The main job of administration lawyers is to tell the policy makers the outer limits set by international treaties and criminal statutes that are studded with ambiguities. "The war on terror," says one official who has ruefully watched his reputation being shredded, "may require us to settle on these issues in a different way than we did before." Or may not.
TORTURE MEMORANDA MANUALS
Nor is it fair to paint as monsters the officials who have, over top military lawyers' objections, developed legal arguments for interrogation methods more harsh than those listed in military manuals that were written in an era when people like Zarqawi were not the major concern. Telling a prisoner that he or his family will be killed unless he talks is not torture, for example, unless the threat is of "imminent" death, under the congressional definition.
It specifies that torture includes only intentional infliction of " severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental." (Emphasis added.) And it was not the Bush administration but the United States Congress that said-in the 1994 criminal statute implementing the torture convention-that mental pain or suffering could be deemed "severe" only if "prolonged," and only if caused by a few listed techniques. The definition is in the torture convention itself. What should interrogators be allowed to do to get Zarqawi to talk? Should he be treated as a prisoner of war, who, under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, "may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind"? Or should he get the benefit of a broad interpretation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which some human-rights activists read as banning (for example) detention for more than two weeks in a substandard cell?Īnd was it just a bunch of immoral Bush administration lawyers who "narrowly redefined" torture "so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal," as The Washington Post implied in a June 9 editorial? No. Suppose further that Zarqawi may well know the whereabouts of other American hostages who are soon to be murdered, or even the details of a plot to kill thousands of us with bombs and sarin gas during this summer's political conventions. forces capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader suspected of beheading Nicholas Berg. It's much harder to provide morally or legally satisfying answers to questions such as this: It's easy to sit in judgment on those assigned to deal with the threat of catastrophic terrorism. Some of the attacks on the recently leaked Bush administration legal memoranda about the use of torture and lesser forms of coercion to extract information are a bit facile.
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