Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Alex G]

Torture: A Primer
Posted by: Jon Henke on Tuesday, May 31, 2005
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=1886

In case my own rundown of the evidence was insufficient, please see this excellent and authoritative piece http://slate.msn.com/id/2119122/ (by, among others, Phil Carter) at Slate. In great detail, they describe....

- How and where torture and abuse has been authorized up and down the chain of command.

- The legal memos suggesting, authorizing and/or setting the environment for torture and abuse.

- Descriptions of the tortures and abuses that have been committed, along with the sources of their authorization when such exists, the location of usage, and the legality according to US, International and Military Law.

- Findings of the various military investigations.

Quotes of Interest:

Secrecy:

Another striking aspect of the torture memos is the secrecy that surrounded them. We would not know about most of these documents were it not for leaks, Freedom of Information Act requests, and subsequent investigations.
Questionable Investigations:
The Pentagon would say that the inquiries and the reports they produced reflect the DOD's considered judgment about who should bear responsibility for Abu Ghraib and the other detention facilities, based on the evidence that was collected. Yet the findings in the Fay-Jones Report and the recent recommendations of Army Inspector General Stanley Green don't match up. And it's hard to ignore the conflict of interest that the military has in investigating its own misconduct, especially when the trail may lead to top commanders.

POW Status:

In response to Abu Ghraib, the military has made some efforts to learn from the disaster and install controls of its own. In a draft field manual posted to a public Pentagon sever-and then withdrawn after the press reported it-the Pentagon ... reaffirms the longstanding U.S. policy of granting Geneva Convention protections to detainees, even where doubt exists as to their status, until a "competent tribunal" can judge them to be enemy combatants rather than protected prisoners of war.

Conclusion:

These policies were deliberately designed to carve out exceptions to international rules regarding prisoners of war that the United States had once championed and led the world to embrace. The rules would remain in place for everyone except the detainees in Guantanamo and Afghanistan purported to possess valuable information that they would not otherwise divulge. "These are the worst of a very bad lot," Vice President Dick Cheney said of the Guantanamo prisoners, according to Rose. "They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can." It is difficult to challenge such a consequentialist argument, for few Americans would rather follow the rules than prevent another terror attack. The exceptions to the standard military doctrine of interrogation, however, did not remain exceptions. They swallowed the rules, as exceptions are prone to do.

The real legacy of American interrogation practices, post-9/11, is that practices and justifications that should have been reserved for the worst of the worst (assuming we could know who they are) began to be used indiscriminately. In the eyes of the government, they began to seem almost normal. The effect has been to turn America from the world's leader on many issues of international human-rights law into the world's tyrant.
[...]
It is not true, as many in the Arab world believe, that the United States has embarked on a reckless campaign of torture and abuse of its Arab prisoners of war. But what has happened-a slow slide from coherent, consistent standards for interrogation and treatment of prisoners to a sometimes ad-hoc, occasionally brutal search for information at all costs-should warrant public outcry. That it has not suggests either that this shift doesn't interest us because it affects outsiders, or that we no longer consider torture or near-torture to be beyond the bounds of civil conduct.
Indeed.