Peace and Justice Post

It’s been one year since Obama signed his executive orders outlawing torture and to close the prison at Guantanamo. Former Rep. Tom Andrews writes about how this day is being marked in D.C.

A team of twenty combat veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are converging on the US Capitol today to meet with Members of Congress. They are representing two thousand of their fellow veterans who signed a letter to Members of Congress asking that they stop the politics of fear mongering and support our troops in harm’s way by closing the military prison on Guantanamo Bay:

Every day that the facility at Guantanamo Bay remains open and detainees are held without trial is another day that terror networks have an effective recruiting poster. Closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay is in the national security interest of America and the troops that we put into harm’s way. We urge you to do so without delay.

Ironically, the US Senate’s soon-to-be newest member from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, arrives on Capitol Hill today as well. Brown was elected the day before yesterday to the seat held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

Brown is bringing a distinctly different message on the subject. He argues that water boarding is not torture and that Gitmo should remain open for business.

The debate over whether the United States should routinely inflict on detainees the very same torture techniques that we hung Japanese officials for inflicting on US soldiers in WWII is far from over….

Today is a day for us all to be off Senator McConnell and Senator-elect Brown’s message. Support the troops being sent into harm’s way. Help two thousand combat veterans deliver their message to Congress: Close Gitmo NOW.

At the New York Times, one of today’s citizen/veteran-lobbyists, Matthew Alexander, assesses where we are, one year after.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment), United States and international law, or even Mr. Obama’s executive order.

If I were to return to one of the war zones today — as an Air Force officer, I was sent to Iraq to head an interrogation team in 2006 — I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners. This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

The adoption last year of the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogations across the government, including the C.I.A., was a considerable improvement. But we missed a unique opportunity for progress last August when the president’s task force on interrogations recommended no changes to the manual, which was hastily revised in 2006 in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal….

The greatest shame of the last year, perhaps, is that the argument over interrogations has shifted from debating what is legal to considering what is just “better than before.” The best way to change things is to update the field manual again to bring our treatment of detainees up to the minimum standard of humane treatment.

The next version of the manual should prohibit solitary confinement for more than, say, two weeks, all stress positions and forms of environmental manipulation, imprisonment in tight spaces and sleep deprivation. Unless we rewrite the book, we will only continue to give Al Qaeda a recruiting tool, to earn the contempt of our allies and to debase our most cherished ideals.

The horrendous story emerging this week about the murder of three Guantanamo detainees in 2006 and the subsequent Justice Department cover-up and stonewalling–which continues in the Obama administration–only adds impetus to this effort. Unanswered torture by Americans will only fuel the flame of hatred against us, as does the constant reminder of a still-open Guanatanamo.

The stain of torture and of Guantanamo becomes more indelible by the day, and it is now no longer just Bush’s and Cheney’s. It is Obama’s and Holder’s, too. And ours. Pretending otherwise won’t make it go away. It will just set it more firmly.