torture – Page 2 – Hank Kalet

Bush’s tortured legacy

Daniel Froomkin calls the president on the legacy question that was raised by his veto of the anti-torture bill and a New York Times piece on Sunday.

The president views his legacy as one of protecting the homeland, with the added benefit of his boosting the power of the chief executive. Froomkin’s assessment is not so kind:

I’ll be a little more blunt: The legacy that Bush affirmed with Saturday’s veto was one of torture.

By refusing to impose on the CIA the same anti-torture prohibitions mandated by the Army Field Manual— prohibitions against such tactics as waterboarding, prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, mock executions, the use of attack dogs, the application of electric shocks and the withholding of food, water and medical care — Bush cast his lot with the world’s torturers and against the global human rights movement that was until recently the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

And by making the claim that the country would have been attacked again after 9/11 were it not for the CIA’s interrogation program — a claim allowed to go unrefuted in most media coverage — Bush has further damaged his credibility among those who are paying attention.

Ouch.

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It’s not torture if I say it’s not torture

The New York Times yesterday revealed the existence of two memos that contradicted Bush administration claims that it was not engaging in torture.

From the story:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

The revelation has Congress — well, actually, Democratic lawmakers — calling for copies of the memo as a prelude to a potential investigation.

That would be a start. But given that the memos appear to condone behavior that violates the Geneva Convention — and, therefore, United States law — it is imperative that we go beyond simple investigations and put the I-word (you know: impeachment) on the table.

If we are to value the governmental structure we’ve created, one that shares powers among equal branches and that values the rule of law, then we cannot allow this kind of imperial attitude to stand.

Neal Katyal, who represented several Guantanamo detainees before the U.S. Supreme Court, told Keith Olbermann last night that the memos are more evidence of a White House that views itself as above the law.

He shouldn’t be. And we shouldn’t allow him to be.

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The illogic of violence

Interesting column in The Star-Ledger today by Raymond A. Schroth, a humanities professor at St. Peter’s College on torture and its relationship to Easter.

Jesus, he says, in his death, embodied the intersection between politics and religion and his death should standa s a reminder, a warning really, that we all share responsibility for the violence — both to body and spirit — done in our names.

For the death of Jesus was the prime moment when politics and religion became one. His arrest, trial, imprisonment and execution was a political event, a judicial murder. Politicians both religious and secular saw Jesus as a threat who had to be removed. Even more than Adam’s fall, this is the Original Sin of mankind: All those from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel to those of us today who have tolerated political violence share the responsibility for Jesus’ death.

All state-sanctioned violence — he writes specifically about torture, but I would add war and the death penalty to this — falls uner this ethical rubric. This is why the Vatican has a theory of just war to separate othe legitimate uses of force — defensive and proportional only — and why the pope oppsed the invasion of Iraq and the Vatican opposes capital punishment.

You don’t have to be a Catholic or even a Christian — I’m not — to agree with Schrath’s argument. Read Camus on the death penaly or Gandhi on the counterproductive nature of revolutionary violence to get a broader sense of the spiritual and physical dangers of state violence — or organized violence, like the Intifada.

Watching stone-throwing Palestinians face off against Israeli tanks (proprtionality?) or suicide bombers targeting civilians (the weapon of the powerless wielded without regard for life, engaging in a ceaseless downward spiral of violence, bombers begetting tanks and bulldozers begetting bombers and so on), can anyone tuly say that this violence is making anyone safer?

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