By By Brian Bohl
One can only hope this is the event that will get the Bush administration to alter its views on torture. Last week the New York Times reported that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a key government intelligence source in the run-up to the Iraq war, may have provided false testimony in 2002 as a result of torture and other forms of duress.
With this admission by government officials, the two most prominent justifications for military action in Iraq have effectively been proven false. While it may be too late to use this information pertaining to military actions, there are positives that can come out of this revelation. The question that is posed now is whether the White House will finally be compelled to soften its stance on torture and start to enact policies that reflect the views of Congress and subsequently make the country safer.
Getting the message through to the Bush administration will not be easy. Despite the deplorable events in Abu Ghraib Prison and the urging of representatives like John McCain, the White House has consistently opposed restrictions on the use of torture to acquire intelligence.
Still not convinced torture is an ineffective tool to pry out information? Heed the advice of McCain, a man that spent five and a half years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese during another liberation war that draws more parallels to Iraq each passing year. Since the vast majority of us will never experience anything like the hell McCain went through, here is a sampling of his perspective so eloquently articulated in a Newsweek article this past month.
"The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear-whether it is true or false-if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little, if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse."
The McCain Detainee Amendment, which would prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment while following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by a margin of 90-9 in the Senate. That sign of universal support did not deter Dick Cheney. The Vice President immediately came out in opposition, saying the bill should not be applicable to interrogations conducted by the CIA.
The stance the Bush administration has taken is understandable, but simplistic in its nature. Their logic goes like this: the detainees we have in custody are bad people who wish to do harm to Americans abroad and domestically. They have intelligence that could save lives if it is extracted in time. Therefore, the government should have the ability to use any means to pry this information from these horrible haters of freedom and good.
It's tempting to follow this logic, but the importance of the McCain bill is not in the way prisoners are treated. The bill better serves the American people by implementing new measures that will bring in more reliable intelligence, while simultaneously improving America's image to the rest the world.
From a public relations standpoint, the bill gives the United States more legitimacy in its claims of moral superiority over its enemies. For a country that prides itself on rule of law, fair trials and civility, we have engaged in activity that is more similar to the discourse of tyrants than befitting the world's lone superpower. This bill will show the rest of the world that this country will not lower itsself to the level of barbarians.
Evidence gathered from torture is similar to forced confessions extracted domestically by local law enforcement agencies. This type of testimony is inadmissible in our court system and for good reason. If the interrogators are clearly trying to get a suspect to provide intelligence that supports a particular conclusion, the odds are that detainees will eventually give them answers they want to hear in order to stop the physical and mental abuse. This easily leads to situations like al-Libi, whose false testimony has now indirectly contributed the deaths of 2,000 military personnel and countless civilians, proving that abusive methods of extracting intelligence can easily put us more at risk.
Finally, despite the public stance of the White House, our military and intelligence agencies incarcerate the wrong people at times. There have been many instances in Guantanamo Bay where terror suspects were released after Administrative Review Board hearings. In an era where suspects can be held indefinitely, would the United States voluntarily release men who they believed would have a chance of engaging in terrorist activity? While this isn't incredibly common, it has occurred frequently enough for a reasonable person to believe non-terrorists are mistakenly detained and possibly subjected to torture.
The latest information about al-Libi comes too late to change anything on the ground in Iraq, but it still serves as a pivotal reminder that torture does not make us safer. The words of McCain finally have a face to go along with it.
