Horrifying and Unnecessary

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

¶ Waterboarding.

¶ Using military working dogs.

¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

¶ Conducting mock executions.

¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops.

“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” General Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

Justice Dept. is examining its water-boarding advice

The agency wants to know if its officials misled the CIA, which employed the interrogation technique until 2006.
From the Associated Press

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding when interrogating terror suspects, according to documents released Friday.

The investigation was revealed at the request of Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. A Justice Department spokesman, however, said the inquiry had been continuing for several years.

Questions about waterboarding are part of a larger Justice probe of the so-called Bybee memo, wrote H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, in a Feb. 18 letter to the two senators.

"Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," Jarrett wrote.

Asked for details, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, "This is not a new investigation, but rather has been ongoing for some time."

Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.

The memo at the heart of the internal Justice inquiry was dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee for then- White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. It defined torture as recognized by U.S. law as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.

The Bush administration maintains that waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top Al Qaeda detainees Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. Earlier this month, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said that waterboarding was used in part because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent.

The CIA banned its personnel from using waterboarding in 2006. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators.

Durbin called the internal Justice inquiry "long overdue" and said the U.S. government had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime.

"Within the question how America could come to use interrogation techniques of the Inquisition is the question how the Department of Justice could have overlooked its own precedents to authorize waterboarding," added Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor.