False Denial

The NY Times, using public documents, demonstrates that the President's statement that torture is not used against terror suspects is not all that it seems.

Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the C.I.A. prisoners as having been "safe, lawful and effective," and he asserted that torture had not been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination that those procedures did not violate American or international law.

The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive interrogation practices for C.I.A. detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.

Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.'s use of 20 interrogation practices.

The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture.

One prisoner is known to have died in Afghanistan after interrogation by a C.I.A. contract employee, but the agency has distanced itself from that episode, and the former employee was convicted on assault charges last month in federal court in North Carolina.

How is it possible that methods that are causing pain 'comparable' to organ failure and the impairment of bodily function could be considered anything less than torture? Death? Causing death in an interrogation is not torture?

What the President has done in his speech is positively Clintonesque. He has simply tried to define his behavior out of existence- or define it into respectability. His administration has written a definition of torture in such a manner as to keep what they are doing from meeting the definition. This, however, is so much worse than Clinton's wagging his finger at the American people ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."), as this is not about a private affair, but the public policy of our nation.

By sanctioning torture, this administration is weakening America's position in the world, damaging the cause of human rights in the world, and putting US soldiers at risk.

The word that I used the other day regarding the President's speech is still the only word that seems to fit: appalling.

GP