Editor’s Note: This is the second post in a series of two on David Gushee’s comments during the final event of our “Public Theology and the Sacredness of Human Life” series at All Saints Church on April 21, 2013. Included below is a video recording of his talk that day. Find the first post here – it was not covered in the recorded talk.
The most important finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.
This conclusion is grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, both historical and legal. The Task Force examined court cases in which torture was deemed to have occurred both inside and outside the country and in instances in which the United States has leveled the charge of torture against other governments.
We found that US torture occurred in many instances and across a wide range of theaters. This judgment is not restricted to the three famous cases in which detainees of the CIA were subjected to waterboarding which had been approved at the highest levels. The panel concluded without dissent that arguments that the nation did not engage in torture and that much of what occurred should be defined as something less than torture are not credible.
The second notable conclusion of the Task Force is that the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for the spread of torture.
The most important element may have been to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al Qaeda and Taliban captives in Afghanistan or Guantánamo. The administration never specified what rules would apply instead.
The other major factor was President Bush’s authorization of brutal techniques by the CIA for selected detainees.
The CIA also created its own detention and interrogation facilities—at several locations in Afghanistan, and even more secretive “black sites” in Thailand, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania where high value captives were interrogated, often brutally.
The consequence of these official actions and statements are now clear: many lower-level troops said they believed that ‘the gloves were off’ regarding treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2002, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, interrogators began routinely depriving detainees of sleep by means of shackling them to the ceiling. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later approved interrogation techniques in Guantánamo that included sleep deprivation, stress positions, nudity, sensory deprivation, and threatening detainees with dogs. Many of the same techniques were later used in Iraq. Often these were used in combination, enhancing their brutality.
Much of the torture that occurred in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq was never explicitly authorized. But the authorization of the CIA’s techniques depended on explicitly setting aside the traditional legal rules that protected captives.
The architects of the detention and interrogation regimes sought and were given crucial support from people in the medical and legal fields. This implicated profound ethical questions for both professions and the report attempts to address those issues. Issues of professional ethics are important for those taking the detainee abuse issue seriously.
On the medical side, policymakers eagerly accepted a proposal presented by a small group of behavioral psychologists to use the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program (SERE) to fashion a harsh interrogation regime for people captured in the new war against terrorism.
The use of the SERE program was a signal example of flawed decisionmaking at many levels with serious consequences. The SERE program was developed to deal with the situation of downed U.S. airmen providing false statements or confessions to their captors in the Korean War after they were tortured. Its promoters had no experience in interrogation, the ability to extract truthful and usable information from captives.
Lawyers in the Justice Department provided legal guidance in the aftermath of the attacks that seemed to go to great lengths to allow treatment that amounted to torture. To deal with the regime of laws and treaties designed to prohibit and prevent torture, the lawyers provided novel, if not acrobatic interpretations to allow the mistreatment of prisoners.
Those early memoranda which defined torture narrowly would engender widespread and withering criticism once they became public. The successors of those government lawyers would eventually move to overturn those legal memoranda. Even though the initial memoranda were disowned, the memorable language that briefly defined torture in this country as only acts that might implicate organ failure remain a stain on the image of the United States and are a potential aid to repressive regimes elsewhere when they seek approval or justification for their own acts.
What the early opinions from lawyers and the advice from psychologists about how to manipulate detainees during interrogation shared in common was that they both seemed to be aimed primarily at giving the client – in this case, administration officials — what they wanted to hear. Information or arguments that contravened the advice were ignored, minimized or suppressed. Our recommendations address ways to prevent this kind of problem from occurring in the future.
The detention policies of the Bush administration may be divided into two different periods. The aggressive “forward-leaning” approach in the early years changed, notably beginning in the period of 2005 to 2006. There were, no doubt, many reasons for this.
One factor was certainly the disclosure of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib in 2004 and the ensuing condemnation both at home and abroad accompanied by feelings of shame among many Americans, who rightly hold higher expectations of the men and women we send to war. It is difficult to overstate the effect of the Abu Ghraib disclosures on the direction of U.S. policies on detainee treatment.
We discovered that there may have been another opportunity to effect a shift in momentum that was lost. That involved an internal debate at the highest levels of the International Committee of the Red Cross as to how aggressive to be with U.S. policymakers. The ICRC, by tradition, does not speak publicly about what its people learn about detention situations. But some officials were so offended by their discoveries at Guantánamo they argued the group had to be more forceful in confronting the Defense Department. In the end, the top leadership of the ICRC decided against confrontation and a valuable opportunity may have been missed.
Another observation is that President Obama came to quickly discover that his promised sweeping reform of the detention regime could not be so easily implemented. A major reason for this was that Congress, when finally engaged in the issue, resisted. The opposition to President Obama’s plans was sometimes bipartisan, notably to those proposals to close Guantánamo and bring some of the detainees onto U.S. soil for trial. Many believe Mr. Obama and his aides did not move swiftly enough, thus allowing opposition to build in Congress.
Today, the U.S. is still detaining people it regards as dangerous. But the treatment of supposed high-value foes has been transformed in significant ways. The U.S. military, learning from its experience, has vastly improved its procedures for screening captives and no longer engages in large-scale coercive interrogation techniques. Just as importantly, the regime of capture and detention has been overtaken by technology and supplanted in large measure by the use of drones. Drones, of course, raise other issues, which go beyond my agenda today.
Conclusions
My role on this panel primarily consisted of keeping the moral questions alive in our deliberations and helping the panel avoid succumbing to the mere utilitarianism so often dominant in public discussions of torture. Though we deal with “efficacy” in the report, “Does torture work” is not a question that can exhaust public reflection on detainee policy. In fact, it is a misleading question even in merely legal terms because our legal obligations include an absolute ban on torture, whether torture might “work” toward some goal or whether it doesn’t.
I hasten to add that everyone I encountered on the panel was also operating with a moral compass that mattered deeply to them, whatever might have been its deepest wellsprings. I admire the way that panel members were able to combine love of country with a higher love of the good and the right. Another way to say it is that they did not absolutize national security, as if concern for protecting America could justify anything and everything that one might conceivably undertake toward that end.
For me, concern about detainee abuse and torture was motivated by deeply held Christian convictions related to the sacred worth of each and every human being, without exception, in God’s sight. My work on the torture issue over many years deeply informs my new book on The Sacredness of Human Life (Eerdmans, 2013). It deepens my sense of the absolute necessity of this ethical framework to help us transcend the passions of the moment, especially during wartime. I was glad to discover patriotic, morally thoughtful ex-government leaders of the caliber of those on the panel. I was gladdened by their willingness to follow the truth where it led regardless of prior views or any kind of party loyalty or ideological affiliation. The report makes me proud to be an American. I am also proud to have been able to bear a quiet Christian witness in public life through my involvement in this taskforce.
There is a final lesson to be learned about the role of activists, Christian or otherwise. Most of what anti-torture activists reported, and argued, as far back as 2002, has been borne out by further research and analysis. This is not the first time that a committed minority, doggedly pursuing an issue based on moral convictions, has been proven right in its concerns even if at the inception of their work they were derided as foolish or misguided. The world, our nation, and the church always needs its cadres of morally serious activists who keep moral issues before the conscience of communities that very much would prefer not to address them. May we continue to produce and nurture such prophetic voices.