Parallel perspectives

Probing Bush era

Philip FERNANDO

Was torture practised by the United States during the Bush era? The debate heats up. Harsh treatment of arrested al-Qaida combatants did take place despite denials that they did not constitute torture. Was that treatment sanctioned by Bush's White House and was it directly the result of Bush and Cheney ordering it? We are in for a series of intense debates watched by the world. A ringside view would be revealing.

Such an investigation has to move up the food chain from CIA interrogators, to White House lawyers, to the Cabinet officers who sit on the National Security Council, to Dick Cheney, to George Bush himself. Looks like the washing the dirty linen will begin within months.

President Barack Obama had ordered all harsh interrogations techniques to be discontinued. The CIA did use harsh treatment on al-Qaida combatants during the Bush era. That treatment was sanctioned by White House and Justice Department lawyers. It had been construed that the extremely harsh treatments meted out to combatants in custody was not real torture.

George Bush	Dick Cheney

This is not a question of "What did President Bush know and when did he know it?" It is a question of the legality and morality of what is already known. And on this, the Americans are rancorously split.

Obama administration pronouncing sanctimonious strictures on the rest of the world on their alleged acts of human rights violations have to first satisfy the world that USA did not practise what they preached. The whole world contends that torture is inherently evil, morally outrageous and legally impermissible under both existing U.S. law and the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War.

It is also a fact that torture does not work. What you get out of tortured captives are hatred, deceptions and lies. Most believe that the utterly cowardly act of getting confessions by torture degrades those who do it, as well as those to whom it is done. It instills a spirit of revenge in its victims. When the knowledge of torture is made public, as invariably it is, it besmirches the good name of a country. It becomes a recruiting poster and a justification to use the same degrading methods on the citizens of countries using them.

What had been supposedly practised during the Bush era were rejected brain washing techniques of the Korean War and the retaliatory criminal tactics on US prisoners of war and the jailers at the Hanoi Hilton who tortured Sen. John McCain and his companions.

Moreover, even if justified, if done in a few monitored cases, where it seems to be the only way to get immediate intelligence to save hundreds or thousands from imminent terror attack, down the chain of command they know it is being done. What was done during the 2002-08 Iraq war at Abu Ghraib prison, described as sadistic copycat conduct by enlisted personnel of the US cannot be justified under any circumstances.

Obama administration is bent on putting an end to all forms of torture. It is now clear that it is immoral to inflict excruciating pain. The morality of killing or inflicting severe pain can never be justified. The very nature of such acts and the circumstances and motive for them must be looked into.

The only exception to taking militaristic retaliation is when a country's security is at stake and if terrorist attack innocent civilians. Similarly, the US Navy Seal snipers who killed those three Somali pirates and saved Captain Richard Phillips were done to ward off high piracy in the international waters. But water boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a combatant held for the (/11 attacks mastermind of 9-11), over 180 times while in captivity is now condemned by many. The debate is now raging in America whether practising harsh interrogation techniques on the enemy combatants to force secrets out of them is an immoral act. Americans seemed divided on how this question is to be settled once and for all.

It is generally agreed that deaths resulting due to wartime activities and the planned torture of captives taken into custody have to be viewed with a great deal of care. There is no debate that fighting off terror to protect a country versus some planned techniques of torture are two different things.

Americans are asking whether Cheney and Bush went beyond their mandate to protect America and committed heinous crimes in trying to force captives to confess. The debate will go on as to whether excesses were committed during that era. There are two movies that received rave reviews recently. "Rendition," a film based on a true story, where an innocent man suspected of belonging to a terrorist cell is sent to an Arab country and tortured, became a hit. More popular was "Taken," a film in which Liam Neeson, an ex-spy, has a daughter kidnapped by white slavers in Paris, whom he tortures for information to rescue her and brings her home.