Drip...drip...drip...
Patrick Jarreau, Le Monde: A British journalist observed that the whole point of the Justice Department memo and the Pentagon's from March 2003 had been precisely to explore the legal arguments that would allow officials to torture prisoners without constituting a statutory offense. Under these circumstances, Mr. Bush's response: that he had given instructions to comply with the law, wasn't "very reassuring". The American president, verging on exasperation, replied: "Listen, I'll say it one more time. (...) The instructions that were given were to comply with the law. That should reassure you. We are a nation of laws. We follow the law. We have laws on our books. You could go look at those laws and that should reassure you."
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Torture Scandal Grows and Threatens to Reach George Bush
By Patrick Jarreau
Le Monde
Friday 11 June 2004
The American president appeared to be in trouble Thursday. Several official reports have attempted to provide a legal foundation for the practice of torture. How did the White House follow up on these texts? "We stayed within the framework of the law," dodged Mr. Bush.
American attention has been monopolized in recent days by tributes to Ronald Reagan and, to a lesser extent, by the G-8 meeting, an index of George Bush's ability to rally the most powerful countries in the world to his policies in Iraq and the Middle East.
However another subject has slipped into the news, to the point of disrupting the White House leader's press conference Thursday June 10 in Savannah Georgia at the conclusion of the G-8 meeting: had soldiers and CIA agents been authorized to torture prisoners in the "war against terror" in Afghanistan, at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere?
A week ago, the American press revealed the existence of several documents generated by the Justice and Defense Departments which offer legal justification for the practice of torture. According to the jurists who drew these reports up, torture could be justified in law in the framework of executive orders given by the President of the United States in his role as commander in chief, the ultimate person responsible for Americans' security.
In this case, the documents assert, civilian or military officials who would act in compliance with such orders would not be liable to prosecution, whether on the basis of the American Constitution, which forbids "cruel punishments", or on the basis of American law forbidding torture. In other words, the United States could dispense with compliance with the International Convention Against Torture, even though it ratified it in 1994.
One of the documents is a memo addressed to the White House by the Justice Department in August 2002. No one knows how Mr. Bush acted on these opinions. He was asked that question a first time on Thursday. "The authorization I gave (...) was that all we did should be in accordance with American law and consistent with our international treaty obligations. That's the message I gave our people," the president responded. Had he seen the Justice Department memo at the time? "I don't remember," he said.
A second question on the same subject provoked a grimace of annoyance followed by an even shorter answer than before. "What I authorized was that we stay within the framework of American law," asserted Mr. Bush, who had avoided saying whether torture is acceptable under certain circumstances or never.
A British journalist observed that the whole point of the Justice Department memo and the Pentagon's from March 2003 had been precisely to explore the legal arguments that would allow officials to torture prisoners without constituting a statutory offense. Under these circumstances, Mr. Bush's response: that he had given instructions to comply with the law, wasn't "very reassuring". The American president, verging on exasperation, replied: "Listen, I'll say it one more time. (...) The instructions that were given were to comply with the law. That should reassure you. We are a nation of laws. We follow the law. We have laws on our books. You could go look at those laws and that should reassure you."
The question of respect for the laws and international engagements was posed very soon after American military operations in Afghanistan began. Methods based on physical pain and psychological damage were used very early on, since John Walker Lindh, the young American who had joined the Taliban and was captured in November 2001 at Kunduz, had been stripped and held in stress positions during his interrogations by CIA agents.
In January 2002, after the opening of the first prisoner detention camp on the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay on the island of Cuba, a Justice Department memo drawn up by John Yoo, today a law professor at Berkeley, concluded that the detainees at Guantánamo do not enjoy Geneva Convention protections. Mr. Bush adopted this opinion, contested by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The August 2002 memo was drawn up by the Justice Department following CIA demands. It appears that the agency had worried its about legal sanctions that might be incurred by its agents who were being pressured by the political power to extract usable intelligence from the al-Qaeda leaders and militants captured in Afghanistan or in Pakistan.
The principal American intelligence agency had not forgotten the problems it had run into following the denunciations in the 1970s of the methods it had used in the fight against communism. Consequently, the agency sought to "cover" itself when it was asked to hunt down and make talk known terrorists or persons suspected of ties to Osama bin Laden's network.
The 50 page long Justice Department memo is signed by Jay Bybee, one of the Attorney General's assistants. Mr. Bybee directed the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the government's authority on legal matters.
In March 2003, it appears that it was a request from officials responsible for interrogations at Guantánamo Bay that brought the Defense Secretary to have the torture question studied by his own jurists. They came to conclusions analogous to those of their Justice Department colleagues. In both cases, the Cabinet members involved, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, have refused to provide the relevant documents to Congress.
In a press conference following Mr. Bush's, Jacques Chirac, without using the word "torture", declared that the struggle against terrorism must not "disregard the principles on which our civilization is based, such as human rights."
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Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.