Multiple Authors
Terror and Torture (4 Letters)
To the Editor:
I am grateful to the Book Review for according such space and prominence to the review of my book ”Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,” and to Andrew Sullivan for the seriousness with which he treats the issue of torture. I wonder if I might make two comments.
First, Sullivan several times refers to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, which include reports by F.B.I. officials who witnessed torture of detainees at Guantánamo, some of it months after the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public. He notes, rightly, that these are ”not provided in Danner’s compilation,” but neglects to add that this is so because the documents were not released until two months after the book was published. Readers will find a link to the A.C.L.U. documents, which are part of a river of evidence that can be expected to grow in volume and force during the next few years, at my Web site, markdanner.com.
Second, Sullivan, after solemnly regretting how ”political polarization” might have contributed to the relative silence that has greeted the American turn toward torture, makes the observation that ”most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents — like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh — were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas.”
For my part — Hersh is well able to speak for himself — the first half of this statement is quite true. I thought invading and occupying Iraq a foolish and self-defeating step for my country to take and I said so, publicly and repeatedly. Simply put, I believed that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States was greatly exaggerated, and that the risks of invading and occupying that country were greatly understated. If these arguments constitute an ”agenda,” events have sadly proved both of them true, with no help from me.
But if there is any evidence, beyond Sullivan’s imputation of motive to me, that I was ”eager to use this scandal to promote” my agenda — that is, to discredit the war — he does not offer it. In the thousands of words he writes I can find no criticism of bias, no fingerpointing at any exaggeration in the text or at any error of fact. Indeed, since Sullivan spends most of his review essentially restating as his own arguments I make in the book, one cannot escape the implication that when I write about torture and related issues it must be in order to discredit the war but when Sullivan writes about them he is simply performing a brave act of conscience. If there is an agenda being promoted here, it is a transparently self-serving one, and it is a pity Sullivan let it mar an otherwise eloquent essay.
I have been reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses for more than two decades, in Central America, Haiti and the Balkans, among other places. In some of those places, such as the Balkans, I believed that the United States should intervene; in others, such as Iraq, I believed that it should not. But I did not use massacres in Bosnia to promote my ”agenda” any more than I did torture in Iraq.
As I hope I made clear in my book, I believe that the damage the United States is doing to itself by torturing prisoners transcends the Iraq war, and that the consequences will long outlive it. On this critical point Sullivan and I appear to agree.
MARK DANNER
New York
To the Editor:
Andrew Sullivan’s powerful review of two books on torture (Jan. 23) makes clear the extent of responsibility for violations of the Geneva Convention and basic human rights. His admission that those like himself who supported the war for humanitarian reasons must share some of the blame is courageous. In this context it is worth remembering Randolph Bourne’s devastating reply to intellectuals who, won over by Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric, supported American entry into World War I. In the illusory hope of promoting their own ”liberal purposes,” Bourne wrote, intellectuals had allied themselves with ”the least democratic forces in American life.” Those forces, not the humanitarian intellectuals, he predicted, would determine the war’s conduct and consequences. Bourne’s warning was vindicated when the Wilson administration unleashed the greatest assault on civil liberties in American history. The lesson — that the character of those who hold power determines how a war is conducted — remains valid today.
ERIC FONER
New York
To the Editor:
Andrew Sullivan’s assertion that those who are ”most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences” requires that those supporting the war join him in dissociating themselves from the context in which dramatic and severe attempts to obtain protective information for our troops and citizens were judged, correctly, as necessary. When suicide bombings and violent beheadings are in process, the need to operate with force to prevent, whenever possible, more loss of troops seems not only understandable but imperative.
HENRY J. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
Cambridge, Mass.
To the Editor:
In his review of ”Torture” (Jan. 23), a compilation of essays edited by Sanford Levinson, Robert D. Kaplan correctly quotes my argument ”against all forms of torture without accountability,” but I fear some readers will misinterpret what he writes and conclude that my ”torture warrant” proposal ”would leave the interrogators with all of the legal and moral blame.” I said exactly the opposite. My proposal would shift responsibility from the low-level interrogators to the president or another very high-ranking official who would have to sign the warrant. As I wrote about Abu Ghraib: ”If a warrant requirement of some kind had been in place, the low-ranking officers on the ground could not plausibly claim that they had been subtly (or secretly) authorized to do what they did, since the only acceptable form of authorization would be in writing. Nor could the high-ranking officials hide behind plausible deniability, since they would have been required to give the explicit authorization.”
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
Cambridge, Mass.
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