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TechnoratiHuman Rights Group: Obama Left Wiggle Room On Torture
The Washington Post blog whorunsgov.com is reporting tonight:
Did President Obama’s executive order today banning torture leave wiggle room for the possibility of reverting to coercive techniques that the current exec order outlaws?
Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, tells me he thinks the answer is Yes.
Obama strongly repudiated torture as he signed today’s executive order, which mandates that the Army Field Manual be strictly adhered to during interrogations. But Ratner pointed to the following lines in the executive order that, he said, provided a possible loophole by creating a Task Force to study the issue:
The mission of the Special Task Force shall be:
(1) to study and evaluate whether the interrogation practices and techniques in Army Field Manual 2-22.3, when employed by departments or agencies outside the military, provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence necessary to protect the Nation, and, if warranted, to recommend any additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies …
The key there, Ratner says, is that the exec order appears to allow for an evaluation as to “whether” — a key word — the Army Field Manual techniques are sufficent to “protect the nation.” That, he says, allows for the Task Force to find after studying the issue that there may be cases where it’s acceptable to go beyond the Army Field Manual.
“It would allow the Task Force to go beyond the Army Field Manual,” Ratner told me. He added that this allowed for at least the possibility that the administration could conclude that “based on the recommendations of this commission, we will allow certain techniques to be used in certain circumstances.”
“It buys into the argument that somehow more severe [interrogation techniques] are going to somehow get at information that the Army field Manual is able to get at,” he continued, adding that it was tantamount to saying that “we’ll make an exception if there’s some kind of need to do so to get information.”
CIA agents are expected to be skeptical of this executive order, and Ratner says he hopes that these lines were put in there as a “sop” to the CIA. Nonetheless, he termed the inclusion of the “loophole” as “terrible.”
“I don’t like the fact that there’s any kind of loophole in an executive order that supposedly outlaws torture,” Ratner says.
One other data point: Today’s New York Times reports that White House counsel Gregory Craig, who’s in the thick of these decisions, privately told Congressional officials yesterday that “the White House might be open to allowing the use of methods other the 19 techniques allowed for the military,” as the paper put it.
Posted by Greg Sargent
11 Comments so far
Show AllThere is an interesting article at GLOBAL RESEARCH today which elaborates on Obama's signings:
"Obama's Orders Leave Torture, Indefinite Detention Intact", by Tom Eley
"Obama strongly repudiated torture." The rest of this article is pure speculation.
Obama also strongly repudiated telecom immunity and then voted for it.
Your motives are visible in what you do, not what you say.
I agree, Anney. Let's wait and see what he actually does.
There are some things so odious that they cannot be approved under any circumstance. Torture is one of them. Joehope, I don't find your arguments compelling. It is a case of the old "slippery slope." If you allow "harsh interrogations," as you call it -- but why don't we just call it what it is, torture -- under some "ticking timebomb scenario" (even though such a scenario has never yet existed), then won't it be used under all sorts of different conditions, and rationalized accordingly? Also, you assume that all your readers voted to "trust" Obama. But as you surely know, many CD readers did not vote for him, myself included. I'm sure I speak for many when I say that no, I do not "trust" Obama, and I certainly don't trust him, or anyone else, to torture people under certain circumstances that YOU say make it necessary.
Also, just because you think YOU would break under certain circumstances and tell the truth, doesn't mean that everyone else would. Nor does it mean you would need to be tortured first. So that analogy doesn't hold up. The bottom line is, torture has already been studied, and been found to be ineffective at gaining useful intelligence.
I find the attitude of "trusting" Obama, or any other President, to be bizarre and childish. Surely if there is one thing history proves, it is that NO US president can be "trusted" when it comes to war and peace.
"The US hasn't committed to never being allowed to use WMD's, but we have demonstrated to the world that we will only use them responsibly and only as a last resort. "
The notion that the US only used nuclear weapons "responsibly" flies in the face of historical truth. Their US was not necessary on Japan, since it was known Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima; moreover, a naval blockade of Japan could have been equally effective (and far more humane) than using nukes. Moreover, presidents have THREATENED the use of nuclear weapons on numerous occasions, including Truman and Nixon, which is in a very real sense USING those weapons. So I find your arguments extremely naive, and historically uninformed.
A country's position on torture must be ABSOLUTE. Either it is absolutely illegal or it is permitted. It is not a matter in which there is wiggle room.
The nation's and Obama's reputations are riding on what Obama actually does about the use of torture by the military, and if he continues on his quest to give the military some "wiggle room", I will have utter contempt for him.
There is a gaping loophole in the Army Field Manual anyway, in Appendix M.
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.... the AFM did not eliminate torture. Despite what it said, it did not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Even worse, it took the standard operating procedure of Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay and threatened to expand it all over the world.
The President of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn has stated that portions of the AFM protocol, especially the use of isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, constitutes cruel-and-unusual punishment and is illegal under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, has stated that portions of the AFM are "deeply problematic" and "would likely violate the War Crimes Act and Geneva," and at the very least "leave the door open for legal liability." Physicians for Human Rights and the Constitution Project have publicly called for the removal of problematic and abusive techniques from the AFM.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/7/20280/97674
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If Obama wants to authorize interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva Conventions under the anti-torture provisions, he can go marching off to the Hague with the GW Bush administration, as far as I'm concerned.
This matter may make or break Obama's presidency from the outset.
Can any one really argue that it is impossible for harsh interrogation techniques to be effective under any circumstances? I understand the desire to believe that there is no reason for the use of torture. But I'm afraid that argument is easily proven wrong.
You see, I oppose torture, and although I am familiar with the arguments that say torture will not yield reliable informative, I know that is not always the case.
How do I know? Simple.
I can say with certainty that I would crack under torture. I couldn't take it. So I don't have to look very far to realize that their are clearly exceptions to the rule. Also, I wouldn't give false information, because I would fear the consequences of more excruciating torture.
Obviously, we don't want these methods to become commonplace. But can no one imagine a scenario where torture might be the only way to save tens of thousands of lives?
Let me reiterate, I do think banning torture is the right thing to do, and thankfully Obama has already done that. But perhaps some wiggle room isn't such a bad idea. We are, after all, the most powerful country on the face of the earth, with great power comes great responsibility. That Obama will control a tremendous amount of power, including the power to wipe whole counties off the face of the earth, is not in dispute. It's not the proper use of power that we need to watch out for, it's the abuse of power.
We all knew the awesome powers inherent to the office of the Commander-in-Chief. Our vote is a way of saying, we trust you, Barack Obama, to faithfully manage this authority.
If we can trust Obama to be in charge of America's military and nuclear arsenal, can't we trust him to use extreme interrogative measures only in the rarest and most dire of circumstances? To put this debate in perspective, which is worse, the authority to use torture to extract vital information from a single terrorist suspect, or the authority to create apocalyptic nuclear war?
If you think about it, the ban Obama has enacted is similar to our policy on the use of WMD's. The US hasn't committed to never being allowed to use WMD's, but we have demonstrated to the world that we will only use them responsibly and only as a last resort. Since harsh interrogation tactics can be useful in some types of ticking-time-bomb scenarios, why not treat the issue of torture like the issue of nuclear weapons?
Let's look at some of Joe's howlers:
"..How do I know? Simple. I can say with certainty that I would crack under torture. I couldn't take it..."
- Here, Joe has unconsciously assumed that when he was being tortured, he actually possessed information. In that case, as he says, he would promptly spill the beans. But what if he had no information? Most of the US-held detainees have no information, but are tortured ANYWAY. The captors have no way of knowing a priori whether a given detainee really has any significant information. Many of them have been tortured to death. Many have been tortured even after years in captivity. // Joe apparently didn't even consider such things.
Joe stupidly writes, "If we can trust Obama to be in charge of America's military and nuclear arsenal, can't we trust him to use extreme interrogative measures only in the rarest and most dire of circumstances?"
- Here, Genius Joe has forgotten that "we" also trusted Bush "to be in charge of America's military and nuclear arsenal." So by Joe's logic, we should also have trusted Bush "to use extreme interrogative measures only in the rarest and most dire of circumstances."
Joe also writes, "The US hasn't committed to never being allowed to use WMD's, but we have demonstrated to the world that we will only use them responsibly and only as a last resort."
- The US has demonstrated no such thing. It was entirely possible that Bush might have used nukes in Iran, any time in the last few years. The Democrats would have done no more to oppose this than they did to oppose any other Bush policy (like torture & eavesdropping, for instance). Hillary spoke only 9 months ago of "obliterating Iran." // What's most striking about Joe's statement is that it lays bare what a naive believer in America's wonderfulness he is.
"...wiggle room isn't such a bad idea"
You're not too bright, are you Joe? Watching '24' on Fox a little too much?
This tentative Obama supporter is embarrassed to be in the company of koolaid drinking, unprincipled Obama supporters like you.
Agreed people like JpeHope just encourage me to be MORE cynical about this whole enterprise. :(
I understand your thinking that torture would work because of YOUR response. The problem with torture is that it is in the control of the torturers. What if they don't or won't believe your truthful response? Would you then fabricate lies that support Darth Vader's arguments, to make it stop? I bet you would. Not that I would fault you for that. That is why we need to make it illegal, for practical reasons and for upholding peace of mind of our citizens and the rest of the world, it should be illegal on moral grounds.