The U.S. Department of Justice has revised its 2002 stances on torture, tightening restrictions on what is acceptable during interrogations.
American troops in Iraq will no longer be allowed to inflict “severe pain” while interrogating suspects after US justice officials broadened their controversial definition of torture in the wake of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
The Justice Department has quietly revised a previous legal memorandum which held that mistreatment amounted to torture only “if it produced severe pain equivalent to that associated with organ failure or death”.
The memorandum signalling the U-turn was posted unannounced on the Justice Department’s website on Thursday night. Human rights groups say the change amounts to a tacit admission that the previous definition was too loose and paved the way for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib last year.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for George W Bush, said that the Justice Department sought comments from the president’s office of legal counsel before pressing ahead with the changes. He said it was to “reiterate the president’s determination that the United States never engage in torture”.
I think the description “u-turn” is quite an exaggeration of what actually amounts to a scope change.
In fact, the president goes further than I personally would. I am against torture as being generally counter-productive and unwarranted but, were the situation dire enough, I would say all bets were off. I guess I’m not a fan of the word “never” when its usage places restrictions that may eventually have tragic consequences. This ties in with my opposition to ever taking the nuclear option off the table during any conflict or ruling out putting boots on the ground as needed.
Michael Ratner, the president of the US-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has sued the Bush administration over its interrogation policies, said that the redefinition “makes it clear that the earlier one was not just some intellectual theorising by some lawyers about what was possible. It means it must have been implemented in some way,” he said.
“It puts the burden on the administration to say what practices were actually put in place under those auspices.”
I disagree with Ratner here. It does not necessarily follow, though it is possible, that anything now restricted was actually implemented as policy, nor is there any requirement on the Bush administration to spell out any actual application of the now-altered policy.
In the original memorandum, which is devoted to a US convention against torture, officials from the Justice Department say that torture should cover only “extreme acts and severe pain”.
It adds: “When the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but it also requires lasting psychological harm.”
The new memo revises the definition to say that torture could include “severe physical pain” and “severe physical suffering”. It notes that physical suffering is difficult to define.
It also rejects an assertion in the original memo that torture could be said to occur only if the interrogator intended to cause the harm that resulted.
David Scheffer, a senior human rights official in the State Department during the Clinton administration, said that while the Justice Department’s revision exercise was commendable, it still left too many judgments in the hands of interrogators.
We are still fighting a civilized war against an uncivilized foe. That’s fine — let’s proceed with one hand potentially tied behind our back. However, if things go poorly, I’d rather a few later suffer the anguish of their actions than we willingly surrender our society for the sake of niceties.