The Torture Memo, and the Outrage
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To the Editor:
Re “ ’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations” (front page, April 2):
It’s high time that the authors of the Bush administration’s legal recipe book for torture be brought out of the kitchen and into the courtroom. Yet despite volumes of highly credible evidence of human rights crimes, or even war crimes, a negligent Congress continues to fail miserably in its responsibility to mandate proper investigations into these cruel policies.
The United States’ moral and political standing in the world have completely eroded, and legitimate prosecutions of crimes against humanity against the United States have been compromised. Congress must finally face its own complicity in torture with concrete measures — not shortsighted hearings — by ordering a full, independent investigation into how torture became United States modus operandi and holding those responsible accountable.
Curt Goering
Deputy Executive Director
Amnesty International USA
New York, April 2, 2008
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To the Editor:
The Bush administration attributes detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to the rogue actions of a few soldiers and a lack of clear interrogation guidelines. But the mounting evidence, particularly the declassified memo by John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department official, proves that administration officials themselves are responsible for the torture and cruel treatment of detainees in United States custody.
The continuing effort to exempt the president from anti-torture law, among other revelations, shows that the government’s calculated policy of torture originated at the highest levels of the administration. The Justice Department’s interpretation of long-held tenets of American and international law provided the executive branch with the unlimited power to treat detainees as it saw fit.
Longstanding legal precedents were willfully twisted to justify a systematic regime of abuse employing the expertise of military psychologists and medical personnel. These “enhanced” techniques inflicted severe and lasting harm on detainees — the kind of harm explicitly criminalized by the United States War Crimes Act.
The use of these interrogation techniques has eroded our international standing and compromised the rule of law. The question is no longer who is responsible. The question now is whether they will be held accountable.
Frank Donaghue
Chief Executive
Physicians for Human Rights
Cambridge, Mass., April 3, 2008
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To the Editor:
Your April 4 editorial “There Were Orders to Follow” brings attention to additional evidence that it could take years to unearth the full extent of the damage inflicted on our nation by this Bush administration.
While it will never happen, once the election is over, an independent commission should be appointed to investigate once and for all the nation’s unseemly march to war, the administration’s apparent disregard for civil liberties and international standards of conduct, and its support of policies that served to advance cronyism, self-dealing and economic waste on a monumental scale.
For future generations to be able to identify and marginalize such conduct, it needs to be identified and exposed. While security demands vigilance to thwart the enemy from without, we should not ignore the more insidious dangers posed by contemptible policies foisted on us from within.
Robert I. Goodman
Rye Brook, N.Y., April 4, 2008
To the Editor:
I was reminded of how differently the Truman administration was advised to respond to the Soviet Union.
In 1946 George F. Kennan was asked to explain why the Soviet Union was behaving as it was. In his famous “long telegram,” Kennan discussed how the Kremlin leaders justified the dictatorship and the “cruelties” they inflicted, along with the threat that Communist expansion posed to the West.
The way to respond to despotism and the Communist threat, he concluded, was to “have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
It is more than regrettable that John C. Yoo and others in the Bush administration failed to remember Kennan’s sage advice. Kenton Clymer
DeKalb, Ill., April 4, 2008
The writer is a presidential research professor and chairman of the history department at Northern Illinois University.
April 8th, 2008 | Category: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Bagram, Black Site, C.I.A., Camp Bucca, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Detainee Treatment Act, Extraordinary Rendition, Female Detainee, Guantanamo, Interrogators, Kabul Prison, Military Commission, Military Tribunal, Sleep Deprivation, Torture, Torture flights, USA, war crimes, waterboarding
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