I guess that I should not have been shocked this week when I read a report in "The New York Times" that detailed how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department issued a secret memorandum that, in effect, justified torture of terror suspects by the CIA. Does anything this administration does or fails to do shock anyone anymore? Sadly, incompetence has reached a new low.
The story goes that in late 2005, Congress was about to pass the Detainee Treatment Act, which outlawed "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world, including the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison. In his infinite loyalty to President George W. Bush and more importantly to Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington, the newly appointed Gonzales approved a memo (written by the future head of the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Bradbury over the objections of Deputy Attorney General James Comey) that said the CIA's current practices did violate this new standard. The problem with this memo is that the interrogation tactics being used by the CIA hardly conformed to this standard.
They were using tactics such as waterboarding, which, according to "The New York Times," involves "pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation."
I would love to hear Bush explain how this could possibly not be considered "cruel": "Now look here, ya see, we were just tryin' to get those boys some water!" Has it really come to the point in this country that our "Justice" Department is drafting memos approving torture?
What's more, experts say that these type of tactics are usually equally or less effective than softer methods. I know that it is hard for some to get worked up about this torture issue; I mean so what if the "bad guys" are being treated rough, right? Wrong. This is just further evidence that despite Bush's claim to be a "compassionate" conservative, America has drifted so far astray from our goal of being the world's moral beacon that we actually condone things that Jack Bauer dreams about. The real problem is that this sort of activity is only symptomatic of deeper problems. Cheney and Addington have so much influence at the Justice Department that the man who originally drafted the narrow definition of torture for the Department, Dr. John Yoo, was privately called "Dr. Yes" by former AG Ashcroft.
Beyond just the trite story of Vice President's Cheney's seemingly unlimited swath of power, this legal decision sets a dangerous precedent. What happens when the enemy decides to apply our interrogation techniques on American hostages? Would Gonzales and lackey Steven Bradbury think it humane then? I think not, yet this is exactly the situation the Bush Administration has put us in. Don't think for a second that our allies approve of such actions either. Just Tuesday the Supreme Court decided against hearing the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, a man of Lebanese descent who claims he was mistakenly held, beaten, and interrogated in a CIA prison in Afghanistan for an extended period of time. The CIA denies having anything to do with el-Masri, yet investigations have revealed that el-Masri's version of events are accurate and German courts have issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents, even though Bush would never hand them over. The decision by the Supreme Court to not hear the case is not surprising, considering the amount of damage it could do to the administration, but it could serve to further damage our relationship with Germany, which was just beginning to recover from the controversy in the build up to the Iraq war. All these problems beg the question: Can Jan. 20, 2009 come soon enough?
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