Important Pundit number 2,435 has decided to come forward and take a brave stand against the prosecution of officials who authorized the torture of detainees. This time it is Thomas Friedman, and as usual none of the other 2,434 Important Pundits is as good at accidentally making the case for the other side as Thomas Friedman.
Friedman first tries to show us that he Understands the Gravity of the Events which cause some people to want prosecutions.
After all, we’re not just talking about "enhanced interrogations." Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.
(Friedman's italics.)
Look, we know that our people killed detainees, Tom. And we know that the deaths are directly attributable to policies cooked up, encouraged, justified, and signed-off on in the White House. You didn't need to invoke Lawrence Wilkerson to establish that.
But, funny thing, since you did invoke Wilkerson, I think I will too. This is from a March 17 guest post by Lawrence Wilkerson at The Washington Note that I guess Friedman never got around to reading or at least never got around to relating to his audience:
The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
What Wilkerson says here kind of takes some of the bite out of Friedman's reasons for avoiding prosecutions. Friedman's reasons are all about how awful Al Qaeda is. Neat. How many of the dead 100 detainees were Al Qaeda? How many were 100% innocent?
I mean, Mr. Friedman, if you're the kind of person who thinks it matters to the justification of torture whether a person is guilty of planning some act, however hazily, then it ought to be of interest to you to know that so many of the people the U.S. was holding were known to be likely to have planned nothing at all. That is, as I say, if this sort of things matters.
To me it doesn't matter whether a person knows anything. I don't think (absent a ticking time bomb, in which case an interrogator should break the law, commit assault on the suspect, and hope for a reasonable jury) torture should go unpunished. Apparently Mr. Friedman also does not think it matters whether a torture victim is even suspected of knowing anything, but for the opposite reason: perhaps he does not think torture should be punished in either case.
Friedman writes:
Al Qaeda was undeterred by normal means. Al Qaeda’s weapon of choice was suicide. Al Qaeda operatives were ready to kill themselves — as they did on 9/11, and before that against U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen — long before we could ever threaten to kill them. We could deter the Russians because they loved their children more than they hated us; they did not want to die. The Al Qaeda operatives hated us more than they loved their own children. They glorified martyrdom and left families behind.
Yes, yes, yes; awful ,awful, awful. Let me repeat something:
The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
Actually, Friedman states two reasons why it would be a mistake to prosecute White House officials for authorizing torture. One, as quoted up top, is that the group of which so many detainees were never members in the first place was really scary. The other is "because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart . . ."
Ah, it would "rip our country apart." So says Friedman and the other 2,434 or so Important Pundits. Now let me quote something else that Friedman's go-to guy Wilkerson said:
The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.
Wilkerson notes that this is "largely unreported." It is entirely unreported by Thomas Friedman and those other 2,434 or so pundits. All they can report is their own firm conviction that the officials Wilkerson describes must not be prosecuted because Al Qaeda is scary and prosecutions would rip our country apart.
To quote Friedman, "look." Look, I am not sure that I have ever seen such intellectual and moral cowardice on such blatant display as on the national stage of late, from our Very Important Pundits.
Update 04/29/09 10:11 PM by LithiumCola: Link Fixed.
Update 04/29/09 11:02 PM by LithiumCola: bebacker in the comments convinced me that the struck-through passage was a mistake. See comments for discussion.