“Truth about Torture” is the title of a Newsweek column
that many Americans and many friends of Americans find hard to believe.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon, however, has denied the shocking
revelations by Army Captain Ian Fishback, Specialist Anthony Lagouranis,
and many others. Republican Senator John McCain not only accepts the
soldiers’ grim reports as factual, he considers them but “the
tip of the iceberg in the military today.” That is the same John
McCain who as prisoner of war during the Vietnam War was brutalized
for over five years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, two of those years
in solitary confinement.
Fishback alleges that members of his battalion of the 82nd Airborne routinely
beat and abused prisoners. Lagouranis thought “our policies required abuse.
There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who
had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines
to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a soft-ball sized blister to prove it.
The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress
positions, hypothermia. We used dogs.”
Already in July, Senator Mc Cain offered an amendment to a $440 billion defense
spending package that would again establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform
standard for the interrogation of detainees. He stressed that this Manual “embodies
the values Americans have embraced for generations, while preserving the ability
of our interrogators to extract critical intelligence from ruthless foes.”
“ Abuse of prisoners harms--not helps--us in the war on terror,” the
Senator
explained, “because inevitably these abuses become public. … Mistreatment
of our prisoners also endangers U.S. service members who might be captured by
the enemy.”
On October 5, 46 Republican senators joined 43 Democrats and one independent
to defy the Bush administration’s February 2002 decision setting aside
the Geneva conventions and the traditional U.S. regulations on humane prisoner
treatment. By a vote of 90 to 9, the Senate endorsed the McCain amendment prohibiting
U.S. military personnel to engage in “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment
of detainees. The Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator
John Warner, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a former military attorney,
also expressed an urgent need for the clearing up of the “confused” Pentagon
orders that may have led to the mistreatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay
and Abu Ghraib prisons.
Now the White House is threatening to veto the annual defense spending bill if
it contained the McCain amendment’s prohibition of torture during the extraction
of information from detainees. Two of the most influential proponents of the
use of torture for intelligence gathering appear to be Vice President Cheney
and his new chief of staff, David Addington who has objected to any use of language
drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Convention in directives given to American
soldiers.
Article 3 specifically prohibits “(a) violence to life and person, in particular
murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture; (b) taking of
hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and
degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions
without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording
all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized
peoples.”
It appears that administration officials are sharply divided over the treatment
of detainees suspected of connections to AlQaida. The New York Times quoted a
senior defense official saying that “The uniformed service lawyers are
behind the rewrite because it brings the policy into line with Geneva. Their
concern was that we are losing our standing with allies, as well as the moral
high ground with the rest of the world.”
Worldwide, the Bush administration also faces severe criticism for indefinitely
holding captured suspects without charge. As the number of such detainees grows,
so does the pressure on the U.S. government to either charge them with an internationally
recognized crime, or set them free.
Fortunately, it now appears that the Republican Congress is determined to assert
the American values that the Republican White House still fails to understand.