[NYTr] Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

"The US does not torture people, and besides, 
torture saves American lives." -The Decider-in-Chief


The Times of London (!) - Oct 7, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article2602564.ece

Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led

by Andrew Sullivan

I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture
at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or
deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those
things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary
to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew
Donald Rumsfeld as a friend.

It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the
far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train
captives to lie about this stuff, don’t they? Bottom line: I trusted
the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and
are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.

>From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush
administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of
good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do
what no American administration had done before. It would torture
detainees to get information.

This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty
obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations
convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied
itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world
and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself
tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism
and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than
any other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington
himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that
such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be anathema to
Americans. 

But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were apparently
more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and
defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick
Cheney called “the dark side” was made, moreover, in secret;
interrogators who had no idea how to do these things were asked to
replicate some of the methods US soldiers had been trained to resist if
captured by the Soviets or Vietcong.

Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia,
beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep
deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of terror
suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown number of
terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in the chaos of
Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when the horror came
to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few grunts at the
lowest level. The official reports were barred from investigating fully
up the chain of command.

Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on extremely
shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers to concoct
memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation with the rule of
law, and their belief that the president had the constitutional
authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their work.

They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent to
the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else
was what was first called “coercive interrogation”, subsequently
amended to “enhanced interrogation”. These terms were deployed in order
for the president to be able to say that he didn’t support “torture”.
We were through the looking glass.

After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these torture
policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was rescinded. The
Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the military itself
from being forced to violate its own code of justice. But the
administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every legal
manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this stemmed
from the vice-president’s office.

Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long after
Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos
that asserted the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The
memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and
beating but allowed them in combination to intensify the effect.

The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring water
over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated
episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not “cruel, inhuman or
degrading”. We have a log of such a technique being used at Guantanamo.
The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back from death, then
submitted once again to “enhanced interrogation”.

George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced
interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman
last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration
strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough,
safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question
is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte
Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term
innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third
degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions
and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The
victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian
insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just
as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections
(subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in
death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in
permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by
John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits
comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise
Institute.

The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney’s arguments.
Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all
detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn’t qualify for full
PoW status, but they couldn’t be abused either. The court also relied
on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international
law: “The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted
serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not
find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . .”

The definition of torture remains the infliction of “severe mental or
physical pain or suffering” with the intent of procuring intelligence.
In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics of the current
president and his aides. The penalty for those who were found guilty
was death. This is how far we’ve come. And this fateful, profound
decision to change what America stands for was made in secret. The
president kept it from Congress and from many parts of his own
administration.

Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what to
do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely passive,
although last week’s leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu
Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the
memos “are more than surprising. I think they are shocking”. Yet the
public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all the Republican
candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse continuing the use of
torture.

One day America will come back– the America that defends human rights,
the America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads
the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this
president leaves office. And maybe not even then.