The testimony on what went on so that torture could be authorized, given last Tuesday and re-aired by C-Span on the weekend, takes a while to sink in.
MR. IN-SECRET DECIDER
What emerges is a managerial model in which decisions are taken and not explained.
This separation and compartmentalization is how the "policy arm" of the government got freed from the bureaucracy, so fully that real torture was possible, for a time.
This separation and compartmentalization is how the "policy arm" of the government got freed from the bureaucracy, so fully that real torture was possible, for a time.For instance, Rear Admiral Dalton's legal review wasn't stopped, it was made verbal and private. The "deciders" didn't seek to generate buy-in, they cut out the normal modes of consensus building (the review at 'the tank', for instance) and cut out dissemination of adopted and rejected recommendations, if any, of the putative "working group", with vetted rationale.
Despite some evidence of co-operation, there is certainly evidence of another kind of compartmentalization, with the command chain doing things that the lawyers were not aware of (for instance, Beaver was unaware that dogs and nudity may have wrongly employed at Gitmo while she was there).
What's odd and ironic is that the players probably thought that they had "covered their bases", so to speak... They actually believed that control over various factors was mitigating, that a few minutes of simulated drowning was humane in a way that ten minutes wasn't. This bet on a distinction in degree regarding torture, chosen ex post facto or otherwise, didn't work, didn't stand up to the light of day.
