Interrogating Torture
Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration’s policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that ... Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
Mr. Gourevitch asserted that, “[f]ormer Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that we must torture because it is effective." I’d like to see the quote and its source. I doubt he said that, or anything that can be construed as making that claim. Did anything the administration sanctioned with regard to interrogation at the CIA level constitute a crime? The lawyers did not think so and neither do many others. The left wants to criminalize opinion and to criminalize that which is not torture. (Whenever I enter large stores, I hear pop blasted at me by singers who can’t sing, backed by electronic devices that do not make music. My opinion is that that is torture. Others may disagree.) The authorized activity fell well short of torture. One writer, in the LA Times, saw a 45-year history of torture authorized by the American government; a law student has seen no torture in the recent CIA past and nothing extraordinary in high-level U.S. government activities to get information after 9/11 from people with no scruple in cruelly torturing and murdering people.. For people to know what torture is really like, one can start and end with what happened to Daniel Pearl. Or tack on the many brutalities, on the record, by Arab thugs in Iraq. Mr. Gourevitch wants the "masterminds" at the top of the former Administration held "to account for their criminal policies." The accusation of “criminal policies” is untenable. He wrote, "When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal." Surely that is what is happening now. We have had an election, but what is going on now amounts to a revolution. Unsurprisingly, the corrupt mainstream press has taken no notice of the sharply leftist cast of Obamists below the Cabinet level. A thirst for revenge marked the French Revolution, the October Revolution of Lenin and the Communists, Stalin, and Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. Does the U.S. hard left, which now rules the Democratic Party, want to follow that foul trail?