Variable Geometry Democracy

By Claude Lévesque
Le Devoir

Monday 14 November 2005

Arbitrary detentions, secret prisons, torture: accusations against the United States pile up.

Yesterday, 350 prisoners with wrists handcuffed and eyes blindfolded had to parade in front of the media assigned to Baghdad. According to the American authorities, more than 42,000 people have been arrested for insurrection since 2003. No less than13,000 of them are still in detention.
(Photo: Reuters)

The American government, which claims to lead a campaign against terror so that democracy and freedom may triumph in the world, is ever more often forced to explain itself about the way its agents treat prisoners.

The questions and the criticisms are not coming only from the pacifist left or the partisan opposition, but also from milieus that one would have thought more in favor of executive power, such as Republican Senators and Supreme Court judges.

Last Monday, the United States' highest court agreed to rule on the legality of military commissions put in place to judge the presumed terrorists detained at the Guantánamo base in Cuba. The matter refers to the first tribunals of this kind to be created since the aftermath of the Second World War.

Wednesday, the Washington Post "revealed" a network of secret prisons established by the CIA to detain and interrogate the same kind of individuals, certain of whom are considered to be important leaders of the al-Qaeda network.

This pair of news stories occurred at the same time as the two houses of the American Congress were debating whether the prohibition against torturing prisoners may suffer certain exceptions.

When the Supreme Court hears the Guantánamo case, we'll hear a lawyers' debate over the extent of presidential war powers and the field of application for the Geneva conventions, to which the United States is signatory.

The two other matters will take place in the less muffled confines of the United States' Congress.

The test case submitted to the high court concerns Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemenite citizen who has been Osama bin Laden's chauffeur. Captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained at Guantánamo since 2002, he is accused of belonging to al-Qaeda. Hamdan is one of the some 500 inmates at the base of whom a dozen are supposed, like him, to soon be called before the famous military commissions.

Just last week, American authorities announced the upcoming appearance of five of them, including Omar Kadr, a Canadian who was only fifteen years old when he was arrested in Afghanistan. According to Amnesty International (United States section), which sponsors this prisoner, the young Kadr has been subjected to torture on very many occasions.

No less than 500 legal scholars from the major American law schools have supported Hamden's defense lawyers' case, writing that the prolonged detention of 500 men in complete legal confusion is unworthy of a government of laws.

Everyone knows about the existence of the prison located at Guantánamo and administered by the Pentagon.

The issue of the secret prisons is a little different. It throws a certain light on the "shadow world" that some would like to keep shadowy.

New Leak

The file published Wednesday by the Washington Post provides details about the existence of these slammers established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in several countries. In fact, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, had denounced this situation for the last few months already, basing themselves on a rather abundant amount of documentation. But the fact that several active or retired agents supplied information for the article in a prestigious newspaper no doubt explains the uproar it created.

Consequently, the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives and of the Senate demanded a Congressional inquiry into the source of this new "leak." For their own account they borrowed the arguments their Democratic colleagues had invoked a few weeks earlier to reproach Lewis Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Cheney, with having put CIA personnel in danger by exposing the status of secret agent Valerie Plame.

For its part, the CIA demanded that the Justice Department make an investigation to learn whether the confidential intelligence could have been divulged to the press last week.

It remains to be seen whether an eventual Congressional investigation will cover the leaks only or whether - as Democratic politicians would like - it will also cover the existence of secret prisons, i.e., the fundamental question. Some Republicans in Congress desire that also.

Where could this new leak have come from? Republican Senator Trent Lott - who is no lefty - formulated this hypothesis: it was Vice President Dick Cheney himself who could have said too much during a recent meal with the Senate's Republican Caucus.

The meeting in question had a slightly different objective, one about which the media had already reported copiously. Cheney was "lobbying" to convince his party's Senators to change their positions with regard to a piece of legislation sponsored by one of their number, John McCain.

The latter is a veteran of the Vietnam War, who knows torture from personal experience when he fell into enemy hands. Keeping in mind the Abu Ghraib scandal also, Senator McCain took advantage of the October debates on the 2006 military budget to propose an amendment prohibiting torture and "cruel or degrading" treatment. The McCain Amendment was adopted by a majority of 90 against 10.

Consequently, Dick Cheney and the new CIA Director, Porter Goss, pressured the Senators to "amend" the McCain Amendment to exempt CIA agents.

Veto

The two houses are presently negotiating with the objective of harmonizing their legislative texts. The threat of a presidential veto hangs over the McCain Amendment.

"We were champions of the Geneva Conventions for a long time because we want our citizens to be treated humanely when they're captured," read the Washington Post's editorial page.

Echoing several human rights defense organizations, the Post also wrote: "Americans don't join the CIA with the objective of practicing torture. And yet that's what could happen if Vice President Cheney's proposition becomes law."

At the end of last week, as he stopped in Panama on the way back from the Summit of the Americas in Argentina, President George W. Bush reaffirmed that the United States does not practice torture.

Not a day goes by without the big American media reporting new information about these issues. For example, we learned that the Pentagon has just adopted a new code to frame prisoner interrogations. New details have also appeared on the subject of two memoranda sent by the Justice Department to the White House in 2002 and in 2003.

The existence of these texts shows that the highest officials of the American government tried to prepare the ground on prisoner treatment ever since September 11, 2001. At the same time, the indiscretions with regard to their contents indicate that this preparation was - at best - hazy and contradictory; at worst, that they were written in such a way as to incite the interrogators to obtain intelligence by any means.



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Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.