The Hindu : International : U.S. memo `justified' torture

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 09, 2004

International

International

U.S. memo `justified' torture

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, JUNE 8. The Justice Department advised the White House in August 2002 that torturing Al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified" and that the international laws on torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" in the war on terrorism, The Washington Post says based on a memo it has obtained.

The Department maintained that if a government employee were to torture a suspect "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States" by the Al-Qaeda. The Department was responding to CIA request seeking legal guidance. The memo said arguments based on "necessity and self-defence could provide justification that would eliminate criminal liability."

The memo runs diametrically opposite to the Bush administration's stand that handling of prisoners is very much within the established norm of international laws and conventions; and the position of the Justice Department would seem to be offering guidance to the CIA after it began detaining suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It is being pointed out that this legal position in 2002 was used by lawyers of the Pentagon in 2003 while determining interrogation rules at the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

The Justice Department feels inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. But the Army's Field Manual expressly sets out rules prohibiting, among other things, pain induced by chemicals or bondage, forcing individuals to stand or sit in abnormal positions and mental torture that would include deprivation of sleep and mock executions, The Post points out. Officials insist that in spite of the legal issues in the memos of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, the U.S. has abided by international conventions on torture and that detenus at the Guantanamo Base and elsewhere have been treated `humanely'. Yet the memos of 2002 and 2003 have revealed the extent to which the Bush administration wished to explore — or push — the legal limits in the interrogation of foreigners in the name of terrorism.

And this Republican administration has adamantly insisted in the aftermath of the scandalous behaviour of American soldiers and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison that the gross abuse there was an exception. Human rights groups and activists who expressed outrage at what went on at Abu Ghraib are even more appalled at what the Justice Department has had to say in 2002.

"It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I have seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke. It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogation," Tom Malinowski of the Human Rights Watch has told The Post.

While the Justice Department has said that it cannot comment on any specific legal advice to the executive branch that would fall in the realm of `confidentiality,' the White House Counsel's office has said that the President had directed the military to treat the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban "humanely and consistent with Geneva Conventions."

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