Yet more news that everyone should have expected by now (Rawstory via Crooks and Liars)[Full report, PDF]:
In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees – and as many as 12 – having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.
The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators. Some of the instances he cites are graphic.
How did we get here? More importantly, how is it that we accept ‘here’ as being morally, legally, and ethically acceptable?
Let’s dismiss the 24-style ticking bombs and the assertions and moral relativism necessary to find torture both necessary and effective, or the similarly vague claims that torture has kept us safe and prevented numerous plots from execution. We’ve seen nothing but decision makers shrugging off responsibility and laying the blame at ‘a few bad apples’. But what went through the legal meat grinder at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to enable lawful torture?
Off the top of my head, I have difficulty deciding if either torture or the opinions sanctioning torture enhanced interrogation techniques came first. What is certain is that torture started post-9/11, with a focus on soliciting battlefield confessions implicating Al Qaeda as being in collusion with Saddam Hussein.
The torture argument is helped along by arguments supporting extraordinary rendition and then indefinite detentions, which in turn are made possible by ignoring the Geneva Convention. The argument for ignoring the Conventions is based on the observation that the “combatants” are not “regular military” fighting for nation and under a flag, and therefore do not fall under the Conventions. This definition of “enemy combatant” also sets the stage for the denial of habeas corpus (and some would argue basic human, if not civil rights) to the detained, regardless to their actual guilt.
The third leg in this gruesome stool is that of torture. The lessons learned post-World War II (from the Nazis, no less) and the those ascertained by the medical and psychological community from the military’s SERE training, allowed us to avoid torture-by-definition while still practicing torture-by-effect, allowing us to hide behind a fig leaf of legality.
All it required was denying what supposedly made us Americans.
Tags: Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, David Addington, Enemy Combatant, Enhanced Interogation Techniques, Extraordinary Rendition, Geneva Convention, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Idefinite Detention, Iraq, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, nazis, Office of Legal Counsel, OLC, Saddam Hussein, SERE, torture, United States
