Once upon a time, before the Cold War had ended, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton attended an academic conference in Rome at which a group of historians tried to settle the question of whether historians should try to predict the future. There was much to-ing and fro-ing on the issue before a Soviet scholar observed that “In the Soviet Union, the most difficult task of the historian is to predict the past.” The author of this epigram remains anonymous, but he sounds like the right man to write a first draft of the history of Washington’s many sleights of hand in its Orwellian “War on Terror”.
The Manichean logic of war on an abstract noun should have emboldened more historians to predict the imminent future that has since become our recent past. After all, any administration that can warn the world that “you are either with us or with the terrorists,” will not have long to wait before willing Inquisitors come out of the shadows. And so it has come to pass, for the United States now practices torture-not in thought experiment sophistries about interrogating terrorists to find ticking bombs, and not just in the dark corners of Abu Ghraib where a few “bad apples” were supposedly allowed to run amok. At army bases in Iraq off-duty soldiers have been allowed to beat detainees severely enough to break bones. At Guantanamo Bay, an FBI agent witnessed an interrogation in which: “The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees … The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.” Presumably, conditions in the CIA’s formerly secret network of prisons are no better.
The latest milestone in this descent into the abyss is a transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed’s tribunal hearing at Guantanamo Bay. Even by the extreme standards of Al-Qaeda, Mohamed is a monster. He masterminded the 9/11 attacks and a raft of other terrorist plots, and he personally carried out the horrific execution of the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl (and made sure that it was videotaped for propaganda purposes). Mohamed’s crimes are so heinous, and the evidence against him so extensive and well documented that his conviction by due process would have been a formality.
So what kind of justice has been meted out to this man? Well, nothing that the framers of the US Constitution would recognise as worthy of the name. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, the historian Niall Ferguson noted that “The [tribunal’s] president implicitly acknowledges that the prisoner has been tortured. He also makes it clear that the prisoner is being denied proper legal representation. Mohamed’s request for two fellow prisoners to be summoned as witnesses is denied [and he] is informed at the end of the hearing that he will almost certainly remain in captivity for an indefinite period.”
The American media has reported widely the fact that Mohamed was often subjected to ‘waterboarding’-a torture which simulates the experience of drowning-and was able to endure the ordeal for such long periods that he earned the grudging respect of his torturers. Of course, all of this was a far cry from the Bush administration’s initial response to Mohamed’s capture. Shortly after his arrest in Pakistan, “senior American officials” told The New York Times that “physical torture would not be used . . . his interrogators would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.” The Guantanamo transcript suggests that all of this was smoke and mirrors, deliberate spin to mask the administration’s real intentions. As a result, the US now finds itself in the grotesque situation of having undermined its legal proceedings against the very embodiment of Al-Qaeda’s barbarity, precisely because it chose to violate the guiding principles of its own legal code. This is not a harmless detail but, arguably, the very heart of the matter. In a crucial sense, once you cede the moral high ground in order to pursue a gang of stateless thugs, you may win all the battles but you can never win the war.
The current Attorney General-perhaps not for much longer-is one of the intellectual authors of this bizarre situation. Responding to a letter in The New York Review of Books, Mark Danner observed that, “As White House counsel Mr. Gonzales served as ‘point man’ directing the administration’s policies on interrogation, and presided in particular over two major decisions. First, he strongly advised the President to withhold Geneva Convention protection from prisoners taken in Afghanistan, an unprecedented position that the Bush administration, after considerable debate, adopted. Second, he solicited a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice that … declares that the president, under his war powers as commander in chief, can ‘legally’ order torture to be applied.” In other words-as the Soviet historian in Rome knew all too well-authoritarian regimes prize their ability to reinterpret the past, and to make it justify whatever they deem expedient in the immediate present. These wilful misreadings never end well. A nation founded on a decent respect for the opinions of mankind ought to expect something better from their government, and the rest of us should hope that they get it soon.
