The confirmation of recently sworn in Attorney General Michael Mukasey gathered opposition at one point because he refused to condemn waterboarding as a form of torture. His refusal is curious, because to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east. After World War II, Japanese soldiers who practiced it were prosecuted as war criminals.
Why must our public officials and would-be office-holders persist in evading the elementary truth about a technique used by monsters like Pol Pot and Pinochet, and that is being used against Buddhist monks today — to say nothing of our own secret prisons?
The best answer is as simple as it is unsettling. Waterboarding cannot be named for what it is, because the current administration has insisted it does not torture. “If Judge Mukasey said that waterboarding is illegal,” notes Yale law professor Jack Balkin, “it would require the Bush Administration to admit that it repeatedly lied to the American people and brought shame and dishonor on the United States.”
Torture has emerged as a litmus test. The real issue before the Senate Judiciary Committee was not a personality but a principle — not a nominee but the shame of our nation. No one should be accepted for attorney general who fails to provide meaningful assurance that our government will not engage in torture. Although Judge Mukasey earlier failed this test, there are measures he could take to rectify the situation now that he is in office.
The new attorney general should agree, in collaboration with Congress, to implement five steps that would stop U.S. torture. As indicated by Darius Rejali in his forthcoming book, Torture and Democracy (Princeton 2007), history shows that when these steps are taken, torture cannot flourish.
First, the rules of interrogation must be clear. Where conflicting directives exist, as occurred at Abu Ghraib, the situation is rife for abuse. Double bookkeeping cannot be tolerated. It is imperative that intelligence operatives of the CIA, for example, or the Navy Seals, be held to the same high standards — without loopholes — as are required by the Army Field Manual.
Second, the chain of command must be clear. Again, Abu Ghraib shows what happens when the lines of authority are blurred. In interrogation, conflicting jurisdictions between military and intelligence services (or independent contractors) must be eliminated.
Third, outside visitation is essential in venues where interrogation occurs. The International Committee of the Red Cross and similar watchdog agencies must receive free access to all detainees as well as authority to publicize the findings. It is alarming that the Bush Administration has systematically blocked such access at Guantánamo and other facilities, even resorting to the use of “black sites.”
Fourth, detainees with grievances must have timely access to a fair hearing. Where the access is not timely or the hearings not fair, the conditions for abuse are obvious.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, structures of accountability must be strictly observed. Where there is no clear accountability, the situation can rapidly deteriorate. Not only does the abuse start to proliferate, but professional interrogators who pride themselves on obtaining reliable information by honorable means eventually get disgusted and leave the system. A process that drives out the professionals, while at the same time rewarding the abusers, can only lead to multiple disasters.
Such disasters now beset us. The authorizing of torture and abuse, the dissembling in high places that obscures it, and the rewarding of those who practice it or, like Judge Mukasey, condone it — this is the tarnished legacy of the Bush administration, the scandal that history is likely to judge most harshly.
Words are inadequate to express how necessary it is for us, as a nation, to face what we have done, to stop all cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as well as torture by our own government, to close all the loopholes, all the secret prisons, all the facilities that shame us, like the one in Guantánamo Bay.
Torture’s disasters are indeed multiple. Torture yields notoriously unreliable information, and shakes the foundations of the rule of law, but at the deepest level, its costs are spiritual. Torture corrupts the society it claims to defend. Doctors, lawyers and psychologists are increasingly tainted by the shame of being accessories to government-sponsored abuse, while religious leaders are tainted by their silence. Torture degrades everyone involved — planners, perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and finally society as a whole.
How can our country lead the world with moral authority if we do not hold ourselves to the same standards we demand from others?
How can we hold others accountable for illicit practices — like detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, outlawed forms of interrogation, and kangaroo military courts — if we have adopted them ourselves?
What does it profit our country if it should gain the whole world but lose its soul?
George Hunsinger is McCord Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
