Olivia Ward, Toronto Star foreign affairs reporter wrote:
some in the United States and abroad are doing the math and demanding an accounting. They reject the argument that the horrific 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington excuse the shredding of the rule of law that came with the "war on terror."
They say the legitimization of torture, the trampling of civil liberties, the violation of international law, and a dubious declaration of war that claimed more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi lives are not just miscalculations but crimes.
War crimes, in fact. "This administration did more than commit crimes," argues Scott Horton, an expert on international law and contributing editor of Harper's magazine. "It waged war against the law itself."
[...]
So the dilemma remains: can a country that has allowed the rule of law to be flouted continue as a credible democracy, setting an example to ordinary citizens and claiming the moral high ground in the international community?
"The fact that a huge slough of people were engaged in torture and conspiracy to torture, with impunity, says something about the rule of law in this country," laments Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "If we think we need to torture someone for any reason we'll do that. What does that say to any police precinct?"
Or to America: "I'm very pessimistic on what I considered an emerging sense of fundamental rights," he says. "In some ways civilization has been set back at least 100 years."
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THE ARGUMENT IS that the Bush Administration's "war on terror" prompted skewing of intelligence that led to war in Iraq, an operation that cost not only blood but treasure, draining an estimated $3 trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars; that it also created homeland surveillance programs not seen since the witch-hunts of the anti-communist McCarthy era; and that the administration enabled "rendition" flights of terrorism suspects like Canadian Maher Arar to countries where they could be tortured, and that it created secret "black sites" where suspects were held and interrogated. Those suspected of terrorist links could be seized and brought before military tribunals, their constitutional rights suspended.
Of these excesses, torture has had the most traction in legal circles, and seems most likely to bring scrutiny, if not justice, to some members of the Bush administration.
British international lawyer Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team: Uncovering War Crimes in the Land of the Free, spent months interviewing those he says created a regime of abusive interrogation.
He concluded the lawyers who advised Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others, were guilty of giving the unsound advice that terrorism suspects had no right to protection under international law, a view that the U.S. Supreme Court overruled in 2006.
By that time, Sands contends, a "torture team" had made abuses systematic, eliminating the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, the 1984 treaties prohibiting torture, and even the army's own Field Manual.
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Last spring, a Spanish court began a criminal investigation of six former Bush officials on suspicion of aiding and abetting torture. Italy has convicted 23 Americans, mainly CIA operatives, in absentia, for kidnapping a Muslim cleric from Milan in 2003 and sending him to allegedly be torture in Egypt.
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the overarching principle remains: "we must hold those responsible for torture accountable. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Perhaps we can deter future conduct if we send a message to the world that torturers, like the pirates of old, are enemies of all humankind and will be brought to justice no matter what their power or high office."
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