In preparation for some minor surgery, I had to have a chest x-ray yesterday. I'd never had one before. The technician had me crane my neck upward and place my chin in a plastic...chin-holder, I suppose. He pressed my chest against a white board, and in order to keep it pressed there I put my weight onto the balls of my feet, angling myself a little more into the board. He had me hold my arms outward just above shoulder height, then he told me to hold my breath and not move while he snapped the x-ray.

As I was standing there, awkwardly straining to maintain this position, I was struck by how remarkably uncomfortable it was to hold it even for just a minute. It was no real trouble to do so. Doubtless I could have held the position for several more minutes had it been necessary. But it was without question uncomfortable, and I immediately looked forward to being able to lower my arms and stand normally.

And then an unwelcome thought came to me: what if I had to hold this position for several hours? Several days? Several months? This minor discomfort, hardly worth mention, suddenly had the potential to be oppressive and debilitating. And the reason this thought occurred to me is that I, along with all other sentient people, have been reading and hearing for years now about such techniques being employed by American officials against detainees in the War on Terror.

The comparison is ludicrous, of course. The thought, however brief, that I might be able to empathize with the horrors to which many of our detainees are subjected is laughable, even insulting. But it wasn't my solipsistic moment of imagined empathy that bothered me most. It was the fact that, as an American, the contemplation of torture, what constitutes it, what it might be like, and its practice by my government are now everyday thoughts. The grotesqueness of our treatment of detainees is only reinforced and heightened by the fact that an average American, thrust up agains the wall in his doctor's office, might casually think, "I wonder if this is anything like what our prisoners at Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo/CIA black sites go through." Disgust with oneself: one of the many debilitating effects of torture on the citizens of the country that practices it...to say nothing of those on whom it is practiced.

But this experience is also worth noting because, as disgusting and trivializing as it is, we would probably benefit if more Americans took a moment to engage in such thought experiments. Because even an attempt at empathy could have important consequences on our collective humanity, as evidenced in this aside by Mark Danner in his deeply affecting piece for the April 30th edition of the New York Review of Books:

This prolonged forced standing is, again, an ancient technique, and a favorite, notably, of the Soviet intelligence services. It can be difficult, when gazing at the stark descriptions of these procedures, to understand their effect. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, when approving in December 2002 a series of interrogation techniques that included forced standing for up to four hours, famously scribbled in the lower margin, beneath his initials: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? D.R." Secretary Rumsfeld, who no doubt was standing at his desk when he scrawled these words, professed to have difficulty comprehending the difference between working at a standing desk in one's office--signing documents, talking on the telephone, speaking to subordinates, drinking coffee--and standing naked in a very cold room with hands shackled to the ceiling for hours and days at a time.

But appealing to stories like this, I realize, is to ask a lot of my fellow Americans, and I don't mean that flippantly. Danner, in his first of two articles chronicling and analyzing a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, tells many of the stories from detainees themselves, detailing horrendous torture in American facilities. But even he admits that such stories, though they may serve to broaden our knowledge of torture's cruelty and degradation, do little to sway those not already convinced that torture's moral costs make it always unacceptable. Those who have little sympathy for cruelty inflicted on those deemed to be "bad," or who believe that torture has tangibly increased our own security, are unlikely to read yet another account of that torture's details and significantly change their view.

That's why Danner's second article, looking at the broader implications of the ICRC report, is absolutely essential. If you read nothing else on the issue of torture and what it means for us morally, politically, and legally right now, read his essay. It is probably the most eloquent and thorough explanation of why we need now more than ever a proper investigation of America's system of detention, interrogation, and torture. Here's just one excerpt:

One fact, seemingly incontrovertible, after the descriptions contained and the judgments made in the ICRC report, is that officials of the United States, in interrogating prisoners in the "War on Terror," have tortured and done so systematically. From many other sources, including the former president himself, we know that the decision to do so was taken at the highest level of the American government and carried out with the full knowledge and support of its most senior officials.

Once this is accepted as a fact, certain consequences might be expected to follow. First, that these policies, violating as they do domestic and international law, must be changed--which, as noted, President Obama began to accomplish on his first full day in office. Second, that they should be explicitly repudiated--a more complicated political process, which has, perhaps, begun, but only begun. Third, that those who ordered, designed, and applied them must be brought before the public in some societally sanctioned proceeding, made to explain what they did and how, and suffer some appropriate consequence.

And fourth, and crucially, that some judgment must be made, based on the most credible of information compiled and analyzed and weighed by the most credible of bodies, about what these policies actually accomplished: how they advanced the interests of the country, if indeed they did advance them, and how they hurt them. For at this point, President Obama's assertion that "the facts don't bear [Cheney] out" [when Cheney says that the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies kept America safer] remains simply that: an assertion. To that assertion Mr. Cheney and others, including President Bush, respond and will continue to respond with claims of "specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through these programs"--about which, of course, they "can't give you details...without violating classification." And when public officials do cite specific cases--as President Bush himself did in describing the use of the "alternative set of procedures" on Abu Zubaydah, who, the President claimed, "was a senior terrorist leader" who "provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States"--other officials, many of them also "in a position to know," leak differing versions to reporters which seem to demonstrate that the claims that were made are exaggerations and worse.

Unfortunately, these contrary accounts, however convincing--and in the case of Abu Zubaydah they have been very convincing--generally come from unnamed officials and cannot serve as definitive proof, or as a sufficiently credible repudiation of what former officials, including the President of the United States, still assert. Far from ending the discussion about whether torture really was, as Cheney insists, "absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack," these ongoing battles between extravagant claims and undermining leaks will ensure that it persists.

It is because of the claim that torture protected the US that the many Americans who still nod their heads when they hear Dick Cheney's claims about the necessity for "tough, mean, dirty, nasty" tactics in the war on terror respond to its revelation not by instantly condemning it but instead by asking further questions. For example: Was it necessary? And: Did it work? To these questions the last president and vice-president, who "kept the country safe" for "seven-plus years," respond "yes," and "yes." And though as time passes the numbers of those insisting on asking those questions, and willing to accept those answers, no doubt falls, it remains significant, and would likely grow substantially after another successful attack.

This political fact partly explains why, when it comes to torture, we seem to be a society trapped in a familiar and never-ending drama. For though some of the details provided--and officially confirmed for the first time--in the ICRC report are new, and though the first-person accounts make chilling reading and have undoubted dramatic power, one can't help observing that the broader discussion of torture is by now in its essential outlines nearly five years old, and has become, in its predictably reenacted outrage and defiant denials from various parties, something like a shadow play.
...
Torture has undermined the United States' reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war--a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them--and the country itself--to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo.

The question is how to set beside this damage to the country's interests--some of which can be measured by polling data in Muslim countries, by rises in recruitment to violent jihadist groups, and so on--against the claims that attacks have been averted. As is so often the case, the categories are not commensurable. Confronted with former Vice President Cheney's arguments, President Obama says "the facts don't bear him out," but the facts he points to appear to be facts about the political damage caused by torture, or about the difficulties it poses to the country in trying to prosecute prisoners. He appears not to be speaking about the same facts that the former administration officials do--facts that they claim prove that torture, in averting attacks and protecting the country, saved lives.

Investigating what kind of intelligence torture actually yielded is not a popular task: those who oppose torture do not like to admit that it might, in any way, have "worked"; those who support its use don't like to admit that it might not have. It is a regrettable but undeniable fact that torture's illegality, or the political harm it may do to the country's reputation, is not sufficient to discourage the willingness of many Americans to countenance it. However one might prefer that this be an argument about legality or morality, it is also an argument about national security and, in the end, about politics. However much one agrees with President Obama that Cheney's "notion" that "somehow...we can't reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests," the fact is that many people continue to believe the contrary, and this group includes the former
president and vice-president of the United States and many senior officials who
served them.
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In this political calculus, liberals obsessed by "legalisms" are part of the problem, not part of the solution, and it is no accident that it is firmly in that camp that the former vice-president has been seeking to isolate the new president. Cheney's success in this endeavor will not be evident now--he is, after all, the most unpopular member of a deeply unpopular party--but the seeds he is so ostentatiously sowing could, if unchallenged by facts and given the right conditions, flourish dramatically in the future.

The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the "politics of fear" is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration's policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.

Those of us who believe so strongly that the secrecy of the Bush administration must be reversed by the current administration, that we must have access to the relevant information and that investigations and inquiries must be undertaken, do so not only out of a belief that what the Bush administration was wrong and must be held to account. We believe these things also because, as Danner points out, we simply don't know the facts. As long as the government is able to insist that its actions and their consequences must be kept secret, we as Americans can never adequately assess whether those actions are correct, can never adequately judge whether our elected officials are in fact keeping us safe, are in fact conducting policy as we would have them do.

Those who defend torture on the basis of its efficacy and necessity have no evidence other than the assertions of Bush administration officials. And those of us who insist torture is morally wrong and, in the final calculus, counter-productive, will make little headway as along as those assertions cannot be judged through a public, transparent, accountable process. The record of the Obama administration on this front is so far discouraging, to put it mildly. But the pressure for Obama administration to relent on its secrecy claims need not come from supposedly lefty anti-torture activists. It need come from any and all Americans who simply want to know precisely what has been gained and what has been lost since our country decided to embrace torture.