{"id":16518,"date":"2012-09-28T06:50:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T14:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=16518"},"modified":"2012-09-28T06:53:10","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T14:53:10","slug":"would-romney-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/28\/would-romney-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Would Romney Torture?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Savage in the New York Times<\/em>, Election May Decide When Interrogation Amounts to Torture<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In one of his first acts,\u00a0President Obama<\/a>\u00a0issued an\u00a0executive order<\/a>\u00a0restricting interrogators to a list of nonabusive tactics approved in theArmy Field Manual<\/a>. Even as he embraced a hawkish approach to other counterterrorism issues \u2014 like drone strikes,\u00a0military commissions<\/a>, indefinite detention and the\u00a0Patriot Act<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Mr. Obama has stuck to that strict no-torture policy.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Mr. Romney\u2019s advisers have privately urged him to \u201crescind and replace President Obama\u2019s executive order\u201d and permit secret \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,\u201d according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum.<\/p>\n

While the memo is a policy proposal drafted by Mr. Romney\u2019s advisers in September 2011 \u2014 not a final decision by him \u2014 its detailed analysis dovetails with his rare and limited public comments about interrogation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now,\u201d he\u00a0said at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we run into the problem repeatedly met by those trying to predict what a Romney presidency would look like. He says he’d be more hawkish on Iran, but will he? He surrounds himself with neocons, but will he really seek to reshape the map of the Middle East through military force? It can be hard to parse through what are probably miscalculated GOP talking points and what some people argue would be a more measured, pragmatic Romney presidency.<\/p>\n

But we can only take the indications we have and it seems here like Romney knowingly signaled that he would reinstitute torture of terrorist suspects. [As a side note, Obama doesn’t have<\/a> a clean record on torture<\/a>, despite his early executive order against it.]<\/p>\n

The problem with this is that there is also every indication that Romney would adopt and perhaps expand the central policy that has made torture obsolete: drone wars. Obama’s embrace of drones to kill suspects in non-war zones<\/a> has replaced any pretense of locking them up without trial. Thus, torture in a Romney presidency would be as outdated a policy as it is in the Obama administration, and Romney’s public rubber stamp for torture was probably just election season rhetoric (like every thing else that comes out of his mouth).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlie Savage in the New York Times, Election May Decide When Interrogation Amounts to Torture: In one of his first acts,\u00a0President Obama\u00a0issued an\u00a0executive order\u00a0restricting interrogators to a list of nonabusive tactics approved in theArmy Field Manual. Even as he embraced a hawkish approach to other counterterrorism issues \u2014 like drone strikes,\u00a0military commissions, indefinite detention and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-16518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16518"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16524,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16518\/revisions\/16524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16518"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}