An op-ed piece from the Miami Herald by two retired U.S. generals, denouncing former Vice President Cheney's support of torture. Full text here.
Fear Was No Excuse to Condone Torture
By Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoa
In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al
Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former Commandant
of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S.
Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never
imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a Vice
President of the United States, a man who has served our country for
many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by
former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate
his dangerous ideas – and his scare tactics.
We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on
treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda.
We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters
recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib. And yet Mr. Cheney and others who orchestrated
America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert –
against all evidence -- that torture “worked” and that our country is
better off for having gone there.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Mr. Cheney applauded the
“enhanced interrogation techniques” -- what we used to call war crimes
because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the U.S. instigated
and has followed for sixty years. Mr. Cheney insisted the abusive
techniques were “absolutely essential in saving thousands of American
lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.” He
claimed they were “directly responsible for the fact that for eight
years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United
States. It was good policy... It worked very, very well.”
Repeating these assertions doesn’t make them true. As more of the
record emerges, we now see that the best intelligence – that led to the
capture of Sadaam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi—was produced by professional interrogations using
non-coercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told
interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.
The U.S. military has always known that torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.
What American leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did
last week, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a
whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee,
and the former Vice President of the United States winks and nods, it
matters.
The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by
authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked
the conscience of the world. Now Mr. Cheney has publicly condoned the
abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a
slippery slope of lawlessness. Rules about the humane treatment of
prisoners exist precisely to deter those in the field from taking
matters into their own hands. They protect our nation’s honor.
To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable
enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military
professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be
applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and
absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a
reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of
command travels through the ranks at warp speed.
On August 24, the United States took an important step toward moral
clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that
in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single
standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.
The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the
defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies.
Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence,
yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Mr. Cheney’s. They concluded
that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and
harms U.S. national security.
On this solemn day we all pause to remember those who lost their lives
on 9/11. As our leaders work to prevent terrorists from again striking
on our soil, they should remember the fundamental precept of
counterinsurgency we’ve relearned in Afghanistan and Iraq: undermine
the enemy’s legitimacy while building our own. These wars will not be
won on the battlefield. They will be won in the hearts of young men who
decide not to sign up to be fighters and young women who decline to be
suicide bombers. If Americans torture and it comes to light – as it
inevitably will – it embitters and alienates the very people we need
most.
Our current Commander in Chief understands this. The Task Force
recommendations take us a step closer to restoring the rule of law and
the standards of human dignity that made us who we are as a nation.
Repudiating torture and other cruelty helps keep us from being sent on
fools’ errands by bad intelligence. And in the end, that makes us all
safer.
Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999.
Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991
to 1994.