The Turning Point-How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture.

[kpete]

The Turning Point
How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Phillipe Sands
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009

Whether torture occurred and who was responsible will no longer be issues behind which senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers can hide. The only real issue now is: What happens next?

... everything changed this morning when the Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation that the treatment of alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay was "torture."

...........................

What changes as a result of Crawford expressly using the word torture? First, the administration can no longer hide behind parsing the language of the Geneva Conventions and the torture statute. Whether or not Michael Mukasey is willing to call water-boarding torture—as the president-elect did on Sunday—a reputable senior military official has put that label on conduct that is arguably not as bad and has been widespread in Afghanistan and Iraq. In her interview, Crawford acknowledges that it was "the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health that led to her conclusion. 'The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. … This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him. … It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge' to call it torture." What Crawford has done here is astounding. She has repudiated the formalistic (and perennially shifting) definitions of torture as whatever-it-is-we-don't-do. She has admitted that there is a medical and legal definition for torture and also that we have crossed the line into it.

The consequences go further. Crawford also told Woodward that the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because he was tortured. This has devastating consequences for the Bush administration's entire rationale for the new techniques of interrogation: that they would make the United States safer by producing intelligence and keeping dangerous individuals off the streets. We now know they do neither. The torture produced no useful information from al-Qahtani, and the cruelty heaped upon him will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to justify his long-term incarceration.

There is a third major consequence to the Crawford interview: Her principle objection to detainee abuse is not ephemeral or spiritual, but a damning indictment of the impact it will have on American troops and the prospects for America's authority abroad: "If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."

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Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law." These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Sen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm

more at:
http://www.slate.com/id/2208688/

[Winterblues]

1. MUST take into custody, and NO EXCEPTIONS..are such vague terms

Let's just move forward and forget all about it..:shrug: I completely understand the Obama Administration not wishing to get bogged down in all of this but it is IMO imperative for either Congress or the Justice Dept to find out if indeed "War Crimes" were committed and if so to indict.

[DCKit]

2. The NYT and WaPo are full of accounts of war crimes for the past six years.

I'd be happy to help with the research if Congress is unable to find their reading glasses.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[spanone]

4. knr

[NNN0LHI]

5. Recommend

[wiggs]

6. I continue to be frustrated that the torture conversation progressively gets

narrower and narrower. The whole torture picture was first narrowed down to waterboarding. Then all we (public discourse) did was talk about whether or not waterboarding was torture. Now we're down to just talking about one guy.

I suspect that torture was widespread, more than waterboarding, and was authorized high up the command. 24 inmates died at Abu Ghraib alone, right? As I recall from distant memory, one died from suffocation while being sat on inside a sleeping bag. Another died from severe blow to the chest. Both torture. How about the other 22? Natural causes? And how about all those from other prisons, secret and otherwise?

It's easy to narrow the debate down to grey areas and single exceptions. Over the last 8 years this has been done in many policy areas and dems have participated. Let's look at the big picture and ALL misdeeds and get the big picture here.

Think Gonzales developed the torture memo (torture defined only as permanent organ damage and even then the president can do anything he wants and is not limited by constitution or geneva conventions) just so that they could waterboard one guy?

[glitch]

7. Good post. Let's not forget use of vicious dogs, electric nodes, sleep deprivation. All torture.

The list is long. Anybody involved or even anybody in authority who knew about it and looked away should be held accountable and not returned to power.

[humbled_opinion]

12. The Torture Memo

That is their defense. They will say well we just did not view these techniques as torture, they may have been harsh but in our view and our legal expert views they were not torture.

So if you have redefined these methods to be torture then we must NOW instruct our interrogators not to use those techniques.

They did the same with the Warrantless wiretappings. They held legal opinion that The FISA rules did not apply to what they were doing. Once the program became public they petitioned Congress to rewrite the rules to allow for the process to continue.

No accountability, do whatever you think necessary then when a legality question arises you simply say you didn't know because it was never defined and of course from this point forward once the court is involved and has defined it as illegal you stop doing it.

I guess that means you can go as fast as you want on a Highway with no speed limits posted....

[JDPriestly]

14. You can't choose a lawyer whose inclination is to say whatever you

want to curry your favor and then use that lawyer's opinion written especially for you to justify what you do.

Remember, unless a case ends in settlement, one or the other party loses, and that means that one or the other lawyer's arguments fail to persuade the court.

[spanone]

8. another kick

[FourScore]

9. k/r

[Usrename]

10. Article 15 of the Convention Against Torture

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.


The 9/11 Commission Report contains statements obtained through torture. The commissioners themselves are guilty of violating this provision of the treaty. They should be forced to either retract their report or face prosecution. It's the law.

[MasonJar]

11. This is dynamite. I do NOT see how even Obama can ignore these

statements. If he insists on doing so, then the US is ruined. England, our principal co-conspirator, is ratcheting up its reaction to its governments lies. The American people MUST insist on what is right this time. No looking forward without fixing what's past.

[rhett o rick]

13. Also, something I haven't seen mentioned. Even by the Gonzales/Bush

definition of torture, enhanced interrogation to the point of death is considered torture.

Is there evidence that individuals died at the hands of their "interrogators"? I have heard about this but haven't found evidence.

[Disturbed]

15. Most Americans don't care that Terrorists were tortured.

Most Americans believe that all those Detainees at Gitmo are Terrorists & don't deserve to be
treated humanely.

[rhett o rick]

17. These are the Nancy Grace people, guilty if charged. nm

[SpiralHawk]

16. Republicon torture freaks must be brought to justice

Their hateful, unlawful, cruel, anti-American, and anti-Christian fetish must be terminated.