When facts fail
Journalist Mark Danner says that the Bush administration's wrongdoing, from greenlighting torture to lies about Iraq to illegal spying, has been exposed again and again. But when there are never any consequences, the scandals simply cease to exist.
By Tom Engelhardt
Photos by AP/Wide World
Feb. 28, 2006 | On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are surrounded by the green of a Northern California winter, though the temperature is pushing 70 degrees. An almost perfectly full moon, faded to a tattered white, sits overhead. Suddenly, I take a turn and start straight up, as if into the heavens, but in fact toward Grizzly Peak, before turning yet again into a small street and pulling up in front of a wooden gate. You swing it open and proceed down a picturesque stone path through the world's tiniest grove of redwoods toward the yellow stucco cottage that was only recently the home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, but is now the home -- as yet almost furniture-less -- of journalist Mark Danner, who has said that, as a young writer in search of "a kind of moral clarity," he gravitated toward countries where "massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil."
Danner greets me at the door, which, thrown open, reveals a bay window with a dazzling vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay and through which the sun blazes goldenly. In a rumpled dark shirt and slacks, he ushers me out onto a small stone patio. "This is where the deer hang out," he says and points to a small area just beyond our chairs where the grass is slightly pressed down. "They lie there contemplating me as I pace on the other side of the bay window. I feel like their Ping-Pong game."
Facing this peaceable kingdom, Danner has a slightly distracted, out-of-the-washer-but-not-the-drier look to him, except for his face, strangely unmarked, which would qualify as lighting up (even without the sun). He beams in such a welcoming way and there is in him something -- in this setting at least -- that makes it almost impossible to believe he has reported from some of the least hospitable, most dangerous spots on the planet over the last decades: Haiti in the 1980s, war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq, which he's visited three times in recent years, among other spots. He has covered the world for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and especially the New York Review of Books.
Danner, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA and the Bush administration. (His primer on the subject, "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror," is a must for any bookshelf.) His cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume "The Massacre at El Mozote," in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where more than 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S.-trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, "The Secret Way to War," is due out in April.
We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and, turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.
I wanted to start with an area of expertise for you, torture policy. For me, the Bush administration's decision to enter this arena so quickly after 9/11 was a reach for power. If you can torture, you can do anything.
When you look at the record, the phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off." We hear this again and again. The interesting thing about that phrase is the implication that before we had the gloves on, that the laws and principles that constitute our belief not only in democracy but in human rights left the country vulnerable. The U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. record of treating prisoners humanely that goes back to George Washington, laws like the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law passed to restrict the government's power to surveil its citizens -- all of these constitute the gloves-on American power, and 9/11 signaled to those in power that the system with "the gloves on" was insufficient to protect Americans. That seems to be their belief.
As you know, very shortly after 9/11, the then-White House counsel [Alberto Gonzales] proposed to President Bush that provisions of the Geneva Conventions had been rendered obsolete, even quaint, by this "new paradigm." The Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the federal statutes against torture -- these undertakings by the U.S. -- represented restrictions that would unduly hobble the country in fighting the war on terror and, by extension, threaten[ed] the existence of the United States. And I think that's where torture -- "extreme interrogation" is the euphemism -- goes to the heart of the reaction against the way this country has observed human rights in the past, a reaction, in a way, against law itself. What we have here is a conflict between legality and power.
Torture is a very direct route from human rights, which is to say, restricted power, to unleashed power. We see a movement here backward from ideals that were at the root of this country's founding during the Enlightenment: the restriction of government power and the conviction that human beings had certain inherent rights, one of which was the freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment. Under this way of looking at the matter, those Enlightenment ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were given to Americans, were extended through the Geneva Conventions, through the Convention against Torture, to all people -- and the administration, in pushing extreme interrogation, in going from a secret abuse of power to a public one
Wasn't it really less an abuse of power than a proclamation of power?
Exactly. In what I've started to call Bush's state of exception, we've now reached the second stage. Many of these steps, including extreme interrogation, eavesdropping, arresting aliens -- one could go down a list -- were taken in relative or complete secrecy. Gradually, they have come into the light, becoming matters of political disputation; and, insofar as the administration's political antagonists have failed to overturn them, they have also become matters of accepted practice, which is where I think we are now. As we sit here, we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It would have been the very unusual observer, on seeing those photographs in April 2004, who would have predicted two years later that extreme interrogation would, in effect, have become accepted within the CIA. And though the Senate passed an amendment that forbade it, the president replied with a signing statement that essentially reserved his right to violate that amendment according to his supposed powers as commander in chief.
In effect, the president claims to believe that his wartime powers give him carte blanche to break the law in any sphere where he decides national security is involved. An added element is the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The only countervailing power we've seen since 9/11 really lay in the June 2004 Supreme Court detention decisions. In one of them, Justice O'Connor declared that the president's power in wartime was not a blank check. Now, she's been replaced by an admitted believer in a "unitary executive." It was Alito when he was at the Justice Department who strongly pushed the strategy of presidential signing statements as a way to mitigate congressional assertions of power.
Weren't you struck by the fact that, of all the things top Bush officials did, their urge toward torture, toward taking the gloves off, was first and fastest? It was an impulse at the top.
I think that's an interesting way to put it, an impulse at the top. The president and the vice president have said that, after 9/11, they asked the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies to come to them with proposals. What should the U.S. do? Look, it's time to take the gloves off and every one of you has to show me the way to do it. General [Michael] Hayden said in an interview just the other night that, with the NSA eavesdropping program, he was responding to a request from the White House.
Wasn't it Rumsfeld, when they were "interviewing" John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in Afghanistan, who actually told the interrogators to take the gloves off?
According to a Newsweek report, Rumsfeld had someone essentially telephone the interrogators: Do what you have to do. Go as far as you have to go.
Next page: Techniques of torture, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, are reappearing