Guantanamo Torture: Denied in word, permitted in deed

The question posed by a new anti-torture group in an advertisement that appeared in The New York Times Tuesday perhaps best captures the moral dilemma facing the United States, once the world champion of human rights, in how it deals with its Muslim prisoners of war. The advertisement, signed by 27 leaders of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, asked: "What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed?"

The newly-established anti-torture group, whose membership includes such heavyweights as Cardinal Theodor E McCarick of Washington, Sayed Said, secretary-general of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and former President Jimmy Carter, says it formed to work against alleged abuses by the United States at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and other locations.

On its web site, the group implies that recently reported cruelty and abuse cases indicate that torture is now the norm, not the exception, in how the United States treats prisoners of war. Several human rights groups and legal experts charge that the United States has created the conditions and psychological setting in which its officials, and some US media outlets, have come to accept torture as a way of dealing with much-vilified Islamic suspected terrorists.

For example, Washington has passed legislation that effectively permits evidence obtained through torture to be used in court, while military tribunals trying some terrorist suspects are now explicitly permitted to consider evidence obtained under coercive interrogation techniques, including degrading and inhumane techniques and torture.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/799/re2.htm