I hadn't seen this diaried yet, so my apologies if it has been (also for the extensive article quotes). Nothing will be new here for those of you concerned about this issue, but I want to direct you to read The Washington Monthly, which has a great series of editorials out right now from the likes of Wesley Clark, Jimmy Carter, Chuck Hagel, Larry Wilkerson, et al. Also a pdf of the entire series.
In part this is a discussion about what torture really is:
On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality—sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold. But such bland terms mask great suffering.
It's not just waterboarding - it's virtually all types of abuse and "enhanced interrogation techniques".
No ifs, and or buts - it's all torture, and all are prohibited under the terms of the Convention against Torture. A few key relevant points from the CAT:
1.1: For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
Ok, so inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering in order to extract information is out, even if you do it to a suspect's children. Darn. I guess that excludes using sensory deprivation & LSD too, huh?
2.2: No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
But western civilization is at stake! Oh...I forgot...we survived WWII and the cold war without resorting to torture, for the most part. Except for that little bit about the School of the Americas...
2.3: An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
I support the troops.
Note that it took 10 years for the US to ratify the CAT after it was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1984. For some reason it took a Democratic President and Democratic Senate to do that. I encourage you to read the CAT; it's not that long, and clearly shows that the US is and has been in violation of the treaty. Without a doubt.
From the Washington Monthly:
Bob Barr (arch-conservative, worth reading in full):
Events of the past few years remind me more and more of Bizarro World, except now it's not a comic-book world, it's the real world. The effect of witnessing a federal government operating according to Bizarro World standards instead of those enshrined in our Constitution and legal system is truly frightening.
Wesley Clark:
There are no legal loopholes permitting torture in "exceptional cases." After all, those were the same excuses used by the torturers we once condemned.
[snip]
General George Washington emphasized the proper treatment of Hessian prisoners during the Revolutionary War, reasoning that we might win them over. In many cases, we did just that. During the Civil War, we issued the Lieber Code, emphasizing that torture to gain confessions or information was never permissible. Ever since, it has been the standard to which the American armed forces have adhered. During World War II, we trained interrogators to elicit voluntary information from our adversaries, and it worked.
Paul Pillar:
The prisoner who knows the location of a ticking time bomb may be a good hypothetical scenario for classroom discussions of counterterrorist ethics, but I find it hard to think of any real-world cases that this scenario resembles.
[snip]
Sometimes information can be checked to determine whether it is good or bad. Sometimes it cannot, or it can cause damage before its veracity can be determined. A case worth considering is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Islamist who, after being captured following the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, made disjointed assertions that Iraq was training his fellow extremists in chemical and biological weapons. The Bush administration seized upon these allegations in making its case to invade Iraq. However, a year after the Iraq War began, al-Libi recanted his assertions and said he had made them while being abused by his interrogators.
Carl Levin:
At the end of last year, a group of congressional staffers traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with senior Saudi government officials. In two meetings, the staffers raised concerns about a case in which a Saudi rape victim was sentenced to three months in prison and ninety lashes and then had her sentence doubled to six months in prison and two hundred lashes after she spoke out publicly. In both instances, the Saudi officials responded by simply saying "Guantanamo" and "Abu Ghraib." As if to say, "Who are you to lecture us about due process and human rights?"
Finally this:
Ideally, the election in November would put an end to this debate, but we fear it won't. John McCain, who for so long was one of the leading Republican opponents of the White House's policy on torture, voted in February against making the CIA subject to the ban on "enhanced interrogation." As for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while both have come out strongly against torture, they seldom discuss the subject on the campaign trail. We fear that even a Democratic president might, under pressure from elements of the national security bureaucracy, carve out loopholes, possibly in secret, condoning some forms of torture.
While this isn't intended to be a candidate diary, this is one of the many reasons I support Obama - he clearly understands our treaty (and moral) obligations, while Clinton initially waffled on the issue, and McCain recently voted to not restrict CIA interrogation techniques to those outlined in the Army Field Manual. Clinton may understand the issue now (I doubt it), but how as a sitting Senator could she be ignorant of the provisions of the CAT, and state:
In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable.
This is not an issue with which there's any room to waffle. We should insist that whenever the media refer to "enhanced interrogation", that they call it what it is: torture. We should make this a preeminent campaign issue. And whenever anyone brings up a "ticking bomb scenario", ask two questions:
- how much time are you willing to waste chasing false information given under torture?
- are you willing to torture or imprison a suspect's children? Yes we have.