WP Editorial: The Policy of Abuse

[Trajan]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30039-2004May15.html

Washington Post Editorial

The Policy of Abuse

Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page B06


UNTIL THIS MONTH very little was publicly known about the Bush administration's procedures for handling and interrogating foreign detainees. Human rights groups had collected reports of abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan, reports that the administration dismissed or denied. Spokesmen pointed to President Bush's statement in June of last year that the United States would not violate an international convention against torture and to assurances that detainees in Guantanamo were being treated according to the principles of the Geneva Conventions. In the past two weeks, thanks to the furor over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison and a series of congressional hearings, a disturbingly different picture has been revealed -- one that in its own way is shocking and damaging to America's place in the world.

What is now known is that official procedures for handling detainees permitted hooding, sleep and dietary deprivation, forced "stress" positions, isolation for more than 30 days and intimidation by dogs, and that these reflected judgments at the highest levels of the Bush administration. These decisions, taken in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, changed decades of previous U.S. policy and violated or radically reinterpreted existing regulations. Their adoption deeply disturbed legal professionals inside the military, so much so that some secretly took their complaints to outside watchdog organizations. The International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as many independent legal experts, has condemned the resulting questioning techniques as illegal under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. Yet Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been saying that the United States considers such treatment of prisoners appropriate and legal -- and, presumably, sanctioned for use against detainees everywhere, including Americans.

On Thursday the U.S. commanding general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, took a first corrective step by prohibiting the harsh interrogation methods in Iraq. But the Pentagon continues to defend the techniques as legal under international law, and they are still available for use in military and CIA facilities in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and elsewhere. That is a recipe for more unacceptable abuses and more damage to the United States.

How have the procedures been changed since Sept. 11? Official U.S. military regulations on interrogation expressly forbid the "physical and moral coercion" outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. A number of practices are identified in official manuals as illegal physical or mental torture, including "food deprivation," "abnormal sleep deprivation" and "forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time." With the encouragement of senior civilian Pentagon officials, these rules have been turned inside out. Sleep deprivation of up to 72 hours, the Pentagon decided, was not "abnormal" and therefore not torture; a forced stress position held for as long as 45 minutes was not "prolonged" and thus also allowed. The list of practices approved for Iraq also included "dietary manipulation" (as distinguished from illegal "food deprivation"), "sensory deprivation" and "change of scenery down" (putting a prisoner in a worse place).


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