Spin and Consequences
Published: November 15, 2006
When President Bush announced in September that he was transferring 14 men suspected of heinous acts of terrorism to Guantánamo Bay, his aim was baldly political — to stampede Congress into passing a profoundly flawed law that set up military tribunals to try “illegal enemy combatants” and absolved U.S. officials of liability for illegally detaining and torturing prisoners....
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That was a major blow to the C.I.A.’s legal strategy. After all, if the president could talk about the prisons and interrogations to suit his political interests, why couldn’t they be discussed in court?
The Justice Department quietly reversed field after Mr. Bush’s announcement, and it informed the A.C.L.U. in a letter last week that two of the documents the group has been seeking do, in fact, exist — although it is still refusing to release them.
One of those documents is a presidential order signed by Mr. Bush authorizing the C.I.A. to set up prisons outside the United States to house terrorism suspects. The other is a 2002 memo from the Justice Department outlining what sorts of “aggressive interrogation techniques” may be used against those prisoners. That phrase, we now know, is Bush administration code for acts that the rest of the world regards as abuse and even torture....
...the Bush administration has abused the courts’ — and the nation’s — trust in the indiscriminate way it has tried to hide its policies behind a supposed shield of national security. At the very least, it should now be much harder for government lawyers to do that.
It would be even better if the courts ultimately compelled the release of these and other documents. Americans have a right to know what standards their president has been applying to the treatment of prisoners. The nation’s image is at stake, as well as the safety of every man and woman who is fighting Mr. Bush’s so-called war on terror.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/opinion/15wed1.html?hp
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