The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Citation | Vol. 78 Pg. 163 |
| Pages | 163 |
78 CBJ 163. THE TORTURE PAPERS: THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB
VOLUME 78, NO. 2
This book is an extraordinary compendium chronicling and documenting the record of the Bush administration's adoption of torture as an instrument of national policy. It is painful to read. It presents the "torture memos" and reports written by U.S. government officials, many of them members of our once distinguished profession, paving the way for coercive interrogation of terror suspects in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, and probably elsewhere.
As Professor Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, writes in her preface:
The policy came about as the result of a series of memos in which the Administration asked for - and was granted - the right to interrogate prisoners with techniques possibly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and by American military and civil law. The authors of the memos then justified the interrogation techniques on the grounds that in these specific cases, the legal restrictions did not apply.
Simply put, this is a book that describes lawyers at their worst. The questions put to them by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld were essentially: How much can we get away with? How far can our interrogators go in applying physical and psychological pressure without exposing them to prosecution for war crimes, violations of torture conventions or simply criminal conduct under our domestic law?
The cast of characters is lengthy and familiar, many with proud backgrounds in academic achievement: Rumsfeld, Bybee, Ashcroft, Goldsmith, Haynes, Yoo, iiter alia. In addition, there are dissenters such as Colin Powell and William H. Taft, his legal advisor. Secretary Powell's memo, driven in part by his military experience, warned that the new torture policy will "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops." His caveat, almost literally a cry in the wilderness, was ignored while the "Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism" (April 4, 2003) wound its way around well-established treaty
law and statutory prohibitions barring torture like a snake cleaner in a swimming pool.
The "Working Group" was charged with the task of providing legal cover for interrogation techniques running the gamut from "Rapid Fire" to "Hooding" to "Sleep Deprivation" to "Face Slap/Stomach Slap" to "Removal of Clothing" - 35 techniques in all.
Why are the Geneva Conventions inapposite? Simple. The president has determined that "none of the provisions apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world because, among other reasons, al Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva." The fact is that the United States and the rest of the world community are indeed "High Contracting Parties" to this Treaty. Under...
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