Tortuous path on torture

Dec 17, 2008 Editorial

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the US has had a remarkable ripple effect across the globe, and the implications of his singular achievement have raised expectations in many capitals that, after he takes over the reins of office in January 2009, the whole tenor of US activities abroad would resonate to a “kinder and gentler” ethos. However, there are early disturbing signals that many may be disappointed.
The signal foreign policy failure of the Bush’s administration was his self-declared “war on terror”. As Ron Paul has pointed out, terror is a tactic and it is impossible to defeat a tactic. More concretely, however, the “war on terror” justified President Bush’s invasion of Iraq when he presented “evidence” that purported to show that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.
But the war in Iraq soon became very unpopular: few Americans believed that the war would drag on longer than WWII did and would incur so many American causalities. The fact that the “evidence” of the presence of weapons of mass destruction was largely discredited did not help President Bush’s case. One of Mr. Obama’s positives was his early and unequivocal stance against that war and his commitment to extricating US troops from that theatre. After his election, Obama has reaffirmed his position on Iran, but has begun to qualify his statements on the exact timetable on the withdrawal of those troops. The straightjacket of incumbency is already beginning to extract its price.
But it is within a subset of President Bush’s “war on terror” that the possibility of backsliding has become more pronounced – the use of torture against opponents to extract information. The issue of torture has attracted the attention of our local lawmakers recently and, while the circumstances are vastly different, the continued use of torture under an Obama administration would send signals to countries like ours that such techniques may not be “such a big deal”. This would be retrograde.
The notorious Abu Ghraib prison abuse of Iraqi detainees was not only the most egregious example of torture under President Bush’s watch but was the direct result of a memo he had signed after he was advised that after 9/11 he could pretty much disregard the Geneva accords and the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 as far as al Qaeda and the Taliban were concerned.
The most glaring result of the President’s memo was his deputy Rumsfeld’s implementing instruction “Make sure this happens!” in Rumsfeld’s handwriting appeared on a memo over his signature which was prominently posted at Abu Ghraib. By June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court had ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, and rejected the artifice of “unitary executive power” used by the Bush administration to “justify” practices like torture. The administration however has insisted that the CIA had to be given leeway to extract information, beyond Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations) that was, in the words of a US general, “consistent with the requirements of law, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions”.
The Field manual directed, among other things that “… Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner, cannot use hoods or place sacks over a detainee’s head or use duct tape over his eyes, cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain, may not use water-boarding, hypothermia, or treatment which will lead to heat injury, may not perform mock executions, may not deprive detainees of the necessary food, water and medical care, and may not use dogs in any aspect of interrogation”.
The prohibitions give us an idea as to what it sought to be permitted.
While Sen. Obama had also said early on that he would eliminate the above-mentioned methods of “interrogation” from the CIA’s arsenal, after his election two key Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Sen. Dianne who is set to become its chair, have begun to entertain the possibility of “another solution”.
We hope that the new President will hold fast to his original position and not send the wrong signal to the world on the abomination of torture.

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Tortuous path on torture

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