David Cole: Torture is not a public relations problem
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The CIA’s response is about 10 years too late. The time to respond to allegations of torture, cruelty and disappearances is when they occur, not a decade later, when an official report finds fault. And when you learn such conduct is occurring, there is only one proper response – order it to stop and hold the perpetrators accountable. Both the Geneva and the torture conventions absolutely prohibit torture and cruel treatment of wartime detainees; the world has proclaimed through these laws that there are no circumstances that justify such acts.
But the CIA, far from halting the practice, continued it as long as it could. The program began in 2002. When the initial Justice Department legal memo authorizing the program was leaked in June 2004, the George W. Bush administration officially rescinded it. But officials substituted a series of other memos, many secret, that continued to give the CIA a green light. The administration did not transfer its disappeared detainees from the CIA’s secret prisons until 2006, after the Supreme Court had confirmed that the Geneva Conventions apply to al-Qaida detainees and Congress had confirmed that the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment applies to everyone in our custody, no matter what his nationality or where he is held.
So what will the public relations strategy look like now? We can probably make some educated guesses, based on past assertions by Bush administration officials. “We didn’t think it was torture because the lawyers told us it wasn’t.” That defense doesn’t work for Mafia dons and ought not work for the CIA. The practices involved – waterboarding, excruciating stress positions, slamming suspects into walls and prolonged sleep deprivation – plainly qualify as torture and have long been treated as such by the United States when other nations employ them. The European Court of Human Rights just held Poland responsible for complicity in the CIA’s crimes, finding that the conduct was so clearly illegal that Poland had an obligation to stop permitting it on its territory.
Poland, in other words, was an accessory to the crime. But the United States was the ringleader.
http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article1155424.html
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