Detainee Interrogation and Abuse

Updated below -- Update II:
News from several fronts this morning provide the Obama administration with a unique opportunity to demonstrate how increased transparency and less reliance on official secrecy can enhance national security.

First are reports of an internal Department of Justice (DoJ) recommendation to Attorney General Holder that some CIA interrogators, both employees and contractors, be prosecuted for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects. This can be both encouraging and discouraging. If the prosecutions are, in fact, limited to those interrogators who exceeded the guidelines for interrogations detailed in a series of legal opinions written by the DoJ's Office of Legal Council, and since repudiated, then in some sense, limited prosecution of low level interrogators is worse than no prosecutions. If they prove to be so selective, the Obama administration will succeed where the Bush administration came up short -- specifically, in institutionalizing the "Torture Memos" as the law of the land if the authors and other high level officials who crafted and implemented the abusive program to begin with escape accountability. One can only hope that this reported initial effort at prosecution will follow the chain all the way up.

In any event, look for the defense attorneys for any of the low-level interrogators who are investigated to use as part of their defense the fact that they never knew of or saw the DoJ guidelines, in part because they were so highly classified. This is but one more example in a long litany of instances where government secrecy has actually damaged the national security it was intended to protect.

The role of increased transparency in the area of detainee interrogations is best illustrated by today's other piece of news to the effect that President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation. The article goes on to report that this effort also includes direction to the effect that:

Under the new guidelines, interrogators must stay within the parameters of the Army Field Manual when questioning suspects. The task force concluded -- unanimously, officials said -- that "the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies...".

As such, it is important to keep in mind the words of LTG John Kimmons, the then Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, who, when releasing the Army's revised interrogation techniques in September 2006, acknowledged that the Army considered classifying some of the techniques in order to keep them out of the hands of the enemy. Instead, they opted for transparency, in part to be "as clear as we can be in the training of these techniques to our own soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines." Such transparency decreases the likelihood that abuses will occur and, if they do, facilitates accountability.

Similar transparency on the part of our than national leaders to include former President Bush, former Vice-President Cheney, and others could have avoided the infliction of unjust government violence in the first place. It would also have denied our nation's adversaries one of the most potent tools that have had over the past several years to recruit new extremists. One can only hope that our government's new detainee policies and procedures will embrace enhanced transparency. That should be the only reason for taking the unusual and highly problematic step of placing the new operational unit known as the "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group" under the direct supervision of the National Security Council (NSC). Otherwise, if the NSC enshrouds this effort in a new degree of official secrecy, we might all wake up one day to find out that LtCol Ollie North has returned to the NSC to direct the effort.

Update: btw -- what does it say about the NY Times that they report on investigations into CIA interrogation abuses, to include cases such as "that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in 2003 in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib prison..." in the "Politics" section of their publication. Who has decreed that murder investigations should be regarded as "politics"?

Update II: The above, of course, was a rhetorical question -- the NY Times is simply adding legitimacy to the inevitable argument that any investigation into murder and abuse of detainees is simply politically motivated by "civil-liberty extremists," as quoted in Glenn Greenwald's blog today, who are weak on national security. It would strike me that those who might make such arguments but who also advocate a strict constructionist approach to the U.S. Constitution would support such investigations into government abuse in that they are clearly in concert with the original drafters' intent. The preamble to our Constitution makes it abundantly clear that one of the principal objectives of this social compact was to "provide for the common defence," national security in today's parlance. Nonetheless, the framer's built in deliberate limits to the government's authority recognizing the inherent rights possessed by all, not because they were bestowed upon us by the government, but because of the basic dignity inherent in every human being. There is no secret coda to the Constitution that states government officials can commit crimes with impunity in the name of national security.