The (Ex) Washington Realist

Nixon Center president and TNI publisher Dimitri Simes has launched his own blog, Subjective Evaluation. He offered this comment, which I reproduce in full below:
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I have a little certificate on my office wall confirming that I spent fifteen days in the fall of 1973 in a Moscow prison—by the way, the same prison later visited for much longer by defiant Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The certificate claims that I was sentenced for hooliganism. According to the prosecution, I had participated in a hunger strike by Jewish activists at the Moscow State Telegraph Office. Never mind that all the hunger strikers were doing, other than not eating, was sitting in a public area designated for writing telegrams and producing messages to the United Nations, President Richard Nixon and other international leaders asking for help in getting permission to emigrate. The Soviet authorities claimed that I and other defendants stayed at the Telegraph for many hours, depriving other people of the opportunity to write telegrams and disregarding repeated police orders to leave the building. The participants disputed this, saying that no such orders were issued.

My situation was a little different, however. Not only was I not on a hunger strike, I had come to the Telegraph straight from a restaurant in the company of a friend who was the daughter of a senior official. After checking her ID, the police allowed her to leave; they arrested me with the others and I spent a night in the police station and was taken to court with them. I explained to the judge that I was not a part of the protest, that I had been at the Telegraph for fifteen minutes at most, and that no one had asked me to leave. Other defendants confirmed my story, clearly puzzling the judge. As a result, she left the court room in the company of the KGB officer responsible for our case. They returned five minutes later and the judge said that on the basis of the evidence she just received, it was established I was clearly guilty as charged. I never learned what the evidence the KGB provided, but nobody was surprised. Those were the Soviet rules.

So, here we are now in the United States, after a victory in the Cold War, where the President of the United States—and not just any President, but one who has made moralism his trademark—is asking Congress to approve legislation that would allow finding people guilty of serious crimes without revealing key evidence against them. Joseph Stalin used to say that “the [security] organs don’t make mistakes.” Do we really want to have a legal system making the same assumption about the CIA?

Our President’s insistence that it is acceptable to use “alternative interrogation techniques” is likely to be viewed as Orwellian by skeptical publics abroad, even in Western Europe. What kind of alternative techniques? Would investigators pray with the suspected terrorists to appeal to their better selves? Show them pictures of the innocent children they are trying to murder? Recite the Bible and Koran with them? Hardly anyone doubts that the President is talking about physical pressure, which he may not consider torture, but apparently thinks would be sufficient to break down a committed militant. And, to be clear, the individual who might be subjected to torture has not yet been convicted of anything and is denied the presumption of innocence applied in American courts. For all we know, a few may be victims of mistaken identity, something already documented as occurring in some recent CIA-conducted investigations.

It is true that any rule, including the rule against torture, should allow for exceptions under the most extraordinary circumstances. So, if there is credible evidence that a nuclear bomb is ticking in a major American city and the only way to disarm it is to force a suspected terrorist to confess, the Commander-in-Chief should be able to do whatever necessary—but the authorization should be provided personally by him. And, for God’s sake, it should be called what it is, not an “alternative technique.”

It’s troubling that Mr. Bush does not accept as self-evident truth that torture is wrong and un-American. The argument that it may save innocent lives misses the point. Through the history of combat, most torture was not inflicted by pathological sadists, but rather by interrogators who wanted to get information that could save the lives of their troops and civilians. If the United States makes it acceptable to use “alternative techniques” against enemy combatants, it is a no-brainer that American soldiers and even ordinary Americans living abroad would be in great peril.

More broadly, in taking the positions he does on torture, President Bush should forget about the ideological struggle he has proclaimed to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. Since as a practical matter that the vast majority of those subjected to “alternative techniques” are likely to be Muslims—and in the age of the internet, their stories are bound to be quickly known all throughout the Islamic world—all Mr. Bush’s claims about his noble desires to make the world safe for democracy would sound hollow. Senator John McCain, Senator John Warner, Senator Lindsey Graham, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired Army General John Vessey are exactly right to insist on modifying the President’s military tribunal plans on the grounds of both security and morality. No improved homeland security procedures, no tighter screening of airline passengers, or even better examination of containers at American ports, can compensate for turning millions of Muslims into America’s enemies. Yet President Bush is proposing is another new step in that direction.