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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (48989)	6/13/2004 8:48:23 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

editorial A darker ethic surfaces This week, a nation mourning for former President Ronald Reagan saw itself as it wants to be seen: steadfast, loyal, upstanding. Half a world away, however, the ramifications of a darker side were still reverberating. For many, it began to emerge with the digital pictures beamed around the world from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: images of hooded prisoners, naked men piled on top of each other, detainees tethered to leashes like animals. President Bush and his closest advisers assured us that they abhorred the treatment of Abu Ghraib's prisoners. They passed off the torture as the acts of a few rogue guards. They said the actions there didn't reflect the America they knew. Then, this week, a darker ethic surfaced in government memos that argued that the president isn't bound by laws or treaties prohibiting the torture of prisoners. The Wall Street Journal broke the story of a March 2003 legal brief prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba complained that conventional methods weren't netting much information from al-Qaeda prisoners. The memo was crafted using an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo to White House counsel. It said torturing suspected al-Qaeda members abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional." Democrats, clutching copies of the memos and photos from Abu Ghraib, cried foul. Some contend the memos, which were the work of numerous lawyers and miliary officers, could have laid the legal groundwork for the prisoner abuses that took place in Iraq and elsewhere. "We know when we have these kinds of orders what happens: We get the stress test, we get the use of dogs, we get the forced nakedness that we've all seen, and we get the hooding," Sen. Edward Kennedy told Attorney General John Ashcroft this past week at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The United States signed off on the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the torture of prisoners, partly because we don't want our captured prisoners tortured. Torture is inhumane. But there are also some practical reasons. Some evidence suggests that often the information given up by someone who's being tortured is inaccurate. They'll say anything the interrogators want to hear to make the torture stop. Kicking in the wrong door in Baghdad or, worse, firing shots into the wrong house because of bad intelligence from a prisoner won't help win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Bush late this week again stepped forward to say he expects authorities to follow the law when interrogating suspects - here or abroad. "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," he said. When reporters pointed out that some of Bush's own lawyers think terror suspects can be tortured without violating the law, the president snapped back: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you." At this point, though, there's little comfort in any of this. denverpost.com