The Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Torture Report” is out, making waves around the world. It’s a rough read, and emotions over the practices it discloses run justifiably high. But the question isn’t whether the report will ignite a firestorm of controversy; the question is what long term impact will it have on the national security policies of the United States—and of the the other countries who face similar questions as their governments try to balance the requirements of security and justice. Will the Senate majority report be a nine day wonder in the blogosphere, or will it be seen as a turning point in American thinking? Will the Senate majority report settle the controversy in the U.S. over interrogation methods and result in legislation that limits CIA activities in the future? Will this investigation go down in history as a parallel to the Church Commission in the 1970s, which led to the the first major reining in of CIA activities during the Cold War?
An important complicating factor in how this plays out is that the the “majority” behind the report won’t be the majority in the new Congress. Democratic staffers on the committee wrote the report, but its policy impact will depend on how the GOP majority in the new Senate handles things.
And the lines of battle are starting to take shape. Defenders of the Bush-era CIA are well-organized and coherent, which should not really be surprising given they have known for some time now that the report would be released. And it’s not a completely partisan group defending the CIA either, with former directors appointed by presidents of both parties chiming in.
While it’s hard to read the report and not be troubled by the thought of seeing Americans—or indeed anybody—doing some of the activities described, it’s also clear that some of the issues involved seem harder than others to resolve. The defense is claiming that the general tone of the report is way off, and the fact that the report’s authors, though having access to six million documents from the CIA, did not interview any staffers, adds some weight to their claim. It’s impossible to rule out political self-interestedness at work among some of the senators involved—a kind of self-whitewashing. There may have been differences between what the staff knew and what some members of the committee knew, and the senators haven’t really wanted to admit that they were privy to things and gave at least a tacit approval to them that perhaps they now regret or don’t want to be holding the bag for. This, at least, is what some defenders of the CIA seem to be alleging, and those of us who were not at the table for the briefings can’t really know what took place. It’s also possible to want some reforms in CIA practices and oversight without welcoming the release of this report or accepting all of its conclusions as the last word on the subjects it treats.
The report and the controversy surrounding it are turning into one of those equivalents of media trench warfare in which the left and the right build alternate universes, with each believing that its own version of events is the only one that any sane and righteous person can accept. Then each side hunkers down in its trenches and unleashes all the artillery it can muster against the bad guys on the other side of the battle zone. The issue of CIA interrogation procedures is particularly amenable to that kind of endless wrangling. To begin with, the moral issues involved (torture on the one hand, service to and defense of the country on the other) are genuinely important and have a lot of emotional weight. At the same time, the questions are complicated enough and the uncertainty is great enough—how authoritative and objective is the committee report, and how would a layperson not deeply steeped in this stuff know—that there is plenty of room for conflicting narratives to form, develop, and take on lives of their own.
We are having a lot of these battles these days: the UVA rape controversy and the police violence controversy are also bubbling along. Each side is looking for the smoking gun, the piece of evidence that conclusively discredits the opposing narrative. Both sides are on the whole at least as interested in the general partisan battle between left and right as they are in the particular issue involved. These fights aren’t just about what our campus sex policy or our police (or our CIA interrogation) policies should be: they are about what kind of country we are and about what core perceptions and beliefs should shape our policies over a wide range of issues at home and abroad.
The release of the Senate report, then, is just the first step in what is becoming a highly ritualized process of national debate. In the next phases, various commentators step in to try to shape public opinion about the report. It is not, at this point, clear where the preponderance of public opinion will lie. The allegations in the report are shocking and discomfiting, yet as we noted yesterday American public opinion in recent years has largely supported the use of “torture” in at least some circumstances. One question will be whether people who say they approve of torture in the abstract will be sufficiently disturbed by the concrete and graphic examples in the Senate report to rethink their stance.
Historically, Americans have had a very high tolerance for violent behavior by those charged with protecting the community from dangerous elements, whether we speak of criminals at home or terrorists abroad. There are reasons why grand juries so rarely indict police officers for violence committed in the course of their work. For some contemporary Americans, this approach is a commonsense way to protect the home in a dangerous world. For others, it is an example of an atavistic brutality that endangers American freedom and which it is America’s highest duty to expose. Both convictions are deeply held and have deep roots in American history and culture; both convictions are grounded in moral arguments that are not, on their face, absurd.
A democratic society can’t resolve these issues by appeal to a higher authority; as a nation state and as a culture we have no supreme moral arbiter whose dictates we have all agreed to respect. Thus struggles in our society over moral questions like torture and police violence turn into political questions and newspaper controversies. We have no Chief Rabbi, no Grand Mufti, no Pope to rule on these questions and settle them; as citizens of a democratic state we must find political answers to these moral and in some cases existential questions.
At our most self confident, Americans like to say that democracy is the best form of government because it is the most moral one. At times like this, that argument is harder to make; if 71 percent of Americans continue to approve of torture under at least some circumstances, our political system is likely to respond to that belief regardless of what others think. That majority may be morally wrong or morally right, but in a democracy it will be the numbers that count. We have chosen this way of settling disputes not because there is a guarantee that the majority is right, but because all the other methods (Supreme Leaders, anointed kings, infallible popes) turn out to be so much worse.
That method of settling moral disputes inevitably means that hot button questions like torture, police violence and campus sex will be addressed in a partisan political atmosphere amid an ongoing media circus. This isn’t going to be particularly edifying and a lot of people are going to be hurt in the process, but that is the way democratic societies process divisive issues.
Many of us aren’t comfortable with the strong form of the arguments on either side of these questions. We don’t think that some of the police and CIA methods we’ve been reading about are signs that the nation’s security policies are working as they should — but we also have our doubts that the most vocal opponents of these and related practices should be in charge of setting things straight. We don’t think a frat party culture of binge drinking and casual sex is a healthy environment for anybody, and we are seriously concerned about the damage this culture can do to young women in particular, but we don’t think depriving people accused of serious crimes of their rights under the law is the way to improve campus life. For people in this mushy middle, it may not be such a bad thing that democratic societies often reach messy compromises on issues like these.
And there is one other thing that our officials need to keep in mind. What police do on the streets and what interrogators do in hidden cells is likely to come under public scrutiny at some point. Those who give orders to our agents and to our police need to remember this basic fact about American life, and act accordingly. Democratic societies aren’t very good at keeping dirty secrets; we should therefore work hard to have fewer such secrets to keep.