William Fisher

NEW YORK, Dec 15 2005 (IPS) — The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday sent a clear signal to the White House that it overwhelmingly supports a proposed ban on prisoner torture and limitations on interrogation tactics in U.S. detention facilities.

By a vote of 308 to 122, the House endorsed a proposal by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to prohibit “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in the custody of the U.S. government. The McCain proposal had been previously passed by the Senate in a 90-9 vote as an amendment to the massive defence department spending bill to fund U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the House vote was symbolic, and does not become part of U.S. law, it sent a strong signal to the George W. Bush administration, which has threatened to veto the spending bill if it contained the McCain language.

More recently, the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been seeking a compromise that would exempt the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the anti-torture measure.

The lopsided House vote, combined with the equally strong Senate endorsement of the McCain proposal, means that there are veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, thus severely limiting the president’s options.

“We cannot torture and still retain the moral high ground,” said Rep. John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “No torture and no exceptions,” he added.

The House also voted to support a McCain provision requiring officials in any Defence Department detention facility to follow the interrogation standards in the Army’s Field Manual on interrogations. That manual is currently being revised.

However, according to press reports, the Army’s rewritten rules add 10 classified pages to the Army Field Manual. They reportedly offer guidance to soldiers on how they can thread the needle between legal and illegal interrogation.

The new rules reportedly outlaw practices never before mentioned explicitly, such as forcing prisoners into stress positions and using police dogs. McCain hopes these will clarify unacceptable practices. But he and other lawmakers are concerned that other additions to the manual may open a back door to condoning practices that McCain is trying to prohibit.

Two hundred Democrats, 107 Republicans and one independent voted for Rep. Murtha’s motion to instruct House negotiators. Voting against it were 121 Republicans and one Democrat, Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia.

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr. of North Carolina was among the many conservative Republicans who voted for Murtha’s motion. Repeating a point consistently made by Sen. McCain – who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War – Murtha said harsh interrogation methods often produce misleading or false information because the detainee “will tell you what he thinks you want to hear” to end the pain.

He said he believes that extreme interrogation tactics resulted in some of the bad intelligence that led the administration to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

Murtha, a many-times decorated war veteran who is generally considered a friend of the military and a foreign policy hawk, further inflamed the debate over the Iraq war two weeks ago when he said the military has done all it can do in Iraq and called for a redeployment of U.S. troops to an “over-the-horizon” location such as Kuwait within six months.

President Bush, who has been delivering a series of major speeches on the war, has sharply disagreed with Murtha, contending that a premature pullout of U.S. forces would embolden the current insurgency and might lead to civil war in Iraq.

The torture issue bubbled up to front-page prominence following the release of photographs showing U.S. soldiers abusing detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. This was followed by revelations of similar behaviour at the U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Defence Department (DOD) has conducted some 15 separate investigations of similar misbehaviour. It has prosecuted a number of low-ranking enlisted personnel and has demoted or reprimanded several higher-ranking officers, including the Army Reserve general who was in charge of Abu Ghraib.

But critics contend that White House and DOD policy intentionally created an environment in which soldiers were unclear about how they could and could not treat detainees. They also charge that the Army failed to properly train soldiers in interrogation techniques and that, in some cases, private contractors – operating outside military rules – were responsible for the abuse.

More fuel was poured on the fire with the disclosure by the Washington Post newspaper that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was using its fleet of secret aircraft to render high value terror suspects to clandestine prisons it is reportedly operating in former Soviet bloc states in Eastern Europe.

The Post said that at former Soviet gulags, “ghost prisoners” simply fall off the radar – unnamed, unregistered, without access to lawyers, family members, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. While The Post did not name the countries, they have been widely reported to be Poland and Romania.

The Post reported that prisoners were routinely tortured, using such techniques as “waterboarding” – submerging a prisoner in restraints in water to convince him he was drowning – mock execution, prolonged shackling, being threatened with dogs, and “cold cell,” in which prisoners are held naked in low temperatures and doused with cold water.

During Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent trip to Europe to help rebuild bridges with U.S. allies, questions about torture and rendition refused to go away. They were a central theme in virtually all of the press appearances Rice made following her meetings with European leaders.

The Council of Europe, the EU’s human rights watchdog, said Wednesday that reports about the secret prisons appeared to be credible. It is carrying out an investigation of the matter, as is the European Parliament.

The issues were particularly contentious in Germany, where a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, announced he is suing the former CIA director George Tenet for forcibly taking him from Macedonia to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned incommunicado for five months. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pursuing the case on the German’s behalf.

Rendition is known to have been a CIA practice for some years. But its frequency increased exponentially after 9/11, with reportedly dozens of prisoners being kidnapped from Italy, Sweden and other European countries, as well as from the U.S., and sent to other countries with well-known histories of torturing prisoners. Italy is currently suing the U.S. for kidnapping an Italian citizen on Italian soil.

The Centre for Constitutional Rights, a major advocacy group, filed the first court challenge to rendition this year. The case is pending.

Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, said the U.S.-led fight against terrorism is eroding the time-honoured international prohibition against torture and other forms of cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners. She said that holding suspects incommunicado in itself amounts to torture. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed with her.