By Curt Wechsler
{xtypo_quote}we just can’t get this issue behind us," even with the
Bush administration on its way out of office, because "issues like
this, like torture, still define who we are as a country. It’s still
unfinished business. – MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow{/xtypo_quote}
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently became the first Bush
administration official to admit that high-level discussions of the use
of torture had taken place in 2002 and 2003.
According to a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services
Committee earlier this month and released on Wednesday by committee
chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), officials were told that waterboarding
and other "harsh interrogation measures" routinely used in a survival
training program for US soldiers would not cause "significant" harm if
used on prisoners.
Rice’s statement is the first acknowledgment of those meetings by any of the officials involved. Rice did not name the other officials who were present, but reports last spring based on anonymous sources mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
{xtypo_rounded_right3}Anti-torture protest at UC Berkeley John Yoo speech 9-19-08 {/xtypo_rounded_right3}Maddow was then joined by Alex Gibney, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, an examination of the US use of torture against suspected terrorists.
Gibney agreed that "I don’t think it’s over at all. … What’s not over is how we reckon with the past. We can’t go forward and capture our kind of moral reputation if we don’t reckon with the past and what we’ve done."
"Should policy-makers be prosecuted?" Maddow asked. "Could they be?"
"They could be if politicians had the will to do so," Gibney replied. "I think, at the very least, a truth commission with subpoena power would be something valuable. … This is not a case of a few bad apples. This is a rotten barrel. And the rotten barrel is the civilian administration."
Gibney explained that in the course of making his film, "I had to interview a number of the guards and interrogators. … I didn’t come into it with much sympathy for them. I ended up having a great deal of sympathy for them. They were scapegoats for a policy that was coming on down from on high."
Gibney said he has also wondered why torture keeps being used when it is known to produce unreliable information. "I fear that the answer is because they were always getting back the information that they wanted to hear," he concluded. "And that is what torture delivers."