Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush’s straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for Western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.
Unlike the UK’s coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama’s administration has apparently ended the practice — but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.
Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah “saved lives”, including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.
|What the interrogator wants to hear
Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn’t produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me — on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear.
What is accurate — up to a point — is Bush’s claim to have acted on legal advice. The circumstances are set out in a narrative account published by the Senate select committee intelligence committee in April 2009 . This indicates that on July 17 2002 national security adviser Condoleezza Rice “advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah”, following a meeting between CIA lawyers, Bush’s White House counsel and the NSA legal adviser.
This was then “subject to a determination of legality” by the office of legal counsel at the department of justice (DOJ). Written approval followed a couple of weeks later, in the form of two now notorious August 1 2002 “torture memos” authored by John Yoo, currently teaching at Berkeley Law School, and Jay Bybee, now a US federal court of appeals judge.
‘Reckless disregard’
Bush fails to mention that the advice prepared by Yoo and Bybee — which did not go through the normal inter-departmental consultations — has been subject to devastating criticism. The DOJ’s own office of professional responsibility concluded that Yoo “put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice and … therefore committed intentional professional misconduct”.
It found that Bybee had acted in “reckless disregard” of his professional obligations. Both men escaped sanctions only because an associate deputy general counsel, David Margolis, later concluded that both men had exercised “poor judgment” but did not knowingly provide false advice. Margolis nevertheless concluded that Yoo’s “loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client”.
This is the dismal, bogus legal advice on which Bush relied, and the fact that he continues to invoke it today says much about his judgement. He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.
When Bush first authorised waterboarding, says former US Centcom commander General Joseph Hoar, “he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers”. So much for saving lives. – guardian.co.uk