dna edit: The wages of war

Half-a-decade and $40 million in the making, the US Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s use of torture on terrorism suspects is on the verge of being declassified in part. The 11-3 committee vote has now put the onus on the CIA to vet the executive summary, findings, conclusions and dissenting notes for sensitive material before it is released, and on the White House to shepherd the entire process. Given the CIA’s vested interests, committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein may be sanguine in hoping that the declassification will be done in a month, but she has left no doubt about the report’s verdict. Its condemnation of the CIA’s use of torture is a case of too little, too late in some respects — after more than a decade of US’s war on terror, only the insufferably optimistic and the incurably naïve have been left with any delusions about its security complex’s modus operandi — but it still retains significant value as an intersection of ethics and politics and a public mea culpa.

The report, after all, is the first official admission on the issue by any organ of the US state; a Department of Justice investigation that ran from 2009 to 2012 chose to see and hear no evil. From what has been revealed so far, it details consistent deception on the part of the CIA. Since 9/11, the agency has misled the US legislature and Department of Justice about the severity of the interrogation methods used; about the significance of particular prisoners; about the efficacy of techniques like waterboarding. Information gained by traditional, non-coercive interrogation has been passed off as having been extracted through harsher methods. The committee’s verdict that torture is not only immoral and illegal, it simply does not work, has plenty of evidence and the opinions of a great many security experts to back it up. Among them, embarrassingly for the CIA, is its current director John Brennan who explicitly debunked the popular myth that waterboarding procured the information that led to Osama bin Laden.

But the report doesn’t go far enough in some respects. By all accounts, no one will be held directly accountable in any of this. And by pinning the blame entirely on the CIA, it has whitewashed the White House’s role. In times of war and conflict, it is a given that the State’s security apparatus will attempt to slip its leash; that is the nature of the beast. It is the executive’s duty to see that this does not happen.

The George W Bush administration did not just fail in this regard, it actively set the CIA on its subsequent path — none more so than then-vice president Dick Cheney, foremost peddler of the mendacious argument that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were a necessity and meant anything other than torture.

The process of dealing with the legacy of America’s years at war will not be an easy or brief one. The report, warts and all, is an important step — a vindication of individuals like former US Navy general counsel Alberto J Mora and organisations like Human Rights First that have fought against the use of torture for years. It may well prove beneficial to current US detainees. And it is a heartening sign that for all its faults and excesses, the US system retains a capacity to self-correct, if slowly. That is something other democracies — not least among them, India, where human rights are a non-issue when it comes to prisoners — can learn from.