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Here at VoA, AZWringer justifies torture because it prevents a captive from “lawyering up“ and seeking justice American-style. Furthermore, he contends torture produces “valid [intel] information” - which is what differentiates victory from defeat in the War On Terrorism, don‘t cha know?
BAA Boy contends torture is no worse than other evils - abortion, church-based child molestation or medical screw-ups that take patient lives. Torture is part and parcel of pure frontier justice - no question about guilt or innocence and justified by a vicious and vindictive God, it gives captives a taste of their own terrorist medicine. Pax vobiscum and Homeland uber alles!
Meanwhile, in Washington, Arlen appears to have had his customary epiphany and will vote for Judge Mukasey’s confirmation. Ditto John McCain - as he continues to polish his “stand-up-POW-jet-jockey-tough-guy” image on the stump.
Are Wringer and BAA marching to the same drumbeat as Specter and McCain? I think not.
Mukasey’s legal hair-splitting on torture has merit. The VoA Bushbackers’ more basic, animal-instinct support of torture does not.
An overriding issue has emerged during the confirmation process - thanks to Bush’s signing statement and Fredo’s secret Justice opinions - we have a double standard on torture. There’s one for CIA interrogators and another for the rest of the nation. Thus, any Bush nominee worth his legal salt, would fail the Senate’s torture test just like Mukasey did.
Congress needs to enact legislation that requires the CIA to abide by the standards imposed on military interrogators - standards that conform to the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act's ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of captives. Standards that prohibit waterboarding.
On Friday, Mukasey told Chuck Schumer that he would enforce such a law.
Will Congress have the chutzpah to try to close the Bush-Gonzales loophole? Will the GOP Congressional Spoilers stand firm to “stay the course” and advocate torture? Will Wringer and BAA end up with egg on their faces?
I dunno about you, but I’ve purchased a dozen of Extra, Extra Large at Safeway and they’re sitting in the sun, ripening, until they’re ready to throw!
ON WATERBOARDING
An excerpt from Sunday's WaPo article, Waterboarding Used To Be A Crime, by Judge Evan Wallach:
The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."
Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.
In this case from the tribunal's records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:
A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.
The United States (like Britain, Australia and other Allies) pursued lower-ranking Japanese war criminals in trials before their own tribunals. As a general rule, the testimony was similar to Nielsen's. Consider this account from a Filipino waterboarding victim:
Q: Was it painful?
A: Not so painful, but one becomes unconscious. Like drowning in the water.
Q: Like you were drowning?
A: Drowning -- you could hardly breathe.
Here's the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese:
They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.
And from the second prisoner: They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.
As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.
More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."
In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."
The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
We know that U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. That's a lesson worth learning. The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history. The law of war is no different. This history should be of value to those who seek to understand what the law is -- as well as what it ought to be.
link:[www.washingtonpost.com]
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