Last week, the CIA was finally compelled to release its 2004 inspector general’s report on prisoner abuses in the U.S. war on terror. The release of the report came as Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., announced plans to investigate individual abuse cases. These events are significant for several reasons.
First, the report shows undoubtedly that U.S. interrogators have taken recourse to torture repeatedly and this authorized use of torture led to abuse. I’ve written about torture before and often hear people blabbering on about how waterboarding isn’t torture, how it’s hard to define torture anyway and (the one that always makes me cringe) how there are a lot of dirty things that go on behind the scenes in intelligence that we will never know about, so don’t be critical.
However, one wants to twist the definition of torture. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald summed up the content of the IG report well when he said interrogation abuses of prisoners included “(a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle.”
That’s torture, and there can be no questions about it – not that there ever should have been any questions. It has long been common knowledge with those who have followed counterterrorism interrogation techniques that the torture of terrorist suspects has even ended in death in some cases. That’s what we call homicide, and it’s bad. And at least 100 detainees have been murdered, which received very little attention from the Justice Department under George W. Bush.
Under the new administration, it increasingly seems very little is going to be done to right past wrongs. Attorney General Holder’s announcement that a preliminary review will decide whether individual abuse cases should be investigated further does not include high-level officials who authorized the use of criminal torture.
The statement said, “The Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”
That translates to: “We would not dare go after Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos justifying criminal torture, and we will not go after any high-level officials who authorized torture within the scope of those memos. No, elitists are too good for that kind of stuff. Instead, we will go after low-level officials and interrogators who didn’t realize that, while it was perfectly fine to deprive detainees from sleep or slam them into the walls, it was not perfectly fine to scare them with power drills.”
Furthermore, Obama administration officials announced that rendition (the practice of sending detainees to other countries for interrogation so we don’t have to worry about our own laws) will continue, albeit with so-called oversight, under his administration.
For years, rendition has been used to get around torture. It is not lawful for us to torture a man; so like Jesus’s rivals, we simply deliver the detainee to another authority. It’s shameful, and many human rights groups are hoping Barack Obama will do more to end this practice.
Matt Watson is a graduate student majoring in Spanish. He can be contacted at [email protected].