A Letter to Secretary Rice on Standards for Permissible Interrogations [View All]

[babylonsister]

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/06/rice_letter.html

A Letter to Secretary Rice on Standards for Permissible Interrogations

June 11, 2007

Dear Secretary Rice:

We are writing to urge you to support strong standards on permissible interrogations – standards that are consistent with U.S. values, statements and law, with the Geneva Conventions, and with other international legal standards.

Section 6 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provides that acts amounting to “torture” and “cruel or inhuman treatment” constitute felonies under the War Crimes Act. It also directs the president “to promulgate higher standards and administrative regulations” governing violations of the Geneva Conventions. Section 6 also prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” as prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution and directs the president to “take action to ensure compliance with this subsection, including through the establishment of administrative rules and procedures.”

We understand from press reports that the administration is considering an executive order on compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as well as new guidelines on CIA interrogation procedures. We urge the administration to adopt rules that would clearly prohibit the interrogation techniques that have been widely reported to be part of the “enhanced” interrogation regime used by the CIA – all of which violate Common Article 3.

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Conclusion

The United States is not the first democratic country that responded to a serious attack and an ongoing terrorist threat by stepping over legal boundaries that it helped create and had previously defended. But it is long past time for the United States to restate unequivocally its commitment to what President Bush once called “the non-negotiable demands of human dignity” by adopting clear interrogation guidelines that prohibit waterboarding and the other “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Sincerely,

Open Society Policy Center
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights First
Physicians for Human Rights
Center for National Security Studies
National Institute of Military Justice
Center for American Progress