Next week, on May 13th, we may have a chance to see how the torture issue will play out on the Hill. On Tuesday, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator, will hold a hearing of a Senate Judiciary Committee panel. Guests include Ali Soufan and Philip Zelikow.
Ali Soufan is also a critic of the torture program. He was an FBI agent who interrogated Zubaydah successfully without using torture. He believes torture, whatever else can be said about it, doesn't work. Zelikow, who was a lawyer and Rice aide at State during the Bush administration, disagreed strongly with the torture memos and said so. The State Department says he didn't, that they can't find the memo showing his dissent. In his post at Foreign Policy, Zelikow writes:
The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.
Our police departments would never do that, would they? Well, I guess we have to admit that they have been capable of despicable cruelties. We might have to go further and admit that our permissiveness in the matter of torture, Constitution and international agreements to the contrary notwithstanding, comes from inside our country, not from exotic locales like Abu Ghraib. Human rights and civil liberties are often scoffed at right here at home, downtown, or in the state pen some miles from here.
There are places nearby where our rights are set aside on a daily basis. Lately the police have been given new tools to work anti-constitutionally or (as Cheney might put it) preemptively.
Here and in nearly a dozen other cities, including Boston, Chicago and Miami, officers are filling out terror tip sheets if they run across activities in their routines that seem out of place, like someone buying police or firefighter uniforms, taking pictures of a power plant or espousing extremist views.
Isn't this reminiscent of rounding up any or all Afghanis who may or may not have been associated with illegal or destructive activities?
What's next? Will we in America now experience one of those situations deemed to be an "emergency" by some intelligence agency? ... an intelligence agency beholden to political master? ... an "emergency" in which a suspect (like the Afghanis in Guantanamo) is subjected to "harsh interrogation" because he may know something or may be planning something big?
The new program isn't the product of some random authoritarian idiocy in Oakland or Queens or a Chicago suburb. No sir. It comes straight out of Washington.
How "degraded" do we have to feel before our own intelligence agencies trust us or even just let us alone? I'm beginning to wonder whether I might feel safer if we had no intelligence agencies.
