When the Prisoners Start Policing the Wardens

I know that we’ve had a bevy of posts on torture and the torture memos of late, but on the estimable Fox News this past Sunday, former head of the CIA Michael Hayden has this interesting bit to say about the Obama administration’s decision to release the memos outlining interrogation techniques used against enemy combatants and what may or may not constitute torture, which caught my ear:

There’s another point, too, that I have to make. And it’s just not the tactical effect of this technique or that. It’s the broader effect on CIA officers.

I mean, if you’re a current CIA officer today — in fact, I know this has happened at the agency after the release of these documents. Officers are saying, “The things I’m doing now — will this happen to me in five year because of the things I am doing now?”

And the answer they’ve been given by senior leadership is the only answer possible, which is, “I can’t guarantee you that won’t happen, but I do know it won’t happen under this president.”

Now, think what that means. The basic foundation of the legitimacy of the agency’s action has shifted from some durability of law to a product of the American political process. That puts agency officers in a horrible position.

So I think the really dangerous effect of this, Chris, is that you will have agency officers stepping back from the kinds of things that the nation expects them to do. I mean, if you were to go to an agency officer today and say, “Go do this,” and, “Why am I authorized to do this?”

And I say, “Well, it’s authorized by the president. The attorney general says it’s lawful. And it’s been briefed to Congress.” That agency officer’s going to say, “Yeah, I know, but I see what’s going on here now. Have you run it by the ACLU? What’s the New York Times editorial board think? Have you discussed this with any potential presidential candidates?”

You’re going to have this agency on the front line of defending you in this current war playing back from the line.

I understand where Hayden is coming from with these remarks, but my inevitable response is: listen, if there is anyone I want critically evaluating the implications of their actions, it’s CIA agents.

Americans often puff their chest and speak loudly about being the freest nation on the planet and I generally don’t disagree with that estimation, at least on a gross level of analysis. But one would be remiss in failing to acknowledge that there are a myriad of subtle, and in some senses not so subtle, ways in which the bureaucratic technocracy of our modern nation-states undermines our freedom (small “f”) while still reinforcing and protecting our Freedom (big ‘f”). The degree to which said technocracy spells out and cultivates an intuitive deference to symbols and centres of authority in our social hierarchy is surprisingly (perhaps not so) ubiquitous.

It is in calling out and challenging these vortexes of power when they extend beyond the acceptable limits of their scope that freedom-fighters from both the liberal and conservative persuasions are at their best. But all too often, the omnipresence of bureaucratic dominance has filtered into our every day lives in such a fashion as to dull the edges of those ideological scythes to a frightening degree. It is this ingrain, institutional, and knee-jerk deference to authority that I can’t help see running throughout every argument that Hayden trots out on this front.

My purposes in bringing this up is to note again how challenging it can be to cultivate a truly critical and independent analysis and thought process around the mundane, let alone questions about the legality of your actions in interrogating someone you have detained. I’m disinclined to judge those lower-level agents too harshly in terms of their actions and think that the focus being trained on those who made the decisions to order those actions be undertaken and those who provided the legal analysis to justify those actions is properly placed. That said; however, isn’t the line between what constitutes legitimate interrogation methods and what constitutes torture something that anyone engaged in the process under question ought to think about pretty carefully and thoroughly?

The proposed outcome of Hayden’s comments is that by releasing these memos, the Obama administration irreparably damages the ability of a vital entity that performs important, if not difficult, tasks in service of the country by poisoning the chain of command. Now I follow how this line of logic operates when one is talking about, say, soldiers in the Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines and the necessity of preserving the chain of commend so as to carry out life and death decisions on a moment’s notice. But the situations faced by CIA agents in interrogating prisoners of war simply don’t follow the same dynamics in even the slightest regard. The further implication is that agents of the CIA ought to be able to trust the orders and directives given to them by their superiors and the decision to release these documents not only inappropriately calls that trust into question, but submits the kind of background consideration in which those superiors must engage in order to be confident about their proposed orders/directives.

The fact of the matter is, though, that by all accounts the superiors giving those orders/directives hadn’t really engaged in the kind of thorough analysis one would expect when the question at hand is something as serious and odious as torture, so the agents in question would have had every right and, indeed, by some lights an obligation to critically examine the orders they were being given. And frankly, if running the orders/directives one proposes to give against the potential perception of the public at a future point in time and as well-founded and authoritative on a set of issues key to the foundations of your country as the ACLU seem like burdensome hurdles to clear before giving those orders/directives, then perhaps you ought to think twice about your fitness to give said orders/directives.

But hey, don’t take my word for it, examine the issue from the perspective of someone tasked with considering the situation from a plethora of vantage points, weighing the implications against the good of the nation. Take it from Geroge W. Bush,

War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”

Indeed, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

I mean, we all like to think that we’d have the moral fortitude to refuse to engage in certain acitivities regardless of who was doing the asking, but the ubiquity of authority and power in our byzantine technocracies often determines otherwise. Contra Hayden, I can’t help but think that this particular chapter in American history demonstrates the desperate need for a heightened commitment to the values of skepticism and critical analysis towards the voices of power and authority, especially when evidence demonstrates that those Orwellian shadows are fast asleep at the ethical wheel.

Tagged as: aclu, authority, beuraucracy, critical analysis, George W. Bush, Michael Hayden, power, technocracy, torture memos