On torture and American values
A
New York Times editorial from October 7, 2007
Once
upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey
the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human
rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where
people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people
in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United
States for its values.
The
Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that
respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week
laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not
only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have
conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American
people and the world about those policies.
After
the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal
detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were
told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held
in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme
ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation —
had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The
administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques
on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.
The
White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted
documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things
American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the
American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s
loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts
did not violate the lower standard of “cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment.”
That
allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and
to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the
interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to
do it, from any kind of legal accountability.
Mr.
Bush and his aides were still clinging to their rationalizations at
the end of last week. The president declared that Americans do not
torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his
detention policies.
Neither
statement was true — at least in what the White House once scorned
as the “reality-based community” — and Senator John Rockefeller,
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious. He
demanded all of the “opinions of the Justice Department analyzing
the legality” of detention and interrogation policies. Lawmakers,
who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White
House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values.
For
the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this
really who we are?
Is
this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with
minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th
century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then
concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid
accountability before American voters?
Truly
banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives;
experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false
confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would
not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their
crimes in a way that does not mock American values.
Clinging
to the administration’s policies will only cause further harm to
America’s global image and to our legal system. It also will add
immeasurably to the risk facing any man or woman captured while
wearing America’s uniform or serving in its intelligence forces.
This
is an easy choice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
