The torture report

A
New York Times editorial                                                   Read Spanish Version

Most
Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the
work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most
unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled
decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by
the American military and intelligence services.

Now,
a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made
what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William
J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice
President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The
report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what
happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and
in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It
said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and
America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced
interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese
agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their
only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what
might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The
officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to
justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that
the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on
terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally
reinterpreted the conventions.

*******

That
order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the
Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of
“aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were
torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and
treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.

These
top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the
armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed
soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that
were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were
actually counterproductive.

One
page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush
and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had
“serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed
techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal
investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may
subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said
some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of
waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said
they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real
review.

The
legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the
time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss,
Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr.
Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes.

The
report indicates that Mr. Haynes was an early proponent of the idea
of using the agency that trains soldiers to withstand torture to
devise plans for the interrogation of prisoners held by the American
military. These trainers — who are not interrogators but experts
only on how physical and mental pain is inflicted and may be endured
— were sent to work with interrogators in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo
and in Iraq.

On
Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo
to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in
Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a
painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a
one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior
military lawyers considered the memo “‘legally insufficient’
and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”

Mr.
Rumsfeld rescinded his order a month later, and narrowed the number
of “aggressive techniques” that could be used at Guantánamo. But
he did so only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally
protest the illegal treatment of prisoners. By then, at least one
prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military
dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a
leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at
Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani.

The
abuse and torture of prisoners continued at prisons run by the C.I.A.
and specialists from the torture-resistance program remained involved
in the military detention system until 2004. Some of the practices
Mr. Rumsfeld left in place seem illegal, like prolonged sleep
deprivation.

*******

These
policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and
may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The
report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite
the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary.

Alberto
Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told
the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank
officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes
of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in
recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the
symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

We
can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters
behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new
administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be
happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the
military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.

A
prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against
top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the
abuse.

*******

Given
his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful
stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not
hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a
politically fraught step.

At
the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First
suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen
prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice
Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr.
Bush’s lawyers.

Mr.
Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch
and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to
look into these and other egregious violations of the law. Like the
9/11 commission, it would examine in depth the decisions on prisoner
treatment, as well as warrantless wiretapping, that eroded the rule
of law and violated Americans’ most basic rights. Unless the nation
and its leaders know precisely what went wrong in the last seven
years, it will be impossible to fix it and make sure those terrible
mistakes are not repeated.

We
expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the
campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other
places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first
acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s
executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and
the rule of law.

That
job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been
chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with
extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr.
Obama’s White House counsel.

A
good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s
disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States
was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva
Conventions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18thu1.html?_r=1&hp