Why torture issue hasn’t had political traction

WASHINGTON - Why have the allegations of torture and abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base and in Afghanistan not damaged the Bush administration in purely political terms more than they have?

The torture charges fueled Democrats’ efforts to defeat President Bush’s nomination of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.

Citing a now-famous Aug. 1, 2002, memo solicited by Gonzales and written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Democratic senators accused Gonzales of “creating a permissive atmosphere” that led American soldiers to abuse prisoners.

But the Senate voted to confirm Gonzales after Democrats decided that the torture issue was not worth a filibuster.

On Tuesday, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were again lingering phantoms as the Senate voted  to approve former Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge, to be homeland security secretary.

Chertoff and interrogation
Like Gonzales, Chertoff won confirmation despite Democratic senators’ questions about what he might have known about abusive interrogation methods during his 2001-2003 stint as chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

According to Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., one recently released FBI document shows that agents “strenuously objected” to the Defense Department’s interrogation methods at Guantanamo and raised concerns “as early as fall 2002, before the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.”

Levin said FBI agents voiced their worries about interrogation techniques to Justice Department officials, including senior officials in Chertoff’s Criminal Division.

When Levin asked Chertoff about this at his nomination hearing, he could not recall such discussions. Levin said the Bush administration had stymied attempts to get more information on Chertoff’s role.

But it isn’t just administration secrecy that explains why Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo haven’t helped the Democrats politically. Some Democrats say torture may in some cases be necessary, although no Democrat has claimed that the depravity in the Abu Ghraib photos was one of those cases.

Torture sometimes justified?
Last June, in the immediate aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee, “If we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believed that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most senators, maybe all, would say, ‘Do what you have to do.’”

Schumer added, “It's easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you're in the foxhole, it's a very different deal.”

During last year’s presidential campaign Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry and his advisers apparently decided that criticizing Bush on the torture/abuse issue would not be a winning strategy.

Kerry did say in May that if he were president, “I would personally have been concerned long ago about the reports (of detainee mistreatment) that were coming out from the Red Cross and from elsewhere.” But he never raised the issue of Abu Ghraib during his three debates with Bush, nor did Kerry’s ads focus on the issue.

In August Kerry found himself under fire from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for his 1971 Senate testimony in which he’d endorsed allegations that U.S. soldiers had committed atrocities in Vietnam.

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