Torture Is Always Bad -- Or Is It?

By: Greg Mitchell One has learned to cringe when spotting a new editorial arriving from The Washington Post concerning any military or foreign adventure ? especially after its dismal record, and lack of shame for same, in regard to all things Iraq -- but the headline and deck on its key piece today raised some hope.

It concerns the criminal treatment of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested, renditioned and tortured abroad as a terror suspect, only to be declared fully innocent a few days ago by an official investigation. Surely, in this case, even the Post would say all the right things -- a ?slam dunk,? as George Tenet might say.

Well, the dunk hit the rim with a clang.

The headline declares ?Tortured by Mistake,? with the deck: ?The case of Maher Arar shows why the Bush administration's secret detention program is wrong.?

But why is it ?wrong?? Mainly because the U.S. got caught and, in this case, a suspect has been proven innocent. The Post says nothing about the hundreds or thousands of others who have not yet had their day in court, and may have suffered similar treatment.

Consider the Post?s lede: ?A couple of years ago, President Bush might well have counted Maher Arar as one of the success stories of the CIA's secret program for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 because he was on a watchlist; Canadian police said they believed he had connections to al-Qaeda. Rather than being returned to Canada, Mr. Arar disappeared into the CIA's secret system -- he was transported to Syria and handed over to its military intelligence service. For several weeks, Mr. Arar was tortured by his Syrian captors, who beat him with an electric cable. Eventually he broke and confessed that he had trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.?

In other words: So far so good. Arrested and renditoned with no legal charges brought against him. Sent to a country known for favoring torture where, mission accomplished, he was indeed tortured, leading to a coerced confession.

So what?s the problem, in the Post?s view? ?The problem with this story, as an official Canadian investigation reported Monday, is that Mr. Arar was innocent.? So it would have been just swell if only he had been, maybe, a little guilty, or at least, still in legal limbo with all the others?

But then the editorial promises to get back on track: ?Mr. Arar's case vividly illustrates a couple of the points that veteran military and diplomatic leaders have been trying to impress on Mr. Bush about the dangers of the CIA program, for which the president is demanding congressional approval.? The points are:

-- Torture usually leads to unreliable information, so more humane methods may work better

-- "Cruel treatment of prisoners, even in secret, eventually becomes known and can badly damage the honor and influence of the United States and its relations with allies. The mistreatment of Mr. Arar has hurt U.S. relations with Canada and could impede cooperation with its police and security services in the future. Other cases of rendition have similarly upset U.S. intelligence relations with Italy, Germany and Sweden.?

In other words: Torture is not clearly wrong on grounds of morality and decency but because it often does not work and can hurt the U.S. ? if it becomes public.

Just to make that clear, the Post concludes, in opposing Bush?s attempt to modify the Geneva guidelines, that the reason to do so is not mainly that torture is wrong under any circumstance but ?the price of his policies is bad intelligence, the criminal mistreatment of some innocent people, and damage to U.S. prestige and alliances that the country can ill afford.?

Note the insertion of the word "innocent" once again. Condemnation of all "criminal mistreatment" of prisoners? Not so much. The high ground was left to Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who concludes his piece today on the same subject with the image of "men who have led us into a moral desert and aren't even looking for a way back home."


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Taking a stronger stand, a Post editorial on Sept. 22 concluded:

"Mr. Bush wanted Congress to formally approve these practices and to declare them consistent with the Geneva Conventions. It will not. But it will not stop him either, if the legislation is passed in the form agreed on yesterday. Mr. Bush will go down in history for his embrace of torture and bear responsibility for the enormous damage that has caused."