The U.S. government’s policy on torture of foreign prisoners has become harder to define or defend.
Last week it became public that the CIA, following a directive signed by President Bush just days after Sept. 11, has adopted a practice known as “renditions” through which terror suspects can be deported to foreign countries for interrogation.
The directive has given the CIA a broad authority to act on a case-by-case basis without approval from the president, and some human rights activists claim that the power has been abused in order to transport suspected terrorists to countries like Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where restrictions against torture are all but nonexistent.
The president denies that he would ever knowingly allow a prisoner to be tortured, and claims that the renditions program creates an alternative to the costly process of housing enemy combatants in the United States.
In the months following the Abu Ghraib scandal last year, much justified criticism was leveled against the Bush administration. The physical evidence of prisoner abuse and torture was undeniable, and the soldiers involved were harshly condemned by top administration officials.
But more than a year after the scandal, few Democrats or Republicans are willing to outright condemn human rights violations related to the war against Islamic terrorism for fear of the political repercussions here in America.
When Bush nominated Alberto Gonzales, believed to be the architect of the renditions policy, as his attorney general last January, Democratic congressmen vowed to challenge the confirmation on the basis of Gonzales’s controversial views on interrogation and torture.
However, beyond the expected howls of unabashed liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, hardly a memorable peep emanated from the Democratic aisle during the course of Gonzales’ swift confirmation.
Meanwhile, the stories of state-sanctioned American torture, whether factual or embellished, persist. Two books released this year about Abu Ghraib spell out numerous accounts of torture at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, as well as in Iraq, occurring up until the present. Many, if not most of these stories, are corroborated by eyewitness accounts and official records.
Republicans and Democrats remain silent on this sensitive issue partly because the media, vilified as partisan and unpatriotic in some conservative circles after Abu Ghraib, has generally depicted the prisoner abuse issue within the framework of a few isolated incidents easily resolved by a few court martials and psychiatric evaluations.
American politicians have no stake in condemning torture until their constituents’ demand that they do. However, in the context of violent international war, many Americans are willing to give their military the benefit of the doubt and assume that all interrogations, no matter how inhumane, are necessary and essential to protecting freedom.
But evidence suggests patterns of brutal interrogation techniques that degrade or violate the Muslim religion. This would lead – and has lead – many people across the world to the conclusion that prisoner abuse has now become unwritten U.S. government policy.
