The CAT'S Out of the Bag: CIA Interrogators Run Amok at Guantanamo

Tonight, I relax.

I just finished emailing my final brief of the year to my professor and boy does it feel good. It feels like I can finally sleep after having been denied it for days. . . like I have finally been allowed to sit after standing for hours. . . like I have finally stopped drowning. . .like the incessant blaring music has finally come to an end. . . like the questions have stopped. . . like the burlap sack has been removed from my head. . .like. . .

Well, you get the idea. The torture is over.

The issue of this brief? Whether the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (sleep deprivation, short shackling) that the CIA has been employing at Guantanamo Bay constitute torture.

I argued that they did. It was not a moral choice. If I had been assigned differently, I would have argued that they did not.

Just following orders.

Here's an executive summary of the assignment:

In 1984 countries across the land got together and agreed not torture people. I suppose at the time it was a novel concept. This agreement was called the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Torture was roughly defined as "inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering" on a detainee. A ton of countries, including the United States, signed on.

United States went home, and by 1992 had enacted its own statute, The Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. 2340), to implement its commitment to the CAT in domestic law. The language was virtually the same as the language found in the CAT.

Fast forward to circa 2003. In our fake case for class, a detainee who is about to be tortured (or if you prefer euphemisms: "enhancedly" interrogated), is suing the government and all of the officers who have signed off on these enhanced techniques for violating the statute.

Government says the claim is outrageous and they don't torture, and even if they use short shackling and sleep deprivation, that's not torture.

Therein lies the dispute.

And now to my main point of writing this blog. In the assignment, the detainee is suing people like John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, William Haynes III the General Counsel to the Pentagon, and even Alberto Gonzalez when he was at the Department of Justice. But this might just be the tip of the iceberg.

It turns out, after last night's story on ABC NEWS, he could've been suing some other notable people as well: Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Condoleeza Rice, George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, all of whom signed off on the methods IN DETAIL.

Here's the story that came out yesterday about how all of these public officials sat down in a smoke-filled room in the basement of the White House and started brainstorming in a way I like to call "thinking outside the statute."

If you'd like to watch the story that aired on TV, feel free to go here.

Here's a bit that I found particularly disturbing:

"According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: 'Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.'"

How Nixonian. With statements like that, it's going to be pretty tough to make the argument that you had no idea that you might be doing something morally wrong or even breaking the law.

But I guess I'll worry about that later. For now, I'm done wrestling with this issue. All that research, all that time formatting and struggling, it might not have been torture, but it was certainly and enhanced amount of suffering.

And now I'm ready to relax.