Detainee Abuse: Levin speech at World Affairs Council: 03/22/07
Thank you, Katherine Van Hollen, for that kind introduction. It is a privilege to be with the World Affairs Council as you focus on education tonight. By bringing international affairs into the lives of young Americans and by continuing to educate and engage Americans of all ages, you strengthen our democracy.
I want to thank you all for this Global Service Award. Last year, you made a wonderful choice by recognizing the men and women of our armed forces, and I am humbled to be in their company in this manner. One of the most rewarding parts of my work as the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee is spending time with our troops. Our nation is divided on war policies but we are united in support of our troops. They deserve the finest training, equipment, family support, and medical care we can provide. They also deserve wise policies that honor their sacrifice.
We are seeing today in Iraq that there are limits to what even the very best military can accomplish. I have argued for a long time that there needs to be a political solution among the Iraqi leaders and that the best leverage we have with those leaders is to end our open-ended military commitment which allows the Iraqi leaders to fiddle while Baghdad burns. Beginning a phased reduction of American troops in four months would hopefully put adequate pressure on Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement, which is the only hope of ending the civil war and maximizing the chances for success in Iraq. Even Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has acknowledged: “The crisis is political, and the ones who can stop the cycle of…bloodletting of innocents are the [Iraqi] politicians.”
America’s security requires that we use our full strength as a nation, not just our military might. So tonight, I’d like to focus on some other sources of power – the power of our ideals and values, the loss to our security when we violate those ideals and values, and the power for good which would be unleashed if we regain our standing in the world. I also want to discuss one particular issue which is undermining our security in a way no military can make up for – the abusive treatment of detainees under American control.
The hard truth is that we need allies. We need allies to confront the radical leaders of Iran. We need allies to deal with the threat from North Korea. And most importantly, we need allies to defeat the threat from religious fanatics who despise modernity and the West and who use terror as their weapon.
Although we wouldn’t hesitate to use force unilaterally if we face an imminent threat, harnessing the power of international institutions, such as the United Nations and NATO, is important to our security. Meeting the threats we face – including international terrorism, rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction, and failed states among others – requires cooperation among like-minded nations and compromises with nations we don’t like at all.
Today, the struggle against extremism is being undermined by how America is viewed by the world. Because of the unilateral and reckless policies of this Administration and the dramatic and vivid reports of our abusing prisoners, America’s standing in the world has taken a nosedive since the world embraced us after 9/11. In a 2007 international BBC poll, only 29 percent of people around the world said the United States is a generally positive influence in the world.
That number should be setting off alarm bells in Washington because we need the goodwill of the world for our own security. That’s not some mushy-headed intellectual musing. It is hard-headed pragmatism. We need that goodwill to deal with the greatest threat we face – terrorism. Information is the key to preventing terrorist attacks. One person halfway around the world overhearing a terrorist plotting an attack could prevent the mass murder of our citizens if that citizen will report it. He’s less likely to do so if he views us as an arrogant bully.
Last week, I visited with our veterans at a Michigan VA hospital. I stopped and asked one veteran who was lying in his bed: What can we do to help you? And do you know what he said? “Win back the respect of people around the world for America.” That veteran understands that the erosion of support for America weakens us in a way that military force can not remedy.
While the tarnishing of America’s image is partly the result of the decision to go to war with Iraq and the way it has been conducted, the problem goes much deeper. As Steven Kull, the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, stated: “The thing that comes up repeatedly is not just anger about Iraq. The common theme is hypocrisy. The reaction tends to be – You were a champion of a certain set of rules. Now you are breaking your own rules.”
America at its best is a beacon for human rights and human liberty, and that’s how we like to see ourselves. But much of the world sees us in a very different way when we fail to live up to the standards we profess. To much of the world, the symbol of American values is no longer the Statue of Liberty; it is that horrific photograph of a hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib, standing on a box, strung up with wires.
In 2002, the Administration decided to permit the use of aggressive, indeed abusive, interrogation techniques that had previously been considered inconsistent with our laws, our international commitments, and our shared American values. On August 1, 2002, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued what’s now known as the “torture memo,” which stated that for physical pain to amount to torture it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
That in turn led to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorizing military interrogators to keep detainees naked, deprive them of light and auditory stimuli, place them in so called “stress positions,” and exploit their fears, such as a fear of dogs. Although the Rumsfeld authorization was later rescinded, the President himself has acknowledged that the United States maintained secret prisons outside the purview of international monitoring, and he has made public reference to “an alternative set of procedures” used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners in the secret program, which he characterized as “tough.”
And just in the last Congress, the Administration successfully persuaded a majority of my colleagues to:
- narrow the accepted definitions of “cruel and inhuman treatment”;
- authorize the Administration to unilaterally redefine its obligations under the Geneva Conventions;
- allow the use of hearsay and coerced testimony in criminal trials of detainees;
- insulate senior administration officials from accountability for detainee abuses;
- bar detainees from ever bringing any legal action challenging any aspect of their detention; and
- prohibit the courts from providing legal relief for detainees who are found to be improperly held.
In pursuing aggressive tactics, the Administration overruled the objections of the top military JAG officers about detainee treatment. It fought the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hamdan case, which declared that the Administration’s military commissions at Guantanamo Bay “violate both the [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the four Geneva Conventions.” And it opposed and successfully derailed the original, bipartisan version of the Military Commissions Act drafted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which met the Supreme Court’s standard in Hamdan and the Geneva Conventions’ requirements for trials.
For America’s standing to be restored we must adopt policies and procedures that reflect our values and international law. We must also insist on some accountability for abuses that have occurred. The standards for humane treatment in the revised Army Field Manual are a good first step, but they are not enough. Some of the legislation of the last two years, and the regulations written to implement that legislation, fail to provide a fair process for detainees. For example, a person can be detained for life as an enemy combatant without ever having had a lawyer or knowing what the evidence was against him, since that evidence can be totally classified.
We also need to get to the bottom of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The investigations to date of detainee abuse have left significant gaps. For instance, there has been inadequate accountability for the authorization by senior officials, both military and civilian, of inappropriate interrogation and detention techniques. As Chairman, one of my first actions was to create a new investigative staff at the Armed Services Committee, and that staff is building on my work in the last Congress to fill in the missing pieces of the detainee abuse story. The new Secretary of Defense has pledged that the Department will cooperate in this investigation.
As part of the Committee’s oversight on detainee issues, I traveled recently to Guantanamo with Senator Lindsey Graham to observe the hearing to determine the status of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (known as “KSM”) – to determine, in other words, if KSM is an enemy combatant. We viewed the proceeding on closed circuit television from an adjoining room.
In the course of the proceeding, a personal representative for KSM – not a lawyer – read a statement on KSM’s behalf, acknowledging, indeed proclaiming, his leadership in planning the 9/11 attacks and many other terrorist activities. KSM was asked by the tribunal president if this statement was accurate, and he replied in English that it was. It was clear that KSM wanted to record for history his part in a war of terror he has unabashedly waged.
KSM also presented a written statement alleging he was mistreated during his captivity by the CIA in the years prior to his arrival at Guantanamo. Unlike KSM’s confession, this statement was immediately classified and has not been released to the public or, as of now, to any of us.
It’s hard to care about due process for someone like KSM. But, as Senator Graham has said, it’s not about him. It’s about us. Senator Graham and I issued a statement on our return which committed us to review the hearing process and to explore possible ways to improve it through Congressional action.
There are many reasons not to tolerate torture – it’s morally wrong, it produces unreliable information, it violates domestic and international law, and it jeopardizes our own troops if they are captured. But there’s also this: people are less likely to believe that a confession was freely given if there have been abuses of detainees. Even with an admitted terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, I’m afraid the world will focus too much on how we treated him, not what, by his own words, he did to us. It is essential for our security that we and the world focus on understanding what KSM did, what he would do if released, what motivates the KSMs of the world, and what methods and capabilities they have and use. That focus gets blurred when serious allegations of torture get thrown into the mix.
America can be – and must always strive to be –the “shining city on a hill” that President Ronald Reagan described. But the sheen is gone in the eyes of much of the world. By understanding the credibility that comes to our actions when we work through international organizations and alliances and by returning to our highest ideals, we can regain that luster. We can – as that veteran in the VA hospital in Michigan urged me – “Win back the respect of people around the world for America,” and that is something we must do for the sake of the security of our nation.
Thank you.