3 - Judging Torture in Iraq

Summary

James Harding (Financial Times): “Mr. President, I want to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that United States officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say you want the United States to adhere to international and United States laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?”

President Bush: “Look, I'm going to say it one more time. … Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions … from me to the government.”

– News conference, Sea Island, Georgia, June 10, 2004

RULE OF LAW BY TORTURE

In the months following the invasion, President George W. Bush began to emphasize bringing democracy and the rule of law to Iraq instead of preempting the threat of Saddam Hussein's never found weapons of mass destruction. In a speech given to the National Endowment for Democracy (Bush 2003), the president insisted that democratic societies “protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law.”

However, within a year of the invasion, Americans were shocked to find their military charged with torturing prisoners in violation of international rules of law in the very same Abu Ghraib prison where Saddam's regime practiced some of its most notorious human rights abuses. As we saw in Chapter 1, Saddam's use of torture was not a secret and instead was a legal authoritarian resource openly used to terrorize would-be threats to the regime.

The American use of torture by law was something different. Its use of torture was unknown to the public until the famous photos made it impossible for Americans to ignore.