U.S. abuse and torture of detainees is no longer dominating the news, but if this were a normal news day, a stunning report on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal would be getting more attention.
The opinions of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales are already widely known. Shortly after 9/11, Gonzales recommended that the Bush administration abandon the Geneva Conventions altogether.
“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” Gonzales wrote to Bush. “The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.” Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
But as the WSJ noted today, this decision went far beyond Gonzales’ office.
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners.
The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified “secret” by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013.
Can anyone, anywhere, still argue that the torture was conducted by a few misguided “bad apples” who were acting out on their own?
Despite all the rhetoric about adherence to the Geneva Conventions and respect for international standards for prisoner treatment in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, we’re now learning that the Bush administration specifically decided that “normal strictures on torture might not apply” to its war on terror.
The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or “superior orders,” sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no “moral choice was in fact possible.”
[…]
A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture — to assert “presidential power at its absolute apex,” the lawyer said.
Every day, the administration gets a little bit scarier.