Civil libertarians have gotten acclimated to a pattern with the Obama administration of supportive rhetoric followed by equivocations, symbolic measures or outright backtracking on campaign promises and supposed first principles. Despite all that, however, in the area of torture, at least, current thinking goes, the administration, though failing to adequately address Bush administration crimes, HAS accomplished decisive and substantive change.
In a recent piece perennial civil liberties watchdog Nat
Hentoff warns that on the issue of torture as well, despite sweeping
pronouncements to the contrary, facts suggest the administration's real
accomplishments are far less than meets the eye.
Nat Hentoff writes
Some of the increasing number of critics, from the left and the right, of President Barack Obama's abuses of civil liberties and human rights make an exception by praising his executive order in the first month of his term banning torture as a form of interrogation on matters of national security. There is credible reason, however, to dispute the credibility of that presidential pledge.
"Torture's Loopholes" (New York Times, Jan. 20) is by Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserves. In 2006, he led the U.S. interrogation team that tracked and found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insatiable killer who commanded al-Qaida in Iraq and was then terminated by coalition forces. Alexander went on to write a book that was not endorsed by Dick Cheney: "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."
This is what Alexander, who describes himself as "an investigator turned interrogator," has to say about Obama allegedly banning torture -- and the accompanying decision last August by Attorney General Eric Holder to remove responsibility for interrogating detainees to a new FBI-directed High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that will constrain itself to use only "noncoercive" methods or those approved by the Army Field Manual.
Unequivocally, Alexander states: "If I were to return to one of the war zones today...I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners." How come? In August, Holder's task force on interrogation, commissioned by the president, "recommended no changes" to the Army Field Manual, thereby retaining the torture loopholes focused on now by the tracker of al-Zarqawi.
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