Bipartisan Campaign Seeks Presidential Executive Order to Ban Torture

WASHINGTON, Jun 25 (IPS) - On the eve of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, a bipartisan group of some 200 religious leaders and former top U.S. national security and military officers launched a campaign for a presidential order to outlaw torture and cruel and inhumane treatment of all detainees.

The campaign, consisting of a "Declaration of Principles," which members of the public are also invited to sign, has been endorsed by, among others, three former secretaries of state, including George Shultz, who served under former President Ronald Reagan; and three former secretaries of defense, including William Cohen, a Republican who served under former President Bill Clinton.

Sponsored by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the Evangelicals for Human Rights, and the Minnesota-based Center for Victims of Torture, the declaration has also been signed by 35 retired generals and admirals, as well as several retired senior counter-terrorist officers of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

"Though we come from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life, we agree that the use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against prisoners is immoral, unwise, and un-American," asserts the declaration, which stresses that such practices are also deeply counterproductive.

"In our effort to secure ourselves, we have resorted to tactics that do not work, which endanger U.S. personnel abroad, which discourage political, military and intelligence cooperation from our allies, and which ultimately do not enhance our security."

The declaration calls on the president to issue an executive order that "categorically rejects the authorization or use (of) any methods of interrogation that we would not find acceptable if used against Americans, be they civilians or soldiers." It comes amid a welter of recent disclosures regarding the personal involvement of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of what they have called "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, but which virtually all international human rights groups have denounced as torture.

It also comes in the wake of a report released last week by Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) on extensive medical and polygraph examinations of 11 former detainees held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay for at least three years and released without charges. In each case, according to the report, the examinations corroborated prisoners' claims of serious physical and psychological abuse, ranging from beatings, electric shocks, shackling in stress positions, and, in at least one case, sodomy.

In a scathing preface to the report, ret. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the military's first official investigation on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, wrote that the evidence forced him to conclude that "the commander-in-chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."

"The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account," he added.

Taguba's investigation in 2004, as well as subsequent revelations about the treatment of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, eventually led to Congressional approval of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. It required military interrogations to be performed according to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which itself outlaws techniques that violate the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on cruel and inhumane treatment.

But, under pressure from the Bush administration, the law exempted the CIA, which has reportedly not only continued using the same tactics, but has also continued holding terrorist suspects in secret prisons and in "rendering" them to other countries whose intelligence agencies are known to use torture.