The Tortured Law on Torture
By Robert Scheer
Created May 14 2008 - 10:26am
- from Truthdig [1]
Ah yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least,
was
the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious
assaults
ever on this nation's commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news
that
charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks' 20th
hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the "evidence" he supplied
under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.
That fact, of course, will not compel President Bush to cut the tortured
prisoner loose. After all, Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani has only been
held in confinement for more than six years without being charged with a
crime, and without being allowed to confront his accusers in a court of
law.
The fact that the information produced is worthless--as evidenced by
Qahtani, once driven insane, naming everyone around him in the camp as a
major al-Qaida operative--will not deter those who condone torture. But
others expert in these matters, including presumptive Republican
presidential nominee John McCain, will recoil from such tactics.
It was the treatment of Qahtani and other prisoners, as witnessed by
horrified U.S. Navy Department investigators at Guantanamo, that got the
attention of the Navy's then-General Counsel Alberto J. Mora. In one of
those all too rare examples of true heroism that makes one proud to be an
American, Mora challenged the Bush administration to practice the human
rights standards that America proclaims to the world. But Bush would stay
true to his own values: "Any activity we conduct is within the law," Bush
stated in November 2005, adding, "We do not torture."
What was it then? As the New Yorker's Jane Mayer re****ted in 2006, citing
the Army's own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being subjected
to do***ented beatings and other physical abuse, was put through an S&M
routine calculated to drive him mad, which it accomplished:
"Qahtani had been subjected to 160 days of isolation in a pen perpetually
flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on 48 of 54 days, for
18
to 20 hours at a stretch. He had been stripped ****d; straddled by
taunting
female guards, in an exercise called 'invasion of space by a female;'
forced
to wear women's underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by
dogs; placed on a leash and told that his mother was a whore.'"
Quite an advertisement for the American way of life. Should we expect the
rest of the world to boycott the Olympics when we next get to host the
Games? Others might question why the Third 1949 Geneva Convention's
prohibition against "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular
humiliating and degrading treatment," doesn't apply to the United States.
The failure to elicit any usable incriminating information from Qahtani
once
again sup****ts the view of most experts that torture is not only morally
repugnant, it is in fact counterproductive to getting at the truth.
But this didn't trouble John Yoo, then the Justice Department lawyer who
wrote the infamous Bybee memo on torture, named after Yoo's boss, Jay S.
Bybee, who was rewarded for his leader****p with a judge****p on the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. Yoo, the best recent example of
what the great anti-Nazi writer Hannah Arendt once referred to as the
"banality of evil," teaches law at UC Berkeley when not touring the
country
to argue that if an action does not produce death through organ failure it
can't be torture. Audiences tend to clap politely and observe that while
they don't agree with him, he is, as I was told by a UCLA professor after
such an appearance, "a very bright fellow."
On Feb. 6, 2003, as Qahtani was being led around on a leash, Yoo visited
Mora in his Pentagon office. Mora later told the New Yorker writer Mayer
that he asked Yoo, "Are you saying the president has the authority to
order
torture?" Yoo answered with a clear "yes." Following that stellar legal
advice, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with Yoo's encouragement,
officially approved "hooding," "exploitation of phobias," "stress
positions," "deprivations of light and auditory stimuli" and the other
horrors that the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would burn into the
legacy of the United States.
--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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