Hide it behind any name you want, surge is still escalation, and aggressive interrogation is still torture. There are international rules for the military and there are rules for the civilian police.
How is torture defined by international law?
Torture, as defined by Article 1 of the 1984 Convention Against Torture, is the “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” infliction of severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, on a prisoner to obtain information or a confession, or to mete out a punishment for a suspected crime. The United States ratified the treaty in 1994 but took a reservation to the convention’s addendum on the definition of torture, deferring to the U.S. Bill of Rights’ Eighth Amendment, which outlaws cruel and unusual punishment. However, the 1980 court case Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, in which a Paraguayan citizen won a suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Second Circuit against a former Paraguayan police officer, established that torture falls under the realm of customary international law—thus, all countries, whether party to the Torture Convention or not, must abide. Further, the suit found that torturers become, “like the pirate and slave trader before him—hostis humani generis, an enemy of mankind.” Other agreements that outline similar definitions of torture include the Geneva Conventions and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Do U.S. interrogation techniques qualify as torture?
A leaked 2004 report by CIA inspector general John Helgerson found that several of the interrogation techniques approved by the agency may violate some of the provisions of the Convention on Torture. Human-rights groups charge the United States has tried to narrow the definition of torture to include only those interrogation techniques that result in severe harm to a bodily organ. Thus, they argue that the use of “waterboarding”—when a detainee is strapped down, forced underwater, and made to believe he is drowning—or the use of sleep deprivation would not legally fall under the definition of torture. What the Bush administration essentially did was “rip up the rulebook as far as military interrogators were concerned, telling them that the decades-old rules of the Army interrogation manual didn’t apply,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in an April 14 Council event on the laws of war.
What are “extraordinary renditions”?
The policy of deporting terrorist suspects to countries, typically in the Middle East, with records of using torture. More than 100 detainees have reportedly been subject to renditions by the United States in recent years. The most widely known example was the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, apprehended by U.S. officials for having alleged connections to al-Qaeda and deported via Jordan to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. He is currently suing the U.S attorney general’s office. U.S. officials deny deliberately engaging in the practice of renditions and maintain they receive pledges from recipient governments the detainees will be treated justly.
Another aspect of this practice is what’s known as “reverse renditions,” when foreign officials apprehend terrorist suspects abroad in non-combat settings and hand them over to U.S. custody. The most famous case is that of the “ghost prisoner” Abdul Salam Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni businessman and alleged intelligence officer arrested in September 2002 in Egypt and then sent via Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held incommunicado for a year and a half.
cfr.org
It might still be a good idea if it worked, which, by most claims, it doesn't. Might be OK if we only used it on foreign soldiers, and nobody took it as license to do it to ours.
As an earliest memory thing, I grew up with stories of what the Germans and Japanese did during WW2. While, of course we wore a white hat.(More or less; at least as a matter of national policy). Then came Korea, and the evil torturing Koreans, Red Chinese, and the KGB. Washing brains, even. Then Nam. "They" did evil things to us, while we had a few minor, lapses like My Lai, and the fact we had to look the other way when the South threw Cong out of helicopters.
But now, in the eyes of the world, we have become what we have feared and fought. Torture ain't for America.
Period. |
