Laszlo Trankovits, Deutsche Presse-Agentur  --  Arab News

WASHINGTON, 25 June 2004 — Washington’s struggle with its conscience was palpable. US President George W. Bush grasped for the right words.

“The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being,” Bush told reporters at the White House Tuesday. “We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.”

Bush, who has propagated his vision of universal freedom and human dignity and backed it up with the strongest army in world history, this week had to insist that he had never ordered torture of anyone.

It was another chapter in the scandal over the abuse by US military officials of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and in Afghanistan and concerns of possible mistreatment at the US naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Wednesday, the media was still digesting 258 pages of classified papers made public Tuesday by the White House that document the legal debate over whether torturing terrorism suspects was defensible under the law.

And then, in what the Washington Post called a “highly unusual repudiation of its department’s own work”, Justice Department officials and White House aides said all the documents would be reviewed.

The disclosure was seen as a public relations bid to shore up drooping public ratings of how Bush was doing in the war on terror.

In fact, the documents also show in harsh detail that official Washington often suspended protections guaranteed under US and international law. They show the excrutiatingly fine line walked by Bush and the State Department between honoring democratic practices while winning the battle against “barbarian” enemies. The US, Bush once said, did not want to become a “Paper Tiger”.

The high level of fear about a second terrorist attack even worse than the Sept. 11, 2001 killing of 3,000 people has driven the debate.

That specter has allowed the government to justify limitations on basic freedoms inside the US, such as suspension of the writ of habeas corpus for terror suspects, and the apparently total overriding of such rules for suspects abroad.

According to the documents, particularly crass suggestions about how to deal with suspected terrorists — such as dunking a suspect’s head into a bucket of water to make them think they will drown — were approved, but never used.

Other methods were found. High-ranking military and intelligence officers complained bitterly about how uncooperative detainees were. They looked for new techniques to find out about Al-Qaeda and its planned attacks. Apparently the capture of Saddam Hussein has been attributed to harsh interrogation methods, media reports have said.

Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were to be shaved, considered an offense for many faithful Muslims, for example. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved stripping prisoners in Guantanamo, using dogs for intimidation, interrogating them for 20 hours a time and making them stand for long periods of time, often in painful postures.

The order was rescinded several weeks later, and such techniques could only be used on a case by case approval basis. But nonetheless, the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib prison which emerged over the past months appeared to be visual evidence of the abstract formulations drawn up at the Pentagon.

Especially questionable was the approval of minor physical mishandling, a vague formulation which allowed much room for interpretation.

Then too, media reports have claimed that the US has sent about 100 terrorist suspects to other friendly countries such as Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, with the justification that it would resolve language difficulties. Critics charge that the detainees have been subjected to harsh torture methods that would violate US taboos.

The documents show the other side of the debate, too. In February 2002, Bush ordered that the Geneva Conventions were to be fully observed — even though he believed he had the authority to suspend the rules.

The documents offer an unparalleled glimpse into the debate about freedom that followed the first massive attack on the US mainland in its history. The attacks showed how fragile cherished democratic freedoms become when a country is under attack, and some have even drawn comparisons to Germany in the 1970s, when terrorist attacks by the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) provoked a clamp-down on rights.

Terrorist suspects, for example, were barred under quickly passed German laws from seeing a lawyer for long periods of times because the lawyers themselves were thought to be conduits to the outside network.

For the United States, the revelations over prisoner abuse have extracted their costs around the world.

On Wednesday, the US withdrew a controversial request that its soldiers and diplomats serving in UN peacekeeping missions be shielded from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.

While the United States has received two previous yearlong exemptions from liability before the court, which it does not support, the fresh incidents of prisoner abuse apparently galvanized Security Council members into a solid front against this year’s bid.

In Washington, Democratic members of Congress submitted resolutions Wednesday calling for a full-fledged congressional investigation and requesting more information from the White House.

Such a probe, said Representative Ike Skelton, would let people know “these are not our values. More important, these are not the values of the young men and women in uniform”.

Seven American soldiers were charged in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal, and one was sentenced in May to one year in prison. The courts-martial of the others are pending.