Charles Kaiser on torture fatigue

Ten days ago, Jan Crawford Greenburg reported on ABC News that in 2002, then–National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice chaired meetings of the NSC Principals Committee at the White House, where they discussed specific torture techniques—meetings that were attended by Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. Two days later, President Bush confirmed that such meetings had taken place in an interview with ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz.

Greenburg said that "Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He argued that, while the tactics were legal, senior advisers should not be involved in the grim details. One top official said Ashcroft asked out loud after one meeting, 'Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.'" (Ponder this for a moment: If this report is correct, it means that John Ashcroft was the closest thing to a moral conscience in the White House during discussions of torture.) Greenburg also said that Rice had told the CIA, "This is your baby. Go do it."

The report that Rice and Powell had attended these meetings—and the fact that Bush had almost instantly confirmed them—was dramatic news, and Keith Olbermann jumped on it on MSNBC. However, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS, and NBC all ignored the story. The Washington Post pretended that it had reported all this back in 2005. In fact, the Post had mentioned three years ago that there were torture discussions at the White House, but that story did not say that Cheney and Rice participated in them. It also said, "State Department officials and military lawyers were intentionally excluded from these deliberations"—even though then–Secretary of State Colin Powell had in fact participated in them. And the Post repeated that mistake in its brief story about the ABC report, which it printed on April 12.

In a classic nondenial denial, Powell told ABC's Greenburg (through a spokesman) that there had been "hundreds of Principal Committee meetings ... and that he could not recall specifics. And even if he could, he was not at liberty to discuss those meetings anyway." Then Powell told ABC's Diane Sawyer that he did not have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings, adding, "I'm not aware of anything that we discussed in any of those meetings that was not considered legal."

Of course, the whole point of these meetings was to find a way to violate the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture in such a way that American torturers would not become vulnerable to future prosecution for violating international law. All of which tends to confirm what Democratic congressman Barney Frank said to me earlier this year when we were discussing Powell's role in crafting the disastrous "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military: "Colin Powell appears to be a man of enormous physical courage," said Frank, "and no moral courage whatsoever."

In response to a query from Full Court Press about the failure of the Times to report that Rice, Cheney, and Powell had participated in these meetings, New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet sent this e-mail:

I should say first off that I'm pretty confident no one has reported the subject of torture and the government's role as aggressively as we have. I think if you take a look at this year's work, as well as the work of past years, you'll see that we've been out front on most of the stories about exactly what the government did.

We thought the ABC and AP stories were good. But it was no surprise that Bush and Cheney, and their deputies, were involved in approving these techniques given that they have been public defenders of them. Additionally, it has been made pretty clear by us and others that David Addington, Cheney's aide, played a key role in shaping the policy. So no surprise that the administration discussed and approved these policies at the highest levels. What the stories didn't have was the debate, who took which stand, whether anyone objected, etc. This continues to be missing, and we are still hoping like hell to nail that and other aspects of this story down.

I tried to find out why the Washington Post downplayed the story—and twice reported incorrectly that no state department official had participated in these meetings—but three e-mails to Leonard Bernstein and Rajiv Chandrasekaran on the Post's national desk did not produce any response.

The only person at the Post who made any effort to get to the bottom of this was washingtonpost.com blogger Dan Froomkin, who pointed out that the Post newspaper had never reported that Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft had participated in these meetings—"[a]nd the earlier article certainly didn't contain any admission by Bush that he had given the principals the go-ahead." But even Froomkin didn't notice the Post's error in leaving Powell out of the meetings as well.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, urged Congress "to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate possible violations by the Bush administration of laws including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws. No one in the executive branch of government can be trusted to fairly investigate or prosecute any crimes since the head of every relevant department, along with the president and vice president, either knew or participated in the planning and approval of illegal acts."

Froomkin pointed out that, unlike the news departments of most newspapers and television networks, the editorial pages of the Kansas City Star, the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had all vigorously endorsed a call from the ACLU for the appointment of a special prosecutor. (Yesterday, April 20, the New York Times also ran an editorial about the ABC story.)

Froomkin also quoted what Anthony Lewis had written in the New York Review of Books: "In these last weeks of turbulent events, the single most significant has not been the financial crisis, not the fall of a governor, not the passing of the fifth year of the war without end in Iraq. It has been an American president's formal blessing of the use of torture."

Apart from those editorial pages, practically everyone else ignored the ACLU's press release. Everyone except the blogosphere—and democracyforamerica.com, which immediately called for Rice's resignation because of her repeated denials to Congress that the United States had engaged in torture—even as she was chairing White House meetings to make torture possible. See the "Condi Must Go" video here—and sign the petition if you agree with it.

-Special thanks to FCP contributors DEK and MP

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.