Now that we’re down to one more week of George W. Bush, the strength of his reality distortion field must be waning. Bob Woodward reports:
“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.
In other words, we couldn’t prosecute Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly planned to participate in the attacks on September 21, 2007, because any statements we might have obtained from him were legally inadmissible due to their being procured by torture.
Folks are abuzz that the word “torture” has finally seen the light of day, but Andrew Sullivan makes the more important observation, more clearly than I probably would have:
So we get bad information; and they get to avoid true legal or moral accountability for their acts of terror (if they committed any).
That’s what torture does. It puts all of us—not just the torture victims—into a place where information is destroyed and fabricated, and nobody knows which way is up. It’s contrary to truth-seeking and it’s contrary to our entire age, which values true information so highly.
And there’s a smidge of irony, too. Our legal rules prohibiting the use of statements obtained by torture come straight through our own checkered history, with cases where white police tortured black suspects to obtain confessions. (See, e.g., the infamous case of Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936).) So here we are, with a white president authorizing the torture of brown-skinned detainees, but nobody will actually admit it until just before the first black president assumes the Oval Office.
I doubt there’s really anything to that observation. Judge Crawford probably would have said the same thing no matter the color of Barack Obama’s skin. But the circumstances lend well to poetic drama. And witnessing the beginning of the end of this whole torture charade only reinforces, to many of us, the terrible danger of turning the most powerful office in the world into a cult of personality and a bastion of ideology. Reality slips away and we damage the integrity of all humanity.