Our budding Torquemadas

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REGARDING MEDIA

 

Pervasive silence about torture issue

Tim Rutten

Regarding Media

 

November 5, 2005

 

OF all the ways in which the American news media have failed since Sept.

11, none may be more consequential than the mild and deferential eye it

has cast on the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy.

 

Who can forget the giddy months through the fall of 2001 when U.S. cable

networks and newspaper op-ed pages actually staged debates — in some

cases in front of live audiences —over how far we should go to " extract

information " from any Al Qaeda members who fell into our hands?

 

Ostensibly responsible Americans — officials and commentators alike —

unashamedly sat and publicly discussed not only whether torture was

licit, but also how and when it should be applied.

 

The whole sorry spectacle reached its nadir when a purported civil

libertarian, Harvard Law professor Allen Dershowitz, proposed procedures

for obtaining " torture warrants. " (The relevance of due process to a

moral universe that sanctions the torment of other human beings is

apparently an irony against which a Harvard professorship armors the mind.)

 

All of this was abetted by a news media that somehow found it natural to

adopt the verbal evasions of our budding Torquemadas. Phrases such as

" coercive interrogation " and " harsh measures " began to turn up with

regularity. Nobody even bothered to wink.

 

One of the best is " rendition, " which occurs when U.S. forces or

intelligence agencies capture suspected terrorists and secretly turn

them over to another country — Egypt, Jordan and Morocco apparently are

favorites — where people aren't squeamish about a little coercion.

 

We remain an ingenious people. Who but Americans would think of

outsourcing torture?

 

None of this is surprising. If recent history has taught us anything,

it's that the road that brings hell to Earth is paved with euphemism.

 

This week we passed another milestone on that path, when the Washington

Post's Dana Priest reported that " the CIA has been hiding and

interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a

Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign

officials familiar with the arrangement. "

 

In her front page account, Priest wrote, " The secret facility is part of

a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at

various times has included sites in eight countries....The existence and

locations of the facilities — referred to as 'black sites' in classified

White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are

known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually,

only to the president and a few top intelligence officials in each host

country. "

 

According to the Post's story, " The CIA and the White House ... have

dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in

open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held.

Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what

interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made

about whether they should be detained or for how long. "

 

Now, why do we suppose our government wants to hold people secretly in

foreign countries? Maybe it's because they want to do things to them

that would be illegal inside the United States ... like, say, torture them?

 

That would explain why Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director

Porter J. Goss have so stubbornly resisted language written into the

defense spending bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a one-time Vietnam

POW, that would prohibit the cruel or inhumane treatment of any prisoner

in U.S. custody, including those held by the CIA. Cheney and Goss aren't

concerned, as their surrogates have argued, about tying the intelligence

agencies' hands in some future, theoretical moment of national

emergency. They're worried that they'll have to close down the

clandestine torture chambers that are in operation now.

 

And the American press continues to abet their sinister evasions with an

indifference to consequence and diffidence to power that only can be

called what it is: moral cowardice.

 

Even the Post, which deserves full credit for exposing the existence of

the White House's petite gulag, stepped back from the full disclosure it

owed the American people. " The Washington Post is not publishing the

names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program,

at the request of senior U.S. officials, " Priest wrote. " They argued

that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those

countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible

terrorist retaliation. "

 

You can bet those officials argue that — and you can bet just as

strongly that acceding to their demands shields the Post from being

called unpatriotic, one of the favorite epithets this administration

uses to bludgeon the press.

 

But at least the Post was willing to take the risk of exposing most of

this story. What should have been a torrent of follow-up reporting and

commentary by other news organizations was barely a trickle by week's end.

 

In fact, when a Washington-based human rights organization came forward

to say it believes the CIA's secret prisons are in Poland and Romania,

the only newspaper willing to print the allegations was Britain's

Financial Times.

 

The grotesqueries presented by this sordid story are almost too numerous

to list. But one likely to be overlooked deserves to be noted.

 

There is something particularly perverse about the United States

inducing the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe to become its

accomplices in all this.

 

For decades, the iron curtain, captive nations and Soviet tyranny were

staples of American political rhetoric — and of the U.S. news media's

editorial pages. Seas of reportorial ink were spilled charting the murky

reaches of the Gulag and the interlocking network of secret police

agencies that maintained the cold grip of an ossified communism

throughout the Eastern Bloc year after gray, numbing year.

 

To make these points in this connection is not to mock. We were right,

and the Soviet Union and its client governments were wrong.

 

Now, we have to wonder whether the Bush administration fixed on Poland

and Romania — or some other Eastern European democracy — precisely

because it suspected that the long night of Soviet oppression had

conditioned them to accept our " black sites " on their soil?

 

Or did we think that societies desperate for a slice of the West's

prosperity wouldn't mind selling just one more little piece of their

collective souls to obtain Washington recommendation to the European Union?

 

There was a time when American officials could stand up in public and —

without blushing — describe the United States as " the leader of the free

world. "

 

Could any of them do that now that this administration has adopted

torture as an instrument of state policy?

 

Sadly, the answer probably is yes. They lost the ability to blush when

shame became a casualty of the war on terror.

 

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times