The torture memos

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to write up a cohesive, coherent reaction, so I’m just going to start writing and see what happens…

The released memos don’t contain much groundbreaking information about methods themselves. There were some minor revelations about the use of insects and “walling” (throwing a detainee into a semi-flexible wall of some sort), but the more important aspect was that the memos provided a window into the justification and cognizance that the Bush administration had of what it was doing.

Looking at the practices authorized in the memos, you can’t help but wonder why the administration would bother acting upset about the Abu Ghraib scandal while it was authorizing similar detainee treatment anyway.

Navy SERE trainer Malcolm Nance made an important point in
his article in the Daily News:

Have no doubt: As a counterterrorism practitioner, should I find bin Laden I will cut his heart out with a plastic spoon. That would be about justice and revenge, not interrogation. But that job – finding him and bringing him to justice – has been made incalculably more difficult for our soldiers and intelligence officers around the world by these documents and what they mean.

Torture defenders are put into an awkward situation: they must both defend the techniques as being rather tame (“sleep deprivation? I didn’t get much sleep last night! It’s not torture!”) and also claim that the techniques are more effective than all other interrogation techniques. There’s a bit of a paradox there.

Here are some clips to give you a sense of that argument:

The memos should be read in context, some of them came from 2002, in which America was still whipped up into a frenzy, and there was a tendency to overreact. The memos from 2005, after Abu Ghraib, are still making the same arguments, and we’re still hearing those today. This isn’t a panicked disregard for the law, it’s a methodical disregard for the law.