Northwestern University Newsfeed

June 25, 2004

In response to concerns that the Bush administration authorized torture in interrogations of terror suspects, the White House has released papers documenting the administration’s internal debate about interrogation tactics. Doug Cassel, director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law, says the White House hopes the documents will dispel the fears of the public.

Cassel: The White House has chosen to release a volume of documents in the hopes that it will persuade the public that the White House and the government have nothing to hide. They hope by this single release to put the issue behind them. I don’t think they will succeed in that because this release is partial, and selective, and raises at least as many questions as it answers.

Cassel thinks the new documents do not adequately refute claims that the Bush administration is attempting to circumvent the law.

Cassel: What’s troubling is primarily two points. First of all, all the documents that were not released and until we see those, we don’t really have a full picture. And secondly, information that we now have from both public and private sources indicating that the abuse of prisoners, not only at Abu Ghraib, but also at Guantanamo, went well beyond anything that is supposedly authorized in these documents.

Cassel says the Justice Department memo, which the Department has renounced, contends the President has unchecked powers in the war on terror.

Cassel: What it says is that in the name of conducting the war against terrorism, the President can do pretty much anything he wants with no restraint from the Congress or the Courts or the laws or the treaties. Now, that is not the concept on which this country was founded of separation of powers where the congress acts as a check on the executive. That’s going back to a previous concept called George III of England. And down that way lies a very dangerous path.

Cassel believes that although previously released memos were not specifically written about prisoners in Iraq, they contributed to the abuse that happened at Abu Ghraib.

Cassel: Last summer, the US occupation forces in Iraq brought over Jeffrey Miller, the general who had been in charge of the Guantanamo naval base detention center. And he brought with him both the attitude toward interrogation, and a list of specific interrogation techniques, which got used against very low-level people who had nothing to do with terrorism necessarily but were Iraqis protesting their occupation.

Recently the significance of detainees being held in Guantanamo has come into question. According to Cassel, there is no indication that the prisoners are important suspects.

Cassel: The few that have been identified could only be characterized at best as small fish. The small fish have been held now, in many cases, for two and a half years without access to a lawyer, without being brought before a judge, without being charged with any crime, without being treated as prisoners of war. It’s a real stain on the record of the United States as a country that is dedicated to the rule of law.