London Review of Books: David Bromwich writes about torture
In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a presumption of humility that Cheney could never have supplied. His pledge of fidelity to the ‘sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty’ was a much-needed supplement to the Cheney imperative of ‘working the dark side’; and the combination of Blair and Cheney seems to have relieved George W. Bush of any last residue of doubt that he was right to set the entire Middle East on the path of war. Two wise and experienced politicians, so different yet speaking now in a single voice: how could they be wrong?
.. As Sam Husseini noticed in a commentary for the website Common Dreams, a main purpose of the torture was achieved whether the things the prisoners said were true or not. Bush and Cheney in early 2002 were hell-bent on a war against Iraq; essential to the case for war was the production of quotable sentences (truth or lie would do equally well) concerning the links between al-Qaida and Iraq, and the possession of WMD by Iraq. A groan of assent of the relevant kind was extorted from the prisoner Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, as footnote 857 of the report clearly says. Additional materials seem to have been drawn from other prisoners, and in that sense the use of torture was a success. The stainless Colin Powell would cite al-Libi’s confession in his presentation to the UN in February 2003.
.. Much of Brennan’s utility to Obama came from his status as an insider to the torture arrangements. If Obama called in Brennan the former agent in large part to protect himself from the agency, Brennan on his side must have been wary of still-active agents. There were things they could divulge about him if they chose. The silence regarding torture until now was a predictable consequence of this web of mutual fears.
.. A whole subset of the argument on torture has asked whether it works – whether any confession extracted by such means can supply a useful lead or serve as reliable evidence at a trial. With the same propriety, one might ask whether slavery works. It is said that people have always tortured. Indeed they have, and so, too, have people always had an appetite for slavery. But the judgment of slavery in the 21st century is very different from what it was in the 19th; and before 2001, the same had come to be true of torture: it was understood as an atrocious practice which no one should defend and no one should want to get away with.