Since the Hamdan ruling a year ago, there’s been some uncertainties surrounding the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, with ambiguous lines dictating CIA policy. The good news is, the White House said yesterday it was clearing things up with an executive order “barring the CIA from using torture, acts of violence and degrading treatment in the interrogation and detention of terrorism suspects.”
The bad news is, the ambiguities are as dramatic as they were before the executive order.
[M]ost of the president’s executive order is written in generalities, leaving unanswered whether the CIA will be free to subject prisoners to a range of specific techniques it has reportedly used in the past, including long-term sleep disruption, prolonged shackling in painful stress positions, or “waterboarding,” a technique that produces the sensation of drowning.
The administration is separately crafting a list of permitted and forbidden tactics that it said will comply with Bush’s executive order, but the list is classified. In a background conference call with reporters yesterday, a senior administration official declined to say whether the new guidelines will permit tactics such as waterboarding.
“I am not in a position to talk about any specific interrogation practices,” the official said. “It is impossible for us, consistent with the objectives of such a program, to publicize to the enemy what practices may be on the table and what practices may be off the table. That will only enable Al Qaeda to train against those that are on or off.”
Unless terrorists are prepared to grow gills, it’s not clear how they can prepare to withstand waterboarding, but nevertheless, the new guidelines leave practically all of the key questions unanswered. No one outside the administration knows what’s on the separate list of interrogation tactics, so no one knows whether administration policy prohibits torture, meets the standards of the Geneva Conventions, or conflicts with any existing laws or treaties.
“All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me,’ ” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.
Given the last six years, it’s not as if the president has earned the benefit of the doubt.
