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February 25, 2007

Blasé About Torture

An Arab news outlet has published an editorial by Rosa Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, that was originally printed in the LA Times, opining that the "American public has become blasé about torture."

Thanks to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, “extraordinary renditions” and “black sites,” many people now take for granted the image of the American as torturer. At least 100 prisoners have been killed while in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan [take note, Leonid], and many more have been beaten, humiliated and abused. Still others have been secretly handed over to our even less-scrupulous friends in various Middle Eastern intelligence services.

And though the vast majority of our troops and officials abide by the spirit and the letter of US and international laws, such abusive tactics have been authorized by officials at the highest level of the US government.

In November 2001, 66 percent of Americans said they “could not support government-sanctioned torture of suspects” as part of the war on terrorism. And when photos of abuses at Abu Ghraib surfaced in the spring of 2004, the US news media treated it — rightly — as a major scandal. In October 2005, the US Senate voted 90-9 in support of legislation prohibiting the inhumane treatment of prisoners, sponsored by Arizona Sen. John McCain. But over the last year, we seem to have lost our former sense of outrage, though prisoner abuse has hardly ended.

A handful of low-ranking people have been convicted for their roles in abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, but the bigger fish carry on as usual. In September, President Bush gave a speech defending the use of “alternative” interrogation methods; a poll shortly after that found public opposition to torture was down to 56 percent. In October, Congress obligingly passed the Military Commissions Act, which permits the use of coerced testimony in trials of suspected enemy combatants and restricts the ability of US courts to examine allegations of abuse.

Not the sort of thing you like seeing, let alone in the Arab press. And it gets worse:

Lately, news relating to torture has been greeted by a collective yawn. On Jan. 31, German prosecutors issued a warrant for the arrest of 13 CIA operatives involved in the illegal abduction of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who was taken to Afghanistan for a little "alternative" interrogation — and then unceremoniously abandoned in Albania when the CIA realized that it had grabbed the wrong guy. On Feb. 16, an Italian court indicted 26 US intelligence operatives and contractors accused of kidnapping an Islamic cleric and taking him to Egypt, where, he says, he was tortured. It should be huge news when two of our European allies demand the arrest of US government agents — but these stories were rapidly superseded on the front pages by news of Anna Nicole Smith’s embalming and matters of similarly pressing national interest.

We talked about the excessive torture portrayed on Fox's "24" a couple of weeks ago, as well as the efforts by military leaders to convince executive producer Howard Gordon to change the show's focus on torture because it was actually making it harder to stop the troops from engaging in torture themselves. Brooks reports that Gordon has said starting next season there will be less torture on the show – not because of any harm to the troops or to national security, but because torture "is starting to feel a little trite."

Brooks is right that Americans are more willing to accept torture. The very idea that a mere 56% of us find it unacceptable is appalling, both because it speaks to the coarseness of our culture and because it speaks to our ignorance about its effectiveness. Some say the Arabs embrace torture and so we ought not to be so squeamish about torturing them. I just always thought we were better than that.

Posted by Becky at February 25, 2007 10:10 AM