President Bush made the admission as he ordered 14 prisoners previously held by the CIA to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where they could be tried by a military tribunal. The prisoners include alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Muhammad. Bush said the CIA is no longer holding any detainees, but that the secret prisons may be reopened..........
The court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to our war with al-Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment. The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article 3 are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by an American or foreign judges. And some believe our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act, simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, yesterday. Barbara Olshansky joins us in the studio today, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, author of Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Barbara.
BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to President Bush's address.
BARBARA OLSHANSKY: You know, there are several. The President’s speech came along with a series of documents: a Department of Defense directive, a new Army field manual that was revised, and this bill. If you put them all together, it says some very interesting things. First, there is the admission, like you said, of the existence of secret prisons, which we knew and they have categorically denied, all across Europe and all across the United States.
But this idea of the CIA program, that language that the President used, we know that that program is a codeword for the use of torture. There's just no doubt about it, because we know how badly people were tortured in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, and we know that not just from detainees' testimony, but from the testimony of FBI officials, CIA officials. Lots of people have come forward. And the President then is asking the American public and Congress to approve a program of torture going forward.
And when he says the United States doesn't torture and I never authorize torture, that is a very interesting word play, because all of the government's documents, all of the White House documents, go to this issue of redefining torture in a way that we don't define it in the United States or in the world. And that definition says torture only occurs when someone’s at the risk of immediate full organ failure or death. So that's the word “torture” that the president is using. That's not our constitutional definition of torture. That's not the international definition of torture. And you know what? That's not the American people's definition of torture.
