We are a nation of laws, hopefully based on a shared sense of what is right and just. Laws come from politicians, elected to represent us, not from the bureaucrats hired to run the government or enforce the laws they are given. More and more frequently we see a loss of that shared sense of what is right and just as our morality is changed by those forces active within society who rebel against the status quo. As our morality changes so do the choices we make with regard to the law.
I’ve never been a prisoner of war, nor have I had to attempt to gain intelligence from those who have been captured as a part of a military or intelligence operation, but I have been through military survival school, and its resistance training. I am fully aware of what the North Vietnamese did to US prisoners in the Vietnam war, as well as what the Japanese did to their prisoners in the Second World War. During this long war I’ve had a number of conversations on the subject of “enhanced interrogation techniques” with my colleagues, what follows summarizes my thoughts, as well as an opinion of Senator Kamala Harris during her question period of Gina Haspel.
With the horrific attack on America by Islamic terrorists on 9/11/2001 this nation’s politicians reacted with the outrage we would expect of a group who found out we were not as immune to the terror as we had been led to believe we were during the 1990s, when the attacks on the US were all against interests outside the homeland or were from isolated domestic terrorists.
They reacted with the only tools they had. They passed legislation allowing us to attack the country that harbored the terrorists, approved and funded the ability of the government to use its technology to monitor the activities of its own citizens and authorized the use of all means and methods necessary to find and bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Some of this was done by the Congress in the form of legislation, and some of it by Executive Order. There were few dissenting voices during those early days, just as there were few dissenting voices when the government approved the detention and relocation of Japanese-Americans at the start of the Second World War.
The CIA, of course, was central to the process. It failed to stop the attack and, I assume, was under a lot of pressure from the President, his Vice President, and a whole bunch of concerned Congressional members to fix the problem of finding Waldo, err Osama. Everyone who had oversight and control pulled out all the stops to get them the tools and funding they wanted. Among those efforts were the establishment of a number of undisclosed detention and interrogation centers, imprisonment in foreign countries where CIA accountability was masked, almost unlimited cash for “rewards,” development of a new generation of UAV and technology to track and target individuals, and of course the “enhanced” interrogation techniques like waterboarding. Tracing the CIA back to its earliest days in the cold war there is a long history of it exploring ways to extract information from those it captured, just as other countries have. It seems to be a foundational quality that if a little fear is good, a lot is better. Wasn’t it the CIA who developed LSD as a tool to enhance the interrogation and quality of information a subject may provide, only to discard it when it was proven ineffective?
From the beginnings of this long war, I’ve found the use of these “enhanced” techniques unappealing and inappropriate for a society and a government that made such vocal condemnations of the brutality of others against our combatants in various conflicts. For those who know me, I find the hypocrisy of saying one thing and then doing another a most unforgivable shortcoming. That being said, I often found myself a distinct minority in the discussions. Most of my peers, both younger and older felt that any tool available should be used if it meant we would gain a tactical advantage in the global war on terror. My concern focused simply on the quid pro quo potential of our hypocrisy, but my friends pointed out the other side wasn’t playing by the rules so why should we? For me, that argument was always the crux of a moral choice, going all the way back to that earliest childhood admonishment from your mother. “If your friends jumped off the bridge, would you?” Just because someone else does something does that mean it is moral? It seems in these days where the morality of all sorts of things are called into question we have opened the door to the individual making his or her own choice.
Let’s take a moment to talk about these interrogation techniques and decide if they are torture or not. Are these enhanced techniques torture? Good question. What is torture anyway? The Oxford Dictionary (online) defines it as “The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.” The beauty of that definition is you can choose to limit or expand your definition by qualifying the words like severe pain and then debating whether or not it deals with just physical or does it mean mental as well? Is the use of phenobarbital against a subject’s will torture? You can certainly make the case it is since it will cause mental anguish. Does waterboarding cause severe physical pain, or is the fear of death from drowning a cause for severe mental trauma? At the end of the day it really boils down to an individual choice, doesn’t it? From a technical standpoint, the real question is “is it effective and does it fit within the legal parameters of international law?” The documentation I see is that “torture” is viewed as an absolute ban in international law, yet it is rarely enforced or condemned by the international tribunals for what I assume is a variety of political reasons. So, the bottom line on waterboarding is it could be torture if you want to call it that, but it might not be if you think you can get away with it and it meets your immediate need.
There is an interesting dynamic in the post-Reagan society where the condemnation of the past takes on a smug moral superiority and those who participate in this reflection of hindsight feel empowered to condemn the decisions of the past as if they were all morally reprehensible and the people who made the decisions, or executed those policies were and are evil. We see that approach pretty routinely in today’s social discourse. I believe it is simply a strategy to gain a superior position and shut down legitimate debate, especially when it would call into question the broader moral questions of one’s own positions.
Other than what I’ve seen in the news, I know very little of Gina Haspel. Apparently, she is a career CIA analyst/operative who has risen through the bureaucracy to become Deputy Director and is now nominated as its Director. Since she is a Trump nomination, her qualifications are pretty much irrelevant as she becomes just another political football. She is either the greatest thing since sliced bread, or she is evil incarnate based solely on your political point of view.
What I did see in the questioning by Senator Kamala Harris was an adult, being questioned by a snobbish, uninformed, and self-serving child who asked a complex moral question dealing with past events, and then demanded a yes or no answer. Her position on the appointment was decided the instant the nomination was made, and there was nothing in any of the answers of Ms. Haspel that would ever remotely persuade her to change her mind. Her 5-minutes before the camera was there to showcase her opposition and set the stage for what she undoubtedly believes will be a run at a higher national office. Unfortunately, she failed to show any qualities that commend her to a broader electorate than she already has.
