Stopping the Senate to Torture

By Fester:

Senators Graham (R-SC) and Lieberman (I-CT) like torture, or at least they do not like accountability for torture, and thus they enable future torture as government policy and government sanctioned freelancing.  That is about all I can conclude from their threats to shut down the Senate if they don't get their way on blocking the Freedom of Information Act from applying to documents and images that supply evidence of American government sanctioned or condoned acts of torture. 

From Roll Call:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened to hold up any and all legislation in the Senate until Congress passes its legislation to prohibit the release of photos showing detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.

�We�re not going to do any more business in the Senate,� Graham said. �Nothing�s going forward until we get this right.�

Getting this 'right' would be worth shutting down the Senate for a while if getting it right meant admitting to our failings as a society and government and then seeking to put into place mechansism of oversight and training that would prevent those failings from occurring again.  Getting it 'right' in Graham's sense of the word is to condone torture.  Graham argues that releasing those photos and not the actual acts of torture will weaken American influence and prestige.  I argue that the acts matter more than the documentation. 

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat's 2nd rule for Bureaucrats is the 60 Minutes rule:

 "Never do anything that would cause Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Steve Croft, Leslie Stahl, or even Andy Rooney to pursue you down a hallway with a camera crew."

Booman expands on this logic of sunlight as a disinfectant and as a deterrant of bad behavior:

I'd like to point out that the Freedom of Information Act is one of the key pillars that helps correct bad foreign policy decisions and to prevent them from happening in the first place.

For example, if seeing images of what the government is doing, and allowing to be done, is going to inflame world opinion against our nation's foreign policies, then, in most cases, we ought not to be pursuing those policies.

I can imagine exceptions. I certainly understand that images can be used selectively in a propagandistic way. No single image, or series of images, can tell the whole story. Sometimes such compilations can be deeply misleading. The answer to that, though, is not suppression but more information that helps give a truer and more nuanced picture of reality.

The bottom line is that it is precisely because these images, if released, will reflect badly on our government that they have the power of preventing our government from continuing to do things that reflect badly upon it. That is the real value of the FOIA. Efforts to weaken the FOIA are really an acknowledgment that our foreign policy cannot be sustained in the light of day.

Right now the laws that have been put into place to not torture are not credible laws as the enforcement mechanisms are hobbled.  Telecoms credibly believe that if they whip up the fear and campaign contributions, they can violate FISA, civilian contractors and government employees can credibly believe that if they violate torture laws, they can raise a political stink and inflict sufficient political costs to avoid an investigation much less punishment.  The Office of Legal Counsel and the Executive Office of the President (and the VP as 4th Branch) can credibly believe that they can either blame the little guys as Bad Apples who were following 'legal-ish' orders or take the reverse Nuremburg defense of "I'm only giving orders" and have legions of legal and media hitmen echo this point. 

Publicity is a credible threat against future bad behavior.  We, as a society, need to impose credible penalities and costs on torture so that we as a nation do not engage in torture.  Costly signals are the only credible signals.