The capacity of the Iraq war to engender foaming irrationality, lies and blindly politicised prejudice never ceases to amaze. The latest surrogate for the never-ending attack on President Bush is his nominee for the post of Attorney-General, the current White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. Mr Gonzales is being accused of personally sanctioning torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and just about everywhere a suspected Islamic terrorist might run up against the US military. According to the New York Times:

'Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the other chief architect of these policies, Mr. Gonzales shamed the nation and endangered American soldiers who may be taken prisoner in the future by condoning the sort of atrocious acts the United States has always condemned'.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was even more vitriolic, calling Gonzales

'the enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby… Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval'

.

So what did Gonzales actually do that was so heinous? Well, his first crime was to pass onto the President the opinion by the Justice Department that terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. His second was to pass on a second interpretation of the law. Here’s the indictment against Gonzales by the New York Times:

'That August, Mr. Gonzales got a legal opinion from Jay Bybee, then the assistant attorney general, arguing that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions at will and that some forms of torture "may be justified." Mr. Rumsfeld's lawyers produced documents justifying the abuse of prisoners sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Gonzales approved those memos or didn't object. We don't know which because the White House won't release the documents. On Thursday, more than eight months after the rotten fruits of those legal briefs were shown to the world at Abu Ghraib, the Justice Department issued yet another legal opinion. This time it rejected Mr. Bybee's bizarre notions that the president could be given the legal go-ahead to authorize torture, simply by defining the word so narrowly as to exclude almost anything short of mortal injury. We were glad to see that turnaround, although it was three years too late. Prisoners have already been systematically hurt, degraded, tortured and even killed.'

From all this, it is clear that the Bush administration has been in a right old mess about the proper limits to be set for interrogating terrorist suspects. And it may well be that, beyond what we already know about Abu Ghraib, the US military — or the CIA, which is another matter — has been doing some terrible things to prisoners under its control. If so, that would be a scandal and a disgrace. But linking Gonzales to this is quite another matter. For all he did was to tell the President correctly what the law actually said.

As Senator John Cornyn said at the Senate Judiciary committee confirmation hearing:

'the Red Cross' own guidelines state that to be entitled to Geneva protection as a prisoner of war, combatants must satisfy four conditions: being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; secondly, having a fixed, distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; number three, carrying arms openly; and number four, conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. Does anyone on this committee or anywhere else, for that matter, seriously argue that al Qaeda terrorists comply with the Law of War? By the way, it's important to note that Judge Gonzales’ legal advice has also been affirmed by three federal courts throughout this country, and has also been endorsed by numerous legal scholars and international legal experts across the political spectrum, as well as both the 9/11 commission, by the way; the final Schlesinger report, an independent report on DOD detention operations; and a brief filed recently in the United States Supreme Court by former Carter administration officials, State Department legal advisers, judge advocates and military commanders, and liberal international law scholars, who concluded that the president’s conclusion that members of al Qaeda and the Taliban are unlawful combatants is clearly correct. Even Washington advocacy director for the Human Rights Watch Tom Malinowski, a vocal Bush administration critic, has grudgingly conceded that the administration's interpretation is probably correct.'

At the hearing, Gonzales explicitly repudiated the use of torture and vehemently condemned the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Of course, the neuralgic issue here is what actually constitutes torture. Gonzales is being attacked because he is following legal definitions and interpreting torture narrowly, thus implicitly permitting lesser forms of ill-treatment. But as Senator Cornyn went on to say:

'Judge Gonzales is being attacked for a memo he didn't write, interpreting a law that he didn't draft. It was Congress, not Judge Gonzales, that enacted a strict definition of torture. It was Congress, not Judge Gonzales, that specifically provided that only specific intent to inflict severe pain or mental pain or suffering would constitute torture.'

What lies behind all this is surely the confusion engendered by war-by-terrorism, which because it is neither war nor terrorism as we conventionally understand these terms means we are not yet equipped with the moral or legal principles or structures to deal with it. In particular, we in the west are quite unable to deal with yet another manifestation of asymmetric warfare — the fact that while US interrogators are restricted by international conventions and the fundamental rules of human behaviour, the detainees are not. The result is that the detainees are exploiting this asymmetry to run rings round their captors.

An impressively researched article in City Journal by Heather MacDonald puts all this in disturbing perspective, and illustrates the malign and potentially lethal effects of the New York Times school of moral sanctimony. According to MacDonald, the approved interrogation techniques and interpretations of what was or was not permitted under the Geneva convention had nothing to do with the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib. She writes:

'The abuse at Abu Ghraib resulted from the Pentagon's failure to plan for any outcome of the Iraq invasion except the most rosy scenario, its failure to respond to the insurgency once it broke out, and its failure to keep military discipline from collapsing in the understaffed Abu Ghraib facility. Interrogation rules were beside the point… Moreover, almost all the behavior shown in the photographs occurred in the dead of night among military police, wholly separate from interrogations. Most abuse victims were not even scheduled to be interrogated, because they were of no intelligence value. Finally, except for the presence of dogs, none of the behavior shown in the photos was included in the interrogation rules promulgated in Iraq. Mandated masturbation, dog leashes, assault, and stacking naked prisoners in pyramids—none of these depredations was an approved (or even contemplated) interrogation practice, and no interrogator ordered the military guards to engage in them.'

Nevertheless, the Bush administration's scalded reaction to the scandal at Abu Ghraib has been disastrous:

'It stripped interrogators not just of stress options but of traditional techniques long regarded as uncontroversial as well. Red tape now entangles the interrogation process, and detainees know that their adversaries' hands are tied.'

And these detainees, she reports, have confounded their captors by their refusal to co-operate at all — a refusal deriving directly from their understanding that the Americans would play by civilised rules, which meant the detainees could just sit out their captivity because nothing would happen to them.

'Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture — a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.'

To counter this, the Americans tried to work out how to inflict extra pressure while still remaining within the accepted limits of behaviour towards detainees:

'Many of the interrogators argued for a calibrated use of "stress techniques" --long interrogations that would cut into the detainees' sleep schedules, for example, or making a prisoner kneel or stand, or aggressive questioning that would put a detainee on edge…What emerged was a hybrid and fluid set of detention practices. As interrogators tried to overcome the prisoners' resistance, their reference point remained Geneva and other humanitarian treaties. But the interrogators pushed into the outer limits of what they thought the law allowed, undoubtedly recognizing that the prisoners in their control violated everything the pacts stood for.'

Since they were told to be consistent with the Geneva conventions, they developed a rule of thumb that any stress they inflicted would be no worse than what they would do to their own troops. The result, says MacDonald, was that the prisoners ran rings round them.

' "It was ridiculous the things we couldn't do," recalls an army interrogator. "One guy said he would talk if he could see the ocean. It wasn't approved, because it would be a change of scenery" — a privilege that discriminated in favor of a cooperating detainee, as opposed to being available to all, regardless of their behavior.'

And then came Abu Ghraib. MacDonald writes:

'Reeling under the PR disaster of Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon shut down every stress technique but one—isolation—and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Even the traditional army psychological approaches have fallen under a deep cloud of suspicion: deflating a detainee's ego, aggressive but non-physical histrionics, and good cop–bad cop have been banished along with sleep deprivation. Timidity among officers prevents the energetic application of those techniques that remain. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by officers who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives.

'In losing these techniques, interrogators have lost the ability to create the uncertainty vital to getting terrorist information. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the military has made public nearly every record of its internal interrogation debates, providing al-Qaida analysts with an encyclopedia of U.S. methods and constraints. Those constraints make perfectly clear that the interrogator is not in control. "In reassuring the world about our limits, we have destroyed our biggest asset: detainee doubt," a senior Pentagon intelligence official laments. Soldiers on the ground are noticing the consequences. "The Iraqis already know the game. They know how to play us," a marine chief warrant officer told the Wall Street Journal in August. "Unless you catch the Iraqis in the act, it is very hard to pin anything on anyone . . . . We can’t even use basic police interrogation tactics." '

It's the dilemma of our times. How do we fight an enemy which does not recognise normal conventions of behaviour and has an unlimited willingness deliberately to take innocent life, while managing not to sacrifice our own moral norms? Is it possible for people for whom human life is everything ever to defeat people for whom human life is nothing? And if not, what in the last resort do we choose to defend -- absolute principle, or the civilisation that brought forth that principle?

MacDonald concludes:

'Human Rights Watch, the ICRC, Amnesty International, and the other self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth—to the real world in which torture means what the Nazis and the Japanese did in their concentration and POW camps in World War II; the world in which evil regimes, like those we fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, don’t follow the Miranda rules or the Convention Against Torture but instead gas children, bury people alive, set wild animals on soccer players who lose, and hang adulterous women by truckloads before stadiums full of spectators; the world in which barbarous death cults behead female aid workers, bomb crowded railway stations, and fly planes filled with hundreds of innocent passengers into buildings filled with thousands of innocent and unsuspecting civilians. By definition, our terrorist enemies and their state supporters have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order and its humanitarian rules. In fighting them, we must of course hold ourselves to our own high moral standards without, however, succumbing to the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every precept of the Sermon on the Mount. It is the necessity of this fallen world that we must oppose evil with force; and we must use all the lawful means necessary to ensure that good, rather than evil, triumphs.'

The Gonzales affair, and its attendant chorus of appeasenik Furies, shows there is no limit to the west’s capacity to make damned sure that it does not.

Posted by melanie at January 10, 2005