The Latest Drafts of the History of Torture

Ninety years ago, in the shadow of the Great War, long before the invention of cable news and bloggers, the great American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in Liberty And The News that:

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggles of classes, he knows at second, third or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself.

(CBS/AP)

Americans could not go see for themselves the effects of the Bush Administration's torture policies. There are no commuter flights to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the train doesn't run on time to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The digital cameras that recorded the degradation of Iraqi prisoners at the prison were never supposed to see the light of day. And the video recordings of the Gitmo interrogations were improperly destroyed by the CIA so that they never would.

We were blind but now we begin to see. Slowly, a clearer picture is emerging of the legal and political path from the "torture memos" authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel (by men like John Yoo and Steven Bradbury and Alberto Gonzales) to the reported water-boarding (simulated death by drowning) of Khalid Sheik Mohammed not once or twice but 183 times. What began in 2002 as faux legal ambiguity (about the legality of torture) turned into official military policy and then into a moral and diplomatic disaster and now has become, as almost all facts always do, a part of history.

So do yourself a favor. Since you weren't invited to be there at the start of America's torture policies, since you didn't get a chance to observe the interrogations or question the interrogated, spend the time it takes to understand what happened, and why, and how, and by whom. Read two recently published think pieces, David Cole's piece in The New York Review of Books on Bush-era lawyers and their culpability for torture and The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and his open letter to former president George W. Bush. They are most comprehensible and accessible works yet on the history of torture in America, 2002-2009.

Neither article is perfect. None are. But both offer pointed, well-written and earnestly candid accounts of how we got to where we were-- and why it's not worth going back.

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(CBS)

Andrew Cohen is CBS News' Chief Legal Analyst and Legal Editor. CourtWatch is his new blog with analysis and commentary on breaking legal news and events. For columns on legal issues before the beginning of this blog, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter.

[brucearnold]

On 9/11/01, the all-powerful bankers behind New World Order globalization unleashed their oil and money hungry military-industrial dogs of war to orchestrate the fall of 3 (not 2) WTC towers--the third, not struck by a plane, housing 3 floors of damning SEC records. On that day, we lost 3000 lives (with 1000s more to follow) plus 4 commercial airliners (with all on board) ... and stood by helplessly as something (not wide enough to be a 757) bored a hole in the side of the Pentagon. Yet even today, two elections and a new administration later, our Big Brother government expects us to believe that all of that masterfully-plotted and perfectly-timed destruction was accomplished by 15 Saudis and 4 of their cousins using nothing more than box cutters and big balls. If you believe that, or if you believe we have been told anything close to the Truth about 9/11, then I ask you to Google "911 truth" and "911 peak oil", and objectively evaluate what you find at websites like AE911Truth.org.

[noloyalisti]

Keep in mind that all the evidence indicates that Bush Cheney knew about 911 and let it happen. They had the means, the motive and opportunity. And see how much political capital and money they gained. It allowed them to steal a second election, and illegally spy and torture without any retribution.

And torture doesn't even work, all it is is state sponsored terror, somthing our country has gotten quite good at.

[babooph]

What is so odd about a torturer hiding his crimes from all that he can?Gitmo was chosen so the sick crime could be done WITHOUT witness.

[rexrox2]

Supported the Iraq invasion,,, you don't want to bring that up. All this hand-wringing about torture. It's the best ANTI-MILITARY rant currently available. It will never go away. Just like every kid in high school must read FAREWELL TO MANZANAR. It's a way to divert attention away from the global success of the american military during WWII. Most people don't play political games with the Japanese Camps, but you know who made that call, and the argument made by Earl Warren in Congress "won" the day for the campists. Now politics is dominating the Guantanamo debate. This does not have the class of the Greatest Generation. One administration's best effort to keep us safe, when the consensus was our women and children would be hit again, and very soon after the 9/11 attack. Did they do what needed to be done? If they would not have taken the action, would we have been hit again. Remember these weren't military targets, they were civilian targets, hit by agents that were sneaking around, getting false papers, traveling to targets to do recon. Not a military action. Kill civilians, kill civilians, strike terror into our citizens. Not typical military objectives. This was not an army, these were civilian murders. Obama has his chance to design a defense for our country. Every meglomaniac in the world is taking TWO GIANT STEPS FORWARD. They don't think he has the cajones. Just remember: It's much more important to consider what your enemies think of you, and much less important what your allies think of you.

[noloyalisti]

Andrew Cohen is citing Andrew Sullivan who voted for GW, supported the un-necessary Iraq invasion based on very obvious lies and has bought into the US government conspiracy theory about 911. Therefore both Cohen and Sullivan have essentially no credibility to offer their opinions.

[noloyalisti]

These guys make it sound like we should not prosecute these war criminals from the Bush Crime Family. Can you imagine if we let the Nazis get away with killing millions for no reason like the US has done?

First of all we are not at war. We are running occupations based on the Neocon/big corporation wet dream for American global hegemony.

Second of all, the War of Terror is a fraud anyway. Let's stop this BS if that's what it takes to investigate the war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Yoo, etc.