Romney Advisers: Bring Torture Back


Mitt Romney’s national security advisers have quietly urged him to reverse President Barack Obama’s 2009 executive order that outlawed the use of interrogation techniques that amounted to torture, according to a 2011 policy memo obtained by Charlie Savage of the New York Times.

The memo, which contains a number of factual errors and misleading statements, lays out two courses for a President Romney: Either immediately promise to rescind Obama’s executive order upon taking office, or initiate a “comprehensive review” of interrogation policy that ends with Romney rescinding Obama’s executive order. Though the outcome of the “review” is never in doubt, the memo states that the latter policy will make Romney appear “open-minded and empirically driven.” The memo does not appear to have a single author, but Savage reports that it was the product of an 18-person policy committee packed with Bush administration lawyers. 

Strangely, the memo is somewhat agnostic in its belief about whether or not the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually work. “It is difficult to settle the question definitively,” the memo states, adding later that “it is difficult to argue conclusively that enhanced interrogation techniques would have generated more information than the techniques in the Army Field Manual; we simply don’t know what we don’t know.” Contrast that with the blanket assertions from conservatives that abandoning torture left the US vulnerable to terrorist attacks

Beyond these qualifications, the memo lays out an extraordinarily weak case for “enhanced interrogation,” with some basic factual errors. Namely:

  • It credits the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed for disrupting the so-called “Second Wave,” a plot to crash another airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. The only problem is the Bush administration publicly took credit for foiling that plot in 2002, and KSM was captured in 2003. Oops!
  • The memo states that waterboarding detainee Abu Zubayda led to the identification of KSM as the architect of the 9/11 attacks. But former FBI Agent Ali Soufan has said that he extracted that information from Zubayda before he was waterboarded
  • The memo claims that former Obama administration CIA Director Leon Panetta “confirmed” that “waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques helped extract ‘useful information'” that lead to the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Only that’s not exactly what Panetta said: In the letter referred to in the memo, Panetta states that some detainees who “had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques” had provided “useful information.” That’s not the same as saying they provided the information while being tortured. More importantly, in the same letter, Panetta notes that detainees like KSM, who had been subject to the harshest techniques, still lied to interrogators about the identity of the courier who eventually lead the US government to Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

The last four years are a trail of broken promises on civil liberties, from warrantless surveillance to indefinite detention. However, one of President Obama’s most uncompromising accomplishments was banning torture through executive order on his first day in office. Still, the administration’s use of the state secrets doctrine to shield both the legal architects and corporate enablers of the Bush torture program, and its refusal to prosecute those who went beyond the “legal” torture sanctioned by the Justice Department have left open the possibility that torture could again become US policy. A future president could simply reverse Obama’s executive order and bring back Bush-era coercive interrogation techniques, which is exactly what the Romney memo proposes to do. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate