White House Nears Completion of New Torture Guidelines
By Arthur Bright
The Christian Science Monitor
Friday 01 June 2007
Critics say administration's endorsement of 'enhanced
interrogation' is 'immoral,' draw comparisons to Nazi war crimes.
The White House is close to completing a new set of guidelines on
the use of "enhanced interrogative techniques" by US agents, even as
critics say such techniques are "immoral," "amateurish," and
"indistinguishable" from Nazi war crimes.
The New York Times reports that the administration is preparing
"secret new rules governing interrogations."
The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed
executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the
Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the
harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated
drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods
that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.
The Times writes that President Bush has claimed the broader
techniques are needed to fight terrorism, and in the recent
Republican presidential debate, candidates made similar suggestions
about the necessity of harsh interrogation.
Critics, however, say that the Bush administration's policy
regarding torture is "immoral." Philip Zelikow, a former advisor to
Condoleezza Rice and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission,
said in a lecture last month (PDF) at the Houston Journal of
International Law that in 2002, the United States made "careful,
deliberate choices to place extreme physical pressure on captives,
with accompanying psychological effects," and that the
administration's "policy guidelines devolved into legal guidelines,
which were to do everything you can, so long as it is not punishable
as a crime under American law."
Brilliant lawyers worked hard on how they could then construe the
limits of vague, untested laws. They were operating so close to the
frontiers of our law that, within only a couple of years, the
Department of Justice eventually felt obliged to offer a second legal
opinion, rewriting their original views of the subject. The policy
results are imaginable and will someday become more fully known.
My point, though, is not to debate the delineation of the legal
frontier. That focus obscures the core of the issue. The core of the
issue, for legal policy, is this: What is moral - not, what is legal?
What is cost-beneficial? ...
My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical,
prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment,
and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral. I offer no
opinion as to whether such conduct is a federal crime; merely that it
is immoral.
Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger for The Atlantic, writes
that many of the interrogative techniques being condoned by the Bush
administration were used by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s [Editor's
note: The article contains a graphic photo.], and resulted in the
convictions of the interrogators for war crimes. Mr. Sullivan notes
the similarities between the "enhanced interrogation" employed by the
Nazis and techniques condoned by the Bush administration, as well as
parallels between the defenses presented at trial by the Nazis and
the justifications offered by the White House.
The victims, by the way, were not in uniform. And the Nazis tried
to argue, just as [former Department of Justice official] John Yoo
did, that this made torturing them legit. The victims were
paramilitary Norwegians, operating as an insurgency, against an
occupying force. And the torturers had also interrogated some
prisoners humanely. But the argument, deployed by ***** Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and the Nazis before them, didn't wash with the court
[which found them guilty]. ...
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration
of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the
political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am
reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods
approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been
used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe
torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation
techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The
techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood
in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
But while the Nazis' interrogative methods were found to be
torture, The New York Times writes that the Allies' methods at the
time were far more effective and far less abusive than those the
United States uses now, according to a December 2006 report (PDF) by
the Intelligence Science Board.
"It far outclassed what we've done," said Steven M. Kleinman, a
former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World
War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort
Hunt, Va., "had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the
language flawlessly," and prepared for four to six hours for each
hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for
the December report.
Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003,
called the post-Sept. 11 efforts "amateurish" by comparison to the
World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked
through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners'
culture.
The Washington Post wrote in January - when the report was
publicly released - that the researchers found "little or no
development of sustained capacity for interrogation practice,
training, or research within intelligence or military communities in
the post-Soviet period," which led to interrogators making up
techniques "on the fly."
In [the report], experts find that popular culture and ad hoc
experimentation have fueled the use of aggressive and sometimes
physical interrogation techniques to get those captured on the
battlefields to talk, even if there is no evidence to support the
tactics' effectiveness. The board, which advises the director of
national intelligence, recommends studying the matter.
"There is little systematic knowledge available to tell us 'what
works' in interrogation," wrote Robert Coulam, a research professor
at the Simmons School for Health Studies in Boston. Coulam also wrote
that interrogation practices that offend ethical concerns and "skirt
the rule of law" may be narrowly useful, if at all, because such
practices could undermine the legitimacy of government action and
support for the fight against terrorism.
The effect of popular culture, particularly of the FOX television
show "24," on Americans' perception of torture, remains hotly
debated. In a commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Wesleyan
University professor Kelly M. Greenhill writes that there is a long
history of works of fiction affecting politics, and that "24" may be
fostering an increased acceptance of torture in the United States.
The US military has shown similar concerns - members of the US
military met with the "24" creative team last November to voice
worries that the show was promoting "unethical and illegal behavior
and had adversely affected the training and performance of real
American soldiers," according to a February article in The New Yorker.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060107C.shtml
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get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.
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