The American way of torture

Alasdair Palmer on how the White House is trying to defeat Senator McCain’s anti-torture Bill

America is starting to get anxious again about its use of ‘aggressive interrogation’. The more usual name for what the Americans have been doing to some of the people they think are terrorists is ‘torture’. When the pictures from Abu Ghraib first became public 18 months or so ago, they caused a flurry of agonised self-examination among senior officials in the country’s armed forces and intelligence services. That quickly passed when it was decided that what happened in Abu Ghraib wasn’t officially sanctioned.

Now, however, something much more serious than Abu Ghraib worries the administration: the growing Congressional campaign to pass a law which will make it absolutely unambiguous that any form of torture by US personnel is absolutely prohibited.

Until now the Bush administration’s lawyers have been able to argue that neither the US Constitution nor any US statute prevents the use of torture — sorry, ‘aggressive interrogation’. But that will change if Senator McCain’s Bill becomes law. McCain’s Bill would prohibit any member of any branch of US armed forces or intelligence services from ever going beyond the techniques laid out in the army Field Manual on interrogation. That manual was crafted around the Geneva Convention. It prohibits all forms of ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ — under which it includes not merely all forms of physical contact, but the use of threats, offers and lies to induce detainees to talk.

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McCain’s Bill passed the Senate by 90 votes to 9. The majority included 46 Republicans, who defied President Bush to vote with McCain (who is himself a Republican). Support for McCain’s proposal has been spurred by the growing body of evidence indicating that as many as 29 people have been not merely tortured, but tortured to death, by US personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq.