With the record of newly minted Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris being freshly scrutinized, one recently recalled item is her reaction to revelations several years ago of the torture of suspected terrorists who the CIA detained. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Harris was a leading interrogator of Gina Haspel, then-nominee for CIA director, regarding the torture issue. She eventually voted against Haspel’s confirmation. Another recent reminder of this black chapter in American history is the first public release of a photograph of the gaunt, naked body of one of the prisoners involved.

Harris’s firm stand regarding torture is admirable, as is a wider sentiment—by no means universal, but now held by many Americans—that torture is an unacceptable national security tool. The unacceptability involves the ineffectiveness as well as the immorality of the practice.

What was largely missing, however, from the focus on the Haspel nomination and what was going on inside CIA detention centers was how the torture reflected a broader condoning of “gloves-off” methods amid the wave of anger that swept across the nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Although the Senate committee’s report on the subject asserted that the CIA had misled Congress and the administration about the extent and success of the interrogation techniques, the use of torture was not kept secret from members of Congress and specifically members of the intelligence oversight committees, who could have objected at the time. However, in the prevailing post-9/11 mood, members quietly looked the other way (this did not involve Harris, who did not enter the Senate until 2017). It was only with the passage of time and the quelling of some of the rage that was the immediate reaction to the terrorist attacks that second thoughts about torture arose and became politically significant.

A similar pattern arose with some intrusive investigative powers that were hastily granted to law enforcement agencies in the aftermath of 9/11, but later—again, with the passage of time and a changing of national mood—many came to perceive as unjustified invasions of personal privacy. Harris’s California colleague in the Senate, the late Dianne Feinstein, who, as chair of the intelligence committee, spoke prominently about the torture issue, later acknowledged—to her credit—that Congress may have gone too far with some of its post-9/11 measures taken in the name of fighting terrorism.

Recollection of these issues from a few years ago happens to coincide with a couple of other recent items in the news that are relevant to how nations respond to arguably immoral or abusive conduct by national security officials—and what this says about a larger national ethos. One is belated reporting of the death of William Calley, who, as an Army lieutenant, led the platoon that in 1968 perpetrated the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of South Vietnamese villagers were slaughtered. Although several other persons were charged with offenses related to either the massacre or a cover-up, Calley was the only one convicted.

As the officer leading the unit that did the killing, Calley probably was more responsible for the massacre than any other individual. But to pretend that responsibility stopped with him was a misinterpretation not only of what happened at My Lai but also of the larger tragedy that was the Vietnam War. Calley was in a chain of command that set objectives, defined standards of conduct and influenced how American soldiers viewed Vietnamese. That chain, in turn, was tasked with fighting a war based on a gross misperception—the notion that what was really an armed struggle by an Asian nationalist movement was instead a theater in a noble American effort to save the world from communism.

Today, almost no one would excuse what U.S. troops did at My Lai. And most Americans—though again not all—regard fighting the Vietnam War in the first place as a mistake. But the national response to an especially ugly facet of the war such as My Lai falls into an all-too-familiar pattern of equating accountability with finding a head or two to roll while not facing up to relevant failings—moral as well as political—of the nation as a whole.

Another batch of recently reported inhumane conduct toward foreign nationals under physical control involves not the United States but instead Israel. Mistreatment by Israeli forces of captured or detained Palestinians is not new. Israel has a long history of exercising no accountability for such conduct or of administering only token punishment or the occasional rolled head if someone happened to record an incident with a video that became public. 

One thing that is new is the issuance by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of a report on Israeli treatment of detained Palestinians since the beginning of the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip last October. The mistreatment of detained Palestinians has been compared to the U.S. torture of suspected terrorists and mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war, and there are indeed similarities. But both the scale and the nature of what Israel is doing to Palestinians far exceed the U.S. abuses of prisoners.

For one thing, the sheer number of detainees involved is of a different order of magnitude. The longstanding Israeli practice of arresting and detaining without charge many Palestinian residents of the occupied territories has been magnified since last October. The UN report states that the detentions have numbered in the thousands and probably have reached five figures. The detained include “men, women, children, doctors, journalists, human rights defenders”— “most of them without charges or trial and in conditions that raise concerns of the abuse of administrative detention.” The huge numbers involved imply that many, and probably most of the detainees involved, are as innocent as were most of the villagers at My Lai.

Moreover, what we know of the nature of the abuse is more severe than what came out of Abu Ghraib or the “enhanced interrogation” at CIA detention facilities. That knowledge is partial, based on evidence such as the statements and physical injuries of released detainees. Much of what has gone on, especially at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev, has taken place beyond the view of foreign eyes. But one measure of the severity of treatment is that, according to the UN report, at least fifty-three detainees from Gaza and the West Bank have died in Israeli custody just since last October.

One severe case that recently became public involved a prisoner at Sde Teiman who was sodomized with a serious injury to his rectum, requiring hospitalization. An Israeli military police investigation focused on nine military reservists who appeared to be directly involved in this abuse. The stage was set for another instance of making a show of accountability by punishing—probably lightly, if conforming with past patterns—a few individuals without addressing larger underlying policies and attitudes. 

But here, this case took a more extreme twist. A riot took place outside the military base where the accused reservists were detained. Far from calling for complete accountability, the rioters, who attempted to storm the base, said there should be no accountability at all and demanded that the accused reservists be released. The rioters included an assortment of right-wing activists but also parts of the official face of Israel, including uniformed soldiers carrying their weapons, an undefined number of members of the Knesset, and at least one government minister. Defense minister Yoav Gallant has called for an investigation into whether another member of the government—national security minister and right-wing extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has responsibility for the police—effectively facilitated the riot with a weak and tardy police response. Ben-Gvir has directly expressed his view on the case by declaring on social media, “Take your hands off the reservists.”

A gap is apparent between American and Israeli responses to the abuse of prisoners who are of a different nationality or ethnicity from those who imprison them. In the United States, there has been widespread recognition that such abuses are wrong. The shortcomings mainly have involved the recognition sometimes coming too late and accountability often being too narrow. In Israel, many of those in power do not consider the abuses to be wrong at all. Typifying the attitude is how a member of the Knesset of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party replied when asked whether it was legitimate to insert a stick into someone’s rectum: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

Some observers have interpreted what happened in this case as one manifestation of a battle for the soul of Israel, and there certainly are Israelis who are appropriately appalled by the abuses. But decades of living by the sword and forcibly subjugating people of different ethnicities have nurtured a malign attitude toward not just Hamas militants but Palestinian Arabs in general that is more widespread than current differences within the political elite might suggest. It is an attitude reflected in finance minister Bezalel Smotrich (who also has responsibilities in administering the West Bank) calling for “total annihilation” of several Gazan cities and saying that starving two million Gazans “to death” may be “right and moral” as long as Israeli hostages are held. Defense minister Gallant announced the “complete siege” of the entire Gaza Strip that has led to the enormous suffering there over the past ten months and said that Israel was going against “human animals.” 

Such characterizations echo how some Americans in uniform during the Vietnam War—no doubt including some who participated in the My Lai massacre—disdained Vietnamese as “gooks.” The American nation, which now enjoys cordial relations with Vietnam, has overcome that foul attitude.

Anyone arguing that the U.S.-Israeli relationship is based on “common values” needs to take such differences into account.

Upon a closer look, there are some similarities between relevant attitudes in Israel and those in significant political segments in the United States, including xenophobia on the American Right. The spectacle of someone in power encouraging a riot and attack on a government installation in defiance of the rule of law took place in Washington just four years ago. The president who instigated the riot promised to pardon the rioters if he returned to power.

Perhaps it is most accurate to say that there are similarities in ethos and character between one segment of the American polity and the dominant political strain in Israel. Still, these similarities do not involve any values about which either nation ought to be proud.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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