H.D.S. GREENWAY
Who's to blame for the torture?THE BUSH administration has released reams of documents seeking to prove that it bears no responsibility for the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib. President Bush himself says: "We don't condone torture." But it sounds a little like saying that it depends on what the meaning of is is.
No one doubts the president when he says "I have never ordered torture." No one is suggesting that there was ever a directed policy from the White House ordering Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The question is, did all the administration's questioning of how torture might be redefined, the bar lowered, and the Geneva Conventions circumvented filter down to the operational level? To that charge White House counsel Alberto Gonzales says: "We categorically reject any connection." But this ignores his own January 2002 letter to the president saying that 9/11 renders obsolete "Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners, and renders quaint some of its provisions." When you have the White House counsel dismissing time-tested conventions agreed to by all civilized nations as "quaint," as if they were nothing more than something Miss Manners would say about finger bowls, then you have a formula for big trouble down the line. Secretary of State Colin Powell recognized this when he reacted to the memo by saying it would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." A series of Justice Department memorandums written late in 2001 provided a legal framework for the argument that prisoners taken in Afghanistan did not have to be treated under Geneva Convention rules, and that American officials who abused prisoners under Geneva rules would not, therefore, be governed by the provisions of the 1966 Federal War Crimes Act. A 100-page memo prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued that the president, as commander in chief, could override domestic laws and international treaties forbidding torture. According to The Wall Street Journal, that memo gave the legal underpinnings to the contention that the president has the authority "to approve almost any physical or psychological action during interrogation, up to and including torture." This despite the fact that the United States ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture which states categorically that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Another 50-page memo from the Justice Department sent to the White House in August of 2002 clearly argued that the internationally accepted definition of torture be more loosely defined as only "pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure." Continued... |
