Straight to the Top

History will not judge this kindly. For many, in America and around the world, these words encapsulate an era in which our government has deceptively deprived individuals of civil liberties and basic human rights in the name of national security. Already, with nine months remaining in his tenure in office, President George W. Bush cannot flee from the scene quickly enough: The latest ABC News/Washington Post national poll showed 64 percent of Americans expressing disapproval of Bush’s performance as president.

The statement above, however, also reflects the sentiments of Bush’s own administration. These words, spoken by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, illustrate a fresh outrage that has been largely overlooked amid the manifest “Bush fatigue.”

According to ABC News, in the years following September 11, 2001, the principle members of the President’s National Security Council held meetings within the White House Situation Room in which they “discussed specific high-value al Qaeda prisoners and exactly how those prisoners would be interrogated.”

The “principles” were led by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and included Ashcroft and Vice President Dick Cheney, along with Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Tenet, who at the time were Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and CIA Director, respectively. According to ABC, these officials approved whether or not specific detainees “would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep, or subjected to simulated drowning called water boarding.” The report went on to say that, according to its sources, approval at this level was so specific that “the interrogations were almost choreographed.”

Ashcroft objected, in ABC’s account, not to the appropriateness of the techniques proposed, but rather to the discussions taking place within such close proximity to the President.

Meanwhile, according to an article in the May issue of Vanity Fair, some of the interrogation techniques that were involved were originally inspired by the television show “24.”

The debate about “enhanced interrogation techniques”—known more colloquially as torture—in itself stands little altered by these developments: It was clear long ago that torture produces little or no useful information while at the same time coming at a great cost to America’s moral authority in the world, also leaving captured American soldiers at greater risk of mistreatment.

Rather, the new reports clarify the false pretenses under which the administration has presented the issue: They reveal the chain of complicity for specific abuses leads very directly to the highest levels of government. This should come as little shock by now, since a recurring theme of the current administration’s abuses has been the irresponsible expansion of centralized executive power—a propensity for legalistic avoidance of checks and balances that often amounts to changing the rules of the game.

Instead of the “few bad apples” blamed when the prisoner abuse first came to light over the Abu Graib incidents, it is clear that those highest in the level of command sanctioned specific methods of prisoner abuse. While the meetings referenced in the ABC report revolved around interrogation at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, according to the Vanity Fair piece, “[An] August 2006 report of the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded unequivocally that techniques from Guantánamo had indeed found their way to Iraq,” specifically to the Abu Ghraib prison. In fact, a month prior to the first abuses by Abu Ghraib’s “bad apples,” two of the chief officials on the ground at Guantánamo Bay visited the Iraqi prison to make recommendations on interrogation techniques.

It is heartening that each of the remaining presidential candidates has denounced the current administration’s position on torture. In this light, however, we are concerned with recent actions of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who in February voted against a bill that would have banned the use of simulated drowning and other interrogation techniques on the grounds that the bill did not leave enough wiggle room for the CIA—in his words—“to use extra measures” in interrogating detainees. (The bill passed and went on to be vetoed by President Bush.)

In light of the temptation for any new president to preserve expanded executive powers, an unambiguous renunciation of this administration’s policy on torture will be a necessary condition for rebuilding American credibility in the world. And as tired as Americans may be of chronicling the disgraces of this presidency, the burden of passing judgment does not yet lie solely with the historians.