The Radical Secularist

In an interview with Fox News (Sunday, April 19 2009), Former CIA director Michael Hayden criticized President Obama’s decision to release selected Bush-era memos concerning CIA interrogation tactics.  Click Here For Video. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” stated Hayden. What Mr. Hayden conveniently failed to mention is that the U.S. “described” these limits the moment it signed onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions.  Whether specific interrogative practices encouraged by the top brass of the Bush administration and practiced by CIA agents are in and of themselves acts of torture is perhaps open to debate.  What isn’t open for debate is whether subjecting a person to waterboarding 183 times constitutes their being tortured.  Choosing to call it and who knows how many similar actions “enhanced interrogation” is purely semantic:  ’Torture’ by any other name is still torture.  Moreover, engaging in a semantic debate over whether the interrogative practices, which by the former administration’s own lights are at the “outer limits” of law are sufficiently enhansive to constitute torture is to be complicit in if not their overt endorsement then certainly in their being enacted.  Indeed, engaging in a debate–as must have occurred among White House advisors–about what practices can be brought to the threshold of torture–which is what we are to hear in a phrase like “the outer limits” of law–without crossing it, seems more diabolical than naively believing that torture is permissible under certain circumstances. 

In his and the Bush administration’s defense of torture,  former General Hayden also rhetorically stated,  ”The honorable position has to be: Even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that. That takes courage.” What’s especially remarkable about this ‘defense’ is not that it is contrary to studies that have been conducted on the effectiveness of torture and other forms of coercive interrogation methods, nor that it is indicative of the deaf ear the Bush administration repeatedly turned to the voices of Americans who vociferously opposed the use of torture on any grounds. Rather, it is the implicit suggestion that torture is something that should be put to a referendum.  However called, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and encouraged by the Bush administration are not just the outer limits of law!  They are the violation of law: Moral, International, and yes, US law!  The reason why there are national and international laws against torture is not only to forestall the need for a referendum on whether or not specific practices constitute torture whenever some doubt should happen to arise, but also to dissuade individuals and governments from licensing torture under the excuse of extraordinary circumstances.  Hayden is right: it often takes courage to do the morally right thing; unfortunately the moral cowards here were not by and large the American people, but Hayden and his superiors.  Torture is immoral, and it’s also against the law.

JPM