Change Begins – No More Torture Says Obama Executive Order

I actually started to get cynical before the inauguration, mainly due to the then President-elect’s picks for top economic posts in the Cabinet.  Today as I look at the Briefing Room on the White House website, the cynicism is giving way to hope once again.

President Barack Obama today signed an Executive Order essentially rescinding Bush Administration policies proscribing torture.  The order carries the title, Ensuring Lawful Interrogations.

This brought a smile to my face:

All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order.

Then there’s this:

Effective immediately, an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict, shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3 (Manual).

So, what’s so big about the Army Field Manual?  It’s called setting and abiding by a standard that is in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, international treaty obligations and federal law.  It means no more episodes of “24″ playing out in Guantanamo or black sites in Poland.  You see, Jack Bauer is a TV character.  To move the plot along his forays into torture often lead to good information.  In the real world, harsh interrogation techniques often yield bullshit.

The order also calls for the closure of CIA operated detention facilities.  To the credit of some in the CIA, they were never for getting into the jailer’s business in the first place.  Obama established a task force to study and make recommendations on issues around agencies other than the Dept. of Defense employing Army Field Manual techniques and how to lawfully transfer detainees from one place to another, ostensibly the kinds of folks who have been picked up through the use of extraordinary rendition, some of who were innocent, one of whom was innocent and died in American custody in Afghanistan.

The Constitution and laws and the understanding of basic human rights are what separates us from the apes who live and think in the Middle Ages and seek to terrorize us.  Today, we began to reclaim the moral high ground.

DICK Cheney and State Sponsored Torture

VP DICK Cheney appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation this morning.  This interview wasn’t substantively different from any of the others he’s done in the past month:

Cheney also urged the Obama administration to continue the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.

“I would hope [Obama] would avoid doing what others have done in the past, which is letting the campaign rhetoric guide his judgment in this absolutely crucial area,” Cheney said. “We were very careful, we did everything by the book, and in fact we produced very significant results.”

So many problems with that statement, DICK.  There are a great many smart people, including former members of the Bush Administration who warned you and David Addington about getting too carried away with agressive interrogation techniques.  Chief among their concerns was something we patriots like to call the U.S. Constitution.  There’s also this other little concern known as the Geneva Convention.  You can argue all you want that our foes in the war on terror are not lawful combatants, but the rest of the world needs to somewhat agree, or, it looks like selective application of an international human rights treaty.  And, what about the old bromide that we’re not going to stoop to their level.  There’s so much more than campaign rhetoric behind the criticisms of the Bush Administration’s endorsement of torture.

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Video: Obama’s National Security Team, Face the Nation, Woodward, Zakaria, Mayer, Dyson | November 30

The following 16 minute video is well worth watching – insightful talk with Bob Woodward, Fareed Zakaria, Jane Mayer and Michael Eric Dyson regarding President-elect Barack Obama’s announcement tomorrow unveiling his national security team.  One interesting comment from Woodward:

SCHIEFFER: …the president, if all goes as expected, at 10:50 Eastern time tomorrow will
announce his new national security team, to be headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of
state.

Mr. WOODWARD: She never goes away, she and her husband. It’s an amazing national security team that Obama appears to have selected. It’s kind of like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

You’ve got too cool, which might be–or at least appropriately cool, General Jones as the national security adviser; Gates is kind of just right, in the middle; and Hillary Clinton, hot. This is going to be a whole new center of gravity for the news media, for the whole world. My assessment without having any knowledge, really, is that the economists and the economic team around Obama convinced him that the economic crisis is so deep and going to require to much time, go ahead and give Hillary and Bill the world.

Yikes.  I’m not sure that’s what I voted for, Bob.

The Case Against Torture – Transcript: Bill Moyers inverview of Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer, a writer with the New Yorker and formerly of the Wall Street Journal has published her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. She was interviewed Friday night on Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS. Moyers’ report on the Congressional hearings on Bush Administration-sanctioned torture and lengthy interview with Mayer was riveting television. It also made me feel like I’ve been tuned out of a debate that no American should ignore.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee subcommittee which conducted the hearings on torture, detainee treatment, etc., did so over the course of around six weeks. They should have had these four hearings, back to back, four days in a row and gotten more of the public’s attention to this issue.

Philippe Sands, a University College of London law professor has also written a book detailing story behind the so-called torture memo signed by then SecDef Rumsfeld. Material from Sands’ book, Torture Team, became this article in Vanity Fair.

 

Now is the point in the post where I should write something about the rule of law, unintended consequences, and a presidency which tramples the Constitution, U.S. and international law. But, Sands said it best in his prepared testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:

From these conversations it became clear to me that the Administration has spun a narrative that is false, claiming that the impetus for the new interrogation techniques came from the bottom-up. That is not true: the abuse was a result of pressures and actions driven from the highest levels of government. The Administration claims that it simply followed the law. My investigation indicated that – driven by ideology – the Administration consciously sought legal advice to set aside international constraints on detainee interrogations. The Administration relied on a small number of political appointees, lawyers with no real background in military law, with extreme views on executive power, and with an abiding contempt for international rules like the Geneva Conventions. These are rules that the United States has done more to promote and put in place than maybe any other country. As result, under international law war crimes were committed: I have no doubt that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was violated, alongside provisions of the 1984 Convention prohibiting Torture. The spectre of war crimes was raised by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 2006 judgment in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That judgment corrected the illegality of President Bush’s determination that none of the detainees at Guantanamo had any rights under Geneva.

For the complete transcript of Bob Moyers’ interview of Jane Mayer Read more