After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and the world saw the Justice Department memos that outlined the Bush administration’s broad tolerance for torture, the White House distanced itself from the policy and said a more accurate, legal policy on interrogations would be forthcoming. Indeed, on June 22, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales renounced the torture memos and administration officials said a revised policy would be available “within weeks.”
That would have been helpful, but it never happened. In a terrific follow-up piece, the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has yet to give guidance on how to handle detainees.
Six months [after promising to revise its detainee policy], that process remains unresolved, leaving the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies without definitive legal guidance for interrogations in the war on terrorism.
Friday, a senior Justice Department official said the project “hasn’t been abandoned” but simply delayed because of the “press of business” in other counterterrorism efforts.
Sure, guys, take your time. It’s not like the administration’s tacit support of torture was a big deal or anything.
Several officials said they doubt a revised Justice Department opinion ever will emerge. “There’s a lot of water between now and then,” an administration official said. Some officials don’t want to commit a definitive policy to paper, while others see no need to bring up the subject since congressional and public interest in it is flagging, people familiar with the discussions say.
“The question is: Why do people have to write opinions about how far you can go?” said one official.
Because under the administration’s model, there are virtually no limits.
Under the previous Bush administration policy, the president signed off on a policy that allows him to set aside federal laws and international treaties (such as the Geneva Conventions) that prohibit torture because he feels like it. Then the White House said there was never any real support for that policy. Since then, the administration has corrected the problem by issuing…nothing in particular.
Alberto Gonzales, who happens to be Bush’s nominee for attorney general and signed off on the DoJ torture memos, hasn’t done much to establish a new, less insane, policy on interrogations of detainees. With his confirmation hearings coming up, some are wondering when we might learn of the administration’s actual policy on the issue.
“We want to know what the current policy on torture is, but since the administration disavowed the Aug. 1, 2002, memo, no public statement of policy has replaced it,” Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, wrote in a letter to Mr. Gonzales this month. “You will be called upon to explain in detail your role in developing policies related to the interrogation and treatment of foreign prisoners.”
“There is the [Pentagon] memorandum which was not withdrawn, which incorporates the [Office of Legal Counsel] analysis in it,” said former Assistant Attorney General Randolph Moss, who headed that office under the Clinton administration. “So it raises a lot of concerns about what rules people are operating under.”
Mr. Moss said the administration should clarify what it now believes the law allows. “There is a perception out there that the view of the United States on the torture statute is one that imposes very few limits on what can be done” to enemy prisoners,” he said. “Having created that perception, I don’t think we can stand back and say we don’t care to opine on it.”
But that’s exactly what the White House is doing. Bush’s gang created a policy that permitted torture and, in their drive to correct their mistake, haven’t done anything to offer new policies. We’re still fighting a war, and we’re still detaining suspected terrorists, but now there are no guidelines about what tactics can and cannot be used to acquire information from detainees.
Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said that until the definitive analysis is completed, the Office of Legal Counsel has been providing advice on interrogation issues “on a case-by-case basis, when there are requests.”
Right, let’s just assume the CIA and the Pentagon know exactly what to do and will act responsibly with detainees without formal guidelines. It’s not like their recent track record is enough to cause concern.