Precious Truths

The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has decided to charge Jose Padilla with lesser crimes than those of which he has been publicly accused (that is, planning to set off a "dirty bomb," to blow up apartment buildings with gas lines) because it was "unwilling to allow testimony from two senior members of Al Qaeda who had been subjected to harsh questioning."

For "harsh questioning" we should read, of course,"torture." And there is good reason why the courts do not accept as evidence testimony elicited by torture: it is notoriously unreliable. When one is being tortured, one will say almost anything to make the torture stop -- often whatever one thinks one's interrogators want to hear.

One of the "senior members of Al Qaeda" is reportedly Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, "believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." Mohammed is being held at a "black site" somewhere -- another kind of undisclosed location. Why undisclosed? "The better to give you the third degree, my dear!"

The Times report continues: "One review, completed in spring 2004 by the C.I.A. inspector general, found that Mr. Mohammed had been subjected to excessive use of a technique involving near drowning in the first months after his capture . . . . Another review, completed in April 2003 by American intelligence agencies shortly after Mr. Mohammed's capture, assessed the quality of his information from initial questioning as 'Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies.'"

What a poetic way of putting it! Yes indeed, torture does bring out the Shakespeare in some people. The all-too-prosaic question the courts must ask, however, is the following: How does one know for sure, of the utterances gasped out during the waterboarding session, which are truths and which falsehoods? How to tell the VIP from his bodyguards?

Yet Mr. Cheney persists in defending torture as a necessary tactic in the War on Terror. We must not "tie the hands" of our Commander in Chief by prohibiting him from tying the hands of others -- this preparatory, of course, to kicking the living bejeezus out of them. If you oppose torture (as, for example, torture victim John McCain does), Mr. Cheney has a question for you: "Why do you hate Freedom?"

Let's call this what it is. It is not intelligence gathering. It is terrorism, pure and simple. We counter terror with terror. Why? Because such hardboiled tactics are what Bush's handlers think will play best in the heartland, will please a majority of voters. No better example of politics trumping moral principle than this.