So. Former President Bush said “Damn right,” he’d approved the torture by waterboarding of Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, and other terror suspects. (Dick Cheney merely said he was “a big fan” of such tactics.)
That statement, and others like it, is in his new memoir, “Decision Points.” Should Americans be proud of his defiant avowal? More important, should this trumpeting of torture make us feel safer in our dangerous world?
The answer is No.
Bush was wrong. Damn wrong.
Why? The evidence is in: Bush’s torture program did not make Americans safer. Just the opposite.
There are many witnesses. Longtime FBI agent John Cloonan, for one, interrogated many terror suspects. In 2008 he told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that,
Based on my experience in talking to al Qaeda members, I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in the forestalling this calamitous eventuality.
The short version: the Bush torture program increased — not decreased–the danger of attacks on the U.S. The program was wrong. Damn wrong.
In addition, Bush’s torture program endangered U.S. troops. Veteran combat interrogator Matthew Alexander knows this first-hand. He broke some major insurgent leaders in Iraq. Without torture. His book, How to Break a Terrorist, explains how.
What does he say about the Bush torture program?
“Torture and abuse cost American lives.”
Why?
Matthew Alexander
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,” Alexander wrote in the Washington Post in 2008. “Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq
The dangers were not just theoretical. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
I do count them. So did the brass. Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, said: “I never met a senior military officer that didn’t object to these policies. They caused the senior military to hold the Bush administration in contempt.”
In other words, torture was wrong for our troops. Damn wrong.
The Bush torture program made Americans more unsafe. And it cost the lives of our troops.
But that’s not all. Bush’s admission also defied international laws against torture, and US federal law, which makes torture subject to a stiff prison term.
Bush thinks it makes no difference if a former U.S. President publicly mocks both national and international laws. He’s wrong again. Damn wrong.
When I worked at the State Department,” wrote Philip Zelikow, former deputy Secretary of State, “some of America’s best European allies found it increasingly difficult to assist us in counterterrorism because they feared becoming complicit in a program their governments abhorred. This was not a hypothetical concern.
Adds the Senate armed Services Committee in a 2010 report:
The fact that America is seen in a negative light by so many complicates our ability to attract allies to our side, strengthens the hand of our enemies, and reduces our ability to collect intelligence that can save lives.
So. Bush may keep bragging about his torture decisions. But America knows better, and must do better. The US torture program is a failure, a crime and a disgrace. America needs an accounting for it.
