What Change?

Concurrent with UN Committee Against Torture interrogation of US delegates.

A treaty ban on cruel treatment will restrict how the United States may treat prisoners in certain places abroad, the Obama administration is expected to tell the United Nations on Wednesday, according to officials. That interpretation would change a disputed Bush administration theory that the cruelty ban does not apply abroad.

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An American delegation will unveil the administration’s position in Geneva on Wednesday in a presentation before the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The panel, which monitors compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, has asked whether the United States still takes the Bush-era view.

  NYT

Oh, that sounds good. But what’s that qualification “certain places”?

The Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships and aircraft in international waters and airspace.

[While “the Geneva Conventions separately require wartime prisoners to be treated humanely”,] the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site” prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there.

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The administration is also taking a nuanced approach to the related question of whether the Convention Against Torture is displaced by the laws of war in armed conflicts. Its theory, developed for the presentation this week in Geneva, says that both bodies of law apply at the same time to wartime prisons, but if a situation arose in which they clashed, the laws of war would trump because they are more specialized for that situation.

So, really, then, we can still torture. No worries. It’s only “a few folks.” .