Torture won’t be tolerated

Torture won’t be tolerated

Miami Herald: One of Barack Obama’s first decisions as president was to ban the use of torture and coercive techniques against terror suspects. CIA Director Leon Panetta made that policy change official last week in announcing the closing of secret foreign sites used by the United States to imprison and torture detainees. The decisions will help restore America’s diminished status as a nation of laws — not of men.

The change is a dramatic break from Bush administration policies, and shows that President Obama believes terrorists can be stopped without the use of torture. The idea that extreme physical punishment is sometimes necessary to stop an imminent attack became a cardinal doctrine in the Bush White House. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has used that rationale repeatedly in asserting that is why the United States has not been attacked again since Sept. 11, 2001.

Although the Obama administration is changing the CIA’s rendition and torture policies, it will not investigate or prosecute agents who were involved in the programs.

Dramatically different

President Obama and Panetta are as strongly convinced that the policies are counter-productive as Bush and Cheney were convinced that the techniques were necessary. The evidentiary record favors the formers’ view. Examples cited by Cheney and former administration officials of getting useful information from tortured detainees don’t hold up under close scrutiny. It doesn’t take an interrogation expert to know that a prisoner will tell his jailer anything he wants to hear to stop excruciating pain. The best interrogators acknowledge that this is true.

A 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross described how prisoners were beaten, water-boarded, slammed into walls, forced to stand for hours with arms handcuffed to ceilings, kept awake for days and exposed to extremely cold temperatures.

These are the methods of rogue countries and uncivilized societies where the rule of law is considered an inconvenience, which to be discarded in a real emergency. President Obama is putting America back on a lawful path where it belongs, and from which it never should have strayed.