Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Bush administration memorandums that justify painful methods of interrogation give the ring of falseness to its claims of ignorance about the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
A president at war is not constrained by American laws or international treaties, says a disturbing and legally dubious memo prepared by a group of Bush administration lawyers for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The March 2003 confidential memorandum uses finely parsed legalisms to justify the use of pain in interrogations. It joins legal opinions from Justice Department lawyers and the White House counsel that offer similar justifications.
The administration has strenuously objected to any suggestion that it knew of or approved the mistreatment and sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But an ever-expanding body of evidence shows that the president, vice president, defense secretary and attorney general sought ways to defend the use of abusive tactics on the part of American military personnel and intelligence agents that violate international law and American tradition.
Their actions have removed the United States from the pantheon of civilized nations - those that have promised not to resort to torture, regardless of the circumstances. We have now taken our place alongside nations such as China, Syria and Zimbabwe that justify any means of securing national security. In the process, they have endangered every American soldier and civilian who may become a prisoner of war and depend on the same protections the Bush administration has disregarded.
In public, the administration continues to recite a mantra that it is applying the Geneva Conventions relative to Iraqi prisoners and respecting the 1994 Convention Against Torture and federal antitorture laws for all detainees. But what officials don't offer is the asterisk: see memos.
The March memorandum attempts to justify painful interrogation methods by giving a crimped reading to the definition of torture. For example, the memo says it is not torture if an interrogator knows he will inflict severe pain but that is not his objective; it is not torture if the pain is not "severe," defined as "a high level of intensity" difficult to endure; and it is not torture if the interrogator believes in good faith that he is not engaging in torture or if he is justified by "necessity."
The memorandum also suggests that the president has absolute authority over prisoners, even if he decides to commit war crimes. "Congress may no more regulate the President's authority to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements," says one section.
Earlier memorandums from the Justice Department and Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, similarly parse phrases to render limits on torture virtually meaningless. In January 2002, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo advised abandoning the Geneva Conventions, saying they should not apply to al-Qaida and the Taliban - a view concurred with by Gonzales in a memo written to the president two weeks later. Gonzales called the limits on interrogations set by the Conventions "quaint."
All this legal firepower has been corraled for one purpose: to justify abandoning principles of restraint that have served as international rules of war and national conduct for more than 50 years. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that torture is not "productive, let alone justified," but the administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to construct legal arguments permitting its use and shielding interrogators from war crime prosecutions.
If the administration wants to show that these memos haven't driven policy, then it needs to make public the 24 permitted interrogation techniques approved by Rumsfeld in April 2003. It needs to document the techniques used by the CIA in its secret interrogation centers around the world. And it needs to end the practice of "rendition," in which suspects in U.S. custody are sent to the security services of other nations known for their brutal questioning.
Otherwise, the American people have every reason to think the worst.