Ten Reasons Why Congress Should Stop George Bush’s Prisoner Abuse and Torture Program

[Time for change]

George W. Bush, in designating thousands of his prisoners captured during the course of his “War on Terror” as “unlawful enemy combatants”, has declared with that designation that those prisoners have no legal or human rights. Furthermore, hundreds or thousands of those prisoners have been subjected to repeated torture, either at the hands of George Bush’s U.S. government itself, or at the hands of other countries to which George Bush renders his prisoners.

It is way past time that this inhumane program should cease. In this post I discuss, in no particular order of importance, ten good reasons why Congress should stop these abominations. If you believe that these are persuasive reasons for Congress to act, then I recommend that you consider showing them to your family, friends and acquaintances who continue to support Bush policies of this sort:


1. It is against international law in several respects

First, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (to which the U.S. is a signatory) specifies that anyone falling into enemy hands during wartime is to be accorded “prisoner of war” status, thus entitling them to specified humane treatment, unless determined otherwise by a competent tribunal. George Bush has made no attempt to comply with that basic requirement, instead designating all prisoners captured in his “War on Terror” as “unlawful enemy combatants”.

Furthermore, anyone falling into enemy hands and who is determined not to be a prisoner of war must be charged with a criminal offense in order to be held in captivity, and they must be accorded all the rights of accused criminals. This includes informing the person of the reason for his detention, the presumption of innocence, the right to contest his detention, access to a competent attorney, the right to confront witnesses, etc. The bottom line is that no person, whether prisoner of war, suspected criminal, or a person given any other designation, can ever fall outside the scope of these minimum international protections. George Bush has made no attempt to comply with this requirement, instead proclaiming that all of his prisoners have no legal or human rights whatsoever.

And lastly, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984 further protects all categories of persons against torture. Again, the Bush administration has proclaimed that it has no need to comply with this international law, claiming among other things that, for his purposes, this law does not apply to non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States.

The purpose of international law is to establish and maintain international peace, harmony, and justice. When the most powerful nation in the world refuses to abide by international law, its purpose is substantially perverted.


2. It puts our own soldiers at very high risk of similar treatment

It doesn’t take a great deal of thinking to realize that if we abuse and torture our prisoners, our enemies will be much more likely to do the same to our soldiers when they are captured. We ask a great deal from our soldiers, and today’s American soldiers are stressed to the max because of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem fair to unnecessarily add to their burdens and risks by impairing their ability to rely on international law to ensure their humane treatment if captured.


3. It produces bad intelligence

Presumably the primary reason for abusing and torturing our prisoners is to obtain intelligence that will help us to win the “War on Terror”. It is extremely difficult to ascertain what if any useful intelligence has been obtained through all this, given the extreme secrecy of the Bush administration.

The most notorious example of bad intelligence obtained from Bush’s torture policies is that obtained from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, in which al-Libi “confessed” to ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. That information was used to help justify our disastrous invasion of Iraq. That need not have been the case, as it is well known that information obtained through torture has a pronounced tendency to be unreliable because of a tortured person’s desire to say whatever he thinks his tormentors want to hear, in order to stop the torture. In fact, George Bush’s own intelligence agencies considered al-Libi’s information to be highly unreliable.

Has any useful information been obtained through torture by the Bush administration in its “War on Terror”? That seems rather doubtful. Certainly if it had, they would be highly eager to publicize the fact. In fact, that’s exactly what they tried to do on June 10, 2002, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, allegedly for plotting to explode a “dirty” (radioactive) bomb on U.S. soil. But after several years, despite years of torture, no credible evidence has emerged to support that contention, so the Bush administration was forced to give up its plans to pursue the “dirty bomb” case against Padilla.

As Four Star General, former Supreme NATO Commander, and former Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark says in this video, torture does not work. Noting that the United States has never treated its prisoners as the current Bush administration does, Clark explains that during World War II we treated our German prisoners as human beings, and that consequently they felt safe with us, and they “sang like canaries”.


4. Effect on the insurgency in Iraq

It is well known that in guerilla warfare the support of the local population is critical in determining the probability of success for either side. With that in mind, a series of Iraqi public opinion polls sponsored by the Coalition Provisional Authority graphically illustrate the sinking fortunes of the U.S. military in Iraq. In response to the question If Coalition forces left immediately, would you feel more safe or less safe?, the results for those answering less safe were as follows:

November 2003: 11%
January 2004: 28%
April 2004: 55%
May 2004: 55%

That same poll, in May 2004, indicated that 92% of Iraqis saw the Coalition forces as occupiers, versus 2% who saw them as liberators and 3% who saw them as peace keepers. And 86% wanted the Coalition forces to either leave immediately (41%) or as soon as a permanent government is elected (45%).

These statistics obviously raise the question of what caused such a dramatic and abrupt rise in the discomfort that Iraqis felt with the presence of U.S./Coalition forces. One likely answer, it seems reasonable to suppose, is the awareness of how we were treating Iraqi prisoners. The revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the auspices of the U.S. government were first made in April 2004. Though we have no way of knowing precisely when Iraqis first became aware of this, it would seem likely that the revelations in April did not come as a complete surprise to many Iraqis.

How might this have impacted U.S. casualties? For the year beginning April 2003 there were 540 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, compared to 929 during the year beginning April 2004, approximately concurrent with the rather abrupt rise in the percentage of Iraqis who felt less safe with Coalition forces present than absent (though we don’t know precisely when the rise occurred or how abrupt it was).


5. Torture – and George Bush’s whole program – is immoral

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than that or to explain why it’s immoral to someone who doesn’t already understand that. Here’s something I just found on that subject:

Ethically, torture is a moral abomination. One cannot engage in it and remain fully human; it requires turning off any sort of ethical sense or code of moral conduct. A nation which engages in it as a matter of policy loses any moral high ground which might give it cause to claim the right to do so in the first place.

6. Effect on the recruitment of anti-American terrorists

There is a strong belief among our intelligence agencies that, far from helping in our “War on Terror”, George Bush’s torture policies substantially facilitate the recruitment of more virulently anti-American terrorists:

Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush's heavy-handed policies - such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the war in Iraq - were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

7. It is against all major religious values

Though the Bush administration’s treatment of its prisoners goes against the values of all major religions, I’ll focus here on Christianity, since Bush and many of his supporters make such a great show of being “good Christians”. Jesus spoke a lot about love, but He never advocated treating people like George Bush treats his prisoners. Here’s a statement from an article in Christianity Today to illustrate the point.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

8. It violates the U.S. Constitution

George Bush’s whole program for treatment of his prisoners violates the U.S. Constitution in many different ways:

Abrogation of the prisoners’ rights to challenge the propriety of their incarceration (i.e. habeas corpus rights) violates the first Article of our Constitution.

The Sixth Amendment to our Constitution is violated in several ways: The holding of prisoners for years without charges violates their right to a speedy trial; Bush’s policies also routinely violate the prisoners’ right to be confronted with witnesses against them; the right to counsel; and the right to be informed of the nature of the accusations against them.

The due process clause of our Fifth Amendment is violated by the routinely arbitrary nature of the arrests and imprisonment.

Our Eight Amendment is routinely violated by the widespread use of cruel and unusual punishments.

Some Bush and Cheney supporters say that our Constitution doesn’t apply to non-U.S. citizens. But there is no mention in our Constitution that such is the case. Our Constitution is based upon the principles stated in our Declaration of Independence, which asserts the unalienable rights of ALL people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. How arrogant would it be to assert that those sacred principles stated in the document upon which our nation was founded apply only to U.S. citizens!


9. Bush’s torture program affects primarily the innocent

There is little or no evidence that Bush’s program of prisoner abuse and torture makes much of an attempt to confine its abuses to people who are likely to have committed serious wrongdoing. If it did, then why does it pay bounty hunters to provide it with victims of completely unknown guilt? If it cared at all about obtaining information and pursuing justice, then why are 98% of its victims held for years without ever being charged with a crime of any sort?

Consequently, it should not be surprising that there is abundant evidence that the good majority of Bush’s prisoners in his “War on Terror” are mere innocent victims, rather than “the worst of the worst”, as claimed by his minions. For example: Major General Antonio Taguba, charged with investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said that “A lack of proper screening meant that many innocent Iraqis were being detained (in some cases indefinitely) and that 60% of civilian prisoners at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society. And the International Red Cross said that between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.


10. These policies facilitate tyranny

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which George Bush pushed through Congress just prior to the 2006 elections, not only condones his prisoner abuse and torture policies, but it gives George Bush himself the right to determine who is classified as an enemy of the United States. How much thought do you think he and his minions put into it before branding someone as an enemy of the United States? And do you think that he might stoop to using this for his own cynical political purposes if he thought he could get away with it?


What will stop Bush and Cheney from continuing this?

How many prisoners has George Bush’s “War on Terror” produced? Because of the secrecy surrounding the program, nobody knows. In addition to the more than seven hundred sent to Guantanamo Bay and the many hundreds in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other U.S. sponsored prisons, the Bush administration has rendered many hundreds more to repressive regimes to do our dirty work for us – in secret. Here is a passage from Stephen Grey’s “Ghost Plane – The True Story of the CIA’s Secret Torture Program”:

My own research would suggest the total number of renditions ran into many, many hundreds… only a small fraction of captured prisoners had been released to tell their stories or were able to pass their accounts out of jail through their families or lawyers. Since 9/11, Pakistan claimed to have captured more than six hundred Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, of which the majority, said its officials, were rendered into U.S. custody. Iran said it captured over one thousand; most of these were handed over to U.S. control… Egypt described the transfer of sixty to seventy into its jails alone…

The Bush/Cheney program of prisoner abuse and torture shames and embarrasses our country in the eyes of the world, and it is a stain on humanity itself, notwithstanding the fact that there are other repressive regimes in the world today that do something similar, although on a smaller scale. The fact that we are the most powerful country in the world means that these policies have far greater potential for jeopardizing the peace and safety of the world (along with our unjustifiable pre-emptive war in Iraq and who knows what other wars to come) than similar policies in the hands of other countries.

Congress is the only body that can directly impede these policies. It should demand the Bush administration to put a stop to them. If it refuses, our Constitution, which gives Congress co-equal powers with our executive branch of government, contains an excellent but underutilized remedy for this sort of thing. That remedy is called impeachment. If Congress fails to use that remedy and thereby allows these crimes against humanity to continue (and I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of other reasons for impeaching Bush and Cheney as well), it will have to answer to its own consciences, and hopefully to the American voters in 2008 as well.

[Time for change]

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