|
本帖最后由 和解团结 于 2009-11-28 04:27 编辑
【原帖地址】http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/bush-torture
【作者】Andrew Sullivan
【媒体】The Atlantic
【媒体译名】大西洋月刊
【出版日期】2009年10月
【说明】
这是Andrew Sullivan十月份在The Atlantic上给美国前总统布什的一篇公开信,要求布什对在关塔纳摩和伊拉克等地发生的虐囚和其他侵犯人权的事件负责。Andrew Sullivan在The Atlantic上的博客是http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com(要翻墙),维基百科上关于作者的介在http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan(不用翻墙)。因为这个文章较长,我将分四楼转载,转贴时候以一些词可能粘到一起了,大家读的时候需要留意。另外,这个文章本身和中国没关系,不过看到前几天的调查里有人提到希望看到一些西方社会内部的文化,政治方面的评论,应该说这个文章还是比较典型和出色的一个。
【原文】
【第一页】
Americanswant, and need, to move on from the debate over torture in Iraq andAfghanistan and close this tragic chapter in our nation’s history.Prosecuting those responsible could tear apart a country at war.Instead, the best way to confront the crimes of the past is for the manwho authorized them to take full responsibility. An open letter toPresident George W. Bush. (Photo by Christopher Morris/VII)
by Andrew Sullivan
Dear President Bush,We have never met,and so I hope you will forgive the personal nature of this letter. Iguess I should start by saying I supported your presidential campaignin 2000, as I did your father’s in 1988, and lauded your first effortsto wage war against jihadist terrorismin the wake of 9/11. Some of my praise of your leadership at the timeactually makes me blush in retrospect, but your September 20, 2001, address to Congressreally was one of the finest in modern times; your immediate grasp ofthe import of 9/11—a declaration of war—was correct; and your corejudgment—that religious fanaticism allied with weapons of massdestruction represents a unique and new threat to the West—was and isdead-on. I remain proud of my support for you in all this. No oneshould forget the pure evil of September 11; no one should doubt thecontinued determination of an enemy prepared to slaughter thousands incold blood in pursuit of heaven on Earth.
Of course, like most advocates of the Iraq War, I grew dismayed at what I saw as the mistakes that followed: the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiascoof Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; thefailure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandmentof the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drasticallyworsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence towardAfghanistan.
These were all serious errors; but they were of a kind often made inthe chaos of war. And even your toughest critics concede that,eventually, you adjusted tactics and strategy. You took your time, butyou evaded catastrophe in temporarily stabilizing Iraq. I also agreewith the guiding principle of the war you proclaimed from the start:that expanding democracy and human rights is indispensable in thelong-term fight against jihadism. And I believe, as you do, that aforeign policy that does not understand the universal yearning forindividual freedom and dignity is not a recognizably American foreignpolicy.
Yet it is precisely because of that belief that I lost faith in yourwar. In long wars of ideas, moral integrity is essential to winning,and framing the moral contrast between the West and its enemies asstarkly as possible is indispensable to victory, as it was in theSecond World War and the Cold War. But because of the way you chose totreat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degradedhuman beings with techniques typically deployed by brutaldictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early, and we have yet toregain it. That truth hangs over your legacy as a stain that has yet tobe removed. As more facts emerge, the stain could darken further. Youwould like us to move on. So would the current president. But we cannotunless we find a way to address that stain, to confront and remove it.
I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizingto the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, anddeeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or inyour name. President Obama’s decisionthus far to avoid such prosecutions is a pragmatic and bipartisan onein a time of war, as is your principled refusal to criticize himpublicly in his first months. But moving on without actuallyconfronting or addressing the very grave evidence of systematic abuseand torture under your administration poses profound future dangers. Itgives the impression that nothing immoral or illegal took place.Indeed, since leaving office, your own vice president has even braggedof these interrogation techniques; and many in your own party threatento reinstate such policies in the future. Their extreme rhetoric seemslikely to shape—to contaminate—history’s view of your presidency,indeed of the Bush name, and the world’s view of America. But mybiggest fear is this: in the event of a future attack on the UnitedStates, another president will feel tempted, or even politicallycompelled, to resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the samepolarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you nowbecause it is within your power—and only within your power—to preventthat from happening.
Don’t misunderstand me. The war was compromised, not by occasionalwar crimes, or bad snap decisions by soldiers acting under extremestress, or the usual, ghastly stuff that war is made of. All conflictsgenerate atrocities. Very few have been without sporadic abuse ofprisoners or battlefield errors. As long as these lapses areinvestigated and punished, the integrity of a just war can besustained.
But this war is different. It began with a memo from your officestating that—for the first time—American service members and CIAofficers need not adhere to the laws of warfare that have governedWestern and American war-making since before this country’s founding.The memo declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to capturedterror suspects but that all prisoners would be treated humanely unless“military necessity” required otherwise. This gaping “militarynecessity” loophole—formally opposed in a memoby the member of your Cabinet with the most military experience,Secretary of State Colin Powell—was the beginning of America’s descentinto the ranks of countries that systematically torture prisoners.
You insisted that prisoners be treated humanely whenever possible, but warswith legal loopholes for abuse and torture always quickly degenerate.In its full consequences, that memo, even if issued in good faith, hasdone more damage to the reputation of the United States than anythingsince Vietnam. The tolerance of torture and abuse has recruited moreterrorists than any al-Qaeda video, and has devastated morale andsupport at home. Your successor remains profoundly constrained even nowby this legacy—compelled to prevent the release of more photographicevidence of war crimes under your command because of the damage itcould still do to American soldiers in the field.
No, terror suspects did not deserve full prisoner-of-war status.That argument was always a red herring. Full POW rights—regular meals,exercise, and the rest—were not applicable to stateless terror suspectswho themselves had no uniform or adherence to Geneva. You were right tosee that as inappropriate, if not offensive. But what these suspectsdid deserve—simply because they are human beings—was protection frominhuman, degrading, abusive treatment or the infliction of “severemental or physical pain or suffering” in order to procure information.This is what Geneva’s Article 3says: whatever the nature of the combatant, in or out of uniform, andwhatever his own moral rules (or lack of them), he deserves basicrespect as a human being with human rights. This principle isnonnegotiable. It is the core principle of Western civilization.Resistance to the physical force of government, especially as thatforce is applied to people in custody, is the core reason Americaexists as an independent nation.
I believe that if you review the facts of your two terms of office,you will be forced to realize that, whatever your intentions, youundermined this fundamental American principle. You may not haveintended that to occur. But you were the commander in chief andpresident, and these were presidential-level decisions. Theresponsibility for all of this is yours—before the American people andbefore the court of history. And you need finally to own thesedecisions, to take full responsibility for them, to account for them,to explain them, and, yes, to apologize for their scope and brutality.
This was never about “bad apples.” It is no longer even faintlyplausible to argue that the mounds of identical documented abusesacross every theater of combat in the war as it was conducted afterJanuary 2002 were a function of a handful of reservists improvisingsadism on one night shift in one prison. The International Committee ofthe Red Cross, the Senate Armed Services Committee, dozens of reputablewell-sourced news stories and well-documented books, and the manyofficial reports on the subject have revealed a systematic pattern ofprisoner mistreatment in every theater of combat, by almost allbranches of the armed services, and in every major detention facilityin Iraq where interrogation took place. (Revealingly, there were veryfew abuses in what the Red Cross calls “regular internment facilities”in Iraq—meaning those where interrogation was not taking place.)
The Senate’s own unanimous bipartisan report,signed by your party’s 2008 nominee, John McCain, proves exhaustivelythat the abuse and torture documented in U.S. prisons were the resultsof policies you chose. The International Red Cross found youradministration guilty of treating prisoners in a manner thatconstituted torture, a war crime. Experts in the history of torture,such as the Reed College professor Darius Rejali, make very carefuldistinctions between the disparate acts of torture or abuse that takeplace in all wars and a bureaucratized top-down policy, wherebyidentical techniques are replicated across the globe in differentservices and under different commands, with some on-the-groundimprovisation as well. The history of prisoner mistreatment under yourcommand fits the second pattern, not the first.
The techniques these various sources describe are not comic-booksadism; they are not the gruesome medieval tortures of Saddam. In fact,they are coolly modern tortures, designed to leave no physical marksthat could be proffered as evidence against the regimes that use them.They have been used by democracies that want to get what they believeare the fruits of torture while avoiding all physical evidence of it.As the sloganin Iraq’s Camp Nama put it, “No blood, no foul.” But torture is notdefined in law or morality by the production of blood or by anyspecific technique—that would simply invite governments to devisetechniques other than those prohibited. Torture is defined by theimposition of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” to thepoint when a human being can bear it no longer and tells hisinterrogators something—true or untrue—to stop what cannot be endured.That’s torture, in plain English. It was the clear goal of the policyyou set in motion—and implemented with great determination across theworld in ships and secret sites, at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram inAfghanistan, throughout interrogation centers in Iraq.
At the same time, though, you expressed what seemed to me to begenuine public revulsion at the techniques you authorized. On June 26,2003, the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, you stated:
I call on all governments to join with the United States and thecommunity of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, andprosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent othercruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak outagainst torture in all its forms and to make ending torture anessential part of their diplomacy. You did not parse torture narrowly here. You were opposed to it in“all its forms.” You also called for barring “other cruel and unusualpunishment.” When four U.S. soldiers were captured early in the Iraq conflict, you stated:
I expect them to be treated, the POWs, I expect tobe treated humanely, just like we’re treating the prisoners that wehave captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisonerswill be treated as war criminals. In 2004, after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, you told al-Hurra,the U.S.-sponsored Arabic television station, “This is not America.America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating peoplewith respect.” You went on to say: “The people of Iraq must understandthat I view those practices as abhorrent.”
Then how could you have authorized them? Maybe it was unclear to youat the time that most of the gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraibdepicted techniques that you and your defense secretary authorized.This is an explanation in some ways, even if it is not an excuse.Photos can jar us into recognition of reality when words fail. Most ofus hearing of “stress positions” or “long-time standing” or “harshtechniques” do not visualize what these actually are. They sound mildenough in the absence of further inquiry. Those photographs did us alla terrible favor in that respect: they removed any claim of deniabilityas to what these techniques mean. And yet you responded to Abu Ghraibby extending the techniques revealed there and codifying them in law,in the Military Commissions Act, for use by the CIA. Youradministration ordered up memos in your second term to perpetuate theseabuses. It is hard to escape the conclusion that you were dissemblingin your initial claim of abhorrence and shock; or were in denial; orwere not in control of your own administration.
I don’t believe you were lying. I believe you were genuinelyhorrified. But that means you now need to confront the denial thatallowed you somehow to ignore what you directly authorized andcommanded: using dogs to terrorize prisoners; stripping detainees nakedand hooding them; isolating people in windowless cells for weeks andeven months on end; freezing prisoners to near-death and reviving themand repeating the hypothermia; contorting prisoners into stresspositions that create unbearable pain in the muscles and joints;cramming prisoners into upright coffins in painful positions withminimal air; near-drowning, on a waterboard, of human beings—in one case 183 times—evenafter they have cooperated with interrogators. Those Abu Ghraibprisoners standing on boxes, bent over with their cuffed hands tiedbehind them to prison bars? You authorized that. The prisoner being led aroundby Lynndie England on a leash, like a dog? You authorized that, too,and enforced it in at least one case, that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, inGuantánamo Bay.
In defending these policies since you left office, you have insistedthat all of these techniques were legal. But one of the key lawyers whoprovided your legal defense, John Yoo, is on recordas saying that your inherent executive power allowed you to order thelegal crushing of an innocent child’s testicles if you believed that itcould get intelligence out of his father. Yoo also favored a definitionof torture that allowed literally anything to be done to a helplessprisoner short of causing death or the permanent loss of a major organ.The Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture offerblanket legal bans on anything that even looks like torture. Yoo set upa mirror image: a blanket legal permission to do anything abusive to aprisoner, hedged only by the need not to kill him. If that is yourdefense of the legality of torture, it is a profoundly weak one.
But leave the question of legality aside. Skilled lawyers can argueanything. Examine the moral and ethical question. Could any moralperson who saw the abuse of human beings at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, CampCropper, Camp Nama, and uncounted black sites across the globe and atsea believe it was in compliance with America’s “respect” and “law andfreedom”? As president, your job was not to delegate moralresponsibility for these acts, but to take moral responsibility forthem. You said a decade ago: “Once you put your hand on the Bible andswear in [to public office], you must set a high standard and beresponsible for your own actions.”
The point of this letter, Mr. President, is to beg you to finallytake responsibility for this stain on American honor and this burden ona war we must win. It is to plead with you to own what happened underyour command, and to reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminaldestruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizationsused to pretend that none of this happened. It happened. You once said,“I’m worried about a culture that says … ‘If you’ve got a problem blamesomebody else.’” I am asking you to stop blaming others for theconsequences of decisions you made.
|
人权, 伊拉克, 关塔纳摩, 布什, 美国, 人权, 伊拉克, 关塔纳摩, 布什, 美国, 人权, 伊拉克, 关塔纳摩, 布什, 美国
|