That promised longer post (Updated)

I wound up working through most of my thoughts in the original post on the torture memos from Thursday, and I’ve been immersed in Dave Cullen’s new book “Columbine” for the weekend, so my apologies if this is late and/or nothing terribly new or informative. But there’s one thing that keeps popping up again and again in the blogosphere: that the combination of the Bybee memo with Abu Ghraib and Bagram somehow prove that the Bush DOJ and others in the administration are guilty of war crimes, monsters, etc. This is absurd. Let’s look at the actual list of questionable practices approved of by Bybee:

attention grasp (grabbing a subject to get his attention);
walling (throwing a subject up against a flexible wall);
facial hold;
facial slap;
cramped confinement;
wall standing;
stress positions;
sleep deprivation;
insects placed in cramped confinement;
waterboarding.

I think it’s pretty obvious that those techniques weren’t the techniques employed at Abu Ghraib or Bagram (at least, not exclusively).  “Facial slaps” don’t produce this. Even the dread interrogative technique of pretending to drown someone for 40 seconds at a time wouldn’t produce that. So clearly there was a breakdown somewhere between drafting and implementation of the Bybee memo, a breakdown so severe that what actually happened at two sites didn’t even resemble what was approved of. This is very important to remember.

Let’s compare that to what happened in Nazi Germany and at the Nuremberg trials, favored comparison points for Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others. The reason that Nazi leaders were fair game for prosecution post-WWII is that it was the explicit goal of the Nazi regime to instigate genocide. (For a quick retelling of the story behind the planning, check out the excellent docudrama “Conspiracy.”) The Bush administration, meanwhile, went out of its way to craft guidelines that wouldn’t cause lasting harm to the subjects they were interrogating. Official policy, as outlined in the Bybee memo, was to push boundaries but not too far. Certainly not as far as things were taken by a few bad apples.

As a result, I think it’s absurd to even discuss things like “war crimes” or “trials.” (Spanish authorities seem to agree, by the way.) To resurrect a point I made in the comments of that first post, My Lai was a war crime and a clear contravention of the rules of engagement. Those who did the deed deserved to be punished. But we wouldn’t consider bringing up the commander in chief on war crimes charges because a pack of bad apples under his command let a situation get out of hand, would we? Of course not. What the release of these memos has shown is that Abu Ghraib and Bagram were clear violations of administration policy. If anything, it looks like these memos provide the administration with cover.

(Update: See, this is what I mean. Andrew refuses to acknowledge any difference between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Bagram and what was outlined in the Bybee memo. It’s not inconsistent to decry the first and not be bothered by the second. It simply isn’t.)

A shorter secondary point: John Schwenkler and others have commented on the “radio silence” from the right on the memos. I don’t see too much of a mystery for the reason: There’s nothing new in the memos (with the exception of the caterpillar thing). We’ve known that the CIA has been pushing things for some time now, especially with the hard cases. We knew that they had discussed it with the administration. Why should we, people who had no problems with what was known before last week, be particularly perturbed now? I’ll go to Abe Greenwald again:

I am an unequivocal opponent of American torture. I do not think torture should be used in special circumstances; I do not think torture should be employed unofficially; I do not think the United States should torture by proxy in foreign lands.

I oppose torture for all the lofty reasons and all the practical reasons that we hear about endlessly. It would reduce us as a people and yield little, if any, benefit.

What’s torture? There’s no sense in ignoring the slippery boarders between tough interrogations and practices that should not carry the imprimatur of the United States of America. But if weighing the legal, moral, and historical implications makes torture harder, not easier, to identify, there is, I believe, a clear way through the morass. How’s this? Anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fairarticle is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.