[NYTr] CBC: Edit'l: What's Torture? What Bush Says It Is

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CBC (Canada) - Oct 23, 2007
http://www.cbc.ca/news/reportsfromabroad/macdonald/20071023.html

Editorial:

WHEN IS TORTURE NOT TORTURE?

When the president says it isn't


The torture called waterboarding is a pretty violent business.

The torturer straps down the victim, feet elevated above the head, then 
covers the subject's face -- often with cloth or cellophane -- and
pours water onto it. This triggers the gag reflex, persuading the mind
that the body is drowning, provoking an atavistic terror. The straining
and flailing against the restraint straps can sometimes break bones.
If the torture is protracted, lung and brain damage can occur.

Now.

This would be the Bush administration's description of the same
procedure: The detainee, an illegal combatant who may have intelligence
valuable to the Worldwide Struggle Against Extremism, is restrained,
and subjected to a robust interrogation. An enhanced interrogation
technique is used, which for national security reasons must remain
classified. But the detainee is not tortured, because the United States
does not torture people.

That's not a caricature. It is a composite of actual administration 
jargon.  And the last bit of circular logic has become the fulcrum of 
Washington's policies on treatment of foreign prisoners: The U.S. does
not practise torture. Therefore its interrogation techniques cannot be 
torture, because if they were, then certain prisoners in the United 
States' secret prisons would have been tortured, and that cannot have 
been, because the U.S. does not practise torture.

By that logic, the following are not torture, either: dousing a
prisoner with water and shackling him naked to the floor for extended
periods in frigid temperatures;  striking him on the head during
questioning; manacling him in "stress"  positions for prolonged
periods; and inflicting sexual humiliation.

And, necessarily, the prisoners who have turned up dead in American 
custody after being beaten senseless, smothered in a sleeping bag or 
shackled to the ceiling, shrieking, as jailers using the technique of 
"peroneal strikes" smashed their legs into useless mush could not have 
been tortured.

"This government does not torture,"  President George W. Bush has
declared time and again.

He will not get into the game, as he puts it, of entertaining detailed 
discussion.

"A simple question," said one White House reporter during a Bush news 
conference last week.

"Yes?" said Bush.

"What's your definition of the word 'torture'?"

"Oh," said Bush. "That's defined in U.S. law, and we don't torture."

Asked for his personal definition, Bush replied: "Whatever the law
says."

LEGAL LOOPHOLE

And indeed, American law does now forbid the "cruel, inhuman and 
degrading"  treatment of prisoners, defining it in minute detail: 
infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering, or even
threats of death.

Bush and his advisers opposed passage of that law a few years ago, 
presumably wishing to reserve the right to inflict all those things in
the United States' secret overseas prisons.

Having lost that fight, though, they devised a neat device to
circumvent the new law: The president simply signed secret executive
orders declaring that none of the CIA's or the Pentagon's "enhanced
techniques" fall within the law's definitions.

Members of Congress, who thought they were banning torture when they 
passed the law, were unhappy to hear about the secret orders, and said
so.

"After telling us and the world that torture is abhorrent," said
Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate judiciary committee and a
Democrat, "it appears that ... they reversed themselves and reinstated
a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret."

During the nomination hearings last week of Michael Mukasey, Bush's new 
choice for attorney general, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat,
asked this simple question: Is waterboarding constitutional?

"If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional," replied 
Mukasey.

"I mean, either it is, or it isn't," replied Whitehouse.

"If it amounts to torture,"  said the former judge, "it is not 
constitutional."

Note the "if."  It's not a word most experts would use in discussing 
waterboarding.

EUPHEMISMS BORDER ON ORWELLIAN

"Absolutely, waterboarding is torture,"  said Prof. David Luban of 
Georgetown University's law school, who has written extensively about 
torture.

"My test for waterboarding," said Luban, "is to tell someone 'Blow all
the air out of your lungs and see what it's like not to be allowed to
breathe in for two minutes.'"

Luban regards terms like "enhanced interrogation techniques"  or
"robust interrogations"  as euphemisms bordering on Orwellian, or
worse:  "The Gestapo used the phase 'sharpened interrogation
techniques.'"

The Bush position, said Luban, is essentially that government employees
do not use cruel, inhuman or degrading techniques, unless they do.
Luban said the "dagger in his heart"  is that the justification comes
from lawyers employed to find ways around the law. In the end, he said,
"any proposition is arguable."

SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL STRATEGY

What's more remarkable, though, is that as a political strategy, it
works.

By simply asserting that its techniques are not torture, the 
administration creates a debate where none existed before. As Luban put 
it, what were once questions of common sense are transformed into legal 
issues.

Newspaper editors and television news producers are naturally reluctant
to flatly contradict the president, so the soldiers and CIA agents and 
private contractors who carry out the interrogations are not referred
to as torturers, as they would be if they worked for, say, the
governments of Russia or Egypt.

I actually hesitated in writing the first sentence of this column
without a qualifier, knowing it would give my editor pause.

After Mukasey's exchange with the Senate panel last week, Human Rights 
Watch called his statements "preposterous,"  but the response was
tinged with disbelief that such criticism even needs to be uttered.

The group pointed out that U.S.  military courts have in the past 
prosecuted soldiers of other countries for using waterboarding on
American troops, and that the U.S. government often criticizes other
countries for the practice.

And, in fact, this was in the first paragraph of a presidential 
declaration on the UN's day of observance for victims of torture in
2004: "The United States reaffirms its commitment to the worldwide
elimination of torture.  The non-negotiable demands of human dignity
must be protected without reference to race, gender, creed or
nationality."

Somewhere in the last three years, that became: "Whatever the law says."