So Philip Gourevitch Can See the Torture Photos, But We Can’t?
By Matthew Rothschild, May 24, 2009
There’s nothing like the elitism of the elite media.
In the Sunday Times Week in Review section, Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, defends Barack Obama’s decision not to release the torture photos.
In the process, he reveals that he himself has seen some of the photos.
“I saw many more pictures than were ever published in the press, including, I believe, many—if not most—of the photos that president would now prefer that you don’t see,” he writes.
He can see them, but we can’t.
He then congratulates himself for not including the photos in the book he wrote about Abu Ghraib on the debatable grounds that “most of the worst things that happened at Abu Graib were never photographed.”
He parrots Obama’s line that release of the photos would “enflame America’s enemies and endanger troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.” But all he musters by way of argument is, “There’s no doubt about it: The policies that the photographs depict have already done terrible damage to America’s cause.”
What’s the logic of that? No one in the press should have published the Abu Ghraib photos?
Besides, if Obama came clean, released the photos, apologized to the world, and then vowed to prosecute not only the torturers but those at the top—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and the lawyers who wrote those memos at the Justice Department—then it’s quite possible that the release of the photos would do more good than harm.
But Gourevitch insists that “releasing additional photographs would not be telling us anything that we don’t already know.”
I’m not sure about that, either.
Cheney just gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where he heaped praise on the U.S. interrogators. If even one picture showed a U.S. interrogator doing a hideous thing to a detainee, Cheney’s position would be severely undermined.
And since Cheney is Torquemada right now and his popularity is perversely rising, it would be good to have the photos out just to steer us away from his neo-fascist dungeon.
Oddly, Gourevitch wants to focus attention, he says, on those “at the top of the civilian chain of command in Washington.”
Releasing the photos would do just that.
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Comments
What happened at Gitmo is out of the box.
How we mistreated prisoners is out of the box.
As long as Gitmo is open it will be a recruiting tool for those who hate America.
This is what a senior interrogator in Iraq (and a former criminal investigator) said under oath to Congress recently
"there was a lesson I learned that served me well: there's more to be learned from what someone doesn't say than from what they do say. Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.
First, VP Cheney said, "This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately... it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do." He further stated, "It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so." That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.
Secondly, the former vice president, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle's Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term "injure" -- no mention of severe mental or physical pain.
Thirdly, the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We'll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president's speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded.
In addition, in his continued defense of harsh interrogation techniques (aka torture and abuse), VP Cheney forgets that harsh techniques have ensured that
future detainees will be less likely to cooperate because they see us as hypocrites."
In order to protect our troops we need to take away this recruiting tool by fully disclosing what we have done and prosecuting those who are responsible.
(And I don't mean low level GI's and CIA agents who were following orders)