Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 5–12
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On 16 April 2009, US President Barack Obama, responding to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act request, released four Bush-era documents belonging to a series of papers known collectively as the ‘torture memos’, which outline the US government’s legal analysis and policy decisions for interrogating terrorism suspects in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In the years since the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs and the subsequent reports into detention and interrogation policies in the ‘war on terror’, the public has been made generally aware of the content of these papers. Beginning in summer 2004, we have been able to read many of the major documents, including the infamous memo of 1 August 2002 that redefines torture; the Alberto Gonzales memo of 25 January 2002 that called the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint and obsolete’; and Donald Rumsfeld’s letter signing off on the enhanced interrogation techniques that would create a law-free zone at Guantanamo Bayfor six weeks from early December 2002 until January 2003. All of these have been subjected time and again to the scrutiny of scholars and experts such as Philippe Sands, Mark Danner and others, as well as to the attention of congressional oversight committees.
It has long been known that the Bush administration redefined torture so that only physical pain of ‘an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure’ or mental pain that would produce ‘lasting psychological harm’ was to be considered illegal. In place of the word ‘torture’, administration officials used the phrases ‘enhanced interrogations’, ‘counter-resistant techniques’ and ‘coercive interrogations’. Subsequent reports by various departments of the US military, congressional committees and international human-rights organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International, and thousands of pages of documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU, have provided a wealth of detail about the policy’s implementation. We have learned that sleep deprivation, the use of hot and cold temperatures, waterboarding, long periods of isolation (sometimes in boxes), and other techniques defined since mediaeval times as torture have been applied to individuals in US custody. Most recently, former British resident Binyam Mohammed claims to have been subjected to the use of a razor all over his body, including on his genitals; this allegedly occurred in Morocco, but while he was a captive of the US government.
Yet, the four newly released documents have caused a major stir. As Scott Horton wrote for the news blog The Daily Beast on 27 April, ‘the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed’. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney has responded, insisting that these memos need to be countered by reports of the valuable information that the use of such techniques has produced. Why has there been such an uproar, given what we have already learned during the past four years about US torture policy? What have these newly revealed memos added to the story? ...
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Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of the Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (2009)and co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (2005).
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