They played on their prisoners' secret and darkest fears, used physical force
against them, made them wear black hoods, held them in "stress" positions for
hours on end, gave them "encouragement" to talk by pistol whipping them and even,
in some cases, by capturing their children to provide them with an incentive to
talk.
Not a pretty picture. Enough to convince me of the perfidy of the Communist
and Nazi brutes who terrorized the world only a couple generations ago.
How does it look when the inquisitors are not Communists or Nazis, but
contemporary Americans?
Every phrase I've used to describe totalitarian treatment of captives is a
direct quotation from a Wall Street Journal article titled, "How Do U.S.
Interrogators Make a Captured Terrorist Talk?" (March 4). All these tactics are
legal, a White House spokesman told the Journal, because "al Qaeda prisoners are
'unlawful combatants' who enjoy neither constitutional rights nor the protections
of the Geneva Convention, which govern treatments of enemy soldiers."
"The standard for any type of interrogation of somebody in American custody is
to be humane and to follow all international laws and accords dealing with this
type of subject," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on March 3. "That is
precisely what has been happening and exactly what will happen."
Just what do "international laws and accords" keep a government from doing to
a prisoner? Well, there are two things that are prohibited by the UN Convention
on Torture: inflicting "severe" pain or suffering or transferring a prisoner to a
jurisdiction that inflicts "severe" pain or suffering.
What does this mean in practical terms? "You're just limited by your
imagination," explained a person identified by the Journal as a "U.S. law
enforcement official," because the treaty has no enforcement mechanism.
But there's one other thing the administration won't be able do: it won't take
the prisoners to the U.S. or to "someplace like Spain or Germany or France" or
"near a place where he has Miranda rights or the equivalent of them," a "senior
federal law-enforcer" told the Journal.
But should our forces capture enemies at all? Within the administration, there
"has never been any consensus [on whether to kill or capture] because it's such a
sticky issue," one Bush administration official told the Journal.
Some officials think shooting them down in cold blood is a bad idea. "Look,
even if we think it's unlikely [the captive] would talk," an FBI official told
the Journal, "we don't necessarily know that." But, the Journal reported, killing
them on sight also has strong support within the administration. Some officials
argue that our forces should simply kill terrorists, without making any attempt
to capture them, especially if the captives are well-known, because holding them
would run the risk that a public outcry would arise to let the prisoner have his
day in court.
Although the Bush administration has said that prisoners will eventually be
tried by "military tribunals," no tribunals have actually been set up, and
officials fear that actually trying the prisoners might bring bad publicity.
The Pentagon has said that the tribunals will be run by three to seven
military officers, who will have the power to close the proceedings and withhold
evidence from the defendant. The defendant cannot be compelled to testify in
court, but the testimony he makes while being questioned — that is, being
held in a "stress" position, being denied food and sleep, being beaten ("a little
bit of smacky-face," is the way one government interrogator put it), being
blindfolded and reminded that their captors also hold their children and being
threatened to be sent to a country where actual "severe" torture can be used to
make them talk — is admissible. And the defendant has the right to attorney
of his own choice, provided the attorney is a U.S. citizen with a security
clearance. And after the detainee is convicted, he has the right to "make a
statement" before he is sentenced.
It's a good thing that this is a government of laws, not of men. Only Yahweh
knows how we'd treat these prisoners if we were a dictatorship, like Hitler's
Germany or Stalin's Russia.
