Torture is a Crime, Not a "Daring Proposal"

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, America's most prestigious private organization commonly believed to represent the foerign policy establishment, has waded into the torture debate. He says:

The issue is whether those who argued that such techniques were not illegal -- and therefore should be available -- ought to be tried. They should not. To begin with, prosecution of Justice Department officials would have a chilling effect on future U.S. government officials. Few would be brave or foolhardy enough to put forward daring proposals that one day could be judged illegal. Putting things down in writing is a useful intellectual exercise that is also central to good decision-making. With the threat of prosecution, serious memos on controversial matters will increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. Prosecution would also set a terrible precedent. One would have thought today's politics sufficiently partisan and poisonous without adding legal threats to the mix. Even knowing this was a possibility would discourage people from entering government in the first place.

This sounds reasonable but is in fact outrageous. It has become clear that Bush Administration political appointees in the Department of Justice and in the White House prepared, endorsed and accepted policy recommendations that authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are now regarded as internationally criminal prosecutable torture by a preponderant number of legal authorities and observers in the U.S. as well as in the governments of our allies. The hair-splitting and rhetorical convolutions in which the DOJ Bush lawyers engaged, as shown by publicly disclosed documents, suggest that they were aware of the potential that violations of law could be involved. For Mr. Haass to describe the endorsement and recommendation of potentially illegal acts as "a useful intellectual exercise that is...central to good decision-making" would be an ironic though understandable statement if the government were an authoritarian regime, but not if the government is democratic and bases its laws on the enforceability of human rights guaranteed by its own Constitution.

This has nothing to do with "partisan and poisonous politics." It has to do with whether the United States will or will not respect the rule of law and the international conventions it has endorsed which condemn torture. This is not an issue which can be decided as a matter of what is convenient for the careers of policy advisors. It is a question of fundamental values. Mr. Haass seems to have had difficulty noticing that.