United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Three books addressing the continuing scandal of America's embrace of torture were reviewed by the Financial Times of London on Friday. -- They attempt to answer the question: "How has the world’s leading democracy, a model for the ideal that power and decency reinforce one another, become the place where torture is debated rather than outlawed?"[1] -- The author of the review, Karen J. Greenberg, is an important participant in the contemporary debate on torture, as Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security as the New York University School of Law and co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and editor of the books Al Qaeda Now and The Torture Debate in America. -- The first of the three books reviewed, Torture Team by Philippe Sands, shows that "what occurred in the White House — and that it did so because lawyers at the highest levels of government enabled it to happen." -- (Sands is a lawyer himself.) -- Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in Torture and Democracy argues for "banal professionalism as key to the rise of government-inflicted torture." -- The third book under review, by a sociology professor at Hunter College in New York, examines French torture in Algeria as a point of comparison and concludes that “Tapping into torture-power is, for the state, a manner of re-sourcing itself, rejuvenating itself by recreating itself, refashioning its existence as the power of instrumental reason.” -- Ultimately, however, these explanations fail to explain. -- "The more we know about torture, the less we can understand how a civil society can choose to implement it," Greenberg writes. -- "Perhaps the only possible response can be to suggest that, all other reasons aside — legal, political, strategic — it is a moral wrong. It is soul-wounding for those who do it — and, we may surmise, for those in whose name it is done." ...

[Review of Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law (Allen Lane, 2008), published in the U.S. as Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton UP, November 2007); and Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity) (Princeton University Press, December 2007).]

In April 2004, the American TV news exposé "60 Minutes" aired a now infamous set of photographs depicting torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Images of U.S. servicemen and women taunting prisoners with leashes and dogs, and of a hooded man connected to electrodes, overnight brought the word torture into present-day consciousness.

Weeks later, a U.S. Department of Defense paper, the Taguba Report, catalogued countless instances of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib. The photos, it seemed, hinted at just a small part of a larger policy of coercive interrogation.

Since then, investigations and rebuttals have created two battling narratives over this issue, between law and action. The law is clear. In the U.S. torture -- defined as an act intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering -- is illegal. Under international law it is also illegal. Yet the Bush administration continues to defend itself in words and legislation. And while laws have been passed to accommodate the administration -- the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act -- the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to support circumventing international law.

How has the world’s leading democracy, a model for the ideal that power and decency reinforce one another, become the place where torture is debated rather than outlawed? How is it that a religiously devout president has justified torture by American hands?

The work of journalists and scholars writing since the revelations at Abu Ghraib offer some guidance in these questions. Freedom of Information Act suits, leaks from government insiders, and tireless reporting have yielded information about the chronology, the prime architects and the politically approved abuses that have occurred in the “war on terror.” In the run-up to the U.S. election and a new administration, several new books document, explain, and contextualize the story of U.S. torture.

The most accessible of these focuses on the pragmatic details of how torture policy came into force. In Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law, British barrister Philippe Sands uses extensive interviews and documents to portray with painstaking accuracy what occurred in the White House -- and that it did so because lawyers at the highest levels of government enabled it to happen.

The small team included Cheney’s lawyer David Addington and Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith. It also included William Haynes, general counsel at the Department of Defense, Alberto Gonzales at the White House, Jay Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel (the legal arm of the executive branch), and his deputy John Yoo. Together, they penned a series of memos that redrafted existing law to prepare the ground for “coercive interrogation.” Sands’ interviews with former administration officials show how this policy was crafted at the top echelons of government and implemented at the lowest.

A lawyer by trade, Sands is also an excellent reporter. He documents the discussions inside the executive that led to the memo written by William “Jim” Haynes and approved by Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002. This paper is notorious for Rumsfeld’s hand-written comment in the margins: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as an allowable stress position] limited to 4 hours?” In spite of such apparently cold frivolity, the memo’s greatest import lies in its “request for approval of counter-resistance techniques to aid in the interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.”

Attached to the letter was a list of 18 “counter-resistance” interrogation techniques. Rumsfeld made most of these into policy. According to FBI analysis at the time, 10 of the 18 violated U.S. law, including “hooding, twenty-hour interrogations, the removal of clothing, stress positions, and dogs.” The administration maintains that they do not constitute torture; Sands disagrees. The newly approved techniques were desired primarily to interrogate a young Saudi, Mohammed Al-Qahtani, in custody at Guantánamo. Al-Qahtani, or detainee #063, had allegedly come to the U.S. to participate in the 9/11 plot.

Under these new measures, he was isolated for more than 160 days and subjected to coercive interrogation. This reduced him to a state of disarray documented in FBI logs. Sands asked Abigail Seltzer, a psychiatrist consultant who specializes in torture victims, to assess the log. She underlined the signs of “expressions of distress” noted alongside the interrogators’ questions: “Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional . . . Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying . . . On the verge of breaking. Angry . . .”

Torture Team’s purpose is not solely to ascribe blame, however, though it does so with clarity and precision. Sands’ other goal is to consider redress for these crimes, for the sake of his own profession. To Sands’ incomprehension, those lawyers who disagreed with Bush on the grounds of constitutional principles and the rule of law -- among them judge advocate generals and general counsels to the armed services -- were excluded from the decision-making process.

This is not, of course, the first time that a modern state power has used bureaucratic radicalism to subvert the law, with torture as its ultimate expression of power. Hannah Arendt pointed to this, for example, when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), about the postwar trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. For Arendt, the banality of evil was rooted in the way in which bureaucracy itself, rather than some overarching evil genius, allowed laws to be pushed aside by the human proclivity to follow orders.

While Sands and others have sought to uncover the story behind American excesses in the war on terror, others have used U.S. policies to consider the larger philosophical context. In Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College, Oregon, begins where Sands leaves off. Documenting modern torture techniques, his book is both horrifying and compelling.

Like Arendt, he focuses on the systems that produce and implement torture policies. As Rejali puts it, “Hell is in the details.” Modern torture, he says, is “clean torture,” designed not to leave marks. But, he asks, “Why is it that torture persists despite an unprecedented age of democratization and human rights monitoring?”

Like Sands, Rejali sees banal professionalism as key to the rise of government-inflicted torture, which he argues has increased since the 1970s. Citing the case of France in 1950s Algeria, Rejali concludes, “What is important here is that democratic institutions were unwilling or unable to stop the turn to torture. One after the other, the judicial system, the legislature, the opposition parties, and the press failed.”

The consequences of torture are always unpredictable and Rejali argues that torture fails when it’s needed most -- in last-minute, ticking-bomb scenarios. “Torture would work well when organizations remain coherent and well integrated, have highly professional interrogators available . . . In short, torture for information works best when one would need it least.”

The case of Algeria seems superficially to defy this analysis, and has often been cited when discussing U.S. torture. The Pentagon helped popularize this comparison when it publicized its own screenings of "The Battle of Algiers" in 2003. Pontecorvo’s film documents the use of torture to elicit information about the rebels. Bush last year also revealed that, at Henry Kissinger’s suggestion, he was reading Alistair Horne’s book on Algeria, A Savage War of Peace.

In Torture and the Twilight of Empire, Marnia Lazreg, professor of sociology at Hunter College, New York, again uses French torture in Algeria as a window on to a panoply of philosophical, historical, and political issues. Among them are gender politics as evidenced in “the sexual core of torture,” psychological warfare as practiced by both the French and the National Liberation Front, and the role of decolonization. This last is particularly important to Lazreg, who claims that, “Tapping into torture-power is, for the state, a manner of re-sourcing itself, rejuvenating itself by recreating itself, refashioning its existence as the power of instrumental reason.”

Lazreg’s analysis includes one of Sands’ and Rejali’s essential points: the attack on civilian institutions as a means to a political end. On November 13, 2001, Bush signed a military order giving the Pentagon, specifically its civilian leadership, authority over military commissions. The Department of Justice and the uniformed military were sidelined. As Lazreg notes of the militarization of French government in Algeria, the “transfer of power from civil to military court” started the repression that was to follow.

Sands, Rejali, and Lazreg agree that torture is a sign of a political order that has rejected the standards and practices of democracy’s revered institutions, notably in the realm of the law. The more we know about torture, the less we can understand how a civil society can choose to implement it. It doesn’t produce good results. It compromises the professions we rely upon for our security. As Rejali points out, the greater the reliance on torture, the less skilled the traditional use of informants and investigation. Perhaps this is why Americans remain stymied by the question of accountability for torture. The need to ascribe responsibility underlies all three books.

But how can we achieve this accountability? Sands’ book is basically a legal brief, designed to build the case against the Torture Team. Meanwhile, the quagmire over torture persists. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam, this year opposed a bill in Congress designed to prohibit the CIA from using interrogation techniques beyond those approved by the new military interrogation manual. Bush explained his own veto of the bill, saying that it removed “one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror . . . this is not time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

No amount of reasoning -- not that based on domestic law, international law, or security concerns about alienating informants -- seems to deter the current administration from its insistence that these “practices” work. Perhaps the only possible response can be to suggest that, all other reasons aside -- legal, political, strategic -- it is a moral wrong. It is soul-wounding for those who do it -- and, we may surmise, for those in whose name it is done.

--Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press).