Josh Gerstein at Politico has ably described the important shortcomings one finds in President Obama’s Executive Orders issued yesterday to close Guantanamo and end torture. While the CIA is disallowed from using waterboarding and other “enhanced” torture techniques, and forced to adhere to the standards (flawed as they are) of the Army Field Manual; and while the CIA is forced now to close their secret black site prisons; and while Guantanamo itself is to be close “promptly… within a year”, there are some troublesome problems remaining.
Not least is the problem with the Army Field Manual itself. Some former Bush administration figures and CIA types see the AFM as insufficient to guide their interrogation actions in the field. They want the ability to improvise their techniques to the given interrogation or situation. Many of these same people are implying that Obama’s moves to close Guantanamo raises the spectre of the release of horrible terrorists in the homeland itself, who will attack American communities. In a column today, Glenn Greenwald dissects this fear-mongering campaign by the right.
Bush has instituted a torture regime that is comprised of ostensibly innocent sounding techniques that in reality can be as deadly, harmful and injurious as torture by horrendous physical acts. Some of the techniques have been sourced back to Chinese torture used for the purpose of extracting false confessions from captured US soldiers, and thus are not designed to obtain valid intelligence to protect our security. The coercive psychological torture technique, which is a package of multiple methods, was renounced by the US as torture years ago. However, it was used against prisoner 063, and then again renounced as torture by a senior Pentagon official recently. Another torture technique of sleep deprivation was also renounced by the US as torture in 2001, yet is apparently still used by the US. It’s no longer just left progressives: More and more people around the world and in our government are stating the obvious – Bush and Cheney et al must be prosecuted for war crimes.
