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Emily, thank you for your post of last night about
the torture memos. It's much easier to discuss singer-prodigies and puppy adoption
than to think about the fact that the very highest levels of my government authorized—no,
oversaw and urged—torture. The latter
makes me deeply ashamed.
But having my current government release the evidence is a strange kind of relief, sunlight coming out of the clouds. A few weeks
ago, I attended a panel on the the executive response to 9/11. Ann Compton, the
only reporter on Air Force One on 9/11 (after My Pet Goat), moderated Andrew Card, Michael
Chertoff, Douglas Feith, Tim Flanigan, and Ari Fleischer—all of whom had been intimately
involved in the response to the bombings. (John
Yoo was in the audience.) Let me say that
it was agony remembering 9/11, feeling again that scorched and distraught feeling we all had from being attacked. I was awestruck as they told what 9/11 had felt like from the inside—believing
that there were more planes in the air, ready to hit, and not knowing what to
do to prevent more attacks. They told unanimously about being given a single policy directive:
This must never happen again. Stop another attack at any cost. There was no
countervailing interest.
But that scorched feeling inside me quickly worsened into feeling
almost too sick to listen, knowing how that prime directive had forced my
country far off course, away from morality. We were a small audience of
journalists selected for our interest in constitutional law, and so we were soon drilling
them about the constitutionality of their responses. How could the administration
have authorized and implemented torture, indefinite detention, the suspension
of habeas corpus, the destruction not just of the Taliban but of Afghanistan itself
(that last a paraphrase of an Afghani journalist's question)?
My question: How they could have been so certain that anyone they
picked up on the battlefield had to be guilty? Why should citizens be expected
to believe that our government was omniscient, knowing in advance who should never
see daylight again? Chertoff answered that on a battlefield, they would have
been permitted to kill anyone there; where should the line be drawn between what
was permitted in battle and what was permitted to people picked up in battle? Then Flanigan looked directly into my eyes and said, essentially: We were the
lawyers. We did what we were asked to do. If you want to hold someone responsible,
look to the policymakers.
That disavowal took my breath away. (As did the moment Feith looked
straight into the eyes of the Afghani journalist and said: Our goal was to
prevent an another attack on the U.S. We were successful. In other
words, your country = not my problem.) Afterward, law professor Sherilynn
Ifill, who was sitting next to me, said: If I were to convene a truth
commission, Flanigan is the first one I'd call. He's ready to name names.