Abstract

Orders to Torture

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal now implicates the highest levels of the Bush Administration in violating federal law and in war crimes. And more details emerge daily: On the "Nation" website, Jason Vest reveals possible perjury by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, while according to Seymour Hersh in "The New Yorker," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally approved a secret "special-access program" for incarceration, humiliation and violent interrogation, expanding the program from a narrow group of presumed Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to the insurgency in Iraq. One revelation in particular should be sounding a constitutional emergency siren: The President has known for more than two years that his Administration has been pursuing policies that could qualify as war crimes under federal and international law. From the Gonzales memo, it is clear that the Administration always envisioned taking coercive interrogation beyond Afghanistan. Thus the scandal is not what George W. Bush referred to as the "failures of character" of a few soldiers at Abu Ghraib. The scandal is that the White House wanted to torture prisoners and get away with it.