The Torture Memo Bush Tried to Destroy

     A document advising the Bush administration against
     torture has resurfaced, despite his best efforts to
     hide it

By Jordan Michael Smith
Apr 4, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/the_memo_bush_tried_to_destroy/

In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo
opposing the Bush administration's torture practices
(though he employed the infamous obfuscation of
"enhanced interrogation techniques"). The White House
tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but
one survived in the State Department's bowels and was
declassified yesterday in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request by the National Security
Archive.

The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and
the Constitution's prohibitions against cruel and
unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA's use of
"waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions,
and cramped confinement." Zelikow further wrote in the
memo that "we are unaware of any precedent in World War
II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent
conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation
practices similar to those in question here, even when
the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants."
According to the memo, the techniques are legally
prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest
to justify them, since they should be considered cruel
and unusual punishment and "shock the conscience."

Chillingly, the memo notes that "corrective techniques,
such as slaps," may be legally sustained, as might be
"[C]ontrol conditions, such as nudity, sleep
deprivation, and liquid diets.depending on the
circumstances and details of how these techniques are
used." However much distress Zelikow's memo caused the
White House, it was not an ACLU briefing paper.

"I'm pleased the memo is now part of the historical
record and available for study," Zelikow wrote Salon in
an email. The White House had determined that the memo -
which was not binding since Zelikow's was a bureaucratic
position without legal authority - was too dangerous to
exist. "I later heard the memo was not considered
appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my
memo should be collected and destroyed," he said in a
May 2009 congressional hearing.

At that hearing, before the Senate Committee on the
Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and
the Courts, Zelikow said he had "no view on whether
former officials should be prosecuted," a decision he
thinks should be left to "institutions." However, he did
call for a thorough inquiry and a public report
examining how the U.S. came to employ torture.

Of course, no such inquiry was ever launched. The Obama
administration declined to revisit the U.S. employment
of torture, with the president saying he didn't want to
"look back." Zelikow believes this was a mistake. "I
still believe an inquiry would be useful, though less so
as time passes and more information becomes available,
especially after the 9/11 trials conclude, hopefully
this year," he says in an email.

During his congressional testimony, Zelikow declined to
say whether Department of Justice lawyers acted
improperly or immorally, conceding only that their
opinions were "unsound, even unreasonable." But in a
2007 lecture in Houston, he had no problem saying "the
cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and
repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and
the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral."

The importance of the memo lies in its revelation that
there was real, serious debate inside the Bush
administration about how to interrogate captured
terrorist suspects. The members of the White House
declined to enter that debate - indeed, they did their
best to squash it. The destruction of Zelikow's
carefully reasoned memo suggests the White House did not
want any record of alternative views even existing, lest
they be considered reasonable or people get the idea
that the torture policies were thought controversial
even by members of the administration.


Jordan Michael Smith writes about U.S. foreign policy
for Salon. He has written for the New York Times, Boston
Globe and Washington Post. More Jordan Michael Smith

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