Torture is Immoral and Illegal and Torturers Must be Prosecuted
Today’s New York Times reports on the Torture Memos that the A.C.L.U. was able to obtain through a successful lawsuit against the U. S. Government. The NYT story confirms what we knew all along: “Torture” was defined in memos written by lawyers in Bush’s Justice Department and signed by Jay S. Bybee, Steven G. Bradbury, and John Yoo. The Bush Administration relied on the legal opinions expressed in the memos to authorize torture, or what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Excerpts from the article:
The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.
The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.
Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.
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Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.
The documents were released with minimal redactions, indicating that President Obama sided against current and former C.I.A. officials who for weeks had pressed the White House to withhold details about specific interrogation techniques.
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Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty.
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The A.C.L.U. said the memos clearly describe criminal conduct and underscore the need to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate who authorized and carried out torture.
This article very clearly places blame not on “a few bad apples” but on high ranking government officials in the Bush Administration. In order to put this nasty episode behind us, we must “spend our time and energy” to identify those who are to blame. And we must prosecute them even if they turn out to be the former President and Vice President of the United States of America.
So I say President Obama is wrong and the A.C.L.U. is right. If we don’t hold those responsible for the “dark and painful chapter in our history,” what is to stop anyone in the future from doing the same thing?
