Published June 13, 2004
It was 1970, and the Vietnam War was raging. A young U.S. intelligence case officer was delivering reports gathered by his indigenous agents to a local U.S. artillery captain. One report was of a crude Viet Cong hospital in the jungle, within range of the captain's guns. We won't be hitting that target, the captain said. Why not? he was asked. Because we don't hit their hospitals and they don't hit ours, the captain replied. In those few words, he expressed a central reason why international norms of behavior in war are important: Although you are trying to kill each other, the Golden Rule still applies: You must treat others as you want them to treat you.
Now comes the Bush administration, post 9/11, anxious to find a means of legitimizing torture and abuse that are outlawed both by U.S. law and by international treaties the United States has ratified. The effort is a despicable affront not only to U.S. and international law, but to the U.S. Constitution and to common decency. It also creates considerable risk for American forces in this and future wars: If the United States doesn't feel itself bound by agreed norms of behavior in war, why should anyone else?
(snip)
The two reports, extensive portions of which have been leaked to the press, boil down to this: While the Bush administration has repeatedly said publicly that its treatment of detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq is in accord with international and U.S. law, its lawyers at Justice and the Pentagon, using pretzel-like arguments and definitions, have determined that the president can do whatever he wants, including the use of torture, to whomever he wants so long as he determines that such action is required as part of the war effort. He is constrained by neither the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, nor the Convention Against Torture, which says that "no exceptional circumstance whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
The administration lawyers also declare that there is nothing Congress can do to stop the president when he is acting in his capacity as commander in chief of American forces. The president's power is thus absolute. Taken together with this administration's unprecedented refusal to declassify the 24 interrogation techniques it uses against foreign detainees, the reports strongly suggest the United States now claims for itself, and employs, a right to use techniques of torture that it has fought internationally for decades to outlaw.
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http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/4824483.html
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