Torture

Today, President Obama released the Bush administration Justice Department memos that condoned the use of torture. The memos make for horrifying reading. Among the things the Justice Department permitted were putting a man in a box and releasing insects into it to exploit his fears, shoving him against a wall repeatedly, slapping him in the face--only meant, by the way, as a violation of his personal space, not to hurt him, or anything like that. But, President Obama says:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

His rationale makes sense to me, but I'm glad it's not a call I have to make. In my time covering personnel policy in the intelligence community, I haven't dealt with folks who were doing interrogations, since they're not usually simultaneously running personnel policy. But my reporting has given me a sense of some of the stresses the IC faces--I actually wrote my column this week on how work-life balance programs have been extended across ODNI to help employees cope with stress. I can't imagine what it's like getting orders to beat someone to get information out of them, or how you run programs to help people cope with that part of their job. I don't know if at some point we'll hear stories about intelligence officers who refused to torture prisoners, and how that response was dealt with in the chain of command. It seems an important part of the story how orders were issued, and how people responded to them.