Then there are the numerous “torture memos” – official government documents written since 9/11 in which the Bush Regime has sought to establish a legal basis to carry out torture. To cite just a few of these documents:
On February 7 2002, Bush himself explicitly opened the gates to torture, as mentioned earlier in this article and as discussed at length by Ray McGovern in another piece linked on this site: “I accept the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world, because, among other reasons, al-Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva,” Bush wrote. He stated further down in the memo: “I also accept the legal opinion of the Department of Justice and determine that common article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees because, among other reasons, the relevant conflicts are international in scope and Common Article 3 applies only to ‘armed conflict not of an international character.’”
In August of 2002, the Justice Department issued a memo that suggested international law banning torture did not apply to the “war on terror,” defined physical torture as pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” and described the threshold for mental torture as psychological abuse spanning months or years.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a March 2003 Justice Department memo written by John Yoo, a war criminal employed by the University of California at Berkeley who will one day have his own wing in the Torture Hall of Shame. Yoo, who was then the deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, explicitly stated that the Bush Regime did not have to follow international law prohibiting torture. “Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law,” Yoo wrote, “and that the president is free to override it at his discretion.” Yoo went on to say that for prisoner abuse to constitute torture, it must involve the “intended sum” of severe mental pain, threat of death, and physical pain that causes organ failure or death. And he suggested that if interrogators were charged with violating international law, they could use “necessity” or “self-defense” as a justification.
In early 2005, the Justice Department issued a memo that explicitly authorized torture methods including waterboarding detainees, beating them, and subjecting them to freezing temperatures.
Then, of course, in 2006, Congress passed and Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which in addition to allowing Bush to order the indefinite detention without trial of anyone he pleases, gave him the exclusive right to define what is and is not torture and discarded the Geneva Conventions for those deemed “enemy combatants”.
And now, on top of all this, comes the news that Cheney, Rice, and other top government officials planned, in detail, the execution of specific torture methods on specific detainees, and that Bush knew about and approved the meetings where the implementation of these methods was planned.
Brazen Admission of Torture
Precisely because this administration is seeking to legalize torture in order to prevent prosecution of those who carry it out, the Bush Regime has—out of necessity—been very open about its use of torture. In other words, the harder the regime pushes to legalize torture, the more it has been forced to leave behind overwhelming evidence of its own criminality. But here’s some bad news for the Bush Regime: Legalizing torture is itself a violation of international law.
Article 4 of the United Nations Convention on Torture, which the United States has signed and ratified—and which the ACLU identifies as “the most important international human rights treaty that deals exclusively with torture” — makes it illegal for individual nations to rewrite their laws to permit torture. The article states: “Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.”
So, in other words, when Yoo said in the 2003 torture memo that, “customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion,” this was complete bullshit. That memo is illegal, as are all the other torture memos written by the Bush Regime.
The Military Commissions Act? ILLEGAL! The meetings held in the White House to plan torture? ILLEGAL! Bush’s approval of these meetings? ILLEGAL!
Also, as McGovern points out in his aforementioned article, numerous articles of the U.N. Convention Against Torture require states who signed the document—and again, this includes the United States—to prosecute those who carry out torture. For instance, Article 6 reads: “Upon being satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is present, shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to ensure his presence.”
In case you’re looking for some other quick reference points to show people who don’t believe the Bush Regime has really violated international law, here you go: To begin with, let’s look further at the Convention Against Torture. This document defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”
That’s a mouthful, but the meaning is clear: Intentionally inflicting mental or physical pain for the purpose of obtaining information is torture. Compare that definition to the one John Yoo tried to establish in his infamous torture memo to the Justice Department in 2003—that torture refers to the “intended sum”of severe mental pain, threat of death, and physical pain that causes organ failure or death.
Other articles of the U.N. Convention Against Torture apply so directly to the actions of the Bush Regime that one could be forgiven for thinking its authors anticipated the methods by which this government would seek to justify torture.
