After months of Republican obstruction, the Senate will finally vote this afternoon on a provision that would end CIA torture once and for all. It is long past time that we apply the Army Field Manual's standards to all interrogations, leaving the Bush administration no doubt that torture is always and everywhere impermissible.
The Senate will soon vote on the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which contains a provision requiring all U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual's prohibition on torture. This reform is urgently needed, and I commend the Intelligence Conferees for adopting this provision. Its enactment will ensure that the government uses only interrogation techniques that are lawful.
In the Detainee Treatment Act passed in 2005, Congress attempted to reaffirm our commitment to the basic rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and restore America's standing in the eyes of the world as a nation that treats detainees with dignity and respect. These rights reflect the values we cherish as a free society, and they also protect the lives of our servicemen and women overseas.
Today, however, we know that the 2005 Act has fallen short of our goals. By not explicitly applying the Army Field Manual's standards to all government agencies, we left open a loophole that that the Bush administration promptly drove a Mack truck through.
The CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation program," carried out in secret sites, became an international scandal and a profound stain on America in the eyes of the world. The administration issued an Executive Order last year to try to minimize the outcry, but the Order failed to renounce abuses such as waterboarding, mock executions, use of attack dogs, beatings, and electric shocks. The disclosure of secret opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel gave further evidence that the administration has interpreted the Detainee Treatment Act and other anti-torture laws in an unacceptably narrow manner. Attorney General Mukasey's refusal at his confirmation hearings to say whether waterboarding is illegal gave us even more reason for concern.
The outrages don't end there. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that in 2005 the CIA had destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the use of abusive techniques on detainees in its custody. These videotapes have been withheld from federal courts, the 9/11 Commission, and congressional committees. Two weeks ago, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Attorney General flat-out refused to consider investigating possible past acts of torture or to brief congressional committees on why he believed the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program" is lawful.
Just last week, we received official confirmation that the CIA had used waterboarding on three detainees. At the same time, the White House made the reckless claim that waterboarding is legal and that the President can authorize its use under certain circumstances.
The White House position is directly contrary to the findings of courts, military tribunals, and legal experts that waterboarding is a violation of U.S. law and a crime against humanity. In the words of a former Master Instructor for U.S. Navy SEALs, "waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration -- usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death."
Waterboarding has a long and brutal history. It is an ancient technique of tyrants. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was used in the Spanish Inquisition. In the nineteenth century, it was used against slaves in this country. In World War II, it was used against our troops by Japan. In the 1970s, it was used against political opponents by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Today, it is being used against pro-democracy activists in Burma. That's the company we keep when we fail to reject waterboarding.
In fact, Attorney General Mukasey couldn't even bring himself to reject the legal reasoning behind the infamous Bybee "torture memo" of the Office of Legal Counsel, which stated that physical pain amounts to torture only if it is "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." According to that memo, anything that fell short of this standard would not be torture. CIA interrogators called the memo their "golden shield," because it allowed them to use virtually any interrogation method they wanted.
When the memo became public, its flaws were obvious. Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School testified that in his "professional opinion as a law professor and a law dean, the Bybee memorandum is perhaps the most clearly legally erroneous opinion I have ever read." The Bush administration was embarrassed into withdrawing the memo. But to this day, no one in the administration has repudiated its contents. The torture memo continues to haunt this country. I have asked the Attorney General several times to reject its legal reasoning, but he continues to refuse to do so.
The only solution is for Congress to apply the Army Field Manual's standards to the entire government. There has rarely, if ever, been a greater need to restore the rule of law to America's interrogation practices.
The Field Manual represents our best effort to develop the most effective interrogation standards. The Manual clearly states that "[u]se of torture is not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the [interrogator] wants to hear."
The Manual gives our interrogators great flexibility and provides all the techniques necessary to effectively question detainees, but it makes clear that illegal and inhumane methods are prohibited. In a letter to our troops dated May 10, 2007, General Petraeus stated, "our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual... shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting the information from detainees."
Applying the Field Manual's standards throughout our government will move us closer to repairing the damage to our international reputation in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. It will once again commit the United States to be the world's beacon for human rights and fair treatment. It will improve the quality of intelligence gathering, and protect our own personnel from facing punishment, condemnation, or mistreatment anywhere in the world. It will make us more, not less, safe.
Torture is a defining issue, and it is clear that under the Bush administration, we have lost our way. By applying the Field Manual's standards to all U.S. government interrogations, Congress will bring America back from the brink -- back to our values, back to basic decency, back to the rule of law.