What To Look For As The Obama Detention/Interrogation Review Process Proceeds

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from The Washington Independent: http://washingtonindependent.com/26990/what-to-look-for-as-the-obama-detentioninterrogation-review-process-proceeds


By Spencer Ackerman 1/23/09 10:50 AM

I think the Obama administration is not likely to cede that authority back to the Congress. – Dick Cheney, Dec. 15, 2008

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them. – Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009


>>I was talking with a reporter friend last night about President Barack Obama’s executive orders on detentions, interrogations and Guantanamo. We were simply amazed by how far Obama went in repudiating the Bush era — the CIA secret prisons: closed; extraordinary rendition: ended; Geneva Common Article 3: the “minimum baseline” for detainee treatment; Guantanamo: to be closed. If you’re former Vice President Dick Cheney, and you view these orders alongside Obama’s executive order on governmental transparency, you think right now the country has just lost its mind.

But it needs to be remembered, as Daphne suggested yesterday, that the orders aren’t the end of the issue. They put in place a process for repudiating the Bush administration’s apparatus of torture and detention. The journey, in other words, isn’t over. And there are several things to watch for as the process unfolds by which we can judge how thoroughly the new Obama administration legal and policy architecture lives up to the promise of the executive orders. Here are a few questions, as best as I can determine them.

What’s kept classified in the government-wide field manual on interrogation? This was an issue in yesterday’s confirmation hearing with ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, Obama’s nominee to become director of national intelligence. After affirming that he agrees with the executive order’s mandate on harmonizing all interrogations in line with the Geneva Conventions-compliant Army field manual, Blair said he’d support keeping some specifics about the implementation of the Geneva-compliant techniques classified, although he promised that that wouldn’t be a backdoor for the re-introduction of torture techniques. (”Not saying ‘Here’s the document, and then, just kidding, here’s the real stuff.”)

But implementation is important stuff. At Emptywheel, bmaz has been sounding the alarm that not everything in the 2006 rewrite of the Army field manual on interrogations is complaint with Geneva — in particular, a ten-page appendix known as Appendix M appears to go beyond the Geneva-based restrictions of the original field manual. This is something to watch for in the review. If the review merely assumes that everything in the field manual is Geneva-compliant, it may end up reaffirming a codification of torture. And beyond that, guidelines for performing, say, the field manual technique of “Pride And Ego Down” (that link goes to a section of the old, pre-2006 rewrite field manual) need to ensure that things don’t get out of hand in the interrogation chamber . . .


read more: http://washingtonindependent.com/26990/what-to-look-for-as-the-obama-detentioninterrogation-review-process-proceeds