Obama was right to limit access to torture photos

Many concerned and decent Americans were disappointed when President Barack Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparent, accountable government, seemingly reversed himself by refusing to release several hundred more photos of detainees being abused and in some cases tortured by agents of the Bush-Cheney “enhanced interrogation� policy. Now that some 60 new photographs have been “leaked� into cyberspace, and more are on the way, one might ask just how relevant the president’s decision is anyway. But it is, and here’s why.

In refusing to release more photos, President Obama seemed to invoke the same Bush-Cheney mantra of “national security,� but in fact Obama has a quite different meaning underlying his decision. For Bush and Cheney, the main purpose of secrecy was to conceal from the “evil-doers� what we had learned about their terrorist networks, methods and future plans of action, and what agencies and techniques, including torture, we were using to obtain that information critical to our national security.

By contrast, for President Obama the purpose of limiting public access to more photographs of abuse, sometimes amounting to torture, is not to further acerbate the ongoing landslide of new recruits to al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiya and other extremist militant groups, whose hatred of America has been fueled by Bush-Cheney torture policies in recent years, and thus pose a real threat to Americans at home and abroad, most especially to U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is “national security� in a sense quite different from the Bush-Cheney pretext.

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Most of the several hundred new photos are “mundane� in the sense that you have seen their likes before, and these are more of the same. So said the president. However, what changed Barack Obama’s mind when he saw them (and what changed mine) was not only the sheer volume of photos, but also the inclusion of a number of peculiarly vulgar pictures (not yet released or “leaked�) of Muslim men being forced to masturbate in public and to “corn-hole� each other while being photographed.

This is something captured U.S. servicemen, such as John McCain, never had to face in the hands of Koreans or Vietnamese, and certainly not in the hands of Muslims where such sexual perversion is absolutely an anathema in the eyes of Islam. It should be in the eyes of Christianity as well.

Yet these interrogation “techniques� have been studiously researched, developed and tested by the United States over a number of years, using your and my taxpayer money for the purpose. (For the most authoritative, intensive and detailed investigation and reporting on this subject, see “A Question of Torture,� (Barnes & Noble, 310 pages, 2006, rev. 2009) by my cousin, Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

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As students and experts in this field will tell you, in breaking down, abusing and torturing prisoners, the idea is not merely to identify the most effective specific “techniques� to apply, but also to set up the most depraved conditions where the techniques are applied. There are virtual protocols or profiles for selecting “lowlifes� to do some of the softening up, before the real professionals get to work. The average person just can’t do this kind of work. All they need is the sense that whatever they do is sanctioned from above. Meanwhile, the higher you go up the chain of command, the more senior officials can distance themselves from the reality they have sponsored, and the more they can work on the semantics needed for exculpation if they get caught.

Fortunately for America, some very good prosecutors have obtained all the photographs they can possibly need for conviction. So, whether President Obama releases the photographs or not, the verdict of history is clear, and hopefully will be equally so in the courts of law. This is a problem that is not going to go away. Some of the future defendants are already making the lecture circuit to build their defense. Fine. There’s one good thing about our country: We give them their fair say in court.

Sharon resident Anthony Piel is a former director and legal counsel of the World Health Organization.