[Editor's notes: I have included some interesting news articles on this subject, but I found one site that was too big to include here and difficult to copy. This site tries to show why torture practices were initiated after the 9/11/01 attacks and what happened from there. It is interesting reading.]
It was a FRONTLINE program titled “The Torture Question”. You can go directly to this site by clicking on the following address:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture.
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Poor George’s Almanac
September 30
11/30 Bush Adds USA to List that Includes the Nazis ,
the Khmer Rouge, WWII Japan
Red Cross Says that the U.S. is Using Tactics that are “tantamount to torture” at Guantánamo Bay
“I don’t think it. I know it.” Jimmy Carter’s response when asked by CNN if he thought that detainees were being tortured by the U.S. Government (October 2007)
2004: The New York Times reports today that the International Committee of the Red Cross believes that the United States military has used tactics in the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba that are “tantamount to torture“.
While the Bush administration might justify its treatment of prisoners at Gitmo as a necessary evil, consider the thoughts of Bush’s widely respected top commander in the later years of the Iraq conflict, Gen. David Petraeus. Having watched the management of the war’s earlier years by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Petraeus would say in 2007, “We can never sink to the level of the enemy; we have done that at times in theater and it has cost us enormously”.
The Bush administration has admitted to ‘waterboarding’ detainees. National intelligence director Mike McConnell has said of this technique, ‘for me it would be torture’. Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey agrees, saying he ‘would feel that it was’ torture were he subject to waterboarding. Bush’s first Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, has said, ‘There’s just no doubt in my mind — under any set of rules — waterboarding is torture’.
Waterboarding has been employed during the Spanish Inquisition (tortura del agua, in Spanish) and during the brutal reign of Cambodia’s Pol Pot. The U.S. sentenced a general to ten years hard labor for using water torture during the Spanish-American War. In WWII, despite its use by both the Japanese and Germans, the United States refused to waterboard. Eight Japanese officers were executed by the Allies for waterboarding British prisoners.
Come 2008, a U.K. Parliament committee voted that the United Kingdom should no longer take the United States’ word on torture, once the CIA admitted to waterboarding.
Bush adds his name and ours to the list of those barbarous reigns (Hitler’s Germany, the Khmer Rouge, The Spanish Inquisition, WWII Japan) that have employed this torture technique, bringing shame upon the nation.
Bush can say “we don’t torture” all he wants, but talk is cheap. Navy Lt. Cmdr Charles Swift has said, ‘We may parse it legally, [they don't] in Europe or Canada or Great Britain. They call it for what it is, torture’ (MSNBC).
For more on the Bush administration and torture, jump to February 20th 2006, May 6th 2004, May 19th 2006, August 1st 2002, August 2nd 2006, September 24th 2005, October 6th 2006, (and coming) December 15th 2005, and December 17th 2002.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Thomas Jefferson, The United States Declaration of Independence, 1776
11/29 “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly”
12/1 Military and Bush Insiders: Iraq War was “a strategic error … unnecessary” »
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UNCOMMON THOUGHT JOURNAL
June 29, 2004
Spinning Torture
I couldn’t help being outraged when I saw the headline Uncertainty About Interrogation Rules Seen as Slowing the Hunt for Information on Terrorists (Johnston, NYT, 6/28/04). The information presented is at once a covert revelation and classic propaganda.
First, there is the implication that there were rules from the Bush Regime that took “interrogation” beyond the legal bounds. This is clear despite regime claims (and claims by Bush in particular) that such “orders” were never given. We know they were given by Rumsfeld – we have the documentation. But that only applies to the military. The Johnston article, and an article from the AP (CIA Halts Interrogation Tactics), make it clear that there were permission changes for the CIA (civilian side) as well. The permission to use “aggressive” interrogation techniques came from the top.
In the Johnston article states:
Interrogators are uncertain what rules are in effect and are worried that the legal safeguards that they had believed were in place to protect them from internal sanctions or criminal liability may no longer exist, the officials said.
It goes on to state that: “Some intelligence officials involved in the C.I.A.’s interrogation program have told colleagues that they are bitter because their superiors, in the months after the September 2001 attacks, had assured them that aggressive interrogation techniques were necessary and legal.”
While one might mince words and say that maybe the CIA was operating on assumption, rather than policy, the Associated Press report is unambiguous. The article starts with the following statement:
The CIA has suspended use of some White House-approved aggressive interrogation tactics employed to extract information from reluctant al-Qaida prisoners, The Washington Post said.
And what did the Post article (CIA Puts Harsh Tactics On Hold – Memo on Methods Of Interrogation Had Wide Review, 6/27/04) say exactly?
The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said.
Had you heard that “administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and Vice President Cheney’s office.”? (wa. Post). In fact, the approval was confirmed by White House Counsel Gonzalez“As far as I’m told, every interrogation technique that has been authorized throughout the government is lawful and does not constitute torture.”
Ok, so the lie of “consistent with the Geneva Convention” is out the window. But the “rules” didn’t go very far over the line did they? Well, “The “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries.” (Wa. Post). Or (from Johnston), “including sleep and food deprivation and procedures in which detainees were led to believe that they might be shot, drowned or hanged.” Or from the AP report, “include feigning suffocation, “stress positions,” light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making captives think they are being interrogated by another government.”
So much for the spin of isolated incidences of “going over the line” by a few “bad apples.” Both the CIA and the military, had clear instructions on abuse and torture as interrogation methods.
But there is a deeper lie here that is left out of all three of these reports. You have heard it, I have heard it. We have heard it from experts in interrogation. We have heard it from the lawyers for the soldiers from Abu Ghraib, and from the experts they have brought on. We have even heard it from JAG lawyers seeking outside counsel about the methods changes desired by Rumsfeld. Abuse and torture DO NOT PROVIDE RELIABLE INTELLIGENCE.
So the second lie is that NOT using these “techniques” is “slowing the hunt for information on terrorists” (Johnston). How can stopping techniques that provide unreliable information “slow down the hunt”? The comment leads the reader to assume that such techniques produce consistently valuable and rapid intelligence. If that is the case, why are they still interrogating the prisoners in Guantanamo after two and a half YEARS? This is not to mention that it legitimates the use of abuse and torture of US military, CIA, embassy personnel, or anyone else thought to “know” something.
There is the revelation that there was a specific policy regarding torture and abuse. There is the promotion of the idea that such techniques are necessary, valuable and effective. There is the promotion of the idea that barring torture is somehow hamstringing a critical aspect of the “war on terrorism.” That, “promotion” is propaganda as far as I am concerned.
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Posted by rowan at June 29, 2004 08:19 AM
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San Francisco Chronical
Los Angeles Times
February 26, 2005
McCain backs bill against
use of torture
Senator responds to fresh allegations
against U.S. Army in Iraq
Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times
Monday, September 26, 2005
(09-26) 04:00 PDT Washington — Sen. John McCain, decrying new reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers, backed a bill Sunday to force the U.S. military to live up to its international obligations under the Geneva Convention and not torture detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Arizona Republican was responding to fresh allegations from Army Capt. Ian Fishback and two sergeants who served with the 82nd Airborne Division. Their description of routine harsh treatment of Iraqi captives parallels the abuse caught in photographs at the Abu Ghraib prison and was contained in a Human Rights Watch report issued by the advocacy group on Friday.
“We’ve got to have it stopped. It is hurting America’s image abroad,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week” program.
The senator announced that his staff on the Armed Service Committee is investigating the allegations, along with a criminal felony probe at Fort Bragg, N.C., by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and an administrative review by the Inspector General.
“I don’t know if these allegations are true,” McCain said. “But they have to be investigated. We’ve got to make it clear to the world that America doesn’t do it. It’s not about prisoners. It’s about us.”
Fishback and the sergeants said Iraqis captured during the siege of Fallujah were kicked and beaten, their bones broken and skin and eyes doused with chemical irritants.
In addition, some prisoners were forced to form human pyramids, while others were made to hold heavy water jugs with their arms outstretched.
The two sergeants, one who has since left the Army, have not been named. Fishback remains at Fott Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, where he is available to assist in the investigations.
In a lengthy chronology set down on his computer after he left Iraq in April 2004, Fishback said he tried unsuccessfully to get the Army to recognize it was skirting the Geneva Convention, which prohibits torture. He further complained that officers were not being properly trained how to handle prisoners.
But he said he was rebuffed by his chain-of-command, and after 17 months approached Human Rights Watch, which helped place him in touch with the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In a Sept. 16 letter directed to McCain, Fishback outlined his concerns.
“I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain-of-command,” he wrote. “Instead of resolving my concerns,” he added, the Army “leaves me deeply troubled.”
McCain, himself a victim of torture as a prisoner during the Vietnam War, made it clear Sunday he does not believe the military, including Pentagon leaders, have gotten the message that the United States must obey the Geneva Convention and abstain from torture.
He said he and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., another committee member, are proposing an amendment to the defense bill requiring the military to abide by the Geneva dictates.
When told the White House opposes such an amendment and that the president might veto the bill if the amendment is included, McCain said he was unsure whether there were enough votes in the Senate to override it.
“I hope,” he said of the Bush administration, “that they will understand why we’re trying to do this and why it’s so important to America’s image in the world.”
The senator also suggested that continued instances of abuse only turn more Americans against the war in Iraq. On Saturday, more than 100,000 protesters marched in Washington against the war. By contrast, only about 1,000 people joined a rally Sunday on the National Mall in support of the war.
“They’re unhappy about a number of aspects of the war, and with some justification,” he said of the protesters. “Some serious mistakes were made.”
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Source:
| Fairleigh Dickinson UniversityReleased: Thu 06-Apr-2006, 09:00 ET |
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Torture Does Not Yield
Useful Information
| Libraries Life News (Social and Behavioral Sciences) |
Keywords TORTURE, INTELLIGENCE GATHERING, GAME THEORY |
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| Contact InformationAvailable for logged-in reporters only | ||
| DescriptionA recent study by a Fairleigh Dickinson University economist finds that torture is a poor instrument of intelligence gathering. In this new research, he looks at the long-standing issue of torture effectiveness from a unique perspective. | ||
Newswise — Torture is a poor instrument of intelligence gathering, according to a recent study. “Torture doesn’t work under realistic conditions,” says the study’s author, Roger Koppl, a professor of economics at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “There are situations in which torture works, but they are rare. Twentieth-century experiences with torture show that it is futile in most cases.”
Koppl argues that torture is useless for intelligence gathering, because governments cannot get around a basic problem. “They cannot make a believable promise to stop torture once the victim tells the truth. Victims know this perfectly well and therefore say anything and everything except what the torturers want to know.” Two problems prevent governments from making a “credible commitment” to stop torture once victims tell the truth. First, “they use torture because they don’t know the truth already. But that means that they can’t recognize the truth when the victim speaks it.” Second, “even if they know they’ve got the truth, the victim is afraid they will keep torturing him anyway.”
The study, entitled “Epistemic Systems,” applies game theory to social situations in which people must decide whether to lie or tell the truth. Game theory is the branch of applied mathematics that studies how people in conflict try to get the best outcome for themselves by picking the best available strategy. It has been used to study games such as poker and political conflicts such as war. Koppl is using game theory to understand when people lie. “As we all learn in childhood,” Koppl remarks, “deciding whether to tell the truth is not just a moral issue; it can be a strategic choice as well.”
Koppl’s article appears in Episteme: Journal of Social Epistemology, which publishes research on which social situations tend to produce truthful outcomes and which do not. “Philosophers used to ask what academic philosophers ought to do to get at the truth,” explains the journal’s editor Alvin Goldman, Board of Governors Professor in Philosophy at Rutgers University, “now we are asking an additional question: Which practices out there in society actually work best?” Sometimes the answer is surprising. “Koppl’s study is a good example of that,” Goldman remarks. “In the past, critics of torture have pointed to moral issues, while assuming that torture works perfectly well. Koppl has shown it was wrong to just assume torture works.”
KEY FINDINGS FROM THE STUDY
- Torture is not an effective means to gather information.
- Torturers do not know the truth when they hear it. Torture victims understand this fact and therefore hide the truth.
- Torturers cannot make a believable promise to stop torture when they hear the truth.
- Torture victims understand this fact and therefore hide the truth.
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Has McCain Flip-Flopped
on Torture?
By Michael Scherer/Washington Thursday, Apr. 10, 2008
Sandy Huffaker / Getty
AS a candidate who relies on his carefully cultivated image as a straight-talking, maverick, John McCain has few issues as symbolically important as torture. No Republican has been as outspoken an opponent of prisoner mistreatment and abuse as McCain, and his own painful experience as a prisoner during the Vietnam War has granted him a unique moral authority on the issue.
So there is nothing the Democrats would like to do more than portray McCain as a rank hypocrite, someone who has sidled up to George W. Bush and flip-flopped on torture, all for political gain — which is exactly what Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean claimed in March. “It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to ban torture,” Dean said in a statement. “And it is reprehensible that McCain changed his position on torture just to win an election.”
Dean’s statement, distributed in a press release, was a political attack meant to raise questions among independent voters. And as with most political attacks, it turned a grain of truth into a misleading landslide of overheated accusation. A review of the record shows that McCain has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue. But at a time when new details are emerging of the Administration’s intimate involvement with formulating specific detainee interrogation practices, the Arizona Senator does now find himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with President Bush on a key election-year vote about those very same controversial policies.
At issue is a Democratic proposal to require the U.S. intelligence community to limit its interrogation techniques to those contained in a military training book called the Army Field Manual. Several Democrats who have received classified briefings on the current CIA interrogation program have said that the U.S. continues to approve of methods that they believe to be immoral and illegal. The CIA will not discuss the methods, except to say that waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning historically considered to be illegal, is no longer employed.
McCain has long argued that the Bush Administration overstepped its legal authority by approving techniques like waterboarding, and has successfully championed two efforts to try to limit the White House to the plain language of international treaties, which ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. McCain has also spoken in opposition to other techniques in the CIA arsenal like sleep deprivation and the use of stress positions, both of which were employed by the North Vietnamese during McCain’s captivity as a prisoner of war and may still be employed by the CIA.
But on this latest piece of legislation, which arose during the heat of the primary campaign and may surface again later this month, McCain sided with Bush in opposing a further restriction of CIA techniques. Despite the claims of some partisans, McCain’s decision was not a flip-flop, but rather the continuation of a position he took in 2005 when he first championed a bill to restrict the Bush Administration’s ability to mistreat detainees.
“The field manual, a public document written for military use, is not always directly translatable to use by intelligence officers,” McCain explained in February, reiterating his position from 2005. He added that the CIA should be allowed to use “alternative interrogation techniques,” that are not otherwise outlawed as unduly coercive, cruel, inhumane or degrading. McCain has not publicly described the techniques that he believes fall into that category.
Some human rights observers say McCain’s latest position is best explained as a symptom of exhaustion at fighting an Administration that has continuously resisted efforts to clearly outlaw practices like waterboarding. “I don’t believe John McCain is comfortable with the current CIA program,” said Tom Malinowski, the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, who has worked closely with McCain and his staff on these issues. “I think McCain just reached a point where he didn’t want any more confrontations with the White House. He wanted to win the White House.”
McCain senior adviser Mark Salter said the candidate continues to monitor whether the techniques employed by the CIA officials pass legal muster. “If McCain has reason to believe that they have crossed the line, he will litigate that,” Salter said, explaining that the Senator might discuss these concerns publicly or privately. “McCain communicates his view directly to the people doing it,” Salter added, in reference to interrogation procedures.
To understand the complexities of McCain’s position, it is first important to understand the legal game of hide and seek that the torture debate has become. Long before Bush Administration legal memoranda made techniques like waterboarding permissible for CIA detainees, many in Congress and the legal community assumed such methods were illegal under international agreements and U.S. criminal law. “There really wasn’t any ambiguity in terms of waterboarding,” explains Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
But since September 11, 2001, the legal waters have been muddied by repeated attempts by the Bush Administration to further define the meaning of the law. According to statements by CIA director Michael Hayden, three detainees in U.S. custody have been waterboarded. To permit these and other techniques, the White House and the Justice Department developed new definitions for terms like “torture” and “detainee” and expanded theories about the power of the President to override congressional oversight in time of war. A 2003 memo by John Yoo, a former Justice Department official, which was declassified last week, went so far as to discuss the potential of the President to approve the maiming, drugging or applying “scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance” on detainees.
In the spring of 2005, McCain began the process of formulating legislation to prevent a use of such extreme techniques and some of the sanctioned abuses at Abu Ghraib. Initially, McCain’s staff proposed and circulated a bill remarkably similar to the Democratic language McCain now opposes. In a draft proposal, dated May 17, 2005, and obtained by TIME, McCain’s staff specifically outlined a plan to make the Army Field Manual “the basis for a uniform standard adhered to by all elements of the United States Government.” Another section said that no person under U.S. control could be treated or interrogated with techniques “not authorized by or listed in” the manual. But in the end, after consultation with fellow Senators and others, McCain and his staff did not adopt this draft language.
“It is standard operating procedure to go through numerous drafts before a bill is actually ready for introduction,” said Brian Rogers, a McCain campaign spokesman, who added that he had no knowledge of the draft version of the bill.
When McCain publicly introduced his bill, which was later called the Detainee Treatment Act, he had narrowed the scope to require the field manual’s use only for the military interrogations or interrogations on military property. But the McCain proposal did also make clear all U.S. Government agencies were banned from employing “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners, as described by the U.S. Constitution and an international convention against torture, for which the United States is a signatory. A year later, McCain supported another bill, called the Military Commissions Act, which again made it a clear criminal act to employ “cruel or inhuman” treatment, as described by the Geneva Conventions.
“Cruel and inhuman treatment is defined as an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical pain or suffering,” McCain explained on the Senate floor, during this second effort. “Such mental suffering need not be prolonged to be prohibited. The mental suffering need only be more than transitory.” McCain has said he was assured by government officials that one of the most extreme techniques, waterboarding, was illegal under these laws.
The problem with all of these measures was that they continued to depend on interpretation by Bush Administration lawyers, who continue to be both secretive and evasive of congressional intent. As recently as February 6, the day after the Super Tuesday primary, a White House spokesman refused to rule out the future use of waterboarding as a technique for high-value detainees. The Attorney General has also declined to say that the technique, or other extreme techniques, are outlawed. On March 8, Bush vetoed the latest congressional attempt to force the CIA to adhere to the Army Field Manual, a rule book that prescribes mostly psychological methods of interrogation, and clearly prohibits the use of forced nudity, waterboarding, hooding and the use of military dogs. Congressional Democratic leaders have not yet announced if they plan to bring up the issue again, but they are unlikely to muster enough votes to override the veto.
Though McCain supports the President’s position on the veto, he has spent the better part of a year on the campaign trail speaking out against waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods as forms of illegal torture. In recent weeks, as it became clear that he would win the Republican nomination, his direct criticism of the Bush Administration has softened. “It is unfortunate,” he said on the Senate floor on February 13, of the Bush Administration’s refusal to call waterboarding illegal. “It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law.”
His words, however, have had no effect. To this day, the Bush Administration continues to ignore McCain’s advice.
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CITIZENS FOR GLOBAL SOLUTIONS
ANALYSIS: Obama vs. McCain on Torture
Josh Rovenger
May 28, 2008
(This is the second in a series of papers analyzing the global and foreign policy views of the presumptive presidential nominees and how each candidate may govern as our nation’s next president.)
It’s become quite apparent that Senator Barack Obama is going to do whatever he can to link Senator John McCain to the Bush administration. Obama has labeled the Iraq War, the president’s economic policies, and the president’s foreign policy perspective as the ‘Bush-McCain War’, the ‘Bush-McCain tax cuts’ and the ‘Bush-McCain worldview’, respectively. However, given McCain’s history as a legislature on the issue of torture, and his experience in Vietnam, conventional wisdom would suggest that Obama is going to have a much harder time tying McCain and Bush together on this issue.
The past seven years have been marked by an administration willing to depart from long-standing precedents. While torture has been continuously condemned in this country, the president has virtually sanctioned it. The Bush administration has denied basic legal rights and treatment to detainees at Guantanamo, has approved tougher interrogation techniques towards suspected terrorists and has overseen the brutal treatment of prisoners at prisons such as Abu Ghraib. The administration has also initiated an extraordinary rendition program in which suspected terrorists are sent to countries specifically known for their harsher interrogation techniques. In fact, Amnesty International, a human rights watchdog organization, recently released a scathing report criticizing the administration for not closing down Guantanamo and its failure to ban all torture.
Although Obama and McCain may be closer to one another on the issue than either is to the president, upon further analysis it becomes clear that Obama is going to have a much easier time framing the issue in his favor. Thus far, he has targeted the current president’s policies as fundamentally unacceptable, while McCain has had to walk a fine line, balancing his loyalty to the GOP, his party’s current president and his own personal views and experiences.
On one hand, Barack Obama has consistently made clear that if he’s elected, “we’ll reject torture-without exception or equivocation.” This includes “ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.” If his rhetoric is any indication of his policies, he is likely to reverse the actions of the Bush administration. He would reject the practice of torture as policy, and his “administration will close down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.” The only question that arises on Obama’s position is what his reaction would be in a highly pressured situation. “Now, I will do whatever it takes to keep America safe. And there are going to be all sorts of hypotheticals and emergency situations that I will make that judgment at that time.” Ultimately though, he argues “what we cannot do is have the President of the United States state, as a matter of policy, that there is a loophole or an exception where we would sanction torture.”
On the other hand, McCain has historically been one of the staunchest advocates against torture. Although he can claim some success, as of late he’s been placed on the defensive. For instance, in 2005, he spear-headed a successful challenge to President Bush by garnering support for the Detainee Treatment Act. The amendment ensured that “no person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.” Although the legislation does not mention water boarding specifically, McCain has continuously indicated his belief that it is an illegal interrogation method for any governmental agency.
His position seemed even clearer in the 2007 primary debate season when he was the sole dissenter who claimed that, “We do not torture people. It’s not about the terrorists, it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.” On a practical level he added, “The more physical pain you inflict on someone, the more they’re going to tell you what they think you want to know.” As for Guantanamo Bay he has said, “I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.”
Questions about his position have arisen because of his decision this February to vote against, and support the President’s veto of, legislation that would have applied the army field manual standards to the CIA. This legislation would have limited the CIA’s ability to use controversial interrogation techniques. “I believe that our energies are better directed at ensuring that all techniques, whether used by the military or the CIA, are in full compliance with out international obligations and in accordance with our deepest values. What we need is not to tie the CIA to the army field manual but rather to have a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.”
McCain should reconsider his position on this issue. Regardless of whether McCain was correct in his analysis, the real meaning of the vote was its potential symbolism as a challenge to the president’s position on torture. The bill arose after mounting criticism towards the president’s stance on water boarding and acted as a manifestation of this criticism. A vote for the legislation represented a rejection of the president’s position, while a vote against it represented nothing more than a capitulation. While McCain’s position may be coherent and quite nuanced, he would serve his values better by reconsidering the decision he made and incorporating the policy into his platform.
Citizens for Global Solutions believes that torture, in any situation, is fundamentally averse to this country’s deeply rooted values and to the fundamental rights of all humans. It also tremendously weakens our standing and leadership capabilities in the international community. As such, both candidates should continue to speak out against the status quo, and should agree to create an independent bipartisan commission on torture and U.S. interrogation policy to fully dissect and ameliorate the current problems. Obama has said that he would consider such a commission but believes, “we already know how detention and interrogation policy should be handled.” He voted favorably in the 109th Congress to an amendment that would have created a national commission on policies and practices on the treatment of detainees since September 11th, 2001. McCain’s position is not as clear, as he did not vote on the measure, nor has he signified his desire for the creation of such a commission. While the two candidates may not agree on everything in regards to this issue, they come a lot closer to one another than either does to the current president.
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April 22, 2009
Report links CIA to military
harsh interrogations
ABC News – Jake Tapper on Torture Memos
AFP/File – File picture shows a demonstrator dressed as an Abu Ghraib prisoner protesting outside the White House …
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 9 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The brutal treatment of prisoners by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Afghanistan was systematic and a direct result of the CIA’s early use of harsh interrogation tactics, according to a Senate report.
The 232-page report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee came less than a week after President Barack Obama released the Aug. 1, 2002 memo that justified the use of severe methods by the CIA.
The timeline laid out in the report shows, however, that military and CIA officers were being trained how to conduct coercive interrogations for as much as eight months before receiving the Justice Department green light. The CIA had started conducting severe interrogations in the spring of 2002.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee’s chairman, said the report shows that abuse of prisoners was sweeping and not, as former Bush administration defense official Paul Wolfowitz once said, the result of “a few bad apples.” As the No. 2 defense official, Wolfowitz was a major architect of the Iraq war.
“Authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment,” Levin said.
The Senate investigation has been in a Pentagon security review since Nov. 21, 2008. Its findings were drawn from more than 70 interviews and 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents.
“In my judgment,” Levin said, “the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan to low-ranking soldiers.”
According to the report, the road to the abuses began in December 2001, just three months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Pentagon’s general counsel office reached out that month to a military agency that trains American personnel in how to endure enemy interrogations.
The legal office wanted information about how the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, conducted mock interrogations and detention operations. The agency trains U.S. armed forces personnel to endure abusive treatment similar to methods used by North Korean, Communist Chinese and Vietcong interrogators.
In February 2002, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would not extend full Geneva Convention protections to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. He replaced that 60-year-old standard governing the treatment of prisoners with a new, untested guideline vaguely requiring only “humane treatment.”
A month later, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, an alleged top al-Qaida organizer in Pakistan. Zubaydah proved resistant to traditional interrogation techniques. During the first half of 2002, CIA interrogators began to subject Zubaydah to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning taught by survival school trainers to CIA personnel sometime in the first half of 2002.
In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel’s office, JPRA officials detailed their methods, but warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”
“A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” the training officials said in their memo.
Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. The memos, one of which remained classified top secret until it was released by the Obama administration last week, appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data to show that the CIA’s methods would not cross the line into torture, which was also newly defined.
The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government’s carefully controlled training program.
Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods are inherently dangerous and students are sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.
“The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially,” he said.
Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military
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October 1, 2009 at 12:07 am
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