Abstract

Chertoff and Torture

The author comments on the United States' policy of torture in the War on Terrorism. On June 12, 2002, John Walker Lindh, the young Californian captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and touted by John Ashcroft as an "American Taliban," was scheduled to take the stand in an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed. There he would tell how he signed the document only after being tortured for days by US soldiers. Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had already said he was likely to allow Lindh to put on the stand military officers and even Guantánamo detainees who were witnesses to or participants in his alleged abuse. The Defense Department, which we now know had in late 2001 begun a secret, presidentially approved program of torture of Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations, had made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted the suppression hearing blocked. Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division was overseeing all the department's terrorism prosecutions, had his prosecution team offer a deal. Chertoff allegedly demanded--at Defense Department insistence--that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. At the time, few paid attention to this peculiar silencing of Lindh. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that the man coasting toward confirmation as Secretary of Homeland Security effectively prevented early exposure of the policy of torture, which we now know began in Afghanistan and later "migrated" to Guantánamo and eventually to Iraq.