The Red Cross Torture Report--Annotations!

Danner, Mark. 2009. "The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means." The New York Review of Books 7: 1-19

This article responds to and analyzes the International Committee of the Red Cross's report on the treatment of the fourteen "high value detainees." It uses the report to talk about the discourses around torture in the United States in general and looks at torture as something not just particular to events with the last few years, but a policy and practice with a long history.

Danner locates torture policies implemented during the Bush administration within a politics of fear--a way of thinking which values what could have happened. This way of thinking centralizes national security as something which must be protected at any cost. Such a mentality is contrasted with President Obama's measurements of the effects of torture--that the torture of these detainees and all others in the wake of 9/11 has deeply shamed the US political image and caused hatred of the US--in essence, has produced more danger.

The article makes explicit that torture is not something unique to the US or Bush administration. That the US government has carried out torture policies, Danner asserts, should not be something new to Americans--the basic storyline has been disclosed for for years. Despite these disclosures and the obvious and proven evidence that the treatment of these detainees was illegal and in violation of Geneva Convention laws, many news sources and government figures maintain that torture was used for protection of national security and needed to be done.

These conflicting ideologies and ways of measuring facts will perpetually make circles around each other and lead to repeating the same process of torture, exposure, scandal, etc. Something different must be done if torture policy is ever going to be changed. For a real policy change, Danner concludes, there must be a genuine bipartisan effort to answer two main questions about the torture of these detainees: 1) Was it necessary? and 2) Did it work?

Only after this information is collected and judged can society disrupt the myths which facilitate an acceptance of torture (i.e., the "ticking bomb" myth) and can the secrecy which surrounds torture and authorizes its use be made transparent.