The Justice Department and the UN Convention Against Torture

Washington Monthly article on the "Torture Memos"


Along with the Geneva Conventions of 1949 there were other binding agreements that the U.S. had been a part of which included the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Stating that the language in the U.N. Convention Against Torture was ambiguous, John Yoo and the Justice Department exploited this language and would justify any method of torture as a tool of interrogations to gain intelligence needed to effectively fight the War on Terror. Yoo believed that words such as "severe", "pain", and "suffering" were not clearly defined in the UNCAT, so he and the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales sought to determine definitions for these words. In the first of the "torture memos" sent in August of 2002 the D.O.J. defined physical pain amounting to torture must be accompanied by serious physical injury such as organ failure, loss of bodily function, or death. Accepting this definition allowed the Bush administration to, under President Bush's executive power alone, promote and perform torturous and humiliating acts in interrogations. In short Yoo gave the President the authority to define torture in any terms he chose to define it, to justify whatever it was the President wished to do.  The gloves were off and it was these definitions accompanied with the aggressive interrogations of captured insurgents, which led to the horrible offences that would occur at Abu Ghraib.

These new definitions of torture that were being used to justify the harsh treatment and intense interrogations by the U.S. in Iraq, would have allowed the atrocities that Sadaam Hussein himself had committed in his own country's prisons and would have failed to define those acts as torture as well. The other element articulated in these memos was the unquestionable power of the president in a time of war. Treaties could not bind the power of the President and not even congress could impose any restriction on the executive branch which lied with President George W. Bush. This authority and power could only be removed at the end of the military conflict. This idea encouraged the cowboy mentality of President Bush and key members of his administration. They did whatever it took to get the information they believed was necessary to protect Americans and win this new kind of war. These ideas had now become the stated policy of the U.S. government and Abu Ghraib and the crimes against humanity there were now inevitable.  The seeds of torture had been planted in Washington and would grow to bear their horrible fruit in a prison outside the city of Baghdad.