Several former military generals have teamed up with human rights activists to keep the pressure on President Obama to officially reject a Bush-era interpretation of an international treaty banning torture as not applying to CIA and military prisons overseas, as well as other foreign facilities.
Next week Obama administration officials will travel to Geneva for their first appearance before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, a panel that monitors adherence to a key anti-torture treaty the U.S. was instrumental in shaping in the mid-1990s.
Despite Obama’s previous positions denouncing torture, human rights activists, several retired generals and many Democrats on Capitol Hill are worried that administration lawyers will prevent a wholesale rejection of the Bush-era interpretation that led to harsh interrogation techniques they consider torture at overseas prisons.
Retired Gens. Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, and Charles Krulak, who served a commandant of the Marine Corps in the mid-to-late 1990s, recently wrote to Obama on behalf of a group of retired generals who stood behind Obama as he signed the 2009 executive order banning torture.
The generals are urging the Obama administration to reclaim America’s global leadership and the moral high ground by clearly distancing itself from the legal justifications that attorneys for President George W. Bush made to harshly interrogate terrorism suspects in the months and years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“Next week in Geneva the U.S. has the chance to reassert its leadership on human rights by making it clear that the U.S. doesn’t condone torture anywhere,” Hoar told reporters Wednesday. “This should be universal and non-controversial.”
Elisa Massimino, the president of Human Rights First, was equally adamant.
“Particularly because of our country’s foray into condoning torture and abuse … the fact is our country is in a bit of a hole here,” she said. “Our actions have really been called into question and it’s been a problem in cooperating with our allies and [their] doubting our commitment to reject torture and it has certainly been a hindrance on the moral leadership side of things.
“There’s a real risk here in the administration missing the forest for the trees,” she said. “What’s needed here is not more lawyering. It’s leadership.”
Under the treaty, countries are prohibited from exercising “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of anyone, including suspected terrorists.
They also are required to take effective measures to try to prevent torture when transporting people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured.
The Bush administration in 2005 interpreted the treaty to allow for cruel treatment that it argued fell short of torture at secret rendition prisons abroad, with its position being that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the U.S. to prohibit cruelty outside its borders.
At the time, Obama as a senator protested the Bush administration’s interpretation, but his administration has never taken a position on the treaty itself.
State Department lawyers reportedly have urged Obama to officially abandon the Bush administration’s stance. But some defense and intelligence attorneys are resisting, insisting they need more time to consider the implications of adhering to the torture treaty.
Instead, Obama’s legal team is considering technical changes that fall short of the Bush administration’s position but still raises questions among human rights critics.
Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, late last week told the Washington Examiner that Obama’s opposition on torture and cruel interrogations anywhere in the world is clear and “rock solid.”
Meehan said Obama’s lawyers are considering “technical and interpretive questions” the Committee Against Torture raised with the administration.
She did not elaborate on the details of the questions or say whether they involve how the United Nations treaty applies to U.S.-sponsored activity overseas or interrogations that take place after U.S. authorities deliver the suspects to another country for interrogations by that country’s personnel.
“The questions that the Committee Against Torture has raised with us ahead of their November meetings are technical and interpretive ones, and we are giving them a full and thorough inter-agency legal review as we do with all such questions,” she told the Examiner.
“Even as we are looking at the committee’s questions, there is no question that the administration’s position that all U.S. personnel are legally prohibited from torture and cruel treatment is clear, is not limited by geography or circumstances, and is not being reconsidered,” she said.
Concern from the generals and human rights activists echoes Democratic calls on Capitol Hill for the Obama administration to clearly reject torture and cruel treatment of all people “directly or indirectly” under control of U.S. authorities anywhere in the world.
