The American way of torture

Alasdair Palmer on how the White House is trying to defeat Senator McCain’s anti-torture Bill

America is starting to get anxious again about its use of ‘aggressive interrogation’. The more usual name for what the Americans have been doing to some of the people they think are terrorists is ‘torture’. When the pictures from Abu Ghraib first became public 18 months or so ago, they caused a flurry of agonised self-examination among senior officials in the country’s armed forces and intelligence services. That quickly passed when it was decided that what happened in Abu Ghraib wasn’t officially sanctioned.

Now, however, something much more serious than Abu Ghraib worries the administration: the growing Congressional campaign to pass a law which will make it absolutely unambiguous that any form of torture by US personnel is absolutely prohibited.

Until now the Bush administration’s lawyers have been able to argue that neither the US Constitution nor any US statute prevents the use of torture — sorry, ‘aggressive interrogation’.