Torture's Achilles Heel

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Since the spring of 2004, the government has been making public previously classified documents nearly weekly, often in response to Freedom of Information Act law suits (though the numbers of newly classified documents are increasing at a rate that more than nullifies any sense of transparency such releases might suggest). Many of these memos have been about torture -- whether to use it; how to use it; and, most of all, how to protect government agents and agencies against prosecution for using it. Among these documents have been memos from the Judge Advocate General's Corps (or JAG), written by military lawyers from the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, and these constitute a welcome oasis of sanity in a desert of compliance with the government's decision to use torture as a weapon in its "war on terror."

First brought to public attention in Senate debate on July 25, 2005, these JAG memos have seen the light thanks to a request from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. They were written in February 2003 as recommendations to a Pentagon working group on "interrogation policy." Collectively, they express a clear opposition to the use of the sorts of harsh interrogation techniques that White House lawyers had not only recommended but declared legally viable. Indeed, by August of 2002, lawyers for the administration had infamously suggested, as a basis for reducing legal culpability for the mistreatment of detainees, that the definition of torture itself be narrowed to include only ""

hysical pain ...equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." <snip>

Prior to the release of these JAG memos, what opposition to torture we knew about within the administration almost invariably stood upon a concern for rights and legality. Secretary of State Colin Powell, William Taft IV, the Legal Advisor to the Department of State, and others reasoned, without much success, against policies which could lay the groundwork for abusive treatment. They cited the possible illegality of such acts under domestic law; the importance of maintaining the high moral ground as a mark of American national identity; the protection of human rights worldwide; the potentially dangerous repercussions that might come from alienating our allies; and the endangerment of our citizens and our troops in a world in which reciprocity in the decent treatment of prisoners might no longer be honored.

The JAG memos restate these arguments, but they also plunge into new critical territory. In a February 27, 2003 memo summarizing the problems the JAG lawyers had with the Pentagon's working group proposal, for instance, Kevin M. Sandkuhler, Brigadier General for the Marine Corps, wrote the following: "The authorization of aggressive counter-resistance techniques by service members will adversely impact ...Human Intelligence Exploitation and Surrender of Foreign Enemy Forces, and Cooperation and Support of Friendly Nations." Put simply, Sandkuhler was saying that the systematic practice of torture threatened to impede the collection of useful information and so had the potential to deliver a harmful blow to the U.S. war against jihadi terrorism. <snip>

http://www.alternet.org/rights/24641/