This week marked the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The United States is a participant in the Convention, and in honor of the Convention, June 26th is recognized as an International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. In conjunction with the anniversary, the ACLU launched The Torture Database, which contains over 100,000 pages of documents obtained primarily through Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the ACLU. The compiled documents are related to the Bush Administration's rendition, detention, and interrogation policies and practices.
Although outrage at the released documents often is not a large focus of public attention, the searchable documents are revealing. The Guardian observed the telling contents of a Justice Department memo from May 30, 2005. The memo analyzes whether the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" violate the Convention Against Torture.
For reference, the Convention defines torture in Article 1.1 as
Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
As the article in The Guardian describes, the memo concludes that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" do not violate the Convention. This isn't the most notable portion of the memo, though.
Its most haunting passage appears in a footnote. The footnote describes the last waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah.
According to the footnote, CIA interrogators determined that, after 82 waterboarding sessions, Abu Zubaydah was "compliant". Still, some officials at the CIA's headquarters believed that he was withholding information. Those officials overrode the objections of interrogators at the secret prison where Abu Zubaydah was being tortured, and they ordered that he be waterboarded yet again.
[...] The footnote does not describe what took place, but it does describe its result: nothing. The final waterboarding session was [determined] "unnecessary".
The Obama Administration has repudiated the use of torture and prohibited the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," yet insists that the nation must "look forward not backward."
The ACLU is encouraging people to tell Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to publicly release their report on the CIA's torture program, which the public still remains largely in the dark about. By pushing for greater transparency and accountability from public officials, maybe torture can become an unfortunate relic of our nation's past, rather than something that's viewed as acceptable wartime policy.
Caitlin Lowell is a summer intern for the ACLU of Maine. She is a rising sophomore at Columbia University and is pursuing a double major in political science and American studies.
