Alex Gibney on the US Justice Dept. secret memo

The parsing of words is important here. The Bush Administration has consistently maintained that "we do not torture." The reason is political. Even the Bush Administration's most fanatical followers do not like the idea of endorsing "torture," because it is a word that no one wants to be associated with.

Yet Vice President Cheney's office has developed an affection for harsh interrogation techniques - some, like waterboarding, which are as old as the Spanish Inquisition - that the international community, military lawyers and most American legal scholars define as "torture" and as illegal under the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act, which is an American Statute.

What's an administration to do when it wants to torture prisoners but doesn't want to face the political blowback of being publicly associated with torture? The answer: produce secret documents that redefine the term.

Some of this has been chronicled before in newspaper accounts and in my film, "Taxi to the Dark Side." In the film, former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora says that he spoke to John Yoo (as part of the Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo wrote the infamous "Torture Memo," in which "torture" is redefined only as an act in which an interrogator intentionally causes pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") who told him that the President had the legal right to order torture. In another conversation in the film, Yoo notes that "crushing a child's testicles" could also be a permissable activity if ordered by the president.

Together, men like Yoo, Vice President Dick Cheney, his key advisor, David Addington and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales all believed that torture could become US policy provided that it was redefined and provided that the President of the United States determined - in his role as Commander-in-Chief - that torture was necessary in order to defend the nation.

But what is new about the latest documents revealed in the New York Times is that they chronicle an extraordinary and determined effort to secretly subvert ongoing attempts by Administration lawyers, the Congress and the Supreme Court to assert the rule of law by maintaining the longstanding ban on torture. Equally appalling, the article reveals that even while key members of the Bush Administration were fighting for the right to torture, the administration publicly declared its opposition to torture so that Alberto Gonzales (who had been a key player in the the Bush Administration's "torture initiative") could be confirmed as the Attorney General of the United States.

The question that always haunts me in this story is "why"? Why were Cheney, Yoo, Addington, Gonzales Rumsfeld et al. so determined to pursue torture (provided the term was redefined) as a matter of policy? Most veteran interrogators agree that there are other legal and more effective means by which interrogators can obtain crucial information from terrorist suspects. Further, most experienced interrogators also know that "harsh techniques" can lead to false information because prisoners will tell interrogators what they want to hear in order to make the pain stop. (Indeed, many of the techniques favored by Cheney et al - forced standing, temperature manipulation, stress positions, waterboarding - were used by the KGB, precisely in order to obtain false confessions!)

This is also not a political issue in the crudest sense of the term. Many of the most heroic figures in this story - men who have tried to halt the forced march to torture - are dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republicans. But unlike the Cheney cabal they have a belief in the rule of law and in fundamental American principles about the rights of man that can be traced back to the Magna Carta.

Then why? Why this obsession with the right to torture?

The only conclusion that I can draw is that these architects and draftsmen of the torture memos are fanatics and/or political sycophants who, because they were weak or unhinged after 9/11, have come to believe that a policy of cruelty will protect us against a terrorist threat. Like all fanatics, they believe that because their motives are pure, their actions are justified. They seem to believe that we can only preserve the rule of law by undermining it. That's the kind of logic that Osama Bin Laden would endorse, precisely because the goal of the terrorist is to provoke liberal democracies to descend into tyranny.

I made my film in the hope that viewers will feel the kind of outrage that will compel them - like the courageous few military men and lawyers who fought the Bush policies on this issue - to demand that the United States recapture the moral authority that these few fanatics have undermined. Some important steps would be to shut down Guantanamo, repeal the laws that continue to enable torture and cruelty, and to demand justice (and punishment, if they are found guilty) for those accused of terrorism. An equally important step, in my view, would be to use the very rule of law that these fanatics have diminished to judge whether they are guilty of crimes against humanity.

Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first all of the national institutions of its own people. - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now. - Henry Miller

Deep, deep, and still deeper we must go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where the endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair and the blackness of the shaft. - Herman Melville

We also have to work through...the dark side... it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. - Dick Cheney, speaking on "Meet the Press," a few days after 9/11