Bush, Obama and torture

The NYT reported last week that the US is increasingly relying on foreign allies to capture, detain and interrogate terrorist suspects.

Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, has a good article in the Washington Post tracing the strategy of Bush and Obama on torture.

He argues the same thing as this blog argued yesterday, namely, that even though Guantanamo detainees have received more legal protections over time, this has caused the Bush and Obama administrations to merely evade those restrictions by sending fewer detainees to Guantanamo and more of them to other prisons which offer fewer legal protections, like Bagram and foreign prisons under the supervision of allies' intelligence services.

Goldsmith writes: "But closing Guantanamo or bringing American justice there does not end the problem of terrorist detention. It simply causes the government to address the problem in different ways. A little-noticed consequence of elevating standards at Guantanamo is that the government has sent very few terrorist suspects there in recent years. Instead, it holds more terrorists -- without charge or trial, without habeas rights, and with less public scrutiny -- at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Or it renders them to countries where interrogation and incarceration standards are often even lower.

The cat-and-mouse game does not end there. As detentions at Bagram and traditional renditions have come under increasing legal and political scrutiny, the Bush and Obama administrations have relied more on other tactics. They have secured foreign intelligence services to do all the work -- capture, incarceration and interrogation -- for all but the highest-level detainees. And they have increasingly employed targeted killings, a tactic that eliminates the need to interrogate or incarcerate terrorists but at the cost of killing or maiming suspected terrorists and innocent civilians alike without notice or due process."