The Senate Intelligence Committee played host to a theater of the absurd in early February when leaders of our intelligence agencies sat down to provide their assessment of the threats still facing our country six and a half years into the Bush administration's so-called Global War on Terrorism. The Directors of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried mightily to have it both ways as they crowed about their success in making our nation safer while simultaneously claiming our security situation grows more dire every day. No doubt they had a tough mission. They had to claim remarkable success in order to justify their abject lawlessness in pursuit of global threats, both real and imagined, while at the same time leverage the fear of future threats to con Congress into giving them even more power to spy on the American people - with immunity for past transgressions thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately the increasing level of threat was the easier case to make, as Committee Chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller opened the hearing with his own assessment that the risk to U.S. interests "has grown substantially" over the last year. This assessment begs a question: are the Bush administration's post-9/11 counterterrorism policies actually making our nation less secure? Of course DNI Michael McConnell's 45-page description [PDF] of the risks posed by today's emerging threats - ranging from homegrown terrorists to cyber-criminals to Pakistani nukes - more than proved the case. Despite more than six years with the "gloves off," despite the sacrifice Americans have paid in blood and treasure - not to mention the loss of our own civil liberties and privacy - we are no more secure from terrorism today than we were on September 10, 2001. What the Senate hearing makes clear is that the intelligence community that failed us so catastrophically on 9/11 still does not understand how terrorism works, and still does not have a comprehensive strategy to defeat al Qaeda and its offspring.
Nowhere was this lack of understanding more apparent than in the discussion of officially-sanctioned torture. CIA Director Michael Hayden finally admitted what the whole world has known for some time: that the CIA used waterboarding as one of its "enhanced" interrogation techniques against suspected al Qaeda figures. The fact that the U.S. prosecuted a Japanese officer for war crimes for waterboarding Americans in World War II and court-martialed a U.S. soldier for waterboarding in Vietnam obviates the need for parsing words: waterboarding is torture. And while Hayden claimed that waterboarding was only used on three detainees under controlled circumstances, he neglected to mention that there were other "enhanced" interrogation techniques in the CIA arsenal and that several detainees have actually been killed by U.S. interrogators, meeting even John Yoo's tortured definition of torture.
But for those, like Hayden, who believe despite all evidence to the contrary that torture produces reliable information, a more important question that remains: is any possible short term advantage ultimately outweighed by the long-term damage such techniques do to our overall security efforts?
Hayden argued that waterboarding was justifiable at the time it was used, in part because the CIA had only "limited knowledge" about the inner workings of al Qaeda. But what the CIA certainly should have known is that the al Qaeda training manual encouraged captured al Qaeda members to report any torture or abuse suffered at the hands of their interrogators. Al Qaeda strategists obviously realized that torture is a universally abhorred symbol of injustice and oppression that strips legitimacy from any government entity that uses it and taints any information obtained with a stain of unreliability. Moreover, al Qaeda strategists also learned from history lessons that the CIA apparently missed - because while our intelligence agencies often call terrorism a "new" type of conflict, terrorists know their tactic is not new and that the response to their horrific attacks is entirely predictable.
When the Algerian National Liberation Front (known by its French acronym, FLN) employed terrorist tactics against French colonialists during Algeria's War of Independence in the 1950s, the French military determined torture would be the best way to get critical intelligence from captured suspects. French General Paul Aussaresses, like Hayden, continues to maintain that the torture he ordered was both necessary and effective. But the torture allegations brought international condemnation, and the French soon left Algeria. The more credible statement on the issue comes from former FLN leader Saadi Yacef, later a senator in an independent Algeria, who explained in a recent interview the true effect of such techniques: "Actually torture helped the FLN enormously because what it did was to expose the real face of the French military... [Y]ou could say that Aussaresses was one of the FLN's most important assets because the more he tortured, the more militants we recruited."
When Hayden and the other leaders of our intelligence community defend lawlessness as a means to an end they undermine American values and American security. They become terrorism's best recruiters. Security measures that don't make us more secure must be abandoned. Only standing up for the rule of law can truly make us safe.
Loading comments…
Posted February 27, 2008 | 05:37 PM (EST)