US TORTURE DEBATE

Is America above the Geneva Conventions?

By Michael Ratner and Sara Miles

Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney about a new set of US Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists. The debate over an anti-torture bill is a sad moment for a country that once stood for human rights.

As someone who has spent decades representing clients who have been tortured under dictatorships, in dirty wars and by lawless governments around the world, I'm having a rough week here at home. My friend Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun whom I represented after she'd been abducted, raped and tortured by security forces in Guatemala, told me she was having a hard time too. "Torture destroys trust," she said. "Since my torture, 16 years ago, I've tried to rebuild that trust, but now my government has shattered it yet again. Fear returns..."



AP
The treatment of Iraqi prisoners has been at the center of the debate on torture.
For Sister Dianna and other victims of torture, this moment represents what she calls "a choice between courage and cowardice, human decency and depravity." Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his aides about a whether a new set of Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists should prohibit the "cruel, humiliating, and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In the Congress, Sen. John McCain, with support from 89 colleagues, is pushing a separate measure to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody -- against veto threats from the White House and fierce opposition from Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington, who are maneuvering to exempt clandestine CIA activities from oversight. And reporters have uncovered a network of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- secret detention camps run by the CIA, where suspects are being held and brutally interrogated.

The idea that torture could be so publicly defensible -- and the news that the United States is maintaining secret facilities in former Soviet-era prisons for torturing nameless and disappeared people -- fills me with shame and horror. And while it's encouraging that John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war, wants to make it illegal to strap naked prisoners to boards and hold them under water, electrocute them or mock-execute them, it's profoundly depressing that the discourse about torture has come to this point.

Cruelty in war may be universal: but an international code acknowledging limits on cruelty has been, until now, a fundamental part of civilization. The Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949, put it plainly: Even in war, all persons are to be treated "humanely"; "cruel treatment and torture and outrages upon personal dignity" are prohibited. The United States and countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 192 in all, have agreed that freedom from torture, degradation, and cruel or inhuman treatment is one of the most basic of human rights, transcending national boundaries. As Judge Irving Kaufman of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1980 -- in a landmark case we at the Center for Constitutional Rights brought in a U.S. court against the Paraguayan general who tortured Joel Filartiga to death -- "for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind."

Changes since 9/11


REUTERS/ The New Yorker
A hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison who reportedly was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off a box.

The Filartiga case set a precedent that torturers anywhere in the world can be held accountable for their crimes. With the Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyers for other human rights organizations, I have represented victims of torture from Bosnia to Algeria, from East Timor to Tiananmen Square: their stories still haunt me and bring me to tears. I'm unable to forget a terrorized Kanjobal Indian boy from Guatemala, who was just 8 when army troops came to his village and rounded up all the men, shackling and hooding them. The boy told me how he'd been forced to watch as his father was hanged from a tree and cut apart alive. The principle that all people should be safe from torture -- that there are universal laws that make us human -- has been at the very heart of our work.

Since 9/11, I've found myself swept up in defending basic human rights and the rule of law against a relentless onslaught by the Bush administration. We've brought suit on behalf of 500 nameless "John Doe" prisoners held at Guantánamo in defiance of the Geneva Conventions; we've fought the indefinite detention of American citizens; we're challenging the Defense Department and private contractors over the horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib. We've uncovered terrible stories about cruelty and torture carried out by our country, like that of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen kidnapped and "rendered" to Syria by American forces, who was kept an underground cell for over 10 months and beaten for weeks on end with a thick cable. I represented three young men from England who were released from Guantánamo when it was finally proved they'd made false confessions -- after being stripped, hooded, isolated, chained to the floor for 12 hours at stifling temperatures and threatened by snarling dogs.


ABU GHRAIB: A SANITIZED HOUSE OF TORTURE




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Yet despite victories in court, and rising political outrage from Republicans as well as Democrats, military lawyers and State Department officials as well as human-rights activists, it now seems that administration hard-liners are digging in.

How did we get to this point? Because the United States is bound by the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, and by the 1987 Convention Against Torture with its prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, McCain's legislation should not even be necessary.



AP
A detainee in an outdoor solitary confinement cell talks with a military policeman in Iraq.
But after 9/11, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (at that time White House counsel to the president) and others gave their legal opinion that prohibitions on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" didn't apply to noncitizens being held by the United States outside the United States. Then, because torture, even outside the United States, remains a crime, they redefined "torture" so narrowly that almost all violent and coercive methods of interrogation were excluded. Then, because of the U.S. criminal statute making violations of the Geneva Conventions a crime, they insisted that the conventions did not apply to anyone they termed a suspected al-Qaida member.

Legal cover

These opinions were an attempt to provide legal cover so that U.S. personnel and contractors could engage in coercive interrogations without fear of criminal prosecution. They were an attempt to show that the United States did not really engage in torture and was not really violating conventions governing cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Once the abuse scandals broke, and the reality of what was being done to prisoners emerged, officials began to talk about lack of clarity in the opinions, or a "failure of supervision" that led to "excesses."

FOUND IN...

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But this administration is now openly and baldly saying that it claims the right to torture, at its discretion. All the fictions that sustained the war on terror -- that abuses were one-time mistakes by low-level grunts; that the rules about human rights weren't clear; that soldiers didn't understand the parameters when they beat and humiliated and tortured prisoners -- have been replaced by a clear declaration: The United States is going to torture people as it sees fit, to subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment wherever and whenever it decides to.

Human rights activists around the world who live under repressive regimes have long looked to this country for leadership; our government, flawed as it is, has launched crusades against human rights abusers abroad and helped prevent terrible suffering by demanding that torture stop. Now we are facing a new world: one in which the most powerful country on the planet publicly declares itself above the laws that have protected individuals everywhere from disappearance, torture and murder. It is a sad and dark moment, in which the hostis humani generis, the enemy of all humankind, speaks with the voice of the United States government.



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Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

It is a sad, dark moment. Of all the horrible things this adminstration has done, this one is the worst.

No the U.S. is not above the Geneva Convention. However, if our prisoner's are being tortured, then we will be forced to re-evaluate the situation. It's a very unfourtunate part of the situation we are in with the middle east. You have to keep yourself on a level playing field. If we aren't playing by the same rules, then we don't have a chance to win.

The problem I have is we don't know what the Iraqi's have done to our prisoners of war. OH yeah, except, drag their bodies through the street, burn them, and then hang them high from a pole so everyone can see them. I think the answer to this question is really simple..... we will play nice if they do.

Pkemp22402, IF prisoners are being tortured?

Have you read any of the government documents that have been released through FOIA court battles? There is no doubt that we tortured prisoners.

Sorry, but in the America I live in WE are the good guys...WE are the ones that set the example for the rest of the world. We do not adopt the values of our enemies. At least we never did until George Bush became Commander in Chief.



Here is just one example out of many such stories that you can view in our torture sub-forum. These were early stories that came out. Much, much more has come out since.

Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail

By DOUGLAS JEHL

03/12/05 "New York Times" - - WASHINGTON, March 11 - Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public.

One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the Army report said, citing a medical examiner.

The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 40 miles north of Kabul. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there.

The reports, from the Army Criminal Investigation Command, also make clear that the abuse at Bagram went far beyond the two killings. Among those recommended for prosecution is an Army military interrogator from the 519th Battalion who is said to have "placed his penis along the face" of one Afghan detainee and later to have "simulated anally sodomizing him (over his clothes)."

The Army reports cited "credible information" that four military interrogators assaulted Mr. Dilawar and another Afghan prisoner with "kicks to the groin and leg, shoving or slamming him into walls/table, forcing the detainee to maintain painful, contorted body positions during interview and forcing water into his mouth until he could not breathe."

American military officials in Afghanistan initially said the deaths of Mr. Habibullah, in an isolation cell on Dec. 4, 2002, and Mr. Dilawar, in another such cell six days later, were from natural causes. Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the American commander of allied forces in Afghanistan at the time, denied then that prisoners had been chained to the ceiling or that conditions at Bagram endangered the lives of prisoners.

But after an investigation by The New York Times, the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides. Last fall, Army investigators implicated 28 soldiers and reservists and recommended that they face criminal charges, including negligent homicide.

But so far only Private Brand, a military policeman from the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cincinnati, and Sgt. James P. Boland, from the same unit, have been charged.

The charges against Sergeant Boland for assault and other crimes were announced last summer, and those against Private Brand are spelled out in Army charge sheets from hearings on Jan. 4 and Feb. 3 in Fort Bliss, Tex.

The names of other officers and soldiers liable to criminal charges had not previously been made public.

But among those mentioned in the new reports is Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, the chief military intelligence officer at Bagram. The reports conclude that Captain Wood lied to investigators by saying that shackling prisoners in standing positions was intended to protect interrogators from harm. In fact, the report says, the technique was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation.

An Army report dated June 1, 2004, about Mr. Habibullah's death identifies Capt. Christopher Beiring of the 377th Military Police Company as having been "culpably inefficient in the performance of his duties, which allowed a number of his soldiers to mistreat detainees, ultimately leading to Habibullah's death, thus constituting negligent homicide."

Captain Wood, who commanded Company A in Afghanistan, later helped to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Two Defense Department reports have said that a list of interrogation procedures she drew up there, which went beyond those approved by Army commanders, may have contributed to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Past efforts to contact Captain Wood, Captain Beiring and Sergeant Boland, who were mentioned in passing in earlier reports, and to learn the identity of their lawyers, have been unsuccessful. All have been named in previous Pentagon reports and news accounts about the incidents in Afghanistan; none have commented publicly. The name of Private Brand's lawyer did not appear on the Army charge sheet, and military officials said neither the soldier nor the lawyer would likely comment.

John Sifton, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said the documents substantiated the group's own investigations showing that beatings and stress positions were widely used, and that "far from a few isolated cases, abuse at sites in Afghanistan was common in 2002, the rule more than the exception."

"Human Rights Watch has previously documented, through interviews with former detainees, that scores of other detainees were beaten at Bagram and Kandahar bases from early 2002 on," Mr. Sifton said in an e-mail message.

In his own report, made public this week, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III cited the deaths of Mr. Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar as examples of abuse that had occurred during interrogations. Admiral Church said his review of the Army investigation had found that the abuse "was unrelated to approved interrogation techniques."

But Admiral Church also said there were indications in both cases "that medical personnel may have attempted to misrepresent the circumstances of the death, possibly in an effort to disguise detainee abuse," and noted that the Army's surgeon general was reviewing "the specific medical handling" of those cases and one other.

The most specific previous description of the cause of deaths of the two men had come from Pentagon officials, who said last fall that both had suffered "blunt force trauma to the legs," and that investigators had determined that they had been beaten by "multiple soldiers" who, for the most part, had used their knees. Pentagon officials said at the time that it was likely that the beatings had been confined to the legs of the detainees so the injuries would be less visible.

Both men had been chained to the ceiling, one at the waist and one by the wrists, although their feet remained on the ground. Both men had been captured by Afghan forces and turned over to the American military for interrogation.

Mr. Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander, died of a pulmonary embolism apparently caused by blood clots formed in his legs from the beatings, according to the report of June 1, 2004. Mr. Dilawar, who suffered from a heart condition, is described in an Army report dated July 6, 2004, as having died from "blunt force trauma to the lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease."


And look at what the Navy said:

Washington
'Abusive techniques' at Gitmo had Navy brass talking pullout

THE BOSTON GLOBE
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.16.2005
advertisement WASHINGTON - Top U.S. Navy officials were so outraged at abusive interrogation techniques being used at the Guantanamo Bay prison in late 2002 that they considered removing Navy interrogators from the operation, according to a portion of a recent Pentagon report that has not been made public.
A top Navy psychologist reported to his supervisor in December 2002 that interrogators at Guantanamo were starting to use "abusive techniques." In another incident that same month, the Defense Department's joint investigative service, which includes Navy investigators, formally "disassociated" itself from the interrogation of a detainee, after learning that he had been subjected to particularly abusive and degrading treatment.
The two events prompted Navy law enforcement officials to debate pulling out of the Guantanamo operation entirely unless the interrogation techniques were restricted. The Navy's general counsel, Alberto Mora, told colleagues that the techniques were "unlawful and unworthy of the military services."
The previously undisclosed events were revealed at a hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee Tuesday. The disclosures shed new light on the military services' objections to the Bush administration's policies on how to interrogate prisoners from the Afghanistan war.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the events are outlined in the largely classified report on military detention and interrogation operations delivered last week by Vice Adm. Albert Church. Levin did not reveal which techniques triggered the Navy's unusual concerns.
Levin said the Navy's expressions of outrage prompted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's decision in January 2003 to revoke an aggressive interrogation policy for Guantanamo detainees, according to the Church report. Rumsfeld then convened a Pentagon working group to examine interrogation issues more thoroughly. It came up with a more restricted interrogation policy in April 2003.
Specifically, the chain of events began when the chief psychologist of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, Dr. Michael Gelles, completed a study of Guantanamo interrogations in December 2003 that included extracts of detainee interrogation logs. Gelles reported to the service director, David Brant, that interrogators were using "abusive techniques and coercive psychological procedures."
That prompted Brant to argue that if those practices continued, the agency would have to "consider whether to remain" at Guantanamo.