Craig said, “While this is a necessary step to regain some semblance of control over the interrogation process, I hope we don't live to regret such a blanket prohibition on more forceful interrogation techniques. It would be wise to consider Bill Clinton's suggestion to allow the use of such techniques only under the explicit authorization of the President.”
I believe that Clinton was referring to a situation where torture was explicitly forbidden. If a scenario were so dire that torture was felt necessary, by commanders in situ, to obtain life-saving intelligence, the President has always had the power issue pardons after the fact.
Pre-authorizing torture has no place in a Republic that values "Liberty and Justice for all".
Thursday, January 22, 2009
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2 comments:
"I believe that Clinton was referring to a situation where torture was explicitly forbidden."
Yes, and Clinton also talked of a scenario in which a real-live Jack Bauer (24) was prosecuted for using torture to break up terror plots, save thousands of lives, etc. Justice Scalia said anyone in that kind of situation who used torture would never be indicted by a grand jury. But we have to be careful here. Just like the allowance of some techniques by the Bush Administration set up an atmosphere that led to Abu Ghraib, to say "harsh interrogation techniques" shall never be permitted also has an equivalent chilling effect on the willingness of any field agents to take a chance. We saw this during the Clinton Administration and on the part of the Army in a chance to kill the leader (Mullah Mohammad Omar) of the Taliban in the early days of the Afghan War - rather than bomb the guy's caravan, the commander felt he needed to radio Washington to get permission and the Omar got away.
I'm not saying we should torture. We never should. Water boarding is torture and never should have been permitted or carried out. But things like sleep deprivation and other unpleasantries that we know have yielded information used to break up terror plots will be swept up in the President's executive order. All I'm saying is that the Administration needs to be careful.
In a CNN.com article [http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/22/guantanamo.order/index.html?eref=rss_topstories] Rep. Bill Young, R-Florida, said he has "quite a bit of anxiety" about the possibility of transferring detainees to U.S. facilities.
"Number one, they're dangerous," Young said. "Secondly, once they become present in the United States, what is their legal status? What is their constitutional status? I worry about that, because I don't want them to have the same constitutional rights that you and I have. They're our enemy."
To me, I detect fear and vengence. What are we afraid of? The dangerous individuals would likely be held in a federal prison and watched like a hawk 24/7 not released into the hinterland like an endangered animal realease into the wild. Keeping the detainees off U.S. soil is a false sense of safety since our own citizens sometimes turn to violence, e.g. the Unabomber, or Timothy McVeigh (sp).
As for vengence, how else do you explain denying access to our justice system that we pride ourselves and like to hold up as better than any other country's? Ever since they were picked up or extrodinarily renditioned (if that is even the right term) Bush has wanted to treat them as less then human, to withold the rights we would expect our own troops would enjoy if captured in war.
Besides the basic violation of our sense of fairness and justice by denying habeus corpus, we are avoiding the reality that the detainees are not criminals, if they were, we would have charged them with crimes and let the justice system do what it will. The detainees are political prisoners although not like the ones like where Cuba imprisons its own citizens for speaking out. The detainees are like pirates who, because they are not agents of an enemy state (this is key) and not a US citizen, we still have to protect ourselves from violence groups. With US citizens, the constitution should always apply. With agents of a state, the Geneva Convention should always apply. To non-state actors, we treat them like a pirate. International law already makes available a legal framework with which to deal with violence by non-state actors. Coming up with our own term "Unlawful Combatant" is a stumbling attempt to do the same thing. The difference is in trying to come up with a brand new set of rules and procedures instead of modifying an existing framework. Prisoners of war are allowed contact with the Red Cross by the Geneva Convention. Why would we not afford that basic human dignity to other prisoners? Are we afraid that the Red Cross will act as a co-conspirator and pass on intelligence? Are we afraid that the Red Cross will report bad behaviour by the U.S. Captors?
The prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment embodies the principle that we don't believe in the state-santioned breaking of a man's spirit. We value humanity so such a degree that we do not believe in dehumanizing an individual even in the name of just punishment. By being willing to condone the inhumane treatment of any prisoner, shows that we are willing to trade away our own humanity for the sake of a temporal sense of safety.
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