As the backlash against interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration reaches a fever pitch, the nation needs to set its future course.

Outside a circle that seems to be tightening around the West Wing of the White House, the use of administration-approved “enhanced interrogation techniques” (some of them widely considered torture) on suspected terrorists has fewer defenders than ever.

In the first major ruling of the first trial of American-held detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military-court judge Keith Allred sent a clear message. By ruling that the confessions of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden’s driver, are inadmissible because they had been gained under “highly coercive” conditions, the Navy Colonel dealt a serious blow to the Justice Department’s future efforts to prosecute so-called “enemy combatants.”

“When they designed these military tribunals, the Bush White House expected to be able to include evidence that had been wrung out of suspects through torture,” says Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker who has closely covered the Bush administration’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Her recently published book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, tells the story of how legitimate national security concerns, intelligence failures and an atmosphere of terrorist-inspired paranoia combined to create the conditions for what would otherwise have been an unthinkable policy: the equivalent of state-sponsored torture.

Watch a video interview with Jane Mayer, as she discusses the Bush administration’s “dark side.”

The book could not be timelier: the same week it was released, a Canadian attorney released a jailhouse video of his client, Canadian terrorist suspect Omar Khadr, being interrogated at Guantánamo. The now notorious footage shows a weeping teenager begging for medical help.

Days later, the British Parliament’s nonpartisan Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report stating they could no longer trust the U.S. government’s denials that it used torture on detainees. According to the report, “given the clear differences in definition [of torture], the U.K. can no longer rely on U.S. assurances, and recommends that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future.”

In our interactive graphic, learn the history and progression of “enhanced interrogation techniques” from 9/11 to today.No one doubts that the White House’s changes of interrogation policy began with the unimpeachable intention of keeping Americans safe. In order to fight what President Bush called “a war unlike any other,” our methods would have to follow suit.
Listen to Stuart Taylor, Jr. as he explains how to tell the truth about torture.
On the Sunday after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” and declared “we have to work the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. 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.”

Desperate to move against the perpetrators of 9/11 and defend against subsequent attacks, the administration turned its lawyers loose to find ways around legal restraints. As a result, more than two-dozen “enhanced interrogation techniques”—including stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, exposure to cold and waterboarding—became standard operating procedure for U.S. interrogators.

In addition to the shocking photographs of prisoner abuse that emerged from Abu Ghraib, there has been a steady trickle of reports that U.S. interrogations have resulted in severe psychological trauma, physical injury and even death. Furthermore, evidence indicates that some of the “enemy combatants” who have been traumatized and killed by American procedures were wrongly imprisoned on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence.

Cheney, whose office reportedly drove the interrogation programs and the legal work behind them, made good on his promise to work “the dark side.” To this day, very little is known about initiatives like the CIA’s program of rendition, which allowed terrorist suspects to be relocated to countries where torture is legal.

 

Repairing the Damage

Now, the country needs to start looking beyond the justified origins of these actions and figure out how to move forward.

Some of those most vocally opposed to these secretive “enhanced interrogation techniques” are members of the U.S. military, who operate in a world where torture is often repaid in kind. In this scenario, it’s easy to interpret Capt. Allred’s decision in the Hamdan case as a form of pushback by the armed forces against the administration’s policy.

“There is sort of a growing movement to hold some people in the administration accountable for war crimes of some sort,” says Mayer. “I think it’s a minority view at this point, and it’s more likely that there might be something like the South African Truth Commission, where at least there would be public hearings where maybe the records will be opened up.”

Few doubt that there will be a day of reckoning of some kind, even if President Bush gives preemptive pardons to those who carried out his administration’s interrogation policy.

“We need to come to terms with what happened,” says Stuart Taylor, Jr., a columnist for The National Journal and contributing editor for Newsweek. “We need to settle on a consensus national policy for the future to be legislated by Congress on what interrogation methods are allowed and what methods are not allowed.”

Even then, the damage done to the reputation of the United States and its standing among the international community is likely to linger for decades to come.