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Is America above the Geneva Conventions? (Bush bashing alert)
Der Spiegel ^ | November 10, 2005 | Michael Ratner and Sara Miles

Posted on 11/13/2005 5:58:49 AM PST by NCjim

Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney about a new set of US Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists. The debate over an anti-torture bill is a sad moment for a country that once stood for human rights.

As someone who has spent decades representing clients who have been tortured under dictatorships, in dirty wars and by lawless governments around the world, I'm having a rough week here at home. My friend Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun whom I represented after she'd been abducted, raped and tortured by security forces in Guatemala, told me she was having a hard time too. "Torture destroys trust," she said. "Since my torture, 16 years ago, I've tried to rebuild that trust, but now my government has shattered it yet again. Fear returns..."

For Sister Dianna and other victims of torture, this moment represents what she calls "a choice between courage and cowardice, human decency and depravity." Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his aides about a whether a new set of Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists should prohibit the "cruel, humiliating, and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In the Congress, Sen. John McCain, with support from 89 colleagues, is pushing a separate measure to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody -- against veto threats from the White House and fierce opposition from Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington, who are maneuvering to exempt clandestine CIA activities from oversight. And reporters have uncovered a network of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- secret detention camps run by the CIA, where suspects are being held and brutally interrogated.

The idea that torture could be so publicly defensible -- and the news that the United States is maintaining secret facilities in former Soviet-era prisons for torturing nameless and disappeared people -- fills me with shame and horror. And while it's encouraging that John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war, wants to make it illegal to strap naked prisoners to boards and hold them under water, electrocute them or mock-execute them, it's profoundly depressing that the discourse about torture has come to this point.

Cruelty in war may be universal: but an international code acknowledging limits on cruelty has been, until now, a fundamental part of civilization. The Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949, put it plainly: Even in war, all persons are to be treated "humanely"; "cruel treatment and torture and outrages upon personal dignity" are prohibited. The United States and countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 192 in all, have agreed that freedom from torture, degradation, and cruel or inhuman treatment is one of the most basic of human rights, transcending national boundaries. As Judge Irving Kaufman of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1980 -- in a landmark case we at the Center for Constitutional Rights brought in a U.S. court against the Paraguayan general who tortured Joel Filartiga to death -- "for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind."

Changes since 9/11

The Filartiga case set a precedent that torturers anywhere in the world can be held accountable for their crimes. With the Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyers for other human rights organizations, I have represented victims of torture from Bosnia to Algeria, from East Timor to Tiananmen Square: their stories still haunt me and bring me to tears. I'm unable to forget a terrorized Kanjobal Indian boy from Guatemala, who was just 8 when army troops came to his village and rounded up all the men, shackling and hooding them. The boy told me how he'd been forced to watch as his father was hanged from a tree and cut apart alive. The principle that all people should be safe from torture -- that there are universal laws that make us human -- has been at the very heart of our work.

Since 9/11, I've found myself swept up in defending basic human rights and the rule of law against a relentless onslaught by the Bush administration. We've brought suit on behalf of 500 nameless "John Doe" prisoners held at Guantánamo in defiance of the Geneva Conventions; we've fought the indefinite detention of American citizens; we're challenging the Defense Department and private contractors over the horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib. We've uncovered terrible stories about cruelty and torture carried out by our country, like that of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen kidnapped and "rendered" to Syria by American forces, who was kept an underground cell for over 10 months and beaten for weeks on end with a thick cable. I represented three young men from England who were released from Guantánamo when it was finally proved they'd made false confessions -- after being stripped, hooded, isolated, chained to the floor for 12 hours at stifling temperatures and threatened by snarling dogs.

Yet despite victories in court, and rising political outrage from Republicans as well as Democrats, military lawyers and State Department officials as well as human-rights activists, it now seems that administration hard-liners are digging in.

How did we get to this point? Because the United States is bound by the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, and by the 1987 Convention Against Torture with its prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, McCain's legislation should not even be necessary.

But after 9/11, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (at that time White House counsel to the president) and others gave their legal opinion that prohibitions on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" didn't apply to noncitizens being held by the United States outside the United States. Then, because torture, even outside the United States, remains a crime, they redefined "torture" so narrowly that almost all violent and coercive methods of interrogation were excluded. Then, because of the U.S. criminal statute making violations of the Geneva Conventions a crime, they insisted that the conventions did not apply to anyone they termed a suspected al-Qaida member.

Legal cover

These opinions were an attempt to provide legal cover so that U.S. personnel and contractors could engage in coercive interrogations without fear of criminal prosecution. They were an attempt to show that the United States did not really engage in torture and was not really violating conventions governing cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Once the abuse scandals broke, and the reality of what was being done to prisoners emerged, officials began to talk about lack of clarity in the opinions, or a "failure of supervision" that led to "excesses."

But this administration is now openly and baldly saying that it claims the right to torture, at its discretion. All the fictions that sustained the war on terror -- that abuses were one-time mistakes by low-level grunts; that the rules about human rights weren't clear; that soldiers didn't understand the parameters when they beat and humiliated and tortured prisoners -- have been replaced by a clear declaration: The United States is going to torture people as it sees fit, to subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment wherever and whenever it decides to.

Human rights activists around the world who live under repressive regimes have long looked to this country for leadership; our government, flawed as it is, has launched crusades against human rights abusers abroad and helped prevent terrible suffering by demanding that torture stop. Now we are facing a new world: one in which the most powerful country on the planet publicly declares itself above the laws that have protected individuals everywhere from disappearance, torture and murder. It is a sad and dark moment, in which the hostis humani generis, the enemy of all humankind, speaks with the voice of the United States government.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: leftistrevisionism; moralequivalency
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Author not to be confused with Sarah Miles:


1 posted on 11/13/2005 5:58:50 AM PST by NCjim
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To: NCjim

The only way that this article could be fair, balanced and and inviting to reasoned conclusions would be to run a parallel and contrasting column of Islamofascist actions and pictures of women, children and civilians being beheaded by the servant of Allah.


2 posted on 11/13/2005 6:05:16 AM PST by WorkingClassFilth (The problem with being a 'big tent' Party is that the clowns are seated with the paying customers.)
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To: NCjim
The idea that torture could be so publicly defensible --

Operative word ... PUBLICLY. Whoever the mastermind are behind all this crap, knew exactly what they were doing.

The United States does not torture, period. If these morons were my employees, I'd be firing them ..... oh wait

3 posted on 11/13/2005 6:08:03 AM PST by Just A Nobody (I - LOVE - my attitude problem! WBB lives on. Beware the Enemedia trolls.)
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To: WorkingClassFilth

That would be nice as a start - then we include the North Vietnamese, Japanese, and a few pics from the hollier than thow Germans.


4 posted on 11/13/2005 6:09:40 AM PST by Mr. Rational (God gave me a brain and expects me to use it)
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To: NCjim
Germans lecturing us about the Geneva Convention? Talk about chutzpah!
5 posted on 11/13/2005 6:10:47 AM PST by Gay State Conservative
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To: NCjim

Thanks for sending us Mohammed Atah, by the way.


6 posted on 11/13/2005 6:11:44 AM PST by Mr. Rational (God gave me a brain and expects me to use it)
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To: NCjim

Screw the Geneva Convenmtion, THEY'RE TARGETING CIVILIANS!


7 posted on 11/13/2005 6:12:57 AM PST by ez ("Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is." - Milton)
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To: WorkingClassFilth

I agree, but don't hold your breath on that one!


8 posted on 11/13/2005 6:28:51 AM PST by NCjim (The more I use Windows, the more I love UNIX)
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To: NCjim

Michael Ratner? Ellen's and Steve's brother? Of the family that tried to PC the 9-11 firemen statue? If so, 'nuff said.


9 posted on 11/13/2005 6:31:06 AM PST by mewzilla (Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. John Adams)
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To: mewzilla

BTW, Ratner and company: The Geneva Convention doesn't apply to terrorists, enemy non-combatants, and/or anyone out of uniform.


10 posted on 11/13/2005 6:32:24 AM PST by mewzilla (Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. John Adams)
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To: mewzilla

BTTT.


11 posted on 11/13/2005 6:44:08 AM PST by mewzilla (Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. John Adams)
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To: NCjim
Under the geneva conventions, any combatant who uses perfidious means or violates the laws of war, even a simple spy acting out of uniform for purposes of stealth, is not a prisoner of war. Prisoner of war status is for legitimate soldiers wearing uniforms that indicate their belligerent status, or in the case of informal militias and irregular forces, carrying their arms openly and making no attempt to feign civilian status. Combatants who violate these forms of conduct are themselves violating the geneva conventions. And are punishable for it.
12 posted on 11/13/2005 6:58:44 AM PST by JasonC
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To: NCjim

Isn't it McCain who suggest torture doesn't work ? even though he gave up his ship, squadron etc...because of torture ?


13 posted on 11/13/2005 7:16:45 AM PST by stylin19a
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To: mewzilla

Are beheadings allowed in the Geneva Convention? Didn't think so.


14 posted on 11/13/2005 7:22:51 AM PST by rbg81
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To: NCjim
Most of the so-called "torture" the left is in a tizzy about are used in military training to resist interrogation. However, I don't see the leftists protesting outside military training bases.

Oh, and of course, giving a lapdance is torture, but the leftists don't protest outside their local strip club. And smearing red ink on somebody is torture, but the leftists aren't protesting the local kindergarten's fingerpainting class.

15 posted on 11/13/2005 7:30:57 AM PST by magellan ( by)
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To: NCjim
Looking for al-Qaida's signature on the Geneva Conventions...
looking...looking...

Nope, not there. It applies to both sides, or neither side.

16 posted on 11/13/2005 7:30:59 AM PST by 10mm
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Comment #17 Removed by Moderator

To: NCjim
"Is America above the Geneva Conventions?"

That may soon be a moot point. There is no longer a USSR, thus any treaties with the USSR are now void. As Islam advances, "Europe" and/or "Geneva" may cease to exist, thus the "Geneva" conventions will also become void.

18 posted on 11/13/2005 9:29:44 AM PST by Enterprise (The modern Democrat Party - a toxic stew of mental illness, cultism, and organized crime.)
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To: rbg81
Are beheadings allowed in the Geneva Convention? Didn't think so.

Funny, I've never heard the Ratners comment on that. Gee, wonder why?

19 posted on 11/13/2005 11:14:14 AM PST by mewzilla (Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. John Adams)
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To: NCjim

Germany must macht Schnell to Jordan. Jordan made some broad wear a suicide bomb on TV, and they will execute her very soon.


20 posted on 11/13/2005 11:17:35 AM PST by ARealMothersSonForever (Proud to be named as a member of the Radical Right Wing. Vast Right Wing got old.)
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