SAN FRANCISCO -- The American Bar Assn. voted Monday to urge Congress to override a Bush administration order authorizing the CIA to use interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, and sensory and sleep deprivation.
The nation's largest lawyers' organization also called on Congress to give federal judges more oversight of government efforts to use the "state secrets" doctrine to throw out legal challenges to anti-terrorism programs.
The first resolution dealt with an executive order the Bush administration adopted last month allowing the CIA to use "enhanced" methods of questioning. Barbara Berger Opotowsky, executive director of the New York City Bar Assn., said the order was clearly "inconsistent with U.S. obligations" under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which requires humane treatment of detainees.
"The use of official cruelty has repeatedly been shown to be far from the best means of extracting truthful information," said Opotowsky, who proposed the resolution. She noted that a U.S. Army field manual on intelligence interrogations issued last September barred the controversial interrogation techniques that will be available to the CIA.
"Unfortunately, the executive order sets a lower standard for the CIA," she said.
Memphis lawyer Albert Harvey, a retired Marine major general, also spoke in favor of the resolution, which passed by voice vote with only a single "nay" registering in the large meeting hall at the Moscone Center here.
"When we put our troops in harm's way, we expect other countries to treat our soldiers humanely. We can do no less," said Harvey, who heads the Bar Assn.'s Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
Like Opotowsky, Harvey quoted an article recently published by P.X. Kelley, a former Marine commandant, and Robert Turner of the University of Virginia's Center on Law and National Security, who in the past have been supportive of the administration's war on terrorism. In this instance, however, they wrote that they could not "in good conscience" support the executive order, saying it affords the CIA "carte blanche to engage in 'willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.' "
By passing the resolution, the ABA's 546-member House of Delegates paves the way for its officials to speak out in favor of legislation, testify in Congress or submit friend-of-the-court briefs. The ABA has 413,000 members nationwide.
