Current affairs: The Torture Papers

[struggle4progress]

REVIEWED BY NICK FIELDING



THE TORTURE PAPERS
ed by Karen J Greenberg & Joshua L Dratel
CUP £27.50 pp1,249

TORTURE AND TRUTH
by Mark Danner
Granta £16.99 pp580



THE ABU GHRAIB INVESTIGATIONS
by Steven Strasser
Public Affairs Reports £11.50 pp256

These three books represent a new trend in publishing that should make us pause for thought. All three are largely made up of the background documents and investigations into the prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Each contains a short contextual essay at the beginning, followed by the official reports.

The most comprehensive is the huge Torture Papers, edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel. Greenberg is director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, while Dratel is a defence lawyer for some of the Guantanamo detainees. The book grew out of a demand for the official papers that the Center on Law and Security satisfied originally by sending out photocopies. Continuing requests resulted in this 1,249-page tome.

The book charts in great detail, via memos, correspondence and reports, the moral descent of the Bush administration into a position where “unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment and punishment of prisoners” became the norm, showing how prisoners were put beyond the reach of any court and excluded from the protocols of the Geneva Convention. The process started in Afghanistan, progressed to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and was transferred to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Throughout, there was an imperative that those implementing the policies should be absolved of any liability for war crimes.

Behind the whole process, as all three books make clear, was the Presidential Ruling of February 7, 2002, in which President Bush made it clear that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world, because, among other reasons, Al-Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva”. Though the finding went on to say that, as a matter of policy, US forces “shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva”, it was a slippery slope that resulted in the now notorious abuse that broke with the publication of the photographs. <snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1475637,00.html