In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Onward Christian Torturer
An Ashcroft and Torture roundup
A Plunge From the Moral Heights
Come and sit with me for a moment. I am in a room, in a Middle Eastern country, and I am talking to a government official. He mentions the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, and what this has done to America's image in his region. He smiles at what he says, for he is a man who appreciates irony. Of course, this same thing happens in his country, he says. Inwardly, I smile back, smug in my confidence that Abu Ghraib or no Abu Ghraib, America is a different sort of nation. It now seems I was a bit too smug.
The recent revelations that the Justice Department prepared memos parsing what is and what is not torture brings to mind regimes that, well, I would rather not bring to mind.
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Small Comfort
"The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you," President Bush said brusquely when questioned last week about a Justice Department legal opinion authorizing harsh interrogation techniques.
We can now see the August 2002 legal opinion for ourselves, thanks to The Post, which posted the complete text on its Web site Monday. Reading the memo's legalistic explanation of why "the mere inflicting of pain or suffering on another" is not torture, you begin to understand why Attorney General John Ashcroft refused last week to release the opinion himself -- and why Bush's description of it was so misleading. The document, in its dry, lawyerly way, is as shocking as the Abu Ghraib photographs.
Contrary to Bush's account, the Justice Department memo wasn't an affirmation of laws that ban torture. Instead, it was a legal interpretation explaining how CIA interrogators could avoid liability under those laws, even if they used methods that might commonly be regarded as torture.
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The memo in question is in pdf format here: Bad Counsel
- rob 1:25 PM - [PermaLink] -
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