University Press.
7. Mackey, C. and Miller, G. (2005) The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America's Secret War against Al Qaeda, New York: Back Bay Books.

About the Author

Steven Lukes is a Formerly Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, Professor of Political and Social Theory EUI, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Siena. Author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work; Power: A Radical View; The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat; and, most recently, Moral Relativism.