Senator Levin: Detainee Abuse Undermines American Security
When the President of the United States says we are not bound by the Geneva Conventions, it is not just our standing in the world which is diminished, it is our security.
For America’s standing and strength to be restored we must adopt policies and procedures that reflect our values and our ideals. Under current policy a person can be detained for life as an enemy combatant without ever having had a lawyer or knowing what the evidence was against him, since that evidence can be completely classified.
So we must provide a fair process for detainees. We must also insist on some accountability for abuses that have occurred, as a way both of restoring confidence and deterring a recurrence. That means establishing responsibility for what went wrong at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The investigations to date of detainee abuse have left huge gaps including an absence of accountability for the green light given by senior officials, both military and civilian, to abusive interrogation and detention techniques. . . .
There are many reasons not to tolerate torture – it violates our basic values, it’s morally wrong, it produces unreliable information, it leads to many prisoners resisting cooperation who might cooperate if dealt with humanely, it violates domestic and international law, and it jeopardizes our own troops if they are captured. But there’s also this: people are less likely to believe that a confession was freely given if there have been abuses of detainees. Even with an admitted terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad who confessed to masterminding 9/11, I’m afraid the world will focus more on how we treated him, rather than on what, by his own words, he did to us. It is essential for our security that we and the world focus on understanding what KSM did, what he would do if released, what produces and motivates the KSMs of the world, and what methods and capabilities they have and use. That focus gets blurred when serious allegations of torture get thrown into the mix.
The full text of Senator Levin's remarks are available here.