MAS Freedom Maintains Stand Against Torture!

As part of our ongoing campaign against all forms of torture and torture rendition committed anywhere, including those committed by operatives of the U.S. government, MAS Freedom (MASF), as the civic and human rights advocacy entity of the Muslim American Society (MAS), joins with other members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) in demanding an end to all forms of torture used by the U.S. operatives, and especially the Central Intelligence Agency.



The "new" policy on torture announced by President Bush last week does not address the ongoing abuses of hundreds of Muslims held prisoner at the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba. Nor does it categorically and completely abolish all forms of interrogation that are categorized as torture by international law.



We ask our supporters to contact their elected representatives to demand that all - and not merely some - forms of torture be completely outlawed.



On Friday, President Bush issued an executive order governing CIA interrogation techniques that keeps the door open to torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees in American custody.



More than three years after we learned about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Americans still don't know what kinds of practices are happening in our name.



What this country needed from the White House was a clear statement of rules that embody America's values and high moral standards. Instead, it got a confusing and opaque double standard shot through with loopholes and equivocations. This failure to articulate a single standard of humane treatment will perpetuate a policy of official cruelty, undermine the rule of law, and increase the risk to American service members, now and in future wars.



While the U.S. military has publicly embraced clear rules in a new Army Field Manual that explicitly prohibits the kinds of abuses previously authorized by the administration – this new executive order undermines those standards by failing to take abusive techniques off the table for the CIA.



The order does not clearly and specifically end illegal practices: so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques", which included water boarding, stress positions, hypothermia, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and isolation, and holding prisoners in secret CIA "black sites" in order to keep them outside the reach of the law. Instead, it allows the Director of the CIA to make his own decision about what's legal and what isn't.



Worst of all, the President's misguided interrogation policy increases the risk to American soldiers. As a group of 49 military leaders wrote last year about the Geneva Convention standards:



"If any agency of the U.S. government is excused from compliance with these standards, or if we seek to redefine what Common Article 3 requires, we should not imagine that our enemies will take notice of the technical distinctions when they hold U.S. prisoners captive. If degradation, humiliation, physical and mental brutalization of prisoners is decriminalized or considered permissible under a restrictive interpretation of Common Article 3, we will forfeit all credible objections should such barbaric practices be inflicted upon American prisoners."