05.16.08
Tortured law on torture
From R-G
by Robert Scheer
truthdig.com (May 13 2008)
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
September 11 attacks’ twentieth 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 US 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 reported in 2006,
citing the Army’s own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being
subjected to documented 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 eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped
naked; 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 supports 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 leadership with a judgeship on the 9th
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 February 06 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.
_____
Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks
Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America”, will be published June 9 by Twelve.
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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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