Late last week, we learned that the CIA destroyed videos of U.S. officials torturing detainees. The administration has said the destruction was necessary to protect the identity of those doing the torturing — a claim that no one can take seriously — while the reality-based world notes that the CIA appears to have obstructed justice.
To get a sense of what conservatives think about a scandal like this one, it’s worth considering the most recent episode of Fox News’ “Special Report with Brit Hume.” On Friday night, viewers saw a fair-and-balanced panel that consisted of conservative media personality Fred Barnes, conservative media personality Mort Kondracke, and conservative media personality Charles Krauthammer. It was quite a discussion.
Barnes, an unabashed White House toady, said it makes perfect sense to destroy evidence of torture because, “You wouldn’t want to see these tapes played on Al-Jazeera.” Well, no, I suppose it would help al Qaeda recruitment to have millions of people in the Middle East watching evidence of the CIA torturing Muslim suspects, but the answer isn’t to destroy the videos, it’s to stop the torture. Barnes nevertheless concluded that “destroying them … is the right thing to do.”
Then it was Krauthammer’s turn. He explained not only why it was right to destroy the torture tapes, but also why it was right to inflict the torture in the first place.
“According to George Tenet and to General Hayden, we got more information out of the judicious use of these harsh techniques on a very small number of suspects, the ones who knew the real stuff, in the year 2002, when America was blind and had no idea about Al-Queda, was waiting for the second shoe to drop, and that this information likely saved thousands of lives.
If that is the case, this is the one example, the one exception where I think everybody would agree if you ever are going to use a harsh technique, it would be in these specific circumstances.
So on the issue of the actual interrogation, I think it was a good faith in destroying the tapes — yes, because it is not a pretty thing, and you don’t want it on You Tube.
After a brief chat with Barnes, Krauthammer lamented the fact that detainees won’t get tortured anymore “when a Democrat becomes president.”
The truly frightening thing about the discussion is that the participants seemed oblivious to how insane they sounded.
In response to the Fox News panel, Andrew Sullivan explained, “So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States.”
That may sound ridiculous, but that really was the argument, articulated on national television, by leading conservative pundits on the Republicans’ national cable network. It’s okay to destroy incriminating evidence, if it might incriminate you and make your country look bad. Except, that’s not a defense for criminal activity; it’s an admission of additional criminal activity. White House sycophants aren’t supposed to admit lunacy like this as part of a defense; they’re supposed to deny it and come up with something coherent.
I was also struck by Krauthammer’s argument that “everybody would agree” that the circumstances of torturing a man like Zubaydah are justified. I have no idea what Krauthammer could be talking about. Was there a ticking time bomb? No. Was this a Jack-Bauer scenario? No. Did Zubaydah have critical information about an immediate threat? No.
As Kevin Drum noted, the tapes would have shown that “we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical ‘confessions’ under duress.” Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for the Washington Post and a major figure in the mainstream media, thinks that “everybody would agree” torture is justified here. It really is like living in a Twilight Zone episode.
Sullivan concluded:
[W]hen you look at what torture has done already to the United States, we see that every bad scenario that those of us who oppose torture feared has actually come about. And we have no independent evidence that it has solved anything, or saved any lives, except the self-serving statements of those who authorized it. And the truth is: we will probably never know. If they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy incriminating tapes, they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy any evidence within the executive branch that could prove that their torture policy has failed. If this isn’t a form of tyranny, annexed to torture, what is? And if the executive branch can simply get away with it, and have serious commentators defend the president’s trashing of the Constitution as necessary to fulfill his oath of office, we really have left the rule of law behind in the ditch.
Painful, but true.