The Secretary of State’s response to an NPR interviewer’s question about torture is something that she, and the rest of us, should still have to wrestle with.
By Tim Connor
Because journalism is the essence of any functioning democracy’s immune system, I’m in what I hope is a large group of people vulnerable to inspiration or despair depending on how we receive and deconstruct important news stories. As often as not, I think our reactions depend on whether a reporter makes an earnest effort to get to the heart of the matter, as opposed to just taking up an orbit around it.
A week ago Monday, the story that stung me in the head was one about Condoleezza Rice. National Public Radio’s diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen, had landed an “exclusive” interview with the Secretary of State and, while the interview was fairly wide ranging, the headline that NPR put on the story was that Condi had just invited Hillary for a visit and, from that, Condi was now ready to say that Hillary would do a terrific job as her successor.
I’m really not being sarcastic. The headline NPR attached to the story on its website was, in fact, “Rice Says Successor Hillary Clinton Will ‘Do Great.’”
Aside from all the empty calories in this headline, there’s a reason this story put me in a blue mood. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Ms. Kelemen and NPR. I just think they were unprepared to get to the heart of the matter, to use this rare interview to hold Secretary Rice accountable for her role in the shame America has acquired around the world on her watch as the top emissary for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
At the heart of that matter is torture.
Why?
Just this. Notwithstanding the flamboyant collapse of the economy (which I agree is a pretty big deal), there is no more important story about the American experience and our future as a people than how we account for, and respond to, the decisions made in the Bush White House that led to the torturing of prisoners taken in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It’s the defining issue of our times. Because who we are in our humanity and our sense of decency is ultimately more important than anything else. I won’t apologize for insisting that it’s even more important than how materially rich, or poor, we are.
To Keleman’s credit, the issue came up in her interview with Secretary Rice. And also to Keleman’s credit, she purposely used the word “torture” rather than the familiar soft-shoe euphemisms that have been shoved, repeatedly, into the discourse, in order to keep doors from slamming and microphones from being turned off.
But, here’s how it went, starting two minutes and forty seconds into the story, after Keleman and Rice had talked about the future of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
MK: Guantanamo wasn’t the only issue that tarnished the U.S.’s image, there was also the treatment of terror suspects, waterboarding, other methods of torture…
Rice: (interrupting) Oh, you know that I’m going to have to object because the United States has always kept to its international obligations, which include international obligations on the conventions on torture. The President was determined after September 11th to do everything that was, uh, legal. And within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that we prevented a follow-on attack.
MK: But are you worried about you, personally though? Because there were all these reports that you were involved in pretty thorough discussions about techniques to get information.
Rice: (Talking over the last phrase of Kelemen’s question) I was National Security Advisor and, uh, quite clearly you would expect the policies of the United States to come through the National Security Council. But I absolutely believed and was told, and continue to believe that we were doing so under our treaty obligations and under our domestic laws. And, in those circumstances, I really do think that the President of the United States and those responsible, in positions of responsibility, have an obligation to to try and protect the American people.
MK: A lot of this, Guantanamo, all these issues, you start hearing from (pause) from people, bad actors in the world, people like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, he brings up these issues at the United Nations General Assembly floor. And I wonder if you think some of this made it more difficult for you, as the Secretary of State…
Rice: (Clearly peeved) Oh, of course not.
MK: To talk about human rights.
Rice: Robert Mugabe. To mention Robert Mugabe in the same sentence with the President of the United States is an outrage. And, uh, Robert Mugabe is simply trying to cover the fact that he’s taken a country, which was once one of the jewels of Africa, made it into a center of starvation and, uh, now, of rampant disease that threatens its neighbors. And, uh, no, we shouldn’t fall prey to any moral relativism here. We should call them as we see it.
MK: And he, uh, President Bush today issued this very strong statement saying President Mugabe must go. I wonder what the U. S., what you’re doing on this front, what the U.S. can do?
Rice: Well, (sigh) this is one of those limits of American power. We are trying to work with the international community to bring pressure on Robert Mugabe. What have we had? We’ve had a sham election and we’ve had a sham power sharing arrangement, talks. And, uh, we need the help of the region. When you have tyrants like Robert Mugabe, or you have regime’s like Sudan, or you have juntas like Burma, the international community seems to lose its voice and its capability, to deal with those circumstances.
At this point in the interview, Kelemen quickly turned to questions about what Rice would do next and, perhaps to break the tension, she even asked Rice whether she would miss the limelight, including the attention of blogs devoted to Rice’s “hairstyles and shoes.”
My disappointment with Kelemen’s interview is two-fold. The first problem it exposes is the common, courtly relationship between reporters and the important people they cover, where access involves at least an implicit understanding that blood is not to be drawn. The second problem is that Kelemen wasn’t willing to push back when Rice tried to evade the torture question. With all due respect to Kelemen, if you’re going to get into explosive issues like
torture in an interview with the Secretary of State (and she was right to raise the issue) you should be both willing and prepared to close the deal. Instead, what happened is that the Secretary honked her horn and Kelemen hastily pulled the interview off the road.
Look closely at the exchange over Robert Mugabe. Kelemen was actually making a good point when she raised the Mugabe question.
Surely it’s a reasonable and fair question whether the vivid accounts of detainee abuse damage U.S. credibility when we then try to gather other nations to help us deal with despots like Mugabe. The credibility issue is the only point Kelemen was raising with the Mugabe question. And yet Rice quickly attacked Kelemen, rather viciously in my book, by accusing her of the “outrage” of mentioning Mugabe’s name in the same sentence as that of the President of the United States, [Kelemen didn't] and suggesting that Kelemen was engaging in “moral relativism.” But, of course, Kelemen was asking a different question. She wasn’t comparing Bush to Mugabe, she was asking whether the knowledge that the U.S. was engaging in torture was hampering Rice’s efforts to coalesce support around the world to take on oppressive regime’s like Zimbabwe’s.
There are some editors who would say that Kelemen, by eliciting that angry and bizarre response from Rice, had done all that a good reporter should do. They would say that it’s up to you dear reader, or listener, to have been paying careful attention to the interview so you can absorb just how rattled and off-base Rice was in her attack on the interviewer.
I disagree. The reason Rice jumped Kelemen was to attack the NPR reporter’s credibility and try to impose her will (and, by extension, George Bush’s will) on the story. It’s a technique deliberately intended–to say the very least–to confuse readers and listeners. Reporters are not only within their rights to resist being shoved around like that, but they should try to set the record straight. In this case, Rice’s attack on Kelemen worked very effectively. Rather than pushing back, Kelemen actually granted Rice’s wish to change the subject by using the outburst as a segue to ask more questions not about torture, but about Mugabe. From Rice’s perspective, it was a swift and sweet escape, abetted by the journalist.
The other part of this story that’s fascinating to me is that we don’t yet know what Rice’s legacy is going to be. I think I’m in that large group of Americans who can’t fathom how someone with Rice’s intelligence and education found herself so deeply ensconced in an administration that so overtly valued machismo over intellect. Generally, in the books and other in-depth treatments of the Bush White House, Rice is portrayed as a moderating influence against Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other hard liners.
But there’s a verbal tick that I’m sure New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer would have noted in Kelemen’s interview with Rice. It’s in the Secretary’s first answer to the torture question where she says: “The President was determined after September 11th to do everything that was, uh, legal.”
Right. “uh, legal.”
Much of Mayer’s remarkable reporting in her new book, The Dark Side goes deeply into the White and Justice Department to meticulously track how Vice President Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington, strong-armed the Bush Justice Department into going along with torture, and putting the Justice Department’s imprimatur to the practice. They succeeded, but it wasn’t easy.
It’s useful to read Mayer’s book alongside former Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s 2007 book, The Terror Presidency. Goldsmith, you may recall, is the former head of the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel, who in the summer of 2004 formally withdrew (thus rendering inoperative0 what Goldsmith himself described as “the infamous torture memo” that former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo authored in 2002.
At least until Goldsmith’s action, the Yoo memo was being used as a so-called “golden shield” to legally authorize waterboarding and other cruel interrogation methods. Torture is illegal under U.S. and international law. As Goldsmith lays out, Yoo’s memo [signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, who preceded Goldsmith] worked in two ways to try to legitimize torture.
The first was by narrowly defining torture as acts inflicting pain “associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions.”
“Any action that fell short of these extreme conditions,” Goldsmith explained, “could not, in OLC’s view, be torture.”
The second prong of Yoo’s memo was even better in its Nixonian sweep. Laws banning torture were themselves unconstitutional, Yoo had written, if they prevented the President “from gaining the intelligence he believes necessary to prevent attacks on the United States.”
In other words, if the President authorizes it, it must be legal. Ergo the “golden shield.”
“Another problem with the [Yoo] opinions,” Goldsmith wrote in his book, “was their tendentious tone. ‘It reads like a bad defense counsel’s brief, not an OLC opinion,’ a senior government lawyer said of the August 2002 opinion when he learned that I was withdrawing it in the summer of 2004. The opinions lacked the tenor of detachment and caution that usually characterizes OLC work, and that is so central to the legitimacy of OLC. In their redundant and one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law, and in their analysis of defenses and other ways to avoid prosecution for executive branch violations of federal laws, the opinions could be interpreted as if they were designed to confer immunity for bad acts.”
As soon as he withdrew the Yoo memo, Goldsmith resigned.
“The pressure on Goldsmith was intense,” Mayer recounts in her book. “At about this point, he decided, he had to quit. [Cheney's counsel] Addington had gone of out his way to humiliate Goldsmith in front of several other administration lawyers, pulling a three-by-five card from his jacket pocket with a list of other OLC decisions and asking snidely which ones he planned to overturn next, since ‘you have already withdrawn so many that the President and others have been relying on.”
So this provides some insight into the heavily politicized environment in the legal offices that were providing Rice and other administration officials with the legal cover she wanted in order to deny that the U.S. tortures as a matter of policy. I can’t do justice, in this space, to the turmoil Mayer recounts in her book, but here’s her summary from the book’s afterword.
“The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America’s ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring. Instead of heeding this well-intentioned dissent, however, the Bush Administration invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11th to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a small handful of trusted advisors sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals’ liberties that had been prohibited since the country’s founding. They turned the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel into a political instrument, which they used to expand their own executive power at the expense of long-standing checks and balances.”
So, this is what people need to know about the “uh, legal” means that Rice invoked in the interview with Kelemen. People also need to know what Kelemen was referring to in her question to Rice when she said, “there were all these reports that you were involved in pretty thorough discussions about techniques to get information.”
This was a reference to the reporting by Mayer and other journalists that Rice was among the top administration officials who’d been thoroughly briefed about the egregious interrogation practices. As fate would have it, three days later [this past Thursday] the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, with bipartisan consensus, released a declassied version of its report on the committee’s “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.”
While the headlines about the report focused on the Committee’s criticisms of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the lasting value of the report will be in how it systematically lays out the process by which the Bush Administration–despite its public proclamations that the U.S. doesn’t condone torture–came to adopt torture as a matter of policy.
Here it’s also important to recognize and praise Karen Dorn-Steele, Bill Morlin, and the Spokesman-Review for their reporting, on James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two shadowy psychologists who set up offices in Spokane as part of their work with the so-called Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. JPRA, among other things, oversees the Air Force survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base. The agency teaches Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques that were originally developed to train pilots and other service members on harsh interrogation methods they might endure at the hands of captors. But, according to the S-R and Jane Mayer’s reporting, Mitchell and Jessen became actively involved in what the new Senate report references as the “reverse” engineering of the SERE training so that the harsh interrogation methods could be used against U.S. prisoners.
What’s telling and disturbing about this, the Senate report notes, is that the SERE training is, according to JPRA, “based on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the last 50 years”–techniques borrowed, in part, from “Chinese Communist techniques during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.”
To “reverse engineer” the methods was to turn the outrageous interrogation methods, including waterboarding, into the fibers of U.S. policy. One of the initiating events, according to the Senate report, was a still classified “draft exploitation plan” prepared by Jessen in April 2002.
The trail leads right to Rice’s office. Here’s how the Senate report, released last Thursday, describes it:
“Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials attended meetings in the White House where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor, said that, ‘in the spring of 2002, CIA sought policy approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaeda terrorists.’ Secretary Rice said that she asked Director of Intelligence George Tenet to brief NSC Principals on the program and asked the Attorney General John Ashcroft ‘personally to review and confirm the legal advice prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel.’ She also said that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld participated in the NSC review of the CIA’s program. Asked whether she attended meetings where the SERE training was discussed, Secretary Rice stated that she recalled being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to ‘certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques.’ National Security Council (NSC) Legal Advisor, John Bellinger, said that he was present in meetings ‘at which SERE training was discussed.’”
One of the reasons I think the Rice/torture story is such an important one is that it unfolds against the weird cloth of American pop culture. It’s here that Rice lives not as a diplomat and shrewd handler of journalists, but as a transcendent icon. Although she owes her
celebrity to George W. Bush, she benefits, enormously, from being so outwardly unlike him. She’s disciplined, cultured, African-American, female, and talks in intelligible, complete sentences.
Rice’s inevitable memoir, unlike Bush’s, will almost certainly be a best-seller, and it will almost as certainly be used as a vehicle for her redemption. We can be sure that part of her revival will be the argument that the torture wasn’t “legally” torture and that, besides, it worked.
To the extent she pulls that one off, it will be an American tragedy.
A reason she may not succeed, is that one of the clear findings of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report is that the use of torture is not just violative of our morals and traditions, it also undermines our national security.
In introducing the report, the senators decided to use this quote from General David Patraeus
“What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight…is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also human beings.”
The Committee itself concluded: “Interrogation policies endorsed by senior military and civilian officials authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques were a major cause of the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. The impact of those abuses has been significant. In a 2007 international BBC poll, only 29 percent of people around the world said the United States is a generally positive influence in the world. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have a lot to do with that perception. The fact that America is seen in a negative light by so many complicates our ability to attract allies to our side, strengthens the hand of our enemies, and reduces our ability to collect intelligence that can save lives.”
A more direct rebuttal to those, like Rice, who continue to suggest that abusive methods are essential to our defense came earlier this month from a man writing under the pen name of Matthew Alexander and entitled: “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw In Iraq.”
“I’m not some ivory-tower type,” he wrote near to top of his guest column in the Washington Post, “I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.”
His column is about what he learned, in Iraq, as an Air Force criminal investigator, trying to hunt down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
“What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me,” he wrote, noting the use of the abusive “Guantanamo Bay model” and how counterproductive it was. In response, he writes, he prohibited his team of investigators from using the harsh methods and, as a result, “Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leader’s location,” and Zarqawi was killed as a result.
“My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war,” he reports near the end of his column, “– one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, ‘Which one?’
“Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress — at considerable personal risk.
“We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.”
-CFJ-
No comments yet.