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The New York Times
Opinion
Notes From the War on
Terror
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com from the Web, May 2, 2008
For more than a year, President Bush
has refused to honor legitimate requests from the Democratic majority in
Congress for legal documents that he used to justify ordering the abuse,
humiliation and torture of prisoners. This week, the Justice Department
finally agreed to show some papers to members of the House and Senate.
Sounds like good news? Not so much.
For starters, it is not yet clear whether the White House will turn over the
complete and unredacted opinions of the government lawyers that claimed the
president could ignore the law and the Geneva Conventions.
Even if the documents are not censored, the Bush administration has agreed to
give them only to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It is
withholding them from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has supervisory
power over the Justice Department and is charged with assessing the legality of
government policies.
Finally, Mr. Bush continues to use a bogus claim of secrecy to keep the
documents on torture from those who most need and deserve to see them — the
public.
As appalling as this stonewalling is, it is not the only disturbing news from
the war on terror.
On Sunday, Mark Mazzetti reported in The Times that the Justice Department still
claims that intelligence agents can legally use interrogation methods prohibited
under American and international law.
In 2006, after Congress put restrictions on the military’s interrogation
methods, Mr. Bush formally exempted the Central Intelligence Agency. He issued
secret rules that are believed to allow harsh and abusive methods, some of which
amount to torture by pretty much any definition except this administration’s.
In a letter to Congress in March, the Justice Department argues that the
administration does not have to follow the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition
against “outrages upon personal dignity.” The letter added that it is
acceptable to abuse or humiliate a prisoner if it is being done to uncover a
terrorist plot. Nothing in American law or the Constitution justifies that
sort of ends-justify-the-means approach.
Finally, after years of Supreme Court rulings and legislation that made it clear
that Mr. Bush is not above the law, the president continues to run an outlaw
system of courts in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Their role is not to deliver any
recognizable form of justice but rather to lock up for life without appeal
anyone Mr. Bush decides to call an “illegal enemy combatant.”
The former chief of prosecutors at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis, testified
recently that superiors at the Pentagon decreed there would be “no acquittals”
of prisoners tried before military tribunals. He said he also was told
that the timing of charges against well-known detainees “could have real
strategic political value.”
There is some good news: Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is demanding all documents related to
waterboarding, the form of torture that simulates drowning. And his panel
voted to restrict the C.I.A. to military rules on interrogation, prohibit
private contractors from interrogating detainees and require the C.I.A. to give
the Red Cross access to any prisoners it holds anywhere.
We know from experience that if Republicans don’t kill these measures, Mr. Bush
will veto them. The next president and Congress will have to work very
hard to uncover all the ways Mr. Bush has twisted or evaded the law, and then
set things right.
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