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Strengthen Interrogation Policy
Editorial
The Hartford Courant
June 26, 2006
Jun. 26--Pentagon officials have it all mixed up.
They should hew to the Geneva Convention instead of omitting language from the military's policy on interrogation that specifically bans "humiliating and degrading treatment" of detainees, as the Pentagon is said to propose.
The United States has already sustained an image-pounding over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, alleged civilian killings in Haditha and other Iraqi cities, and the use of sexual touching to break Muslim captives at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Dropping the ban on humiliating treatment would suggest what many in the world community already suspect: that the United States condones the abusive treatment of those it holds in captivity.
Moreover, dropping the ban on humiliating and degrading treatment would limit the United States' moral authority to condemn and seek sanctions for human rights abuses by other nations.
The original language was designed to conform with the minimum Geneva Convention protections against cruelty and torture.
But the Bush administration has, since 2002, suspended portions of those requirements, contending that they are too restrictive and that the special nature of terrorism - its mobility and capacity to strike at civilian targets anywhere in the world - justifies the use of harsher treatment.
Among the questionable techniques reportedly employed by American interrogators to elicit information are sexual humiliation, the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, sleep deprivation and "water-boarding," which involves strapping a prisoner to a board and dousing him or her with water to simulate drowning.
Such methods are ineffective because prisoners will say whatever they think the interrogators want to hear to stop the abuse.
There is still time for Pentagon officials to restore the language. The new interrogation rules don't take effect until the Defense Department makes them public, and that step in the process has been delayed in the wake of strong opposition to the change from the State Department.
On this matter, the diplomats are right.
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