Transcript
STUART TAYLOR: In a nutshell, this panel is about locking up suspected terrorists and seeking intelligence from them, sometimes potentially life-saving intelligence, through coercive interrogation, with the questions of torture and quasi-torture that that raises with the clash between some people's perception of our security needs and other people's perception of our legal constraints and probably more important than the legal constraints, what's the right policy about how tough you can be in interrogating people when the information you're seeking from them isn't just about trying to convict someone of a crime. It's about trying to prevent perhaps a bombing.
Now, President Bush, of course, has been saying "we do not torture." But some people don't think it's that simple. And in just a survey of recent headlines, before we get into the panel, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, was followed around Europe last week by people angry about reports of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, where high-level Al Qaeda suspects are questioned. There are long-term negotiations going on between Senator McCain and his allies on the one hand, and the Administration on the other hand, including Vice President Cheney.
Senator McCain wants to have a new law that limits interrogation rules more than current law does. It's often been misreported in the New York Times and other papers as being that McCain is trying to ban torture. In fact, torture is already banned by criminal law and international statute.
This is about a category of interrogation techniques that's classified as a little bit short of torture, but not very nice, called cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment.
The action in Congress this week is that probably the Defense Department Authorization bill will go through this week or soon, and the McCain Amendment, which has great support, will probably be on it, and another amendment in which Senator Graham has—Senator Lindsay Graham has gotten support, made a compromise with Senator Carl Levin, called the Graham-Levin-Kyle Amendment. Senator Kyle that doesn't deal with questioning; it deals with detention and what sort of procedures are necessary to justify long-term detention of suspected Al Qaeda people.
The British House of Lords last week had an important decision in which they said basically torture is never right and information gleaned through torture is never admissible in our courts.
There were further reports last week about a captured suspect named al-Libi, who said, while under interrogation in Egypt, to which he had been transported by the CIA I think, he said that he was the main source of the Administration's claims that there were close ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in terms of chemical warfare training and the like; information that proved to be incorrect.
There's a debate between Charles Krauthammer in the Weekly Standard and Andrew Sullivan in the New Republic. Krauthammer says a nuclear bomb about to go off in New York City. You have the guy who knows where it is. Do you—it's a moral imperative to torture him in a case like this, says Krauthammer. Sullivan disagrees.
The continuing fighting about military commissions. This week we'd had a report that there's a deal near on the McCain Amendment, but Senator Graham was on TV yesterday, saying that there isn't a deal in sight yet on his amendment.
And so there's a lot going on, and both Left and Right are unhappy with the McCain—I'm sorry—with the Graham-Levin Amendment and the Administration has been very unhappy with the McCain Amendment.
So we have—it's very fortunate that we've got four panelists who are among the leading experts on this, covering a diversity of points of view.
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