Torture Becomes a Matter of Definition
WASHINGTON — The question Democratic senators put to Condoleezza Rice last week seemed easy enough to answer: Did the secretary of State nominee consider interrogation practices such as "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he will drown, to be torture?
She declined to answer.
"I'm not going to speak to any specific interrogation techniques," Rice said, adding that it was up to the Justice Department to define torture.
About the same time, senators on another committee were asking nearly identical questions and getting nearly identical answers from Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush's choice for attorney general.
The back-to-back confirmation flare-ups spotlight a problem the Bush administration faces in its policies for detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects.
In the months since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the administration has insisted that America does not and will not use torture. At the same time, the government has tried to preserve maximum leeway in the interrogation of terrorism suspects by not drawing a clear line between where rough treatment ends and torture begins.
"What the administration is saying is we're not going to torture people," said John C. Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor who, as a deputy assistant attorney general during Bush's first term, worked on torture policies.
"What the administration does not want to say, and I think for good reasons too, is what methods the United States might or might not use short of torture."
Opponents say it is a moral, political and tactical mistake for the United States to blur that line. They charge that the administration, while condemning outright torture, deliberately has sought loopholes in laws and treaties that would allow U.S. intelligence officers to use extreme interrogation methods on terrorism suspects held abroad.
To protest the administration's Iraq and anti-terrorism policies -- and what they charged was the evasiveness of Rice and Gonzales under questioning -- Democratic senators have delayed both confirmation votes until this week.
As a result, the full Senate likely will debate the definition of torture in a session that could embarrass the administration and provide fodder for its international critics.
Ambiguity on prisoner treatment is causing discomfort among some of the administration's allies. Current and former military officers in particular fear it will result in the mistreatment of captured American soldiers.
