Abu Ghraib Scandal Strikes Again

Here we go again. It turns out there were much worse photographs of the Abu Ghraib torture sessions of 2004. The Daily Beast has the grim details:

The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.

I'm not sure what to say. I'm glad I'm not one of those people who are digging in to support torture techniques. If you open the door to not treating people in captivity humanely, it's no surprise something like this would happen. Heck, some it of was sanctioned. To people who think either you have to torture to get information or the people who think this kind of thing isn't real torture: This mess is yours. Don't give me the "few bad apples" excuse either.

The Bush Torture Memos

This is not pretty. The US has published four secret memos detailing legal justification for the Bush-era CIA interrogation programme.

Three of the documents were written in May 2005 by the then acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Stephen Bradbury. They gave legal support for the combined use of various coercive techniques, and concluded that the CIA's methods were not "cruel, inhuman or degrading" under international law.

The fourth document, dating from 1 August 2002, was written by OLC lawyer John Yoo and signed by his colleague Jay Bybee.

It contained legal authorisation for a list of specific harsh interrogation techniques, including pushing detainees against a wall, facial slaps, cramped confinement, stress positions and sleep deprivation.

The memo also authorises the use of "waterboarding", or simulated drowning, and the placing of a detainee into a confined space with an insect.

Announcing the publication of the memos, Mr Obama said: "I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release.

"Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time," he explained.

But he also gave an assurance that "those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice... will not be subject to prosecution."

(...)

Critics of the Bush administration's interrogation programme say the memos provide evidence that many of the methods amount to torture under US and international law.

It does appear that they were breaking the law, and knowingly. I confess that I was caught up in the emotions of 9-11, like many people. Apologists sold the ticking clock theory: If a prisoner had information about an imminent attack, shouldn't we use every means possible to obtain that information and put a stop to it before it's too late? This is a powerful argument, and I certainly bought it. BUT, how many situations are actually like this? Reading some of these examples are people who didn't have knowledge of attacks and were sordidly tortured over several months.

Illegal is illegal. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke we were told it was a bunch of rogue soldiers, who were acting on their own volition. (Which I believed at the time.) Obviously, that wasn't the case. Orders came down from the Oval Office. They were breaking the law and covering up. Whatever their justification, the administration was in the wrong.

Ultimately, if you're preaching freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law to the Muslim world, you lose your credibility when you act in this manner.

UPDATE: It seems a lot of people on the right are trivializing waterboarding, as merely being splashed by water. Christopher Hitchens subjected himself to it and wrote about it: Believe Me, It's Torture

UPDATE II: I think Paul Wells has the pithiest account in Maclean's

He points out that the State Department routinely decries as torture the very practices he and his colleagues are busy justifying, but only when other countries do it. And then he says it’s only torture if other countries do it.

The memos are a huge smoking gun that they knew they were doing wrong. I wonder if there will be legal action?

UPDATE III: The US World War II tribunals convicted Japanese camp officials and guards for waterboarding prisoners. From the Washington Post:

Here's the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese:

They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.

And from the second prisoner: They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war.