Why torture issue hasn’t had political traction

< Prev | 1 | 2

Kerry under fire
Republican consultant Chris LaCivita, who served as the Swift Boat Veterans’ strategist, said Monday that Kerry held back from criticizing Abu Ghraib partly because “it’s no longer fashionable among those in the Democratic Party to engage in the bashing of American servicemen and women while they are in combat. It might have been in vogue in 1970 and 1971 when Kerry was getting his sea legs in politics,” but not today.

“Had Kerry done something that cast aspersions on American troops currently serving” by using torture as an issue, “he would have opened himself up to people saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is the same type of charge he made in 1971, with a blanket indictment of American soldiers,’” LaCivita said.

Elisa Massimino, director of the Washington office of Human Rights First, an advocacy group that opposed Gonzales’ nomination, said torture has so far fallen short as a compelling issue due to “the inability to really make a case to the public that the Abu Ghraib pictures are not just about Abu Ghraib.”

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

She noted that, “some of us had been ringing the alarm bells as early as December 2002 when deaths occurred at Bagram” air base in Afghanistan.

She added, “If you asked most Americans how many detainees have died in U.S. custody, they would say less than 10. In fact it is almost 50.”

“Abu Ghraib is a window on a broad policy,” Massimino said. “With each nomination, the window opens a bit. You might get the window wide open when the Haynes nomination comes up.”

She is referring to Bush’s nomination of Pentagon general counsel William Haynes to serve as an appeals court judge. “He would have known a lot more about deaths in custody than Gonzales knew,” Massamino said.

Focus on degrading treatment
University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, a critic of the Bush administration, who edited a new book of essays on torture, said the debate had become badly distorted by focusing only on whether certain actions are or aren’t torture.

As its name indicates, The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment bans more than torture.

In 1994 the Senate ratified this treaty, with certain reservations, narrowing its definition of torture. It was those limitations that Bybee and Yoo discussed in their memo.

Alluding to last week’s Washington Post report that female interrogators at Guantanamo had rubbed their bodies against detainees and made lewd remarks to provoke them, Levinson said, “It is a stretch to call it ‘torture’ but not a stretch at all to call it degrading.”

Levinson also says, “It is far too easy (and tempting) for critics of the OLC memo(s) to focus on John Yoo or Jay Bybee … rather, say, than on Senate Democrats who voted to support the relevant ‘reservation’ to the United Nations convention that has helped to cause so much consequent mischief.”

But he notes that Democratic senators probably agreed to the reservations due to a need to compromise with then-Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.

Levinson is dismayed that the 2004 campaign was not the occasion for a thorough political debate on the treatment of detainees. Legal scholars, politicians and citizens, he said, need to deal not so much with the extreme scenarios such as the one Schumer cited, but cases that descend "into the muck" of specific interrogations.

< Prev | 1 | 2