As readers of this site know, I’ve long argued that one of the historical reasons that the US attempted to take custody of terrorism suspects after 9/11 was to avoid having to rely on bad intelligence provided by foreign intelligence agencies using unbridled methods of interrogation. I’ve maintained that the political push to bring terror suspects into the criminal system and/or close down prisons like Guantanamo Bay would mean a reversion to reliance on rendition; and while that provided the appearance of humanitarianism, in practice it was neither humane nor intelligent. It moved the interrogation process offshore, beyond the legal responsibility of the United States. But that merely moved things behind the curtain and once again returned poor intelligence without any gain in moral stature. In the absence of the political will to take responsibility for either challenging the existing protocols on coercive interrogation in order to keep up appearances or simply accepting the risks that might attend a self-restriction on interrogation techniques, policymakers have resorted to subterfuge to try and have it both ways. They’ve employed weasel phrases like “a false choice” to imply that there were no tradeoffs, no hard decisions that had to be made; or they have simply redescribed former practices with other words to produce the desired cosmetic and technically legal result. But the dilemma remains the same: to keep their jobs the politicians have know they must prevent another mass terror attack on American soil, but to keep their jobs they decided to lie about how they had to do it. Nancy Pelosi was perhaps the most egregious example, but she was by no means alone.
Today the Washington Post describes what anyone should have known from the start: the holier-than-though routine was a shell game. Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes about how things have simply been shifted around:
The revelation last weekend that the United States is increasingly using foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain terrorist suspects points up an uncomfortable truth about the war against Islamist terrorists. Demands to raise legal standards for terrorist suspects in one arena often lead to compensating tactics in another arena that leave suspects (and, sometimes, innocent civilians) worse off. …
The U.S. rendition program — which involves capturing suspected terrorists and whisking them to another country, outside judicial process — began in the 1990s. The government was under pressure to take terrorists off the streets and learn what they knew. But it could not bring them to the United States because U.S. law made it too hard to effectively interrogate and incapacitate them here. So instead it shipped them to Egypt and other places to achieve the same end. …
A little-noticed consequence of elevating standards at Guantanamo is that the government has sent very few terrorist suspects there in recent years. Instead, it holds more terrorists — without charge or trial, without habeas rights, and with less public scrutiny — at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Or it renders them to countries where interrogation and incarceration standards are often even lower.
That is not the half of it. As I’ve argued in the past, bad intelligence leads to further abuse. It fingers the wrong people; it leaves gaps in our true knowledge of enemy intentions. By reverting to a reliance on rendition the current administration has done the worst of all possible things, consign detainees to unlimited brutality in order to falsely represent themselves as the paragons of moral uprightness, for the worst of all possible ends: to get bad intelligence bought at the pain of hidden suffering. Goldsmith concludes:
The government, however, sees the terrorist threat every day and is under enormous pressure to keep the country safe. When one of its approaches to terrorist incapacitation becomes too costly legally or politically, it shifts to others that raise fewer legal and political problems. This doesn’t increase our safety or help the terrorists. But it does make us feel better about ourselves.
It is on this last point that I disagree with the professor. It only makes some people feel better about themselves.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member