Again with the "time of war" every time a horrendous and unconstitutional abuse of power is justified. The president has no business deciding anything here. The attorney general has a duty to uphold the law. Obama has the same legal duty we all have not to obstruct justice. And such abuses are exactly as unconstitutional even when "bipartisan" and would be even if you could get 18 parties to support them. Sullivan is right to point to Cheney's bragging. Another word for it is confessing. And Bush has done the same. They have both admitted repeatedly on television to authorizing torture. Bush has signed executive orders and signing statements to the same effect. Cheney and John Yoo have both stated publicly that Bush was responsible. Sullivan's biggest fear is right on, but too theoretical. The wars and spying and rendition and lawless detention and unjustifiable secrecy and indeed torture are ongoing now. The current White House claims the power to torture if it chooses to now. This hypothetical stuff was OK eight months ago, but not any longer. The danger is more immediate and should be expressed as such. Obama is formalizing a system of indefinite preventive detention in a way that one administration alone could not have done. The same goes for the use of signing statements, orders, decrees, and secret memos.
Don't misunderstand me. The war was compromised, not by occasional war crimes, or bad snap decisions by soldiers acting under extreme stress, or the usual, ghastly stuff that war is made of. All conflicts generate atrocities. Very few have been without sporadic abuse of prisoners or battlefield errors. As long as these lapses are investigated and punished, the integrity of a just war can be sustained.
But this war is different. It began with a memo from your office stating that� ��"for the first time� ��"American service members and CIA officers need not adhere to the laws of warfare that have governed Western and American war-making since before this country's founding. The memo declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to captured terror suspects but that all prisoners would be treated humanely unless � ���"military necessity� �� � required otherwise. This gaping � ���"military necessity� �� � loophole� ��"formally opposed in a memo by the member of your Cabinet with the most military experience, Secretary of State Colin Powell� ��"was the beginning of America's descent into the ranks of countries that systematically torture prisoners. You insisted that prisoners be treated humanely whenever possible, but wars with legal loopholes for abuse and torture always quickly degenerate. In its full consequences, that memo, even if issued in good faith, has done more damage to the reputation of the United States than anything since Vietnam. The tolerance of torture and abuse has recruited more terrorists than any al-Qaeda video, and has devastated morale and support at home. Your successor remains profoundly constrained even now by this legacy� ��"compelled to prevent the release of more photographic evidence of war crimes under your command because of the damage it could still do to American soldiers in the field.
This is good as far as it goes, but this war was compromised in the way that a smaller and less horrific mass-murdering rampage could be "compromised" by other lesser crimes. And what compels Obama to withhold numerous photos, videos, memos, orders, reports, testimony, diaries, and other evidence is his willingness to spit on the Constitution, his desire to keep presidents above the rule of law (for obvious reasons), his fear of the corporate media, and his desire to please the permanent bureaucracy in Washington. If he wanted to protect soldiers he would bring them home.
No, terror suspects did not deserve full prisoner-of-war status. That argument was always a red herring. Full POW rights� ��"regular meals, exercise, and the rest� ��"were not applicable to stateless terror suspects who themselves had no uniform or adherence to Geneva. You were right to see that as inappropriate, if not offensive. But what these suspects did deserve� ��"simply because they are human beings� ��"was protection from inhuman, degrading, abusive treatment or the infliction of � ���"severe mental or physical pain or suffering� �� � in order to procure information. This is what Geneva's Article 3 says: whatever the nature of the combatant, in or out of uniform, and whatever his own moral rules (or lack of them), he deserves basic respect as a human being with human rights. This principle is nonnegotiable. It is the core principle of Western civilization. Resistance to the physical force of government, especially as that force is applied to people in custody, is the core reason America exists as an independent nation.
No king, not King Bush and not King Sullivan, has the power to invent new categories of prisoners. Geneva does not apply only to people who themselves uphold it. And those not accorded the rights of prisoners of war must be accorded the rights of prisoners in peace. A third category of not-quite-as-human-but-still-fairly-human prisoners cannot be invented ad hoc by royalty if we are to operate under the rule of laws. Such a policy could be smart and sensible, but there would be nothing to prevent its mutating into something else. There is a reason we make laws, make those laws public, and hold each other to them. This is clearly lost on Sullivan who, despite now unavoidably knowing that most of the "terror suspects" imprisoned by the United States in these past several years have not been guilty of any terrorism, finds it possibly offensive to suggest that they should have had too many human rights -- even though those rights might have prevented years of imprisonment for innocent human beings.
I believe that if you review the facts of your two terms of office, you will be forced to realize that, whatever your intentions, you undermined this fundamental American principle. You may not have intended that to occur. But you were the commander in chief and president, and these were presidential-level decisions. The responsibility for all of this is yours� ��"before the American people and before the court of history. And you need finally to own these decisions, to take full responsibility for them, to account for them, to explain them, and, yes, to apologize for their scope and brutality.
Exactly, and to turn yourself in at the nearest police station. The cops guarding your mansion in Dallas are very decent sorts. I'm sure they would be willing to keep the cuffs loose.
This was never about � ���"bad apples.� �� � It is no longer even faintly plausible to argue that the mounds of identical documented abuses across every theater of combat in the war as it was conducted after January 2002 were a function of a handful of reservists improvising sadism on one night shift in one prison. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Senate Armed Services Committee, dozens of reputable well-sourced news stories and well-documented books, and the many official reports on the subject have revealed a systematic pattern of prisoner mistreatment in every theater of combat, by almost all branches of the armed services, and in every major detention facility in Iraq where interrogation took place. (Revealingly, there were very few abuses in what the Red Cross calls � ���"regular internment facilities� �� � in Iraq� ��"meaning those where interrogation was not taking place.)
The Senate's own unanimous bipartisan report, signed by your party's 2008 nominee, John McCain, proves exhaustively that the abuse and torture documented in U.S. prisons were the results of policies you chose. The International Red Cross found your administration guilty of treating prisoners in a manner that constituted torture, a war crime. Experts in the history of torture, such as the Reed College professor Darius Rejali, make very careful distinctions between the disparate acts of torture or abuse that take place in all wars and a bureaucratized top-down policy, whereby identical techniques are replicated across the globe in different services and under different commands, with some on-the-ground improvisation as well. The history of prisoner mistreatment under your command fits the second pattern, not the first.
The techniques these various sources describe are not comic-book sadism; they are not the gruesome medieval tortures of Saddam. In fact, they are coolly modern tortures, designed to leave no physical marks that could be proffered as evidence against the regimes that use them. They have been used by democracies that want to get what they believe are the fruits of torture while avoiding all physical evidence of it. As the slogan in Iraq's Camp Nama put it, � ���"No blood, no foul.� �� � But torture is not defined in law or morality by the production of blood or by any specific technique� ��"that would simply invite governments to devise techniques other than those prohibited. Torture is defined by the imposition of � ���"severe mental or physical pain or suffering� �� � to the point when a human being can bear it no longer and tells his interrogators something� ��"true or untrue� ��"to stop what cannot be endured. That's torture, in plain English. It was the clear goal of the policy you set in motion� ��"and implemented with great determination across the world in ships and secret sites, at Guantà �namo Bay and Bagram in Afghanistan, throughout interrogation centers in Iraq.
True enough. No investigation is needed. Sullivan can be spared that "trauma." The facts are sufficiently public for an easy conviction. What's needed is a quick prosecution and a lengthy jail sentence.
At the same time, though, you expressed what seemed to me to be genuine public revulsion at the techniques you authorized. On June 26, 2003, the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, you stated:
"I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy."
You did not parse torture narrowly here. You were opposed to it in � ���"all its forms.� �� � You also called for barring � ���"other cruel and unusual punishment.� �� � When four U.S. soldiers were captured early in the Iraq conflict, you stated:
I expect them to be treated, the POWs, I expect to be treated humanely, just like we're treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
