(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

For the last post in this long and admittedly depressing series, I want to tie up some loose ends.

What Dahlia Lithwik and Phillipe Sands point out, and which this series of posts has examined in great detail, is that the discussion on whether the US committed torture is over. There is no question about it and anyone who keeps saying that it didn’t is ignorant, lying, or relying upon a convoluted reading of history and the definition of torture. At the very least, such people should be willing to agree on the issue being examined by the International Criminal Court, which “is the first permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community.”

Lithwik and Sands point to a highly significant statement given on January 13, 2009, just before Obama took office, by someone intimately aware of what is going on in Guantanamo. Susan Crawford was the convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general, is hardly the kind of hippie moonbat Cheney would like to poke fun at. And that’s why everything changed this morning when the Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation that the treatment of alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay was “torture.”
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Crawford also told Woodward that the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because he was tortured. This has devastating consequences for the Bush administration’s entire rationale for the new techniques of interrogation: that they would make the United States safer by producing intelligence and keeping dangerous individuals off the streets. We now know they do neither. The torture produced no useful information from al-Qahtani, and the cruelty heaped upon him will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to justify his long-term incarceration.

There is a third major consequence to the Crawford interview: Her principle objection to detainee abuse is not ephemeral or spiritual, but a damning indictment of the impact it will have on American troops and the prospects for America’s authority abroad: “If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”
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Whether torture occurred and who was responsible will no longer be issues behind which senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers can hide. The only real issue now is: What happens next?

The answer to that question takes you to a very different place when the act is torture, as Crawford says it is. Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.” These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Sen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.

Torture is one of those cases where we seem to be even less enlightened now than we were in the past when it comes to judging our own actions with at least some impartiality.

In 1901 a US army major was sentenced to 10 years hard labor for waterboarding a Philippine insurgent. Similarly, water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago and a US soldier who waterboarded a Vietnamese prisoner was court-martialed. But now, far from taking action against torturers, we dispute whether these acts are even torture. We excuse and even praise torturers and those who support and authorize torture by saying they acted ‘in good faith’ or ‘in the interests of the nation’. (By coincidence, yesterday’s Sunday Doonesbury cartoon dealt with this.)

We have sunk a long way in the last 100 years. We can only go up from here.

POST SCRIPT: Documentary on torture

Those who have stuck with me through this long series on torture may also want to watch the three-part documentary Torturing Democracy put out by the National Security Archive.