PBS film documents Rumsfeld’s role in authorizing torture

In responding to the question, who is to blame for Abu Ghraib?, the documentary points out that despite twelve Defense Department investigations, culpability has been laid exclusively at the feet of a “few lower-level bad apples.” Following the chain of accountability up the command structure, “The Torture Question” provides a visually harrowing depiction of the torture and abuse sanctioned and encouraged by the Bush administration and the military leadership. Incorporating interviews with high-level military, intelligence and White House personnel—in most cases retired—as well with interrogators from Abu Ghraib, the film documents the criminality of the US aggression in the Middle East.

Arriving last August in Iraq, the “Frontline” crew followed 50 recently captured Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. The documentarians acknowledge that of the 4,500 inmates undergoing ‘coercive interrogation techniques,’ many are probably innocent victims.

“The details of what happened in those cellblocks between the American soldiers and Iraqi detainees are well known,” says producer/director Michael Kirk on the PBS web site, “but how and why it happened is what took us into the heart of Abu Ghraib that night [in mid-August].” As a result of its investigation, the program “brings the torture question to the highest levels of the American government.”

“The Torture Question” traces the development of the US administration’s interrogation policy in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, which led to authorization for military interrogators to degrade and intimidate prisoners through the use of dogs and sexual humiliation techniques.

“What probably is very new, and new with the war on terror, is that there exists now documentary evidence, including documents from the Department of Justice lawyers themselves, talking about these procedures and, in effect, approving them,” states Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror and one of the film’s talking heads.

Featured prominently is John Yoo, who was a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003. Yoo was the principal author of the Justice Department’s memos arguing that President Bush had unlimited powers to prosecute the so-called “war on terror,” dismissing the Geneva Conventions as outdated, and justifying a policy of state-sanctioned torture.

Coldly defending his views, Yoo tells “Frontline”: “The one thing I think we don’t want is for the government to be hamstrung in the way it interrogates people who have knowledge of pending attacks on the United States because we have so much disagreement about what those phrases mean and that we can’t do anything. So I think it’s important that the government do figure out what that language means and how to apply it rather than operating [in] this sort of vague fog of uncertainty.” Yoo lauds Israeli ‘coercive’ techniques as the model for American interrogation methods.

Yoo also discusses the infamous August 1, 2002 Justice Department memo that sharply narrowed the definition of torture. The memo stated that physical pain must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” and that inflicting such pain must have been the “specific intent” of the defendant to amount to torture. It also claimed that US ratification of a 1994 anti-torture statute could be deemed unconstitutional because it infringed on the president’s power as commander in chief.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/pbs-o26.shtml