October 18, 2007
Stuart Taylor, Legal Reporting, and Torture Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:45 PM EST I want to thank John Steele Gordon, belatedly, for directing my attention to Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. I have not yet had the opportunity to take a glance at this book, but I look forward to doing so – even if it was reviewed well in (cue music) The New York Times. I am generally a fan of Mr. Taylor’s work, and though I know little about Professor Johnson’s, I am sure their collaboration was a fruitful one. One subject where I think Taylor’s writing has been particularly strong has been that of counterterrorism policy. While plenty of people have weighed in on topics like torture, detainment, and extraordinary rendition, Taylor is one of comparatively few who have done so in a legally-minded, evidence-based way. National Journal, where Taylor is a columnist, has perhaps the tallest, widest, most expensive subscription wall ever created for a publication, so forgive me for not linking. But in a January 2005 piece titled “Distorting the Law and Facts in the Torture Debate,” Taylor called for officials to cut through the “fog of confusion” over interrogation policy, and detailed the various ways in which the Bush administration and, to a lesser extent, their critics, simply weren’t addressing the real legal issues surrounding detainee treatment. More recently, in May 2007 Taylor urged Congress and the White House to stop improvising and enact meaningful guidelines for dealing with “a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist.” Sometimes Taylor engages in a kind of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, let’s-split-the-difference reasoning that I find unpersuasive. All the same, though, he’s stayed on these tricky, important legal issues when many other opinion leaders have given them only fleeting attention. That’s admirable. I was reminded of Mr. Taylor’s work last weekend, even before Mr. Gordon’s post, by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. “Back then,” Petula Dvorak writes, “they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.” Said one former interrogator: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.” This struck me as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.
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