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Tortured Logic

Amy Miller
Legal Director of ACLU Nebraska

Torture of detainees. Indefinite detention. Secret government kidnappings. These ideas should not represent the United States of America. Torture is un-American. And we need to tell our leaders and the world how deeply we oppose our government’s unconscionable involvement in these acts.

It’s been two years since the first images from Abu Ghraib prison shocked people everywhere and tarnished America’s standing as a champion of freedom. Yet the U.S. has failed to comply with the universal prohibition against torture — abroad and at home. The ACLU has taken a new step to try and address these issues: we presented a detailed report outlining our country’s failures with the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Earlier this summer, ACLU representatives appeared in Geneva to provide live testimony about how the U.S. is not complying with our international treaties.

There is a systemic pattern of torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody abroad. The federal government has failed to reverse the policies that led to this abuse or to hold a single high-ranking official responsible. ACLU presented information showing that torture and abuse is not limited to actions by military personnel overseas in the “War on Terror,” but is common here at home — through pervasive prison rape, abusive conditions at supermax prisons and taser use by local police.

The ACLU Report

Entitled Enduring Abuse: Torture and Cruel Treatment by the United States at Home and Abroad, the ACLU report is based on a range of sources, including more than 100,000 government documents turned over to the ACLU as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation, detailing the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The FOIA documents provide evidence of a systemic and pervasive pattern of torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody: detainees have been beaten; forced into painful stress positions; threatened with death; sexually and religiously humiliated; stripped naked; hooded and blindfolded; exposed to extreme heat and cold; denied food and water; isolated for prolonged periods; subjected to mock drownings; and intimidated by dogs.

The ACLU also has made public a powerful new Web-based search engine that allows users to comb through and analyze the massive number of torture documents released as a result of the FOIA lawsuit. This is the first time this important set of documents has been made easily searchable and available to journalists, scholars and the public.

The UN & American Torture Practices

In addition to issuing this report calling for our government to voluntarily change its ways, ACLU has taken a historic step in going directly to the United Nations to ask that body to enforce our international treaty obligations. The primary treaty implicated by U.S. torture practices is the “Convention Against Torture.” Dealing exclusively with the subject of torture, this international human rights treaty obligates countries who have signed it to prohibit and prevent torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in all circumstances. The Convention compels governments who ratified it to investigate all allegations of torture, to bring to justice the perpetrators, and to provide a remedy to victims of torture. The Convention was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1984 and went into force in 1987. As of April 2006, 141 countries have ratified the Convention. As a signatory (the United States ratified the treaty in October 1994,) we are obligated to comply with the provisions of the treaty just as we would any other domestic law. The U.S. Constitution itself makes clear that treaties are “the law of the land.”

Since the Convention Against Torture prohibits the exact sort of actions that are happening with Bush/Cheney Administration’s approval, ACLU appeared this May before the Committee Against Torture of the United Nations. The committee, made up of members from Chile, Spain, Norway, Senegal, Morocco, the U.S., China, Cyprus, Ecuador and Russia, heard ACLU representatives’ testimony about torture and extraordinary rendition. Upon hearing testimony firsthand about civil liberties abuses at home and abroad, the Committee issued a series of recommendations and concerns in June 2006. The committee’s recommendations are not legally binding, but they place an important moral obligation on the U.S. government, which has committed to complying with the treaty before the nations of the world. The committee’s recommendations regarding our country’s international actions include the following:

• Ensure that no one is detained in any secret detention facility;

• Promptly, thoroughly, and impartially investigate any responsibility of senior military and civilian officials authorizing, acquiescing or consenting, in any way, to acts of torture committed by their subordinates;

• Cease to detain any person at Guantánamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible, ensuring that they are not returned to any State where they could face a real risk of being tortured;

• Promptly, thoroughly and impartially investigate all allegations of acts of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment by law enforcement personnel and bring perpetrators to justice.

The committee also heard testimony on domestic issues ranging from the need to abolish the death penalty, to end racial profiling by law enforcement, and to improve juvenile justice. Recommendations for the U.S. to improve their record in these domestic areas were also issued by the committee.

Within one year, the U.S. government is to provide detailed information responding to the committee’s recommendations both on the domestic and extraterritorial level. Again, this is not a mandatory requirement from the United Nations committee, but this heightens the burden on the president and his administration to respond to our international community’s concerns.

At the very moment that the UN committee was issuing its recommendations, the U.S. Supreme Court also dealt a blow to the administration’s policies toward detainees. The Court ruled in June that the administration’s plan for trying detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law, and that the prisoner protections for a fair trial spelled out by the Geneva Conventions extended to members of Al-Qaida.

The White House’s response to these developments, though, has hardly been encouraging. On September 6, President Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the CIA was indeed running secret prisons overseas. Instead of apologizing and promising to mend his ways, however, the president sent legislation to Congress that very morning that would authorize these military tribunals and grant the executive branch the power to interpret international standards for prisoner treatment.

The president’s own ‘tortured’ logic and twisted language at the news conference provided further evidence that the administration has no intention of abiding by international law. Even as the newspapers were reporting that “the prisons were made legal under U.S. law with a presidential finding allowing the [CIA] to set them up” and the prisoners were subjected to “interrogation techniques including feigned drowning, extreme isolation, slapping, sleep deprivation, reduced food intake and light and sound bombardment,” President Bush was asserting, “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.”

As it’s now obvious that our government cannot be trusted to honor its human rights obligations, we ourselves must be the ones to stand up and hold our government accountable.

All of the documents the administration wants to keep secret about government-sponsored torture are available on the ACLU website: www.aclu.org. (Just click on the “Torture FOIA” logo.) The full text of the UN’s Committee Against Torture recommendations online is also available on that same page. Finally, while you’re there, take a stand and sign the online petition asking our government to stop using our tax dollars to torture people in our names.