For years, the Bush Administration has said that it neither endorses nor practices torture but has refused to disclose which interrogation techniques are used. Recently, the Administration also refused to turn over a secret torture-related memo to the House Judiciary Committee (WaPo).
An article in yesterday's New York Times suggests that the Administration has secretly violated laws and treaties that ban torture, with help from government lawyers who apparently wanted to further their careers:
"When the Justice Department publicly declared torture 'abhorrent' in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Wasn't use of frigid temperatures a Nazi interrogation technique? Unfortunately, there's more....
The Times continued:
"Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on 'combined effects' over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be 'ashamed' when the world eventually learned of it.
"Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard."
None of this is surprising, because the Bush Administration has habitually displayed a penchant for what strongly resembles secrecy, deception and outright law breaking (when such acts suited its agenda).
It's nice to know that I'm not alone in holding this opinion. Salon Columnist and former constitutional-law litigator Glenn Greenwald commented:
"As a country, we've known undeniably for almost two years now that we have a lawless government and a President who routinely orders our laws to be violated. His top officials have been repeatedly caught lying outright to Congress on the most critical questions we face. They have argued out in the open that the 'constitutional duty' to defend the country means that nothing -- including our 'laws' -- can limit what the President does."
I suspect that there may be enough legal wiggle-room (what, with all those government lawyers approving the Administration's preferred techniques) that no impeachment-grade smoking gun will surface. I hope I'm wrong.
Constitutional law Professor and former prosecutor Robert Sheridan also pointed out the potential wiggle-room, but he seems less pessimistic than I am:
"If Bush is ever prosecuted as a war criminal, his first defense is apt to be that he broke no U.S. law because, lookie here, the A-G [Attorney General] signed off on it. They should both be prosecuted as war criminals and we'll see whether that flies."
Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan pulled no punches:
"The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made.
"Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture a permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism....
"Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.
"There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - 'verschaerfte Vernehmung' in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here. [links in original]
"We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?"
Won't it be interesting to see how this plays out?
Related BN-Politics' Posts:
* General Says Rumsfeld Misled Congress re: Abu Ghraib (June 17, 2007)
* Colin Powell Calls for Closing of Guantanamo (June 11, 2007)
* Senate Considers Closing CIA Secret Prisons (June 1, 2007)
* Boeing Faces Suit over CIA's Secret Abductions & torture (May 30, 2007)
* Aggressive Interrogation Tactics Part II (May 25, 2007)
* Aggressive Interrogation Tactics vs. The American Way (May 23, 2007)
Excellent post, and I couldn't agree with you more... I would change the question though, to what can we do?
Posted by: Terra | October 05, 2007 at 12:56 AM
Terra,
A good suggestion. I just didn't want to repeat Sullivan's question (block quote). I will come up with a different last line, though.
Posted by: The Crux | October 05, 2007 at 12:06 PM