Conspiracy To Torture

Nation: America Must Try To Stop Torture, Not Deny It Exists

(The Nation)  The McCain defense appropriations amendment is a crucial step. His amendment is a powerful reaffirmation of the nation's responsibilities under domestic war crimes law and international anti-torture covenants. It's imperative that the House of Representatives, where the White House enjoys more leverage, not dilute the McCain amendment in the appropriations conference negotiations. It's just as important that the conference committee reject Lindsey Graham's amendment, which would strip Guantánamo prisoners of habeas corpus rights — and thus their ability to protest effectively their "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in US custody.

The acceptance of torture amounts to a crisis of democratic culture, requiring patient cultivation of outrage on the part of the antiwar movement and human rights campaigners. Activist groups beyond the human rights lobby, like MoveOn.org, are beginning to focus on torture as a political issue, a welcome development. Whether from activists or Congress, few steps matter as much as encouraging and protecting whistleblowers at all levels of the military and intelligence agencies. Truth-telling by soldiers, officers, intelligence operatives and Administration officials is the best hope for dismantling the torture regime. That Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, is now denouncing Cheney for providing "philosophical guidance" for torture is evidence of how high whistleblowing can go. To everyone with knowledge of the torture system, the message is simple: As Daniel Ellsberg wrote last year, "Do what I wish I had done in 1964: Go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims."

More than enough evidence has already accumulated to justify a criminal investigation of the renditions, secret prisons and interrogations, which together amount to a conspiracy to violate a host of federal statutes and constitutional procedures. Senator Carl Levin and many human rights advocates make the case for a 9/11-style truth commission. But the torture conspiracy is crying out for a special prosecutor, as Anthony Lewis argues forcefully on page 13. The Justice Department and Attorney General, so deeply and personally implicated in the torture conspiracy, cannot be trusted to investigate themselves. And the military's criminal-investigation system in torture cases is woefully inadequate, as Tara McKelvey reveals on page 15. It's time for an outside authority to step in — one vested with power to hold military higher-ups and White House officials criminally liable.

If American institutions don't act, prosecutors and parliaments abroad will. Already, kidnappings and renditions have spawned criminal inquiries in Italy, Sweden and Canada, while the EU and Council of Europe investigate the black sites. In many European nations, victims of human rights violations enjoy broad standing to bring legal action — as General Pinochet learned in England. The more information leaks out, the less frivolous is the fantasy of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales and other complicit officials unable to travel to Europe without fear of being served with papers. The Administration may be scornful of international human rights covenants. But in recent death-penalty and gay-rights cases, the Supreme Court majority has taken pains to indicate that international human rights standards do matter in American law, in the noble tradition of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" articulated by the Declaration of Independence.

If the twentieth century proved anything, it is that no nation, no constitutional system, is immune from the downward human rights spiral signified by torture — as Britain, France and Israel, among other nations, learned at great political cost. The purpose of this special issue is to confront the sweeping moral seriousness of the American torture crisis of the twenty-first century. The point is not so much that we are "better than our enemies," as Senator McCain and others have argued, but that our democratic institutions are vulnerable to erosion. The outline of the torture conspiracy is clear, but the full facts need to be exposed and the chain of responsibility definitively established. History will judge the Bush Administration's torture policy in the same harsh light as Jim Crow, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American internment. The conspirators must be held accountable.