Our Ms. Brooks: The Blame Game
It's Thursday, and that means Rosa Brooks has another column up at the Los Angeles Times. This week, Ms. Brooks takes on the destruction of the CIA torture tapes and points out what the real issue is.
After pointing out the furious game of buck-passing going on in the administration on the "Who ordered the destruction of the tapes?" question, she moves to what the real question should be.
As the president told ABC News, "It will be interesting to know what the true facts are." Uh-huh. But in many ways, the question of who ordered that the tapes be destroyed completely misses the point. ...
...In this case, as blogger and Georgetown professor Marty Lederman reminds us: "The cover-up is not worse than the crime, and they knew it. Those tapes must have depicted pretty gruesome evidence of serious criminal conduct." Waterboarding? For sure, according both to press accounts and to former CIA operative John Kiriakou. Other "enhanced" forms of interrogation that, to the unenhanced eye, would look indistinguishable from plain torture? It's a pretty good bet. If I had to guess, the tapes were destroyed because obstruction-of-justice charges are no big deal compared to war crimes charges.
After we find out who authorized the destruction of the tapes, the true who-done-it will remain: Who gave the CIA the green light to use interrogation methods that the agency surely suspected were criminal? Who decided to let the U.S. adopt the interrogation methods of a hundred tin-pot dictators?
Answering that one will be far more uncomfortable. It would be nice to find a scapegoat (Aha! It was Dick Cheney!), but the unpleasant truth is that the blame is pretty widespread.
Cheney, presumably, and the sinister little gnomes on his staff, and the checked-out Decider, who either knew and didn't care, or didn't care to know. And the CIA leadership and a whole cadre of operatives, who were willing to try a long list of discredited shortcuts they could borrow from our enemies. And blame the conservative punditocracy, which eagerly defended enhanced interrogation methods. And let's not forget the GOP leadership in Congress, which gave the administration a whole book of blank checks.
But save some blame for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who apparently uttered not a word of dismay when briefed in 2002 on enhanced interrogation methods that included waterboarding, and for quite a few other congressional Democrats as well, who thought that ignoring and overlooking administration criminality was a legitimate form of congressional oversight. And we can blame ourselves too, collectively. After all, we're the nation that made "24" a hit show.
How does a democracy come to adopt a policy of torturing detainees? To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. [Emphasis added]
Well said.
After pointing out the furious game of buck-passing going on in the administration on the "Who ordered the destruction of the tapes?" question, she moves to what the real question should be.
As the president told ABC News, "It will be interesting to know what the true facts are." Uh-huh. But in many ways, the question of who ordered that the tapes be destroyed completely misses the point. ...
...In this case, as blogger and Georgetown professor Marty Lederman reminds us: "The cover-up is not worse than the crime, and they knew it. Those tapes must have depicted pretty gruesome evidence of serious criminal conduct." Waterboarding? For sure, according both to press accounts and to former CIA operative John Kiriakou. Other "enhanced" forms of interrogation that, to the unenhanced eye, would look indistinguishable from plain torture? It's a pretty good bet. If I had to guess, the tapes were destroyed because obstruction-of-justice charges are no big deal compared to war crimes charges.
After we find out who authorized the destruction of the tapes, the true who-done-it will remain: Who gave the CIA the green light to use interrogation methods that the agency surely suspected were criminal? Who decided to let the U.S. adopt the interrogation methods of a hundred tin-pot dictators?
Answering that one will be far more uncomfortable. It would be nice to find a scapegoat (Aha! It was Dick Cheney!), but the unpleasant truth is that the blame is pretty widespread.
Cheney, presumably, and the sinister little gnomes on his staff, and the checked-out Decider, who either knew and didn't care, or didn't care to know. And the CIA leadership and a whole cadre of operatives, who were willing to try a long list of discredited shortcuts they could borrow from our enemies. And blame the conservative punditocracy, which eagerly defended enhanced interrogation methods. And let's not forget the GOP leadership in Congress, which gave the administration a whole book of blank checks.
But save some blame for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who apparently uttered not a word of dismay when briefed in 2002 on enhanced interrogation methods that included waterboarding, and for quite a few other congressional Democrats as well, who thought that ignoring and overlooking administration criminality was a legitimate form of congressional oversight. And we can blame ourselves too, collectively. After all, we're the nation that made "24" a hit show.
How does a democracy come to adopt a policy of torturing detainees? To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. [Emphasis added]
Well said.
posted by Diane at 3:48 AM
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