DownWithTyranny!: Should Anyone Be Punished For That Whole Torture Thing? Or No?

Apparently Dick Cheney thinks he caught bin Laden by torturing some people down in Guantánamo. He seemed out of his mind in his Meet The Press appearance yesterday. "I'd do it again in a minute," is as good a reason for indicting him and trying him as any I've ever heard. And he has "no regrets." If the justice system was working properly, he would. Interestingly, Members of Parliament, from both side of their aisle, are pressuring-- to no avail of course-- David Cameron for an official judicial inquiry into the U.K.'s role into the Cheney torture program. Unlike Cheney, U.K. Conservatives are getting nervous. First, though, take a look at political hack Chuck Schumer advocating for a "balanced" use of torture:

Andrew Tyrie, Tory chairman of an all-party group on rendition, said: “That we are talking about here is kidnap and people being taken to places where they can be maltreated or tortured and I never thought in the 21st century that my country would be facilitating such practices, but they have done; the question is: how much?”

David Davis, the Tory former shadow Home Secretary, told Sky News: “I think this needs to be a judicial inquiry… it needs to be bigger than that [the ISC inquiry]. It needs to be completely independent of the establishment.” What we want out of it is something which says to everybody this will never happen again, indeed, it becomes politically fatal for it to happen on your watch.”

...Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Craig Murray, who was sacked as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004 after alleging that Britain used intelligence obtained by the CIA under torture, said he attended a meeting at the Foreign Office where he was told that “it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves” and claimed this policy came directly from Mr Straw.

Murray would like to see former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, as well as Tony Blair, stand trial for torture. And he's running for Parliament now to make that point. "When," he wrote, "I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report... The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies.' The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room." Oops.

"We don’t need," he concluded, "an inquiry into British complicity in torture. We need a trial. And it should be Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the dock." Over the weekend the Institute for Public Accuracy looked at this mess from a different perspective-- the complicity of psychologists, medical professionals, in the Cheney torture regime.

“Earlier this week the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited executive summary of its 6,000-page classified report on the CIA’s brutal post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. The report provides gruesome details of the abuse that took place in several ‘black site’ prisons-- waterboarding, confinement in a coffin-sized box, threatened harm to family members, forced nudity, freezing temperatures, ‘rectal feeding’ without medical need, stress positions, diapering, days of sleep deprivation, and more.

“Two names appear dozens of times in the committee’s summary: Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar. These are the pseudonyms that were given to James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. It has been known for several years that these two contract psychologists played central roles in designing and implementing the CIA’s torture program. Now we also know how lucrative that work was for Mitchell and Jessen: their company was paid over $80 million by the CIA…

“Responding to the new Senate report, the American Psychological Association (APA) was quick to issue a press release distancing itself from Mitchell and Jessen. The statement emphasized that the two psychologists are not APA members-- although Mitchell was a member until 2006-- and that they are therefore ‘outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process.’ But there is much more to this story. After years of stonewalling and denials, last month the APA Board appointed an investigator to examine allegations that the APA colluded with the CIA and Pentagon in supporting the Bush Administration’s abusive ‘war on terror’ detention and interrogation practices.

Paul Waldman-- this morning in the Washington Post on the significance of Cheney's demonstration of abject moral bankruptcy. "[T]orture advocates from the Bush administration and the CIA," he wrote, "have always insisted that the things they did to prisoners-- like the use of waterboarding or stress positions, the purpose of which is to induce excruciating pain-- are not actually torture, and are therefore perfectly legal and morally unproblematic. This is one of the two pillars on which their advocacy rests, the other being that the torture program produced significant intelligence that couldn’t have been obtained any other way. And it’s precisely what could allow a future administration to start torturing prisoners all over again."

Cheney’s argument here-- and this was hardly the first time-- is that as long as al-Qaeda’s tactics are worse than ours, nothing we do is morally unjustified. His claim that “there’s this notion that somehow there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists and what we do” is a classic straw man. No one’s asking whether the CIA’s torture program is better or worse than the September 11 attacks; that’s not how you make moral judgments. According to Cheney’s logic, if I approached him on the street, pushed him over and took his wallet, I could escape accountability by telling the judge that I did nothing wrong because it would have been much worse had I hit him over the head with a lead pipe and stolen his car.

Cheney never even attempted to define torture. But that definition isn’t some complex, arcane matter that you need a team of law professors to unravel. It’s very straightforward. Here’s the way U.S. law defines torture: “An act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

The United Nations Convention Against Torture-- a treaty the United States signed and ratified-- defines it in a substantively identical (if somewhat more verbose) way: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

But even after this repeated questioning, we still don’t know how Dick Cheney or any other torture advocate defines it. Why not? It seems pretty clear. There is simply no definition that anyone could devise that wouldn’t apply to things like stress positions or waterboarding. Try to imagine one. Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering to obtain information or a confession-- but only if it leaves a mark? Or only if it’s done by non-Americans? Any such definition would be absurd on its face.

So when people like Cheney are asked what the definition of torture is, they say, “September 11!” When asked what definition of torture wouldn’t apply to the particular techniques the CIA employed, they just repeat, “We didn’t torture” over and over. They not only defend torture as a means of obtaining intelligence, they sing its praises and insist that it was spectacularly successful, all without having the courage to call the thing by its true and only name... But torture was already illegal, and the Bush administration did it anyway. All it required was a couple of administration lawyers willing to write memos saying, in essence, do whatever you want. In this case, the key memo was written by a lawyer named Jay Bybee, who wrote that if a technique of abuse didn’t cause “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions,” then it wasn’t “severe” and therefore wasn’t torture. Jay Bybee sits today on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Every single Republican in the Senate, along with 25 Democrats [including Chuck Schumer], voted to confirm him to that position.