The Politics of Fear

The news that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) destroyed two videotapes in 2005 has caused more furor than the suspected contents of the tapes themselves. The tapes likely contained footage of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment given legitimacy under the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” regime. But rather than focus on who authorized the contents of the tapes, critics have focused on the CIA cover-up.

Both the Justice Department and the House Intelligence Committee have launched investigations, the latter stymied by the former. On Friday, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey ordered the House intelligence committee to halt its probe for fear that a House investigation would jeopardize that of the Justice Department. Given Mukasey’s refusal to deem one such enhanced interrogation technique, waterboarding, illegal during his confirmation hearings, the Justice Department probe seems likely to shield the Bush administration from censure.

Mukasey has argued that the congressional probe “would present significant risks to our preliminary inquiry.” His rationale for leading the preliminary investigation sounds oddly similar to the CIA’s rationale for destroying the tapes: Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, said that not only did the tapes lack intelligence value, but their continued existence would jeopardize the identities of undercover officers.

This administration’s reliance on threats and fear in the face of outside scrutiny is nothing new. By playing to popular anxiety, the Bush administration succeeded in authorizing the CIA’s current interrogation regime in 2002 without scrutiny from either side of the aisle. Knowledge of the Agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” has been widespread for months.

Perhaps more disturbing is the recent revelation that members of Congress, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), voiced no objections to these techniques, including waterboarding, in a secret briefing with CIA officials in September 2002. The complicity of both Democrats and Republicans can be understood best by viewing the CIA as a fearful, incompetent bureaucracy.

Fear, rather than strategic aims, motivated the authorization of interrogation techniques that amounted to torture. Seasoned interrogators have argued that not only do such extreme interrogation techniques harm the United States’ moral standing in the world and violate U.S. law, but they actually hamper strategic aims, as they simply compel detainees to say what they what they want their captors to hear. The U.S. National Defense Intelligence College found in a recent study that “enhanced interrogation” fails to improve the quality of information extracted from detainees.

Yet so long as government institutions allow fear to dictate policy and rhetoric, a rational assessment of such techniques will be absent from the debate. By leaving the investigation of the destruction of the tapes to a sympathetic Justice Department, the Bush administration has once again used the language of fear to dodge responsibility. This time, members of Congress must not delegate their role to check the power of the executive. Instead, they must remind the American public who authorized the contents of the tapes in the first place.

Joanna Naples-Mitchell ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.