Why was it again that, as President Obama said, "we tortured some folks" after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That's why we don't shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them.
Back in August 2014, Obama explained the urge of the top figures in the Bush administration to torture "some folks" this way: "I understand why it happened. I think it's important, when we look back, to recall how afraid people were when the twin towers fell." So naturally, in those panicked days, the people in charge had little choice but to order the waterboarding, wall-slamming, and rectal rehydration of whatever possible terrorists (and innocents) the CIA got their hands on. That's what fear drives you to do and don't forget, at the time even some mainstream liberal columnists were calling for torture. And whatever you do, don't forget as well that they were so, so afraid. That's why, says the president, "It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious," too quick to judge the people in the Bush administration, the CIA, and even the U.S. military who planned, implemented, and justified torture.
The president has vacillated about just how long this period of exculpatory fear was supposed to last. Sometimes he seems to suggest that it's just the responses in the more or less immediate aftermath of those attacks we shouldn't feel too sanctimonious about. Sometimes it's all those "years after 9/11" during which America's leaders had to face "legitimate fears of further attacks" and therefore kept on torturing people.
However long the panic lasted, the important point is that, as Obama insisted in 2009, and again at the end of 2014, no one should be prosecuted for torture, because everyone was scared.
Anyone in President George W. Bush's position would have declared that the Geneva Conventions, which are supposed to protect prisoners of war from mistreatment, don't cover prisoners taken in the "war on terror." Anyone would have told the pundits on "Meet the Press," as Vice President Dick Cheney did less than a week after 9/11, that the attacks meant we would now have to work "the dark side." Anyone in CIA Director George Tenet's shoes would have agreed with Cheney when he said that "a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies."
And any attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel would naturally have written the "torture memos" that John Yoo and Jay Bybee created in 2002, in which they sought to provide legal cover for the CIA's torture practices by redefining torture itself more or less out of existence. For some act to count as "severe physical suffering" and therefore as torture, they wrote, the pain inflicted would have to be of a sort "ordinarily associated with a... serious physical condition, such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions."
Wouldn't anyone do what these men did, if they, too, were frightened out of their wits? Actually, no. In fact, the sad, ugly story of the U.S. response to the criminal acts of 9/11 is brightened by a number of people who have displayed genuine courage in saying no to and turning their backs on torture. Their choices prove that Bush, Cheney, & Co. could have said no as well.
Though you'd never know it here, no level of fear in public officials makes acts of torture (or the support of such acts) any less criminal or more defensible before the law. It's remarkably uncomplicated, actually. Torture violates U.S. and international law, and those responsible deserve to be prosecuted both for what they did and to prevent the same thing from happening the next time people in power are afraid.
Some of those who rejected torture, like CIA official John Kiriakou and an as-yet-unnamed Navy nurse, directly refused to practice it. Some risked reputations and careers to let the people of this country know what their government was doing. Sometimes an entire agency, like the FBI, refused to be involved in torture.
I'd like to introduce you to six of these heroes.
Sergeant Joseph M. Darby: If it hadn't been for a 24-year-old soldier named Joe Darby, we might never have heard of the tortures and abuses committed at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles outside Baghdad. It had once been Saddam Hussein's most notorious prison and when the U.S. military arrived in 2003, they put it to similar use.
Early on, however, the Defense Department was unhappy with the quality of "intelligence" being produced there, so Major General Geoffrey Miller was dispatched from his post as commandant of the jewel in the crown of the Bush administration's offshore system of injustice, Guantánamo, to Iraq with orders to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.
Joe Darby was a member of the Military Police assigned to that prison. One day early in 2004, Army Specialist Charles Graner handed him a couple of CDs full of photographs, thinking perhaps that Darby would enjoy them as much as he did.
Graner was one of the people in charge of the Army Reservists responsible for "softening up" prisoners before they were handed over for interrogation to Military Intelligence and the "Other Government Agency" (a euphemism for the CIA and its private contractors). Prisoners being softened up were stacked in pyramids like cordwood, paraded like dogs on leashes, bitten by actual dogs, and in at least one case, raped in the anus "with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."
When Joe Darby saw the photographs, unlike Graner, he was not amused. He was horrified. He recognized them as evidence of crimes and, after three weeks of internal debate, handed them to Special Agent Tyler Pieron of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, who was working at Abu Ghraib. From there, the photos made their way up the chain of command, via a leak into the hands of New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, and eventually into U.S. living rooms on 60 Minutes II one Tuesday evening at the end of April 2004.
Darby hoped to remain anonymous, but he soon gained international renown for what he had done. With exposure came threats to him and to his family. In the immediate aftermath of the disclosures, while still stationed at Abu Ghraib, he feared -- he told the BBC -- that he might be murdered in his sleep. Still, he doesn't consider what he did anything special. As he said, when accepting the Kennedy Library's Profiles in Courage award, "It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time." Joe Darby may have felt fear, but he didn't go along with a torture regime.
Major General Antonio M. Taguba: When the photos of Abu Ghraib came out, so did the calls for investigation into what many people hoped was either 1) not as bad as it looked (Rush Limbaugh famously compared it to fraternity hazing); or 2) a unique aberration. The Army picked General Taguba to investigate and he complied. The 2004 Taguba Report -- officially, the "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade" -- is a model of restrained rhetoric in the service of devastating revelation. Read it and weep.
