The torture memos - a lot of debate and disagreement in the cabinet about wisdom of releasing them - certainly seems like a big and unnecessary risk, which says to me the main motivation was political - which makes it a bad decision as far as I'm concerned no matter what happens now. As I've said before I find arguments that think the US must make amends for 'bad behaviour' in order to improve 'standing' in the world to be simplistic, specious, unconvincing - and yet there's really no other non-politically motivated justification for parading the memos in front of the masses. Gates supported release against some deep concerns, but apparently only because he thought release inevitable - can't say as I understand that position. Panetta opposed - haven't read anything about what Clinton and Jones thought, but would have to assume from things they've said in the past that they wouldn't be thrilled by the idea.
As for torture and Bush's policies thereof - well, it's a no win situation for the US to be engaging in torture: no evidence that it's an effective way to garner reliable info and so you needlessly put yourself in a position of having to defend something that can't be defended which leaves you looking like an enfeebled hypocrite. That being said, I assume forms of torture - strong persuasion let's call it - have always existed within the security apparatus of powerful countries - the stakes are just too high for that not to be the case - although I guess one could say that if that were the case why did Bush's legal team spend so much effort trying to justify it? Don't know - but regardless, I find all this shaming of the Bush administration and by association the country over 'torture' to be over wrought, naive and bit self serving. Armies throughout history, 'good' and 'bad' ones, have engaged in torture-like activities - there are numerous accounts of the Allies mistreating German prisoners in WWI and II - not to mention what the US did to the Mexicans and Indians and Indonesians in their various 'colonial' wars - and so to act as if it's not in the American character etc etc is just nonsense. What's more, I don't really consider what the CIA was doing to be torture - extreme discomfort is not to me torture - not to suggest it's right - but to me breaking bones, teeth, testicles and any number of other forms of bestial violence one person can impose on another, that's torture - drawing and quartering, that's torture - although, granted, philosophically I may be treading a thin line here. Furthermore, all this talk about how if we engage in harsh tactics our enemies will use that as justification to do the same is a load of horse shit: our enemies are going to behave badly no matter what - just because they may use Bush's foolishness as an excuse to do bad things doesn't at all mean that Bush's foolishness will have caused the bad things to happen - a fallacious argument. Stalin didn't need an excuse to torture his enemies - bad behaviour was a natural extension of his world view.
Torture, at least in an institutionalized form , is not natural to our Western view, to the evolved norms of our civil and open society. Brutality is always a possibility and therefore inevitable, especially given extreme circumstances - but a free people, governed by laws that seek a true justice, will always push back against it - and that's the best we can expect from ourselves. Were the memos released to affirm that? I doubt it - in fact they could have the exact opposite effect by clouding the view with pointless pandering to the ideological extremes of both parties which in turn may foment an unwelcome momentum towards a judicial review that will sow discontent and in the end amount to nothing more than a 'show trail'.
As for why the Bush administration went down the slippery slope of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - well, the simple answer is that Cheney and his partisans ran that White House and 9/11 unloosed in them a very conservative paranoia concerning the beginning of the end of American power - my guess is that they pursued this 'quasi torture' not because of a firm faith in the efficacy of it but rather because to not pursue it would have been to betray a weakness, to evince a softness that conservatives, not without some justification, have always feared was immanent in democracy and freedom - and liberals. Just think Edmund Burke.
