I seek the wisdom of the Scene
So Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands say that “the Susan Crawford interview” — in which the “convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay” says straightforwardly that prisoners there have been tortured — “changes everything.” Why? Because “whether torture occurred and who was responsible will no longer be issues behind which senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers can hide. The only real issue now is: What happens next?”
Also, they claim, “Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to ‘ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law,'” and thus “For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed.”
As someone who believes that torture has indeed taken place at Guantanomo, and that prosecutions of responsible parties should at least be considered, I’m not on the other side of the fence from Lithwick and Sands on the substance of the issue. But their essay makes no sense to me. Why can't “senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers” simply say “We disagree with Susan Crawford”? And why couldn't the Obama administration say that it’s not absolutely clear to them that torture was committed and on those grounds take “the do-nothing option”?
I don't see that the Susan Crawford interview changes anything, much less everything. Am I missing something?
Fat lot of help y’all are.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 16, 05:10 PM · #
Your welcome.
— cw · Jan 16, 05:28 PM · #
I’ve revisited this issue hundreds of times, thought about it deeply, tried to look at it from every accessible angle, and . . . I don’t feel even the smallest blip of outrage at the treatment of al-Qahtani:
Further, I feel only the tiniest bit of concern about a slippery slope that might lead to me and mine (though, to be complete, I have contempt for the Administration’s legal mischief and theoretic stupidities). Maybe my moral machinery is defective, maybe I’m emotionally stunted, maybe I’m being obtuse. If so, sorry.
As to your question, Alan, Crawford could plausibly lead to a phase change. Her position of authority, her apparent disinterestedness, and her credibility all make her a relatively unique and stable sky-hook on which to hang the hopes of political retribution. Doesn’t justify the breathless hallelujahs, though.
— JA · Jan 16, 05:43 PM · #
I think the argument is that if the military lawyers say it’s definitely torture, the Obama administration will have to act, because not to do so, after saying that they think there was probably torture there and having it confirmed, would open the case up for other countries to press charges and demand extradition of Bush admin officials. That’s my guess.
— Zak · Jan 16, 05:51 PM · #
“I don’t feel even the smallest blip of outrage…”
That’s hard to believe. Not even the smallest blip? That’s strange and scary.
— Kolya · Jan 16, 06:51 PM · #
That’s hard to believe. Not even the smallest blip? That’s strange and scary.
Why do you suppose you think that?
— JA · Jan 16, 07:05 PM · #
Two things occur to me.
1. Prosecutorial discretion happens all the time. The treaty obligation is to ensure that torture is a criminal offense, not that every and all instances are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If the Obama administration thinks that the (political) costs of such prosecutions are too high, I suspect that they can simply do what you say and largely ignore it.
2. The interesting question will be if there is a difference of opinion between the administration and Congress, the latter seemingly much more motivated to punish Bush administration officials and the former seemingly want to keep its options open (unsurprisingly). If Congress starts holding hearings but the administration isn’t fully on board, who knows what would end up happening?
— Bryan · Jan 16, 08:11 PM · #
Standing naked in front of a female agent? That happens every day in regular U.S. prisons. (Otherwise, the prison would be forced to illegally discriminate against female guards in the assignment of job responsibilities.) So I don’t understand the phony outrage.
— y81 · Jan 16, 08:23 PM · #
“Why do you suppose you think that?”
It’s very simple, JA: you wrote you don’t even feel the smallest blip of outrage. To me this means that you are were NOT disturbed one bit, not even a tiny bit, by what you read. Any normal human being should feel at least somewhat disturbed that a prisoner is forced to wear a leash and forced to perform dog tricks (especially if you know how Muslims feel about dogs) and is also told that his mother and sister are whores. It is undignified and vile behavior on the part of the interrogators, regardless of the crimes that the person committed. (And no, I’m not saying that the prisoner should have been treated with kid gloves or anything of the sort.)
— Kolya · Jan 17, 09:32 PM · #
Kolya, what do you think happens to prisoners in regular American jails? You must spend every day writhing in agony, if a few hundred people at Guantanamo upset you so much. Or else, you care much more about foreigners than about your fellow citizens.
— y81 · Jan 18, 05:16 AM · #
Y81, to be fair to the greatest number: the outrage, however got, is sincerely felt. We just don’t share in it.
Kolya, to me it’s not at all clear what normal beings should feel. I’m much more comfortable talking about what normal beings should do.
— JA · Jan 18, 06:16 PM · #
JA, notice that I finished the comment by writing about behavior not feelings:
“It is undignified and vile behavior on the part of the interrogators, regardless of the crimes that the person committed. (And no, I’m not saying that the prisoner should have been treated with kid gloves or anything of the sort.)”
And yes it would indeed be vile if in regular US jails authorities force inmates to wear leashes and perform dog tricks.
(This is my last on this thread.)
— Kolya · Jan 19, 09:33 AM · #
Kolya, spare me the phony outrage. Inmates in U.S. federal prisons are forcibly sodomized on a regular basis, and public officials commonly make jokes about the practice. The only reason inmates aren’t forced to wear dog leashes is that it would seem more amusing than humiliating to the average American. So choosing that one example as something that doesn’t happen regularly in American jails is a total red herring. You know that and so do I.
— y81 · Jan 19, 03:30 PM · #
Alan, Here’s my take on Lithwick’s article.
I think there are many in the mainstream media who believe that the United States has been torturing people, but they are reluctant to say so out of a concern to be fair and balanced. So instead they write of “harsh interrogation techniques which some argue amount to torture.” But I think they are just waiting for a suitably influential and neutral (or maybe even just Republican) official to assert that this is in fact torture and then the storyline can change. They can write instead of “allegations of torture which some defend as harsh but legal interrogation techniques”.
So I think Lithwick is arguing that this here is the moment they’ve been waiting for in which there is enough consensus to call this torture that they can do so without seeming completely partisan.
As for the arguments above that the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo is no worse than other prisons in the USA, they are wrongheaded in many ways. Prisoners in Guantanamo have not been publicly charged with a crime and have been allowed to mount no real defense of themselves. Guards who mistreat prisoners in federal prisons have not been expressly directed to do so by the President and/or his cabinet. Prisoners in federal prisons are being punished for crimes a jury found them guilty of committing, whereas the prisoners in Guantanamo are being subjected to intellegence-gathering techniques of extremely dubious efficacy, techniques that were originally developed and only known to be effective for securing confessions rather than extracting information.
— Michael Straight · Jan 22, 10:01 PM · #