IT is the closest the US government has come since 9/11 to real accountability to the international community. On Friday, 30 top administration lawyers began two days of having to answer 59 probing questions on torture and other abuses; the questioners are from the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva and they will conclude their interrogations on Monday. The Bush White House is clearly uncomfortable but just how uncomfortable it should be will only become apparent when the UN committee makes its findings public later in the year.
The investigation is taking place on two levels. At the lower, there are cases of torture and abuse which, it could be argued, emerge from simple indiscipline among ordinary soldiers and junior officers. Washington readily admits that these have occurred among US forces, as it maintains, they occur in many other armies. When such crimes come to light, the Americans assert that they have investigated and prosecuted. The US lawyers said on Friday that 250 people had been punished because of crimes at the notorious Iraqi prison.
The question of Abu Ghraib leads, however, to the second level of the investigation. This will test the suspicion that there has been official sanction for torture and abuse. Washington’s lawyers denied this in Geneva, reasserting that the United States was committed to its obligations as a signatory to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Yet the whole tone of the US war on terror seems to be most apparent in Guantanamo Bay where America has illegally isolated a number of Al-Qaeda suspects who, for the most part, were captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. While it makes sense to isolate these suspects in order to stop them from returning to the terror cells of which they are allegedly members, the manner in which the US has done this gives rise to some very deep concerns. Being in Cuba, Guantanamo is apparently beyond the power of the US courts so the detainees enjoy none of the rights they would have if held in mainland US prisons. The pictures and the stories from Guantanamo are harrowing; yet in the past, administration officials have said that the manacling and discipline meted out there is little different from that in any high security US prison. If that is true, then perhaps the UN committee’s investigation should be broadened.
The kidnappings resorted to by CIA agents in extreme rendition are also totally unacceptable. Administration attempts, particularly by Condoleezza Rice, to defend extreme rendition are odious and add to the suspicion that Washington is throwing over norms of legality as well as decency. There was a time when the White House would not even say that US citizens would be guilty of suspected torture if the acts took place outside the US. Rice put this right last December. Nevertheless, all these dubious and ambiguous activities and statements make it look more, not less, likely that abuse has been sanctioned from the top. This will make the UN committee’s findings all the more significant.
