Will President Obama ignore bi-partison torture report?

The Bush administration engaged in illegal torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees, in violation of U.S. and international law.

Isn't that the same old worn out, unproven allegation of the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, and others rabid partisans?

No. It is the documented conclusion of a 600-page report issued last month, following a 2-year investigation by The Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment. The 11-member independent, bi-partisan, blue-ribbon panel was co-chaired by Asa Hutchinson, a former GOP Congressman from Arkansas, and James R. Jones, a former democratic congressman from Oklahoma and ambassador to Mexico under President Bill Clinton.

The panel unanimously concluded that American intelligence and military personnel used interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere that constituted torture. The group also concluded that U.S. forces conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties.

In the face of such conclusive evidence that members of the Bush administration engaged in illegal torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, how can President Barack Obama continue to hide his head in the sand and fail to investigate, and if warranted, prosecute, all those who violated the law?

The Constitution Project is hardly a bunch of left-wing conspiracy freaks. Established in 1997, it "brings together policy experts and legal practitioners from across the political spectrum to foster consensus-based solutions to the most difficult constitutional challenges of our time" and "to strengthen the rule of law through scholarship, advocacy, policy reform and public education initiatives."

"After conducting our own two-year investigation, weighing the credibility of all sources and studying the current public record, we have come to the regrettable, but unavoidable, conclusion that the United States did indeed engage in conduct that is clearly torture," Hutchinson, undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security under President Bush, said. "What sets the United States apart as a world leader, in addition to our military might, are our values and respect for the rule of law. All the available evidence led us to conclude that, for many of these detainees, the U.S. violated both international law and treaties and our own laws," Jones said, "greatly diminishing America's ability to forge important alliances around the world."

The Task Force was made up of former high-ranking officials with distinguished careers in the judiciary, Congress, the diplomatic service, law enforcement, the military, and other parts of the executive branch, as well as recognized experts in law, medicine and ethics, representing diverse political and ideological views. The report is based on a thorough examination of available public records and interviews with more than 100 people, including former detainees, military and intelligence officers, interrogators and policymakers. Task Force staff and members conducted on-the-ground fact-finding in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lithuania, Poland and the U.K., and also at Guantanamo Bay.

The group unanimously arrived at its conclusion by examining what constitutes torture in a number of historical and legal contexts. The U.S. State Department has characterized many of the techniques used against prisoners in U.S. custody in the post-9/11 era - including interrogation methods like waterboarding, stress positions, extended sleep deprivation and cramped confinement - as torture, abuse or cruel treatment when those same techniques were employed by foreign governments. U.S. courts have made similar findings, and the CIA, in an internal review, acknowledged that many of the interrogation techniques it employed were inconsistent with the U.S.'s own human rights positions.

The report concludes that much of the mistreatment that occurred at Guantánamo Bay, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere resulted directly from decisions made by the nation's highest civilian and military leaders, who took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban captives, and that the CIA could employ brutal interrogation techniques against certain "high-value" detainees.

Although Task Force unanimously acknowledged that it is important to set forth a historical account of how these decisions were made so that our nation will proceed differently in the future, President Obama has stubbornly insisted we should "look forward, not back." But the Constitution mandates that Obama "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The president is willfully violating that sworn duty by faithlessly refusing to enforce the Anti-Torture Act, 18 U.S.C. Section 2340A, the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. Section 2441, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified in 1992) and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, (ratified in 1994).

In fact, under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), each party to the treaty "shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures" to punish torture. Whereas here, after an examination of the evidence, the circumstances so warrant, the U.S. is required to arrest any person alleged to have violated CAT (Article 6.1) and to prosecute all acts of torture, as well as "attempts, complicity or participation" (Article 5. 2). Every day that Obama fails to investigate and prosecute torture, especially in the face of the conclusive evidence amassed by the Task Force, he is willfully violating CAT.

The report also criticizes other decisions Obama has made, particularly his ongoing concealment of the details about torture by the CIA and military, as well as his less-than-clear policy on drones. The panel urges the president to direct executive branch agencies to declassify as much evidence as possible - consistent with legitimate national security concerns, and with redactions only where needed to protect specific individuals, to honor specific diplomatic agreements - regarding the CIA's and military's abuse and torture of suspected terrorists in U.S. custody.

Specifically, the group called for declassification and public release of the recently adopted, but still secret, study of CIA interrogations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; the report of the Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies; all reports of the CIA's inspector general on the agency's interrogation, detention and transfer of detainees; and all investigations by the Department of Defense into abuses of detainees by Joint Special Operations Command Special Mission Unit Task Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We believe an honest, informed and open accounting of our government's handling of detainees in our war against terrorism will serve our country well in the future," Hutchinson said. President Obama should heed the recommendations of the Constitution Project. If he truly takes his oath of office seriously and does not want to become complicit in the crimes committed by his predecessor, Obama should immediately instruct his Justice Department to heed the recommendations of the report on torture, and use the comprehensive evidence on which it is based to investigate and prosecute every government official who broke the law.