JURIST - Hotline: Bush administration should be held accountable for torture

Jameel Jaffer [Director of the ACLU's National Security Project and author, with Amrit Singh, of Administration of Torture]: "Recent media reports reveal that the Justice Department issued two legal memoranda in 2005 that authorized the CIA to use a slew of inhumane interrogation methods, including “head slapping,” “waterboarding,” and extreme temperatures – according to the New York Times “the harshest interrogation techniques” ever used by the agency. The first of the two memoranda was issued by the Justice Department only months after the Bush administration published (and publicly trumpeted) another legal memorandum declaring that “torture is abhorrent to American laws and values” and, probably not coincidentally, only weeks after Alberto Gonzales took office as Attorney General. President Bush has responded to the latest disclosure in the same way he has responded to each of the other similar disclosures over the last four years: by assuring the American public, and the world, that the United States does not use torture.

At this point only the most credulous would take the President’s assurances seriously. There is abundant evidence that Bush administration attorneys constructed a legal framework designed to make torture permissible, empowered interrogators to use a long list of unlawful and barbaric interrogation methods, and repeatedly encouraged interrogators to push the limits of their authority. When the President wanted to evade laws prohibiting torture, his attorneys redefined that term so that interrogators’ conduct would not come within its reach. The recent revelations show that when the President wanted to evade laws prohibiting cruel treatment, his attorneys took the same approach.

When the President declares that he has never authorized torture, he is speaking a language of his own invention. The pressing question now is not whether the Bush administration endorsed torture -- plainly it did -- but what the country and the world should do about it. Over the last three years, the senior officials who ought to have been held responsible for the maltreatment of prisoners have been let off the hook or even nominated to higher posts. A serious effort to hold these officials accountable is long overdue."