Not surprisingly, Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon recently announced that he is ignoring the sovereignty of the United States and the advice of Spain's own attorney general in launching his self-righteous prosecution of Bush Administration officials giving legal opinions on enhanced interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay detention center. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has been ambiguous regarding whether he would cooperate with evidentiary requests from the magistrate, which what many regard as a sop to the Angry Left, demanding prosecution of alternative policy points of view. Garzon regards Obama's recently released cherry-picked list of CIA interrogation techniques as indicative of a systematic torture policy from the United States.
I've heard enough liberal rants (e.g., on Hardball with Chris Matthews) to outline the basic case: the Bush Administration sanctioned the use of certain techniques, e.g., waterboarding, which in fact are torture, were the target for various post-war prosecutions as war crimes and outlawed by 18 USC 2340 (the US implementation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture). The leftists also argue that waterboarding was totally superfluous, that other, more morally acceptable interrogation techniques were actually responsible for all real intelligence gained at Gitmo and there was no point to waterboarding, since torture yields no reliable information. The only real purpose to the torture was institutionally-protected sadism; alternatively, leftists suggest that the motive to cruel and unusual waterboarding was to coerce false confessions of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to rationalize the 2003 liberation of Iraq. [The fact of the matter is that if Bush had believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, his initial response would not have been against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which refused to turn over Osama bin Laden. The core of the US case against Hussein was based on the toothless response of the UN Security Council in response to Hussein's failure to comply with 17 resolutions and material violations of ceasefire terms to the first Gulf War. My personal view is that any relationship between OBL and Hussein was more of a loose anti-American alliance, but that neither man was willing to subjugate himself to the other.]
A relevant response is to point out that Bush Administration did not proactively pursue enhanced interrogation techniques; key CIA leadership requested legal opinions regarding the use of relevant techniques so they couldn't ex post facto be prosecuted for violating 18 USC 2340. In early 2007 CIA director Hayden asked for and received authorization to ban the practice of waterboarding; in the summer of 2007, Bush signed an executive order banning violations of 18 USC 2340 during interrogations (which, of course, liberal rights groups found as hopelessly vague). However, the leftists imply all incidents of waterboarding are implemented uniformly and within conditions allowing it to be classified as torture. In fact, the Wall Street Journal claimed that only 3 high-value prisoners with intricate knowledge of Al Qaeda operations were exposed to the technique and had not been applied since 2003. Whether waterboarding is, in fact, torture (as defined by 18 USC 2340) seems dependent on a variety of factors, including the method, duration and pattern of the exposure, the target's responses to the procedure, and whether there are observers (such as medical personnel) checking on the conditions of targets. As to the effectiveness of the technique, there are some reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave useful information (relevant to dozens of plots) only when waterboarding was introduced in interrogations. Finally, US Special Forces in training are subjected to the same implementation of waterboarding.
By any objective standard, the leftists are engaging in disingenuous arguments. For example, they assume what is disputed, i.e., that waterboarding, in any and all forms, is torture. Waterboarding in and of itself is not outlawed by 18 USC 2340. What is relevant is a more general criterion of "severe pain". There is no doubt that the method, if not carefully implemented, can reach the relevant threshold; but it's clear that the opposition is based not on the details of how it was applied to e.g., Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but on an unconditional basis. Second, the limitations of the time frame of its reported use recognize that once captured, there is a time value to what the target does know, and the target no longer is plugged into the terrorist network with knowledge of new or changed operations. Third, the opposition does not take into account that the purpose of a technique's use. For example, the North Vietnamese used torture on American POW's, notably Senator McCain, to coerce false confessions. A technique can also be used to sadistically to punish or intimidate. It seems very clear from the pattern of application that the technique in the case of the 3 terrorists that the interrogation period seemed directly proportional to the time value of the detainees' knowledge of operations. There is no evidence that the technique was arbitrarily used on rank-and-file detainees for purposes of gaining false confessions or unusable intelligence, as some on the left suggest. Finally, it is indisputable that the left is engaging in deliberately misleading and deceptive arguments. For instance, it is true that in 1947 the US military prosecuted a Japanese military officer Yukio Asano for using a version of waterboarding. What the leftists won't tell you is that Mr. Asano used the technique against a US civilian and was charged with using other techniques as well: "beating using hands, fists, club; kicking; burning using cigarettes; strapping on a stretcher head downward". It is clear from context that waterboarding in this case was in the context of a pattern of sadistic behavior against a low-value target.
No doubt the Spanish magistrate, whom presumptuously feels he speaks on the behalf of all nations and has a mandate to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, knows how he can get Bush Administration officials to confess; after all, which country knows more about waterboarding than the proud homeland of the Inquisition where it was introduced as a means to avoid leaving telltale marks on the human body? What better use of his time and energy than to prosecute the interrogation methods of three captured Al Qaeda terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11, when the American government was doing everything in its power to intercept additional attacks on its civilian population? It's not like there more significant, indisputable and scalable violations of human rights closer to Spain itself, like genocide in Darfur...
