Just because Americans aren't ever likely to arise en masse against the practice of torture doesn't mean we can relax our efforts to put a stop it

"What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

--international law expert Philippe Sands, on Bill Moyers' Journal

If you have a chance to catch a PBS repeat of last night's Bill Moyers' Journal, don't miss it -- or check out the video (and transcript) and other coverage on the Journal area of the PBS website. Roughly the first 40 minutes are devoted to a remarkable interview with a remarkable Briton, a breathtakingly articulate law professor and international lawyer named Philippe Sands, who knows more about the subject of torture and probably more about America than anyone you're likely to have heard lately.

Most recently, Sands has (1) published an apparently astonishing new book called Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, and (2) testified on the subject before Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee.

Here's part of how Moyers introduced Sands:

After 9/11, writes Philippe Sands, our highest government officials sanctioned a "culture of cruelty" that put our troops, our Constitution, and our own standing in the world at risk. This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee began hearings trying to find out how the President came to approve "enhanced interrogation methods" — that's the official code for the use of cruelty in the pursuit of confession. The administration has been fighting to stop a public accounting of the internal decisions behind that policy. The officials who took part in those discussions fear they could one day face prosecution if their actions turn out to have been illegal. Those key officials talked to Philippe Sands for his book, and this week he was asked to testify at those hearings in Congress.

I want to come back to this interview when I've had a chance to look at it again and digest it more fully. Meanwhile thanks to Sam Seder for tipping us off to Sands, whom he had as a guest on his Air America Radio show this week in connection with his House testimony. And Sam sent out a clip (which I tried but failed to embed) of Senator McCranky on 60 Minutes in October 1997 acknowledging that during his POW captivity in Vietnam, he broke under torture and "confessed" to assorted crimes against the Vietnamese people.

It's a point that Sands made again in his interview with Bill Moyers, and in case the point isn't obvious, we'll come back to it.

Now, torture is an exceedingly complex issue. Not on the merits, as Sands points out, because there is remarkably little civilized disagreement that it's wrong from a human and moral standpoint. There is even surprisingly little disagreement among professional interrogators that it's wrong from a practical standpoint: The "information" produced under torture is overwhelmingly likely to be whatever the torturee has to say to get the torture to stop, which is saying what the torturer wants to hear, whether it's true or not. Sands cites the example of Britain's long struggle with Irish separatists, which he argues was prolonged for an unnecessary 15-20 years by the government's use of torture.

No, where the complexity of torture kicks in is in the perception. I don't want to say "most people," but certainly a lot of people think it's just fine under the right, admittedly extreme circumstances, and that it produces life-saving, even civilization-saving results,

There are even professionals who hold this view, but they are the sort of professionals who, for example, will pontificate about waterboarding being a perfectly acceptable procedure, even claim to have undergone it themselves, when of course they knew from the first drop of water that entered their throat that it would stop, which is exactly what the actual waterboarding victim does not know -- and therefore makes their experience in no imaginable sense waterboarding. In other words, these macho morons who imagine that they have firsthand knowledge of the subject actually know less about the subject than anyone on the planet, because everything they think they know is 100 percent, no 200 percent wrong.

And of course the ordinary Americans who reflexively don't mind or even, deep down, approve of torture are just as wrong. I realize this blunt statement will cause a lot of screaming, but let's come back to that another time -- with some documentation from Philippe Sands. (Actually, there is an extended exchange in the Moyers inteview that makes the case remarkably succinctly. Maybe we can get to that later today.)

For now, though, I just want to make two points.

(1) TORTURE IS UN-AMERICAN

First, there's Sands's extended title: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He argues that official acceptance of torture as acceptable is in fact profoundly anti-American, and that this isn't just theoretical -- that in fact some of the most important backlash against abuses like those occurring at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib came from within the U.S. military itself, where there was apparently a deep and widespread revulsion against the wholesale overturning of the U.S. Army Field Manual, with its careful incorporation of the principles of the Geneva conventions.

The revulsion against torture, it turns out, is deeply embedded in American principles, and not least in the military itself. Of course, Sands acknowledges, torture has taken place before under U.S. government auspices. However, from an official government standpoint, "What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

For the book, Sands talked to the people actually involved in the revolution in U.S. torture policy. He worked his way up the government legal chain, from the lawyers "on the ground" all the way up to Jim Haynes, "Mr. Rumsfeld's lawyer." If you're dying of suspense, I can tell you that all fingers point to one legal architect of the new policy, David Addington, who of course is Dick Cheney's lawyer, and can be presumed to have been acting on the instruction of his master.

(2) McCRANKY KNOWS THAT TORTURE VICTIMS LIE

Okay, so torture is deeply un-American. It's still true that an awful lot of Americans don't know that torture is deeply un-American. And for this reason, I have to part company with some of the blogospheric denizens (and other commentators) I respect most deeply and say that I don't think torture is now or is ever going to be a productive political issue. Yes, it's outrageous, but the mass of Americans don't care and don't want to know.

Oh sure, there was a lot of revulsion to those amateur photos of the sickening goings-on at Abu Ghraib. But did you notice how that stopped, how it all went away?

A lot of Americans who were paying some attention managed to explain it away. Oh, it's faked, or exaggerated, or taken out of context. Oh, that sort of thing always happens. And in the extreme case, they applied the equivalent of a solution that the Car Talk guys [that's Ray and Tom at right] often suggest when a caller reports having an annoying noise in his/her car: Can you turn the radio up? If your goal is just not to hear the noise, there are almost always of managing it.

So I have to say to colleagues of mine who are waiting for great waves of popular revulsion to arise at the disclosure, for example, that Chimpy the Prez himself participated in meetings where new horizons in official American torture were thrashed out: It's not going to happen. The people who watch that dumb, utterly unbelievable, and thorouhgoingly dishonest pile of crap 24 think torture is not only selectively OK but effective, and it's what, y'know, really manly men do.

Which doesn't in any way change the wrongness of it, and that is absolutely an issue we have to fight tooth and nail, even understanding that, while we may try to elevate the level of public awareness and understanding, we aren't ever likely to rally any kind of mass revulsion.

However, on some level even the manly-mannest proponents of torture do get it. Which brings us back to the example of McCranky. His public record on the subject is frankly terrible. But nobody has more concrete knowledge than the senator that people under torture say whatever they have to say to make the torture stop.

It's interesting that in McCranky's public career no reasonable person has ever blamed him for the "confessions" he made under Vietnamese torture. I think we all understand that we would likely have broken a lot sooner than he did. Still, break he did. It's certainly possible that he told his tormentors some things that were true, but no one knows better than he does that his "confessions" were not true.


UPDATE: TORTURE TEAM ONLINE

Reader Woid notes in the comments:

Vanity Fair ran a long, chilling, excerpt from the Philippe Sands book in their May issue.

It's online at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805?printable=true&currentPage=all

In case the link hasn't come out right, what with all the copying-and-pasting, just work your way to the May Vanity Fair (www.vanityfair.com).


SUNDAY UPDATE: TORTURE TOO, THE FOLLOW-UP

I've finally posted the follow-up to this post, in which Philippe provides the basis for his assertion that torture doesn't work, and explains how the British government's use of it is now generally thought to have extended the I.R.A. conflict by 15-20 years.

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