CIA Should Come to Grips With the Lessons of the Past

December 12, 2014

ALL countries fail to live up to the ethical standards they set themselves; only a few have the moral purpose to examine their lapses in the public square. After the attacks of September 11th 2001 the waterboarding, sleep-deprivation, insult-slapping and “rectal feeding” used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to interrogate prisoners were a betrayal of America’s values. By criticising the CIA’s programme in a report this week, the Senate intelligence committee has enraged the agency’s defenders and comforted America’s rivals. Yet, for all its flaws, this airing of the CIA’s tactics is vital, because it is a necessary step towards redemption. 

The report accuses the CIA of mismanaging the programme and of concealing its extent and its severity. The methods were dreamed up by two psychologists who were neither practised interrogators nor experts in al-Qaeda. And contrary to what the CIA told Congress, the White House and the public, interrogations produced hardly any useful intelligence. 

The rebuttal has been furious (see article). Yes, there was mismanagement, argue the spooks, but after September 11th the threat of another attack meant timely intelligence was vital. The CIA programme had legal approval and the public demanded protection by whatever means—this was a time when torture warrants were debated. Indeed, the CIA was not gung-ho enough for hawks like Dick Cheney, then vice-president. Most important, say the report’s critics, the programme produced intelligence of genuine value. 

The rebuttal misses the point. Even if the CIA’s techniques were deemed legal, they were designed to extract information using physical and mental anguish. To call that anything but torture is self-deception. Torture may well yield information, but it is a devil’s bargain. An official policy of torture corrupts the torturers and the people charged with overseeing it. Congress and the White House wanted to shield themselves from the cruelty of acts being committed in their name but which, in the atmosphere of the time, they could not or would not condemn. If the CIA misled members of Congress, it was partly because the politicians were willing. Everybody becomes implicated—even Democrats now sloughing off responsibility. 

Official torture also corrodes American policy abroad, even if it is wrapped up in a legal opinion from the Justice Department. Torturing Muslims feeds the very terrorism that it is designed to prevent. More broadly, a superpower that professes moral arguments to underpin its global vision for human rights and democracy cannot just abandon those standards in the futile search for absolute security. Autocracies welcome a policy of American torture as a put-into-jail-free card. For geopolitical rivals like Russia and China it is evidence to add to widespread electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency that America is a hypocrite just like the rest. 

Hard questions 

America has work to do. Although Barack Obama stopped “enhanced” interrogation when he became president, the camp at Guantánamo Bay has not been emptied of prisoners held without charge; they should be put on trial or set free. Mr Obama still has immense discretion over the CIA’s tactics—and in a future crisis a president will be tempted to abuse it in the same way that the Bush White House did. 

This week’s Senate report makes a return to torture less likely. The CIA’s black jails and the terrible things that went on in them were unworthy of the United States. However, amid the foreign gloating and the unedifying partisan rows at home, remember that unlike the rest, America tends to face up to its demons. That is an example other countries should follow.