Enhanced Interrogation Techniques - Public Positions and Reactions

Public Positions and Reactions

President Bush stated "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand." The administration adopted the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to address the multitude of incidents of detainee abuse. However, in his signing statement, Bush made clear that he reserved the right to waive this bill if he thought that was needed.

The Washington Post reported in January 2009 that Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions, stated about the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of the so-called "20th hijacker" of the September 11 attacks:

The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent.... You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge .

The reason Crawford decided not to prosecute al-Qahtani was because his treatment fell within the definition of torture.

Former President Bush in his published memoirs defends the utility of "enhanced interrogation" techniques and continues to assert that they are not torture.

However, his successor President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Guantanamo military prosecutor Crawford called the techniques torture. The British government has determined the techniques would be classified as torture, and dismissed President Bush's claim to the contrary. A report by Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PFH) stated that these techniques constitute torture. They also cite the U.S. Office of the Inspector General report which concluded that "SERE-type interrogation techniques constitute 'physical or mental torture and coercion under the Geneva conventions.'" A United Nations report denounced the US abuse of prisoners as tantamount to torture. The UN report called for cessation of the US-termed "enhanced interrogation" techniques, as the UN sees these methods as a form of torture. The UN report also admonishes against secret prisons, the use of which, is considered to amount to torture as well and should be discontinued.

Some in the US press have been hesitant to call enhanced interrogation torture because as Paul Kane of the Washington Post explained, torture is a crime and nobody who engaged in "enhanced interrogation" has been charged or convicted. The New York Times terms the techniques "harsh" and "brutal" while avoiding the word "torture" in most but not all news articles, though it routinely calls "enhanced interrogation" torture in editorials. Slate magazine terms enhanced interrogation the "U.S. torture program."

Following NPR's controversial ban on using the word torture and Ombudsman Alica Shepard's defense of the policy that "calling waterboarding torture is tantamount to taking sides", Berkeley Professor of Linguistics Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out that virtually all media around the world, other than what he called the "spineless U.S. media", call these techniques torture. In an article on the euphemisms invented by the media that also criticized NPR, Glenn Greenwald discussed the enabling "corruption of American journalism":

This active media complicity in concealing that our Government created a systematic torture regime, by refusing ever to say so, is one of the principal reasons it was allowed to happen for so long. The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as "torture" -- even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantanamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word "torture" to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries --reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks.