Costs of War: Dirty Little Secrets

There is going to be accountability for the officials who authored and authorized the US interrogation program for al-Qaida detainees. The only question is how, Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.

There has already been some measure of accountability for those behind Washington’s interrogation program, which the International Committee of the Red Cross external pagesayswas torture - if you count making its secret justifications public and naming their authors.

The external pagepublication of the memos authorizing the torture, and other previous and continuing external pagedisclosures like those last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, has formally taken the lid off a can of worms - but they had been wriggling free for years.

Mark Danner - the man who external pageobtained and published that Red Cross assessment - external pageargued in the Washington Post at the weekend that, prior to the victory of US President Barack Obama, it was not in the interest of either political party to confront the issue, even though the broad outlines of the program, including its use of waterboarding, had been known since the summer of 2004.

“Republicans ordered it and, then as now, supported its use - as long as they could call it something else. Democrats, on the defensive since 9/11 as the party of weakness on national security, saw no interest in taking up a cause perceived to be deeply unpopular [...]. Did Democrats really want to make themselves the party that stood for the rights of Khalid Sheik Mohammed?”

A senior Republican congressional staffer told this reporter at the time that he welcomed the revelations about the secret program. “Outside of Washington,” he said protests from Democrats about the use of waterboarding, stress positions and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques “play as being nice to terrorists.”

Danner’s external pageassessmentseems to concur. “The dirty little secret of the torture scandal and of all the loud expressions of outrage now clogging the country's airwaves,” he wrote, “is that until very recently, the politics of torture cut in the opposite direction.”

But surely the real dirty secret - and part of what makes the question of accountability so politically tricky - is that one of the guilty parties is the American people. Or at least an electorate who knew, courtesy of the New York Times and other reputable news organizations, about the broad outlines of the program - and still re-elected George W Bush.

And Danner appears to be wrong about the way the politics of the issue have shifted, at least according to a external pagenew poll from Gallup.

The poll, conducted in the days after the memos’ release, found that a small but definite majority - 55 percent - of Americans “believe in retrospect that the use of the [harsh] interrogation techniques was justified, while only 36 percent say it was not.

“Notably,” the analysis continues, among “those following the news about this matter ‘very closely,’” the majority believing the methods were justified was even greater - 67 to 37 percent.

Gallup does not provide any historical information, and pollsters always warn about comparing the results of different surveys, but it may be instructive to compare the Gallup numbers with external pagefiguresfrom the Pew Research Center earlier this year.

Their survey, conducted in February, found less support than Gallup, not more, for interrogation techniques it described in questions as torture. “Views have remained stable about whether the use of torture is justified in order to gain important information from suspected terrorists,” found the Pew survey. Public attitudes on the issue “have been largely unchanged since 2004,” according to their data.

In February, before the release of the memos and the resurgence of the issue, fewer than one-in-three Americans - 31 percent - believed torture was never justified; lower than the 36 percent opposition to “harsh interrogation” that Gallup found.

In other words, only about a third of Americans - the great majority of them committed Democrats - oppose the use of torture. And that has been the case since the broad outlines of the CIA program emerged in 2004.

That opposition might broaden as further details emerge about the use of torture - especially if external pagemore evidence comes to light that detainees were tortured to make them provide (bogus) details of al-Qaida’s relationship with the Saddam Hussein regime.

But the political problem for the administration remains a hard one. Gallup found that a bare majority - 51 percent - favor an investigation, while 42 oppose it. That support is actually a historically low number “because Americans are generally quite supportive of government probes into potential misconduct by public officials.” In recent years, Gallup found, for example, that 72 percent supported calls for an investigation into the firing of eight US attorneys, 82 percent backed a probe into oil company profits, and 70 percent agreed that the government's response to Hurricane Katrina ought to be looked into.

Worse, among those who say they are “following the news about this matter ‘very closely,’” the numbers are reversed. They oppose an investigation by 58 to 40 percent. Independents are equally divided on the investigation question, but they back the use of “harsh interrogation” 55 to 34 percent.

Of course, political leadership is all about changing numbers like these, and officials have a powerful mandate for the president’s external pageconviction that adhering to American values makes the nation safer.

But as things stand, the ball is not really in their court.

There is already the prospect of one prosecution in Europe, where myriad investigations into rendition threaten to raise the corner of another curtain altogether.

In the US, Congress will likely continue to take investigative center stage - and any inquiries will inevitably become fodder for partisan food fights.

Already, Republicans like Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra, ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, are external pageseeking to establish a paper trail showing Democrats knew all about the program - an exercise unlikely to be entirely fruitless. And his external pagecolleaguesaccuse the administration of jeopardizing the nation’s security and, yes, of stabbing its intelligence agencies in the back.

Sometimes in Washington, good politics is also good policy - and one important aim of any investigation has to be to discover how and why the congressional oversight machinery put in place after the Church Commission failed to prevent the administration using US intelligence agencies in ways that many think violated federal law.

US prosecutions, unlikely as they seem, will in any case - as Danner observes - not resolve the argument about whether torture is justified.

Taking the issue away from Congress by establishing some kind of commission is one way the administration could start exercising the leadership needed to build an American majority against torture. It also effectively punts an issue which is going to keep coming up, and which - on current numbers - offers the president nothing but pain and trouble.

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