I remember being taught that the USA was a nation of laws not of men. I liked that idea and believed it until Nixon came along with his sick idea that if the President does it, it is not a crime. Cheney clearly brought that same sick idea into the Bush the Lesser administration. We need to be very aware of what is legal and what is not with our supposed national interest in individual human rights.
Torture has become increasingly illegal since the days of the 1949 Geneva Convention with the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment signed by President Reagan in 1988 and The War Crimes Act of 1996 passed by Congress. Continued after the loopy thingy.
The Third Geneva Convention of 1949 covers the use of torture.
Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
• violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds,mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
• taking of hostages;
• outrages upon dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and
• the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
Whether you like Reagan on not you will have to admit that he got terrorism right. They were regarded as criminals and hunted down and arrested and tried in US Courts, like the Blind Sheik from the car bomb at the World Trade Center who was hunted down by the FBI and tried in US courts during the Clinton years and the underwear bomber. He avoided declaring war or terrorists since that would legitimize their cause, they were criminals not warriors, nothing more. He also came out against torture on 5/20/1988, while transmitting UN Torture Convention Treaty
to the U.S. Senate:
The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
The UN Convention clearly defines torture
For the purposes of this Convention, 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.
The UN Convention requires that the prohibition of torture is publicized
1. Each State Party shall ensure that education and information regarding the prohibition against torture are fully included in the training of law enforcement personnel, civil or military, medical personnel, public officials and other persons who may be involved in the custody, interrogation or treatment of any individual subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment.
2. Each State Party shall include this prohibition in the rules or instructions issued in regard to the duties and functions of any such persons.
The UN Convention makes sure that there is no excuse for torture
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.
The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who order it, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.
This act has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.
Yet The general in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stated that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ordered that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy.
in How to Break a Terrorist by Gilbert Cruz, a professionally trained interrogator, tells how those techniques could not work.
After 9/11, military interrogators focused on two techniques: fear and control. The Army trained their 'gators to confront and dominate prisoners. This led down the disastrous path to the Abu Ghraib scandal. At Guantánamo Bay, the early interrogators not only abused the detainees, they tried to belittle their religious beliefs. I'd heard stories from a friend who had been there that some of the 'gators even tried to convert prisoners to Christianity. These approaches rarely yielded results
On the new interrogation tactics he was trained to utilize: "The quickest way to get most (but not all) captives talking is to be nice to them. But what does it mean to be "nice" to a subject under interrogation? ... It means, ideally, getting to know the subject better than he knows himself and then manipulating him by role-playing, flattering, misleading, and nudging his or her perception of the truth slightly off center. The goal is to turn the subject around so that he begins to see strong logic and even wisdom in acting against his own comrades and cause."
Former Navy Judge Advocate General
Admiral John Hutson also said of the Bush torture program:
Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that’s important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.
Ali Soufan the FBI professional interrogator who first questioned Zubaydah and was later withdrawn by the Director due to his concerns over the legality of CIA methods developed by Mitchell and Jessen who were hired by Cheney. He also points out that the FBI agent who knew KSM best never had a chance to question him, instead of a professional interrogation the CIA amateurs waterboarded KSM 183 times in the month of March after his capture on March 1, that is an average of once every 4 hours for a month.
Ali Soufan who is a true FBI hero in the war on terror noted the futility of the Bush torture program.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
Stephen M. Colecchi in an interesting article in America Magazine wrote:
The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism.” It is counterproductive not only because experts tell us that it does not work, but also because it undermines the very good it hopes to achieve: the common good of all.
So not only does torture not work, and not only does it create more terrorists, it is for the "psuedo-tough". In other words, real men don't torture.
Since torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo tough how did the Buch torture program come about? The lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough Vice President found lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough people at the CIA to talk to who sent him to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program (SERE) where he found 2 lazy, stupid pseudo-tough people to run their program.
Of course they had to make this decision in a lazy stupid and pseudo-tough manner, James Risen and Matt Apuzzo describe the process.
The C.I.A. has said it hired Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen because their experience with “nonstandard” interrogation was “unparalleled.” But the government’s own experts favored the traditional approach to questioning prisoners. And the Senate report makes clear that the speed with which Mr. Mitchell was brought into the program — less than 24 hours elapsed between the time his name was floated and that first cable — meant there was no time to analyze whether his approach was best.
After a year of lazy stupid and pseudo tough planning these 2 went to Guantanamo with a chart copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The NYT even suggested that they may not have even known the source of this chart. The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. Of course torture is only good for conformity at best and does not work at securing accurate information. The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton , a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.
It saddens me, said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a 180-degree turn.
The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.
So what should a nation of laws do when its laws are clearly broken. I would suggest that we follow the advice of one of the main participants George W. Bush who said this on el Arabiya TV after Abu Ghraib. The full tape is no longer available but you may hear Bush say this here
It's important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse ... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. ... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation.
After reporting this quote
The Atlantic Magazine concluded that:
Bush personally authorized every technique revealed at Abu Ghraib. He refused to act upon the International Committee of the Red Cross's report that found that he had personally authorized the torture of prisoners, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture and domestic law against cruel and inhuman treatment. A refusal to investigate and prosecute Red Cross allegations of torture is itself a violation of the Geneva Accords.
I should think that even conservatives would support prosecution since Bush did a 180 on their hero Reagan and the violation of treaties and international and national law are so clear. Since anyone who participated in torture or was complicit to torture is by definition a war criminal, there is a lot of work to be done. Do remember that the supporters of the Bush torture program are among the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10