Justifying Torture
The newly-published Bush administration memos show a chilling, Orwellian abuse of language to justify torture
David Cole
"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing." So Dennis Blair, President Obama's director of national intelligence, stated as he sought to minimize the significance of four previously secret Justice Department memos that employed tortured legal reasoning to authorise CIA agents to use cruel and abusive tactics to interrogate suspects inside secret prisons.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." So begins George Orwell's classic novel of the security state, 1984. It seems unlikely that Blair intended the allusion. Maybe every incoming US director of national intelligence is required to read 1984, and the opening line just stuck with him. But the reference could not have been more appropriate. The four Justice Department memos, spanning 124 pages of dense legal analysis and cold clinical descriptions of sustained, systematic abuse of human beings, do precisely what Orwell foretold: twist the English language in order to approve the unthinkable.
How else could one conclude that slamming a suspect's head against the wall, depriving him of sleep for more than a week, forcing him into stress positions and dark, confined boxes for hours at a time, and waterboarding him repeatedly – 183 times in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and 83 times in the case of Abu Zubaydah - was not "torture," and not even "cruel, inhuman, or degrading?"
All such conduct is prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the US signed and ratified into law in 1988. So the lawyers' job should have been to tell the CIA that they could not use these tactics – which in any event have never been shown to be more effective than alternative forms of interrogation. Instead, the lawyers – including John Yoo, now a professor at Berkeley and Jay Bybee, now a federal judge - undertook to read the treaty prohibitions to authorise precisely what they were designed to prohibit.
The legal arguments employed are stunningly bad. None of the interrogation tactics result in severe physical or mental pain or suffering, the threshold required for torture, the lawyers reasoned, because US military trainers have used most of them on our own soldiers to train them to withstand abuse by their captors. But to be subjected to waterboarding in a voluntary setting by someone you know is on your side and has no intention to harm you is completely different from being subjected to such treatment by the enemy, where the fear of death is perfectly reasonable. The fact that my children sometimes hide in a dark box when playing hide and seek doesn't meant that it's not inhuman, degrading, and possibly torture to confine a human being against his will to such a box for hours on end. The fact that consensual sex does not inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering does not mean that rape doesn't.
Most of the attention thus far has gone to the memos interpreting the criminal torture statute, but the most outrageous memo is surely the fourth one [PDF], signed by Stephen Bradbury, which argues that these tactics are not even "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" – a much lower threshold than torture. The memo first contends that the treaty's prohibition on such abuse does not protect foreign nationals held outside our borders, only Americans. But the very purpose of an international human rights treaty is to protect all human beings from outrages to human dignity – and dignity does not turn on what passport you happen to hold.
The memo goes on to argue that even if the prohibition extended to foreign nationals held abroad, none of these tactics are in fact cruel, inhuman, or degrading. If you asked any class of 10-year-olds the same question, I doubt a single one would disagree that forced nudity, stress positions, slamming people into walls, slapping their faces and abdomens, confining them in dark boxes, and suffocating them until they fear they are drowning, are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Indeed, that is their point.
But the 10-year-olds would not have had the benefit of a legal education. The Justice Department lawyers reasoned that only conduct that "shocks the conscience" can be considered cruel, inhuman or degrading, and that even though the Supreme Court has held that the slightest use of force "shocks the conscience" in a domestic criminal investigation, the very same tactics lose their shocking character when perpetrated in the name of national security.
In fact, federal courts have held that merely questioning an individual while he is suffering from pain not inflicted by the questioners "shocks the conscience." If that's the case, then logic would seem to dictate that deliberately inflicting pain for the purpose of questioning also shocks the conscience. But in this instance, neither logic nor law dictated. The end was deemed to justify the means, and these lawyers were only too willing to torture the law to let the torturers loose. Long live George Orwell.
SOURCE: The Guardian
We could always use the methods of ..........................."The Spanish Inquisition"..
NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION :(
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I think you have me confused with someone who gives a sh1t.
LOL!
I wonder if they could find additional "humane" methods like constantly (24-7) playing Barry Manilow music!
Surely, that would make anyone tap-out or surrender!
The truth is we will NEVER know the whole truth about the inhumane methods used. ;)
now you touched the sensitive nerve of me.
Just be patient thats all :)
We are still waiting for your email regarding QLSG
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humane methods applicable, they must have already tried them..and they haven't worked for the purpose, and took a long period of persuation...so are the quick methods of agony.
and as long as war is there....
just get few beer bottle smack them down his throat and he will be all fine and good.
I'm afraid Mr.Paul is just getting started! ;)
Calm down boy calm down no need to get hyper
Funny you should mention a drill. I was thinking about the movie classic "The Marathon Man" where Dustin Hoffman is tortured by having a tooth drilled!
OUCH!
If, to find a Nuclear device in NYC, means drilling the guys kneecaps then so be it.
Im not one for f****** about with the PC brigade.These rules of PC-ness and the like are made by armchair warriors safe in their ivory towers.
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I think you have me confused with someone who gives a sh1t.
can you give 3 of those thousands humane methods..like sweettalking maybe...promising house and lot or salvation? absolution?
Let me re-phrase: I believe that more humane methods can be used to extract necessary information needed to save thousands.
for infomation, that may save thousands of lives.If yer wanna live by the sword, then expect to die by the sword as well.
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I think you have me confused with someone who gives a sh1t.
I don't know if your comment is directed at me, but I will say that no the torture is not justifiable.
But, it is what it is. Governments have their methods (and you can get off your high horse thinking it's just the US government that tortures hostages) and these methods are questionable.
Like I said, "It's easier to beg for forgiveness..."
Brit, I agree, the Geneva Convention document has become a joke.
britexpat...you took your words from my mind!
The Geneva Convention document should be torn up and thrown away.. No one really adheres to it. Our governments quote it when it suits our needs.
the essence of this justification? that torture is justifiable after all?
Perhaps the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 needs to be revisited and revised.
I would imagine that all governments document methods used in dealing with hostages. Whether these documents are truthful is another story.
Often the mentality of "It's easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission" persists.
Well, the way I see it some govts do attempt at some sort of a transparency in their dealings, which causes them to come out with the skeletons in their own cupboards. and then there are countries where everything is censored and a rosy picture is put up in front of the world.
Such things had been happening over and over for decades even before the cold war...this bit of exposure shouldn't even make you lift a finger or an eyebrow.
I am shocked that nobody gets upset about this! The Bush administration admits to torture, that is quite soemthing isn't it! They should be punished severely!!!
Alexa... as Ive said, Memo's were published...pls visit cageprisoners.com for more.
by the way not all countries do that, we dont have that in my country, al hamdulilah!
aand yes, NO Government Admin has admitted to the crime of torture, only the prisoners themselves are claiming it has been hapenning.
BUT getting these Dox in public/published is one way of the BUSH ADMINISTRATION of admitting, isnt it?
In the UK, Government lawyers have been forced to make a humiliating apology to the High Court for concealing 13 crucial intelligence documents about the torture of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed....
but like I said, the story goes on and on...
I thought truth serums were a myth?
They say that mental/psychological torture is far more productive than physical torture when getting information.
The west just gets others like Pakistan to do it for us.
Business as usual I suppose. When you want an orange juice, then squeeze the orange. You want the horse to run faster, then beat it's butt. No pain, no gain. Your way, my way.
Kudos to Obama for addressing this issue .
I always wonder why we need torture in this day and age, when there are all types of truth serums and similat drugs available?
lol. bedtime story int he morning!
Day b4 yesterday, Pres. Obama has agreed to published the alleged "Secret Legal Memo's" from the Bush Administration regarding the "justification of torture" made to the alleged "terrorists" that have been held for years and years. Most of these people are from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Palestine...some of these people that are holding British & American citizenships were captured in US &UK.
The memo's were proof that Bush Administration has allowed "torture" to these people. Although the names and other important detail were blacked out...TO protect those involved. It is a sucess that the claims of torture from these so called "terrorists" are proven, as they were always denied by the Bush Admin. Now there is a hard proof! BUT sad to say, those who were involed in legalizing this torture WILL NOT BE PROSECUTED.....
To add to this, Government lawyers have been forced to make a humiliating apology to the High Court for concealing 13 crucial intelligence documents about the torture of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed....
DONT GET BORED!! this goes on and on and on..............
http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=28705
I have such a short attention span i couldn't get past the first two lines :p What is this some bed time story for the morning?
Good Fortune always comes knocking at your door...when you are sh*tting in the toilet!! :)
_[]~SMoKE~[]_
I got eye pain while reading this... too long but worth it... eye opener! anyone read abt Jarallah Al Marri??? 1 of 2 Qataris imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for 5 yrs+.... But al hamdulilah, he's back in his homeland now :-)
but sadly his cousin is still in some detention center in the US...
why some things like that will happen,,, why???
bin laden ....
how m i suppose to have tat much of time to read all tat ?? :)
what the hell is with this copy paste thing from news website.