Bush Took 'His Sweet Time' on Torture Initiative

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CIA director Michael Hayden: He has told CIA employees that the President's recent order was necessary to ensure that detention and interrogation was done in accord with recent Supreme Court rulings.


Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said on July 22 that the United States will persist with techniques of interrogating terror suspects that have saved 'countless lives,' but will stop short of torture.


Bush Took 'His Sweet Time' on Torture Initiative
Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
EDITORIAL
July 22, 2007


PRESIDENT Bush's executive order banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners - primarily terror suspects - is a welcome step, even though he has taken his sweet time taking it. But the order's ambiguous wording makes the assertion by CIA Director Michael Hayden that it gives the agency "legal clarity" difficult to understand.

Human rights organizations were understandably quick to point at the "inadequate" nature of the decision, particularly because it came years after the world received incontrovertible proof that "torture was authorized at the highest levels and utilized by U.S. forces."

Considering the chronology of America's tripped-up so-called war on terror, it becomes clear that Bush's latest step owes more to political face-saving than the international outcry over torture methods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. With Bush's ratings unlikely to improve anytime soon and as his stay in the Oval Office approaches its end, it's no surprise that the administration has resorted to such a PR exercise.

Those is especially true since the torture methods in question, attributed to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were defended by everyone who sought to further the neocon agenda at the time. Now, even though Bush's statement says personal abuse "including sexual acts and attacks on religious beliefs" are not to be tolerated, there has yet to be a clarification of whether the CIA still has the option to use terror as an instrument, and specifically what limits the new ruling will put in place.

It is pertinent to note that torture techniques were just part of the modus operandi of the Bush camp's anti-terror war. For over half a decade, the administration has held prisoners without trial, operated secret prisons, coined the terminology "illegal combatant" to sidestep the Geneva Convention, and yet it has nothing to show for its efforts.


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