McCain passes amendment to end torture of detainees; Bush threatens veto (Politics) By mcc Fri Oct 7th, 2005 at 01:52:52 AM EST
	If you look at the Army Field Manual's section on interrogation techniques, you will find an enlightening little passage on the subject of "coercive" interrogation, which says in part: The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. Here is the short version of the article which follows from this point: Early in the "War on Terror", the Bush Administration made a decision that the U.S. military would not be bound by the Geneva Convention in the fights that were to come. When the fights came, the "detainees" that the military picked up were met with treatment that some supporters of the Bush Administration called "coercive" and some other persons called "torture". Yesterday evening, John McCain passed an amendment to the next military appropriations bill which if followed would end such practices by simply requiring the treatment of detainees to be held to the standards in the Army field manual. Bush claims he's going to veto it. This would mean the first, and so far only, veto of Bush's entire presidency would be performed in support of torture.

In 1967, a naval aviator named John McCain serving in Vietnam was shot down and captured by the Viet Cong, at which point he was held as a prisoner of war for five and a half years. During this time, according to his captors, John McCain was not in fact a prisoner of war, but (as the confession they extracted from him by force put it) a "black criminal" and "air pirate"; the government of Vietnam still maintains that the "Hanoi Hilton" where McCain was for some time imprisoned was "a prison for criminals, not POWs, and that those held in the Hanoi Hilton were 'pirates' and 'bandits' who had attacked Vietnam without authority". Because they had classified their prisoners as "criminals" rather than POWs, the Viet Cong was of the opinion that these prisoners were not covered or protected by the Geneva Convention. And because the Viet Cong did not feel themselves obligated to follow the Geneva Convention, McCain received regular torture and beatings at their hands that were so intense he still suffers a degree of physical handicap from them today. John McCain, as you may have noticed, is now a Republican Senator from Arizona. On August 1, 2002, a White House lawyer named Alberto R. Gonzales, asked to find legal justifications for "more aggressive" interrogations of terrorist suspects, wrote a memo which said, in part: We conclude that, under the current circumstances, necessity or self-defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate Section 2340A. Section 2340A makes it a criminal offense for any person "outside the United States [to] commit or attempt to commit torture". Though this memo is occasionally alleged to be the basis of unethical practices regarding detainees, by the time this memo was written the U.S. government had long since reached the conclusion that they were not obligated to follow the rules of the Geneva Convention in the "War On Terror", on the grounds that the prisoners from the wars were not actually Prisoners of War, but "unlawful combatants", criminals to whom the Geneva Convention did not apply. (Though of course that would only be the third Geneva Convention, the one concerning prisoners of war; for some reason the Bush Administration has never explained why the Fourth Geneva Convention, the one concerning the treatment of civilians in occupied territories, does not apply.) Alberto R. Gonzales, as you also may have noticed, is now the head of the United States Justice Department. So, what exactly is an "unlawful combatant"? Nobody seems to know. The Red Cross doesn't seem to believe any such category exists. The military under the Bush Administration has applied the category to persons as diverse as American Citizens in the United States plotting terrorist attacks, and Iraqis fighting in the Iraq war in Iraq who happened to take up arms while "not wearing uniforms". The only certain thing about "unlawful combatants" is that they aren't governed by the rules of the Geneva convention, and unless they're American citizens they aren't governed by the rules by which the American government normally treats criminals. What rules are they governed by? Well, again, no one seems to be quite sure. And therein lies a bit of a problem. Ever since the first prisoners-- I'm sorry, "detainees"-- arrived at Guantanamo Bay, a very public debate has raged over exactly what their status should be, why, and what should be done with them. But beneath this a somewhat quieter, decidedly less public debate has been simultaneously going on, on a subject that some people feel really just should not have to even be debated in the first place: Is it acceptable for the U.S. to engage in the practice of torture? And is chaining someone immobile and naked in a fetal position to the floor of an unheated cell until they defecate on themselves torture, or just "coercive"? The debate over the U.S. policy on interrogation is made extremely difficult by the aforementioned fact that nobody seems to know what the U.S. policy is. There is some kind of general spirit reported to have been made clear within the military that soldiers may now be "more aggressive" with their treatment of "detainees", but exactly how they are to be treated, who is to be treated that way and when, and where the limits on all this stand seems to be entirely ambiguous. At least one White House memo of "approved" interrogation tactics did circulate at some point, but no one outside the military got to see these until quite recently and it seems quite certain that most of the low-level troops performing interrogations hadn't seen them either. One memo issued by Donald Rumsfeld himself in late 2002 outlined 17 techniques approved for use in Guantanamo Bay interrogations, including threatening prisoners with dogs, forcing them to wear hoods, leashes and/or women's underwear, or the use of interrogations that last for up to 20 hours at a time. This memo was rescinded a month later, but then later replaced with a list of 24 approved techniques; the contents of this list are still classified. The clearest idea of exactly what the policy might be comes from statements by FBI observers at Guantanamo Bay, obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act; one assumes the best way to find out what the policy is would be to watch it being enacted. Or not. Because the problem is, the Bush Administration line nearly from the beginning has been to wave off nearly all reports of abuse as unauthorized behavior, claiming they can't be held responsible for that which they didn't approve. The Bush Administration has not attempted to hide its support of "coercive" or "psychological torture" methods (though whichever title you choose to call them by, these techniques are unambiguously banned by the third and fourth geneva conventions as well as the U.N. Convention Against Torture) such as those approved in Rumsfeld's aforementioned memo. But the worst abuses, officially, are unsanctioned and unapproved. These abuses somehow have managed to happen with striking consistency, in nearly every different area of the military from GTMO to Iraqi detention centers, all the way through all the Bush Administration's wars, with no one stopping them. But officially they're unapproved. So if we hear about a single instance of prisoner abuse-- say, we're told that the FBI witnessed treatment of prisoners that "included strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings"-- how do we interpret it? In the "approved" psychological torture, or the "unapproved" normal torture? And does this make a difference in whether or not these actions reflect badly on the Bush Administration? One frequent allegation is that no, there really isn't a difference. Since the military certainly knew these things were happening and did nothing as they continued, this could be seen as a tacit approval, with the "sanctioned" lists being just a flimsy layer of plausible deniability. Some people go further and even point out that it may be an awfully funny coincidence that many of these "unauthorized" and supposedly untrained torture methods seem both extremely sophisticated and extremely similar to formal methods of torture developed by the CIA and then banned in the 80s. Either way, nowhere are these allegations of complicity through unofficial approval more clear than in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison; the place that has come to symbolize the entire problem of "detainee" abuse, both because of the extreme and poignant nature of the abuse there and because supporters of the Bush Administration have been trying so incredibly hard to pretend it's the only place where any kind of prisoner abuse happened ever. The nature of the abuse at Abu Ghraib-- clearly violent, obscenely sexual, and clearly wrong by any conceivable moral code-- probably doesn't need any kind of introduction whatsoever, due to the large amount of media coverage it received, and the fact that the photos are all over the internet anyway. What hasn't been covered quite as well, and may require stressing, is the quiet insistence by the now-crucified individual troops perpetrating the abuse at Abu Ghraib that their superiors knew what was happening and were if anything encouraging it the entire time. This claim has been disputed, but what isn't in dispute is that absolutely nobody higher up the chain was placing any limits or official guidance whatsoever on the treatment of those prisoners. An internal Army investigation into the Army prison system in the wake of Ghraib going public-- despite being criticized in some corners for not looking into some of the cases where the worst abuse was alleged-- managed to find 94 incidents of confirmed or probable prison abuse at 16 different facilities in multiple countries, and concluded that "soldiers were inadequately trained and lacked proper supervision and clear orders"; based on this they concluded the problem was not "systemic" and "should be viewed as what they are -- unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals". Meanwhile back at Abu Ghraib, Lyndie England, the most infamous of the abusers (probably because she wound up looking creepiest in the photos), claimed for months that "all of us who have been charged, we all agree that we don't feel like we were doing things that we weren't supposed to, because we were told to do them"; and claimed she was ordered to pose for some of those photos, and felt "kind of weird" doing so. Meanwhile documentation kept by the operators of the prisons as well as Army investigations showed that these operators were untrained and lacked credentials for the job they'd been handed, were given no resources on the proper interrogation and handling of prisoners either by superiors or the "Other Governmental Agency" interrogators frequently passing through, were never told to hold back in future on anything, and were constantly begging for resources just to keep the prison running; and other soldiers testified that while the abuse was happening higher-ups constantly "told us to keep it up, we were doing a good job''. It is easy here to just claim that the Abu Ghraib guards were The Most Evil Americans Ever and so all these claims they make must clearly be a lie, but in doing so we risk missing something terribly important about what exactly we are doing to the soldiers fighting these new wars. People are very interested in focusing on what monsters the soldiers at Ghraib were, but terribly disinterested in trying to figure out how they got that way. America's troops in Iraq are all in a horribly difficult position. Untrained troops running a prison in a war zone mostly staffed by mercenaries-- whoops, I mean "security contractors"-- are in a position difficult to the point where it would break most normal minds. The Ghraib guards didn't enter Iraq as evil people; the capacity to do evil was brought out in them by the circumstances they were placed in. When you consider the extent to which those exact same circumstances are replicated all over the zone of anarchy that is post-"Mission Accomplished" Iraq, one begins to wonder how we are expected to be so stupid as to seriously believe Abu Ghraib was the only place where these circumstances produced abuse. We're persistently told over and over to "support our troops", but this only seems to last insofar as it means supporting the war; none of that support seems to really be getting through to the individuals on the ground. Certainly the troops in the Abu Ghraib scandal weren't being supported by anyone in the entire world either before or after the scandal broke, and after the scandal broke the people most vehement about denouncing the troops at Abu Ghraib while absolving the military structure that put them there seem to have been the same people who normally yell "support our troops" loudest. Meanwhile the military structure does get absolved; the plausible deniability of the system where physical torture is "unapproved" yet encouraged neatly shields the Bush Administration in the press from anything they can claim to be beyond the military's guidelines, and Abu Ghraib would seem to be outside any conceivable guidelines. But considering that (despite the "FEW BAD APPLES" screaming) several of the things that had people seriously upset in the Abu Ghraib photos were specifically listed in Rumsfeld's original 17 Things You Can Do To Prisoners memo from 2002-- and considering that claims and evidence that Abu Ghraib wasn't the only unsupervised or abusive prison in Iraq or even the only one where photos were taken for fun (just the only one where the media got hold of evidence) are abundant, yet receive little attention or investigation-- you kind of have to wonder what good these guidelines are. And in a situation where nothing is clearly prohibited and the only thing that is known is that interrogators are allowed or expected to be "more aggressive" than what normal moral guidelines like the U.S. Army Field Manual or the Geneva Convention would normally demand, can we really say anything at all is a violation of the guidelines? Well, there's certainly one easy way to answer that question: Come up with some guidelines, put "legal" and "illegal" combatants alike under their protection, and then you won't have that problem. Which brings us to yesterday. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defying President George W. Bush, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of military detainees in the wake of abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. The Senate voted 90-9 for a bipartisan amendment to establish rules for detainee interrogation and treatment, even though the Republican administration said the measure would tie its hands as it fights terrorism and threatened to veto a $440 billion bill to fund the Pentagon if it contained them. The amendment from Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, would establish the U.S. Army field manual as the standard for interrogations and bar degrading and inhumane treatment of anyone in U.S. military custody. Another amendment to the defense bill the Senate was expected to consider this week would clarify the legal status of enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay military prison and increase congressional oversight of their detention and release. McCain said the rules would help U.S. soldiers, who are under intense pressure to extract intelligence from prisoners but blamed when there are excesses. ... Jabbing at the administration in which he served, retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell backed McCain's amendment, which he said in a letter would "help deal with the terrible public diplomacy crisis created by Abu Ghraib." This can't undo the problems we've seen so far, but it could really more or less end them in future. This simple amendment would both bar the psychological torture-- or if you like, "coercive"-- methods now on the Bush Administration approved list, and end the situation of unclear guidelines that have been claimed by some-- well, including me above-- to have caused the situation at Abu Ghraib. We cannot guarantee good interrogation practices unless actual training is done, but at least under this amendment a clear and humane statement of "this is where the line is, this is what you should do" would supplant the old "go as far as you need to, if you cross the line we'll arrest you" logic. The Bush Administration and its supporters have all along walked a funny line of simultaneously defending unsavory interrogation practices as necessary while denying that the same practices are actually happening, and so the Bush Administration is pretty unhappy about this amendment. In fact, as of yesterday morning, Bush was threatening that he would veto McCain's amendment if it passed, even though it's attached to a huge and crucial military appropriations bill, and even though in his five years in office Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill yet. (Bush is, in fact, the first president since James A. Garfield not to veto anything, and Garfield spent over three years of his one term in office dead.) Considering that the show of support for McCain's amendment turned out considerably higher than the estimates yesterday were pegging it at-- 91 senators out of 100 is easily more than one would need to override a veto-- it seems extremely improbable that Bush would actually follow through on this threat now, since at this point there seems to be nothing to gain from doing so except bad publicity. So what does Bush do next? So far the amendment has only been accepted by the Senate, not yet the House; can the administration bully the House into rejecting something 91 senators voted for? And once the amendment goes through, with or without Bush's support, does Bush's military implement it? Well, in any case, we'll see what happens next.

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