More About That Frontline

Its a couple days later now and I am still buzzing about that episode of Frontline I watched the other night. One of the things that has stuck in my head above all others was the story of one of the early "reditions" from Afghanistan.

A rendition is where the CIA takes someone captured off the battlefield and then moves them to a place of unknown disclosure for questioning. I'm not saying its just we who don't know, the person being moved doesn't know; and I'm not talking about around town, I mean across the globe. Many of these journeys have ended for prisoners in Cuba, but this particular story was about someone from before we had really set up there (although I did think I understood from what was presented that the detainee base in Cuba was on the board prior to our even going to battle - I hadn't known that).

This story was about someone captured during at Tora Bora, I think it was operation anaconda. It was the time that listening now you can be fairly certain that we knew where Bin Laden was, but made an insufficient troop deployment to get the capture. People rage on and on about this incident, about how if we had been focused on Afghanistan instead of already leaning toward Iraq that we would have captured or killed him there. I am not sure if I believe that. We can't secure the border between Arizona and Mexico. I think that trying to secure the terrain between Afghanistan and Pakistan may just be asking too much, of anyone, with any amount of resources.

Anyway, Bin Laden, injured, slips into Pakistan and leaves some number two level guy in charge and he is eventually captured. He is pulled aside from other captives and is subject to a rendition to Egypt. In the episode they say:

He was sent to Egypt to be tortured, everyone who had ever worked on Egypt knew he would be tortured.

This really bugs me. On the one hand, it bothers me because we're the good guys and we're not supposed to do that sort of thing. But, ok, we're at war, new kind of war, whatever, President authorizes, blah blah blah. Fine. Except, over and over again people have been in front of the public to say we don't torture people and we don't send people into the custody of other countries to be tortured.

Why is it necessary to lie to us? Why not just refuse to answer on the grounds of national security. There's some word parsing game going on here I am sure... "We transferred those prisoners because of an overcapacity problem in our holding areas, that they would be tortured was never our intent" or something, fits the denial. Its sick.

If you are going to be an international hard ass, then you should really own up to being an international hard ass. "We're doing what we believe is necessary within the limits as set by the President in time of war." Likely the press won't let you stand on that, but we're all adept at spin these days. There's plenty that could be said without issuing a flat denial of something we actually were doing. In fact, I think it would actually help perception of prisoner treatment in our own facilities if people would know that we had to go to someone else for mistreatment. As is, I am much more likely to believe that this sort of tragedy is happening in our own facilities.

Eventually intelligence yielded from the torture investigation of this individual yielded the link between Al Queda and Iraq that the administration wanted. He was the one that asserted that Saddam had offered chemical weapons training to Al Queda operatives. And of course, he later recanted - after the administration used that item to help bulldoze their path into Iraq.

What was it that Picard said we had learned about torture by the 24th century? That it had never been a reliable means for gaining of information. When Harry Callahan stood on Scorpio's wounded leg on the 50 yard line the girl was already dead. I wonder just how useful this sort of thing really is. And, if it actually is useful, and we actually are doing it, then I think we should be up front about what we are doing and do the "ends justify the means" thing - talk about all the lives that have been saved. Justify it and defend it rather than do it and deny it.

Problem there is likely that nobody can really make a good case to justify it right? And that it leaves our own troops subject to the same treatment if captured in the future. But does simply denying it protect them from it if in the end it is an open secret that we did it? And really, when people from our side are just as likely to be murdered as prisoners rather than held, does it matter? Hard questions. But if we truly are at war, these are the sort of things we ought to be sorting through aren't they?

I am sorting through them, and all I did was watch a TV show.