Center for International Policy

Gonzales on Torture
Wayne S. Smith
3/9/05

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' assurances on renditions, as reported in the article by Jeff Smith in The Washington Post on March 8, are at once contradictory and ineffectual. First he says that U.S. policy is not to send detainees "to countries where we believe or we know that they're going to be tortured."

But it is a matter of record that in its renditions program, the CIA has sent detainees to Syria, Egypt and various other places where we know full well they practice torture.

In direct contradiction to his first statement, then, Gonzales adds that if a country has a history of torture, the US would seek additional assurances that it would not be used against the detainees we transfer there!

Ah, so we do send detainees to countries we know to have a history of torturing prisoners! More, Gonzales goes on to admit that we of course "can't fully control" what other countries do. In other words, the so-called assurances we get from them (if in fact we even ask for or get any at all) are worthless.

Gonzales' statements, more than anything else, make it clear that the Administration is fully aware that detainees we are shipping to third countries may be tortured. But coming from a man who back in 2002 at least initially endorsed a memo stating that "certain acts may be cruel inhuman and degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall with [the] proscription against torture," what else would we expect?