Torture, the CIA, and How We Lost Our Herd Immunity

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

08 April 14

hile watching the antics of the anti-vaccination crowd, who are bringing back measles and whooping cough as though they all were a set of Tenement Slum Re-Enactors, I became fascinated by the concept of "herd immunity." This is said to occur when a sufficient portion of the population is vaccinated against a disease that they provide a certain level of protection who have not developed the proper biological immunity. Herd immunity remains controversial, and not just among the anti-vaccination folks, but the idea seems sound enough to use to describe what's going on now as we stumblingly re-examine the crimes and horrors of what the government did in our name between the years 2001 and 2008. The focal point at the moment is the fight between the CIA and the Senate over the release of the Senate's report on who we tortured, and how, and how often during the last administration. All indications are that at least some of the report will be released to the public. (That it all should be is beyond question, at least to me.) Distressingly, through the State Department, the administration has been sending mixed signals on whether or not it believes the report should be made public; at least partly, the case the State Department makes is that revealing how and where we tortured people will endanger Americans abroad, and will embarrass the countries that we bribe...er...convinced to play host to our torturers and our black sites. So, in our panic, and in the essential sociopathy of the people we allowed to govern us, we infected governments overseas. What we used to call "the free world" lost its herd immunity.

Back home, the infection remains pandemic. For decades -- nay, for over two centuries -- the idea that the United States would develop a systematic torture regime, and that the United States would justify that regime with threadbare legal opinions from government lawyers and protect it with entire barricades of misinformation thrown up by the intelligence community -- was as distant from what we believed about ourselves as whooping cough was from the nation's elementary schools. (That we participated -- or were complicit -- in torture on an ad hoc basis was considered an aberration. We never took the idea that the United States would torture systematically as a subject for actual debate. The whole notion was thought to be lunatic.) Now, though, as we fight over the release of a report to which we all, as citizens, have every right, it's clear that the herd immunity we built up through two centuries is gone, too.

Dick Cheney, Patient Zero in this particular outbreak, and a towering public combination of inhumanity and cowardice, is out in public bragging about how deeply infected he is. (His daughter, Liz, went on TV over the weekend and suggested that we should ignore the  decade of torture inspired by her father and concentrate instead on the true crime of the past 20 years...Benghazi.) Over the weekend, the inexcusable Fred Hiatt loaned the space over which he presides at The Washington Post to Jose Rodriguez, a truly monstrous figure in the events in question, so that Rodriguez could spread the infection even further through the subject population.

Third is authority. This program was approved at the highest levels of the government, judged legal by the Justice Department and regularly briefed to the leaders of our congressional oversight committees. There was never any effort to mislead the administration or Congress about the program. In 2006, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden expanded those fully briefed on the program to include all members of the intelligence oversight committees. It is a travesty that these efforts at transparency are now branded insufficient and misleading.

And there's your tree of death right there. Cheney to the lawyers to Rodriguez to the waterboard in Poland. The disease raged out of control. And Fred Hiatt is the anti-vaccination activist, whittling away at our herd immunity to an even greater extent.

For years, our herd immunity on these matters consisted of a general consensus that there were some things that the United States simply could not do and remain the country we told ourselves and the world that we were. We believed that there were things that were unthinkable, and that kept us at least partly safe from an outbreak of our worst impulses. That herd immunity will not be rebuilt easily. It will take a steady intellectual and political inoculation against the worst in us all. And we must contain the spread of the infection as best we can, and not listen to those people who tell us that what always has worked in the past for us endangers us now.