The recent Congressional hearings for the candidate Attorney General has left me more disappointed than usual in our political process. For starters, the current debates are nothing more than a semantic argument. The real issue is the actions of the interrogators, not the definition of the word torture. Interrogation techniques cover a whole spectrum of coercion -- ranging from asking politely to mutilation and fatal abuse. The difficulty in dealing with this spectrum is that there isn't a clear line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable".
Congress seems more concerned with semantic games around the word "torture" than stopping the behavior itself. We're seeing the natural evolution of the culture that gave us Bill Clinton pondering the meaning of the word "is", instead of admitting he had an affair and telling the world to butt out of his business.
The embarrassing truth is that Congress makes the laws, not the Attorney General. If something needs to be declared illegal, Congress itself has that power! If Congress is truly concerned about water boarding, they don't need to find an Attorney General to fix it for them; they need to pass a law to outlaw it. The fact that they haven't is a testament to their investment of politics above the moral ideals of our society.
It's informative to consider the role of certain of our government agencies and the positions they've taken on the issue of water boarding. The military is the de facto agency responsible for using coercion upon our enemies. Military intelligence operations are aimed at operationally useful information.
Civilian intelligence agencies are aimed at developing objective information to support decision making by the executive branch. However, our intelligence agencies are increasingly influenced by political forces.
Military intelligence has long outlawed water boarding. However, the civilian agencies that are more susceptible to political influence apparently feel they can get results from a technique that the military abandoned long ago.
The White House and their supporters also feel that the public debate should be silenced to prevent giving our enemy any information about techniques. This argument ignores the corrosive effects of such secrecy on democracy. The government must be controlled by the will of the people. When secrecy becomes as systemic as Bush desires, the public is no longer informed well enough to manage government.
The enemy's propaganda already portrays us as cruel and immoral; actually behaving cruelly does nothing but lend them credibility. This is a fundamental aspect of the conflict. This is billed as a "War on Terror", but this war does not fit the traditional sense of war. In the traditional sense of war, the military is capable of winning. But the "War on Terror", much like the wars on drugs or poverty, cannot be won militarily.
This new conflict is fundamentally a conflict of culture and values. As such, anything short of genocide will not resolve this conflict by force. In a conflict of values, one of the conditions for victory is to maintain the values of your culture. The steady erosion of personal liberty and human rights is effectively defeating us in this conflict.
The unilateral nature of the Bush administration is also self-defeating. In this conflict the principle victory condition is to make cultural allies of those who oppose us. By acting unilaterally, we alienate our existing allies and reduce our influence with countries like Saudi Arabia which are not fully aligned with us. It is precisely countries such as Saudi Arabia that we must transition into full fledged cultural allies, not just allies of convenience.
