The Torture Continues

The central assertion of Richard Fernandez's essay is that the liberals - President Obama and Speaker Pelosi - are trapped in a web of lies about the torture scandal. On the one hand, they want to denounce torture and have nothing to do with it. This position is weakened when we find out how early and how thoroughly Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the matter. And so, the Speaker may have fibbed a bit to conceal her apparent complaisance.

On the other hand, they don't really want to concede that torture produced any really useful information, because that would draw too starkly the choice between national ideals and national security. Fernandez may be right to say that they should have faced that choice, and that they should be prepared to explain when it is right to sacrifice a little public safety for the sake of our democratic ideals, and when it is better to give a little more scope to the pursuit of security.

What Fernandez does not say is that the same dilemma faced the Bush administration, and they too funked it. Oh, sure, you can point to the torture memos from the Office of Legal Counsel as exactly the sort of attempt to balance law and security that was needed. But those memos were secret. Those memos were kept very secret, because the administration didn't want to explain its reasoning to the public. Moreover, I suspect, the administration was concerned that the public would reject its reasoning.

Fernandez, by raising the possibility of public debate on such matters, raises yet another dilemma. What if the people's judgement about when it is appropriate to use torture (and polls have shown that, depending upon how the question is asked, a lot of people would approve of such methods) and that of the officials does not coincide? One could contend that the secrecy of renditions, enhanced interrogation techniques, and the paper trails generated by such activities, was driven by the dual fears that the public would either find the methods used to be criminal and unacceptable, and that the public would find them too half-hearted and ineffectively applied.

Given the choice, the Bush administration opted to try to enhance our security at the cost of the Constitution it is our purpose to defend. It may have damaged the Constitution without enhancing our security, or any gains in security may have been so marginal as not to matter. The Obama administration is trying to take a public position on how these things have been done up to now, and to take a clear stand against certain practices, while keeping a few of them available, just in case that choice between security and liberty raises its head again.