Truth about Torture
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
07 November 2005 Issue
A courageous
soldier and a determined senator demand clear standards.
Army Capt. Ian Fishback is plainly a very
brave man. Crazy brave, even. Not only has the
26-year-old West Pointer done a tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, he has had
the guts to suggest publicly that his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, lied to Congress.
After making headlines a month ago for alleging that systematic interrogation abuses
occurred in Iraq-and that the Pentagon was not forthright about it-the
plain-spoken Fishback went back to Fort Bragg, N.C. He is now
practicing small-unit tactics in the woods for a month as part of Special
Forces training. After that, he hopes to fight for his country once again
overseas.
Fishback's courage in taking a lonely
stand may be paying off. Inspired by his example, "a growing critical mass
of soldiers is coming forward with allegations of abuse," says Marc
Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the New York-based activist group that first
revealed Fishback's story. One of them is Anthony Lagouranis, a Chicago-based
Army specialist who recently left the military. He supports Fishback's
contention that abuses in Iraq were systematic-and were authorized by officers in an effort to
pressure detainees into talking. "I think our policies required
abuse," says Lagouranis. "There were freaking horrible things people
were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee
told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a
softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite:
sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used
dogs."
Fishback has also won a devoted and
powerful ally in Sen. John McCain, who says that the captain's tale "is
what I view as the tip of the iceberg in the military today." Fishback's
account has proved to be a prime exhibit in McCain's long-running feud with
Rumsfeld over conduct of the Iraq war. In a long letter to Congress obtained by NEWSWEEK, Fishback
told McCain and others in Congress that when the Defense secretary testified
before Congress in the aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, Rumsfeld
did not accurately represent what was occurring in Iraq.
Fishback said that many of the brutal
practices shown in the Abu Ghraib photos-which the Pentagon called the work of
a few rogue soldiers "on the night shift"-were actually "in
accordance with what I perceived as U.S. policy." After he heard Rumsfeld testify in May 2004 that
the U.S. forces were following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, Fishback wrote:
"I was immediately concerned that the Army was taking part in a lie to the
Congress, which would have been a clear violation of the Constitution."
Based on what he saw, Geneva rules for prisoner treatment were not being followed, he says.
And for 17 months, a frustrated Fishback tried to get a clear answer about what
standards were being used- consulting his superior officers, Army lawyers, even
a professor of philosophy at West Point, Col. Daniel Zupan. He says he never
got an answer. A devout Christian, Fishback held soul-searching discussions
with fellow officers in Bible class about what he should do. In the end he went
to Human Rights Watch for guidance.
Like Fishback, McCain has grown keenly
frustrated by the lack of clarity in the Bush administration's interrogation
policies. The Arizona senator, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, is now battling the administration over an amendment he has
attached to the new defense appropriations bill. It would set down, once and
for all, what is allowed in interrogation rooms. In simple, clear language, the
two-and-a-half-page amendment forbids cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
"regardless of nationality or physical location"-and defines such
treatment as the same as that which is prohibited under the U.S. Constitution.
In a rebuke to President George W. Bush last month, the GOP-controlled Senate
voted 90-9 to approve the McCain amendment.
The Bush administration has consistently
maintained that it is not U.S. policy to abuse prisoners. But Bush has threatened to veto the
entire appropriations bill if it contains McCain's language-all in an effort to
preserve the right to treat prisoners in whatever way the president decides is
necessary. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney, with CIA Director Porter Goss
in tow, met with McCain to try to persuade him to exclude the CIA from any
restrictions. The administration also sought to cut out the term
"regardless of physical location," McCain said in an interview. The
Washington Post, in a harsh editorial, later branded Cheney "the vice
president for torture." Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said she
had no comment on the McCain meeting. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck also
declined to talk about it. But John Yoo, a former Justice Department official
who drafted an August 2002 memo that justified rough methods, said last week
that the administration should continue to treat terrorists differently
overseas because they "do not operate according to the Geneva
Conventions."
Critics, many of them inside the military,
say Yoo and other administration hawks have never understood that U.S. observance of Geneva rules is not dependent on what the enemy does. As
McCain puts it: "This isn't about who they are. This is about who
we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies." He
says the administration could make things worse than they already are by
putting a law on the books that will, in effect, authorize abusive practices at
overseas facilities. "We aren't going to allow any weakening of
language," McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is vetoed or watered
down, he adds, "we will certainly put it on
another piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow."
Even at senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy about the
administration's opposition to the McCain amendment. "The uniformed
military is appalled by Cheney's stand," says a Pentagon official who
would talk only if he were not identified.
For a year and a half now, the
administration has sought to make the Abu Ghraib scandal go away. When
questioned about abuses, the Pentagon regularly cites the sheer numbers of
punishments it has administered to U.S. personnel-230 cases in all, including jail sentences, demotions
and other nonjudicial discipline.
But Defense officials
rarely point out that no senior officers or civilian officials have been
charged since Abu Ghraib. Other officers say they too are seething over the
lack of accountability at senior levels. Colonel Zupan, the West Point philosophy
teacher, says he himself should have acted when he was deployed in Afghanistan and heard of similar abuses. "I didn't raise my eyebrows
about it," he said. "I think it was wrong of me. And if I didn't, as
a field officer, then how are we going to be too harsh on an enlisted
soldier?"
The Army has sought to paint Fishback as a
lone malcontent. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, says the Army Criminal
Investigation Division was investigating the captain's allegations. He calls
Fishback's long letter "verbiage" and says he had no comment on the
questions raised about Rumsfeld's veracity. But NEWSWEEK has obtained
corroboration for Fishback's central point in the Army's own files. According
to papers released by the Defense Department in September in response to a
lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting documents for an
inspector-general probe in July 2004 show that abuses were much more widespread
than the Army acknowledged. In one IG document, an Army sergeant testifies that
putting detainees in stressful positions and pouring water on them "seemed
to be something all interrogators" in the Fourth Infantry Division were
doing.
Before heading into the Fort Bragg woods this
week, Fishback told NEWSWEEK that he doesn't want to talk to the media now.
"I will just say: I support clear standards in accordance with American
values," he said. Judging from the firestorm he started, he may someday
get them.
Go to Original
Vice President for Torture
The Washington Post |
Editorial
Wednesday 26 October 2005
Vice President Cheney is aggressively
pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the
executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights
abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of
prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan
administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other
governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve
legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign
prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become
an open advocate of torture.
His position is not just some abstract
defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of
prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva
Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International
Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have
"disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice
Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation
techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or
simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain
medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during
interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official
investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in
Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held
accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the
agency's performance.
It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would
be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record.
The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's
decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice
by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of
documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of
the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This
summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would
veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the
use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.
The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats,
and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month
by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a
House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify
the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow
such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as
the vice president who campaigned for torture.