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.