And bravo for our President for taking a principled stand for human rights.
Unfortunately, some human rights are apparently superior to others:
[I]t is the waterboarding of Zubaydah that has now become the centre of fresh controversy triggered by Newsnight's investigation.The CIA recorded Zubaydah's detention and interrogation---and that of other detainees---on 92 video tapes.
Twelve of them covered the application of the "enhanced interrogation techniques", including waterboarding.
On one or more of them, I understand Zubaydah is shown vomiting and screaming.
John Rizzo, the CIA's top legal counsel who oversaw the legalisation of the techniques in an exchange of memoranda with the Department of Justice, wanted to be certain that what was happening at the black site was in accordance with what had been legally agreed.
He had not anticipated that waterboarding would be used as often as it was. And he sent one of his most experienced colleagues to the black site, believed to be in Thailand, to find out.
Rizzo's colleague viewed all the 92 hours of video and concluded that the techniques were being legally applied, but he was uncomfortable about what he saw.
"He did say that portions of the tapes, particularly those of Zubaydah being waterboarded, were extraordinarily hard to watch," Rizzo told me.
"He [Zubaydah] was reacting visibly in a very disturbing way.
"It's not a pretty sight when you are waterboarding anybody or using any of these techniques, let's be perfectly honest.”
So was he being sick?
"He was experiencing some physical difficulties, I'll just leave it at that... 'tough to watch in places' was his term."
There really is no moral justification for abetting this behavior. If some assholes in the CIA were threatening a coup if the President decided to pursue war crimes prosecutions, he should have done his duty as Defender of the Constitution, dared them to try it, and thrown a few of them in jail on charges of treason if they did. For the pure sake of argument, perhaps torture may have helped us to win precious victories in our War Against Terror (but how the hell would we ever know?), but even if this dubious thesis is proved true, in the process America has mortgaged something far more valuable than a battlefield victory or even its national security: Its moral authority as the last best hope on earth for people fleeing torture and persecution in distant lands. Even worse, we have unleashed a malign spirit of state-sanctioned sadism into our political bloodstream, and if we really think it can simply be wished away with platitudes and pleas to our better angels, we are fooling themselves into thinking we're immune from the harsh correctives of history.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we will regret one day the moral cowardice that our two most recent Presidents have displayed here. The decision to provide legal countenance to torture, and then to flush all accountability for it down the memory hole, are two of America's gravest moral failings, and the fact that they were made by a conservative Republican and liberal Democrat in succession have now bestowed the practice with the veneer of bipartisan legitimacy. Our leaders may prefer that we look forward, not backward, but people in other parts of the world have longer memories than ours---and we should not be surprised to learn one day that someone, somewhere is building an explosive with Ali Zubaydah's or Khalid Sheik Mohammed's name written on it. And if it is intercepted, or it doesn't work, someone else, somewhere else, will build another and another.
So I'm delighted that the President has decided to embrace the LGBT community that worked so hard for his election. But sooner or later, the euphoria we feel for the cause of human rights must yield to some definitive and level-headed criticisms.
---Vitelius
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