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 News from Around the Americas | December 2005 
Rice: U.S. Torture of Prisoners Banned
 David Holley - LATimes
| | Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addresses the media during a NATO foreign ministers meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels December 8, 2005. (Francois Lenoir/Reuters) |
Moscow — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared in Kiev today that the rules of the U.N. Convention Against Torture apply to Americans overseas, and that this includes a ban against inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.
"As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT, which prohibits, of course, cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside the United States," Rice said at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital, in comments later posted on the State Department website.
It was not clear to what degree Rice's comments marked a change in U.S. policy or possible infighting within the Bush administration over how to respond to suspicions that the United States mistreats terrorism suspects during interrogations overseas.
When asked in Washington whether Rice had stated a new U.S. policy for the treatment of detainees abroad, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said, according to Associated Press: "It's existing policy."
President Bush has previously asserted that the U.S. does not torture prisoners overseas and that it follows international conventions on the treatment of prisoners.
However, the Bush administration also has argued that the U.N. torture convention's ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners does not apply to Americans working outside U.S. territory.
The White House has opposed an amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would set new anti-torture restrictions barring "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners by all U.S. personnel in all circumstances.
Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Congress to at least exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the tougher rules, which passed the Senate on a 90-9 vote in October. McCain is a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who endured torture.
CIA interrogators at overseas locations reportedly have been permitted to use interrogation techniques banned for use by the U.S. military. The McCain amendment would make the Army Field Manual the authority on interrogation techniques for all U.S. government agencies.
The administration, arguing that existing laws and regulations are adequate to prevent the torture of prisoners, has expressed concern that the adoption of the amendment could signal to detainees that they had little to fear during interrogations. Officials have been in negotiations with McCain to seek a compromise on his measure, which has not been passed by the full Congress.
Rice began her European tour engulfed by criticism of the United States over reports that CIA planes used airports on the continent as stopovers while transporting prisoners to secret interrogation sites. Rice has defended the U.S. activities as having helped protect Europeans from terrorism.
Suspicions about the behavior of U.S. personnel abroad have been fueled by the revelation of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the denial of U.S. civilian court trials to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and the acknowledged American policy of "extraordinary renditions," in which terrorism suspects are seized in one country and flown to another nation for interrogation.
One high-profile case that Rice has been confronted with on her European tour is that of Khaled Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent. He filed a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Virginia alleging that U.S. intelligence operatives mistakenly abducted him in December 2003 and held him for five months, subjecting him to "torture and other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment."
On Tuesday, without addressing the Masri case directly, Rice said at a news conference in Berlin that "any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it does, we will do everything we can to rectify them."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that she understood the comment to apply to Masri. |
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