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From the 2002 trial of John Walker Lindh -- the American captured in Mazar-e-Sharif in 2001 fighting for the Taliban -- Donald Rumsfeld's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, is said to have advised the commander of U.S. forces in Mazar to "take the gloves off" when interrogating him.
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Per today's Washington Post: A partially declassified CIA report released Monday by the Obama administration describes the early implementation of the agency's interrogation program in 2002 and 2003 as ad hoc and poorly supervised, leading to the use of "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented" techniques.
Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms while they were bound behind his back with a belt. Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. And another squeezed a detainee's neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out.
Authorized techniques such as waterboarding were applied in a manner that exceeded the language of Justice Department memos that authorized their use. Interrogators "continuously applied large volumes of water," explaining afterward that they needed to make the experience "more poignant and convincing," the report said.
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For the moment, let's leave the "Dark Side" in the shadow of government secrecy and instead focus on the legitimate and legal use of brutal violence by our government -- i.e. sending 19-year-old soldiers into combat in order to kill fellow human beings. Imagine a superior officer who went out and hired a contractor took a raw recruit, gave him an M-16 rifle, and set him loose in the streets of Iraq or Afghanistan with instructions to "kill the bad guys" but without any training or supervision. The results would be inevitable and clear for all to see -- indiscriminate killing amounting to murder. The superior officer would personally be held criminally liable for the actions of the untrained, unsupervised contractor raw recruit he unleashed on the innocent and guilty alike.
Our military recognizes that when we ask our children and our fellow citizens' children to kill on our behalf, we must first afford them to intense training and discipline. Anyone who has been in combat recognizes that it takes tremendous discipline to adhere to the rules of engagement when others are trying to kill you right then and there. The noise, the confusion, the rush of adrenaline all make it essential that a soldier's self-discipline become innate and control his or her conduct in action almost without thinking. This only occurs as the result of intense training and a system of enforceable discipline. Our young soldiers understand, as do their superiors, that they will be held accountable if they violate their training and engage in undisciplined violence.
Furthermore, notwithstanding the brutality of the violence our military unleashes in our name, they do it for the most part in complete transparency. Occasionally, individuals, to include commanders, will fall back into secrecy in order to cover-up misdeeds (i.e. the case of Pat Tillman or instances of mistaken aerial bombing of civilian victims) but invariably, the military always comes around and insists on complete transparency and accountability. They recognize that it is only through such transparency and accountability that we can continue to ask our young soldiers to kill their fellow human beings on our behalf, yet retain their humanity.
Contrast that with the "Dark Side" which was crafted and/or approved by our most senior leaders in our government to include the former President and Vice-President. They asked both government and contractor interrogators to "shed a little bit of their humanity" and engage in torture. However, there is no such thing as "shedding a little bit of your humanity." Once you descend down that road, the inevitable consequences should be plain for all to see, especially when the shedding of humanity occurs within an undisciplined world with no effective training and supervision. The only potentially basis for shock would be if such a process did not inevitably lead to the torture, abuse, and even murder of detainees.
Our government leaders deliberately chose to craft and implement the process for handling and interrogating detainees in official secrecy, not for the purpose of depriving valuable information to our adversaries but solely to escape the transparency which they absolutely know would have precluded them from engaging in such conduct in the first place.
I am reminded of an article which appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2004 entitled: "AbuGhraib Intelligence Soldier Describes Iraq Abuse in Detail ." In the article, one military intelligence soldier related how, after a session in which abuse was inflicted upon some detainees, as he got ready to leave the cell block amid anguished please for help from the prisoners, another soldier looked at him and asked, "Izzy, you're not going to tell anybody, are you?" The use of official secrecy by our most senior government leaders in the entire interrogation process, from crafting and design to implementation, was akin to asking Izzy, out of a sense of shame and fear of being found out, not to tell anybody.
To now effectively say to the low-level interrogators who our government leaders asked to shed some of their humanity on our behalf that we now believe they shed too much, while at the same time failing to hold accountable the very leaders who set them down that path in the first place, is the most misguided decision the current administration could have made.
(Note: This post was updated upon my realization that I used an imperfect analogy. Referencing the use of an ill-trained and undisciplined contractor vice an ill-trained and undisciplined raw recruit is too close to reality; e.g. Blackwater, et. al. In fact, the military disdained the in-theater use of such contractors for the very reasons indicated above) .
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