US vows to stop using torture against terrorism suspects

NEW YORK — The Obama administration told a UN panel in Geneva on Wednesday that the United States had tortured terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but that it had since taken steps to prevent any future use of unlawful, coercive interrogation techniques.

“The United States is proud of its record as a leader in respecting, promoting, and defending human rights and the rule of law, both at home and around the world,” Mary McLeod, the acting State Department legal adviser, told the panel. “But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we regrettably did not always live up to our values.”

Continue reading below

The panel addressed by McLeod monitors compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture. In her testimony, she formally introduced a new position by the US government on whether a provision of that treaty, which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” imposes legal obligations on its conduct abroad. The George W. Bush administration contended that it applied only on US soil.

But the Obama administration, after an internal debate, told the United Nations that it applied abroad where the United States had governing authority. Those places include the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as US-flagged ships and aircraft, she said.

The State Department, which had proposed changing the Bush-era position on the scope of the cruelty ban, faced resistance from military and intelligence lawyers, who raised unspecified operational concerns. Administration officials have described the debate as a technical legal matter about unintended consequences and said no one was proposing the use of cruelty or torture in interrogations, which is banned under US law.

In its presentation Wednesday, the Obama administration stopped short of saying that the treaty also barred cruelty in overseas prisons where the United States had a detainee in its effective control but was not a governing authority. Such places would appear to include the former secret prisons where the CIA interrogated prisoners during the Bush administration and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan during wars there.

McLeod and Tom Malinowksi, the assistant secretary of state for human rights, said that there was no place the United States considered itself free to use torture.

“We believe that torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions,” Malinowski said. “The legal and moral argument against torture would be dispositive under any circumstances. It would not matter to that argument if torture were effective; our experience also taught that it is not.”

After the opening presentation by US officials, several members of the panel posed questions. Among them, Alessio Bruni of Italy asked why an appendix to the US Army Field Manual on interrogation permitted limiting a detainee to four hours of sleep a night as part of a special procedure for separating captives to prevent them from communicating.

Bruni noted that four hours of sleep, especially over an extended period, was “definitely insufficient for a majority of people” and could be a “form of ill treatment.”

Both Bruni and Jens Modvig of Denmark also pressed the delegation to discuss the US military’s practice of force-feeding detainees at Guantánamo, who are on hunger strikes.

The US delegation will return to the committee Thursday to answer those and other questions.

Source http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/11/13/vows-stop-using-torture-against-terrorism-suspects/w0uzIFGt4qdTLpx4fxm0nL/story.html