Panel opposes torture during discussion at MSU

Elshafei Mohamed knows about the prison at Guantanamo Bay almost first-hand.

A videographer from his hometown in Sudan, who was captured in Afghanistan, has been held there for five years.

Mohamed, an artist based in Jackson, displayed part of a work of art dedicated to the videographer, Sami Elahj, during a panel discussion on torture held Tuesday night at the MSU College of Law.

“The young students and professors … can speak on behalf of others and they can bring the truth,” he said to the group of more than 30 people attending.

Brian Clark, an economics junior at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, said he drove to East Lansing to hear expert opinions on torture.

“There’s probably a lot of misconceptions about it,” he said. “I’m pretty much staunchly against it, so I wanted to see if anyone was for it and the arguments for it.”

However, the panelists all opposed torture, though they talked about their opposition from different angles.

Catherine Grosso, an MSU assistant professor of law, discussed three cases in which the Supreme Court declared torture unconstitutional.

“The court held that to be admissible, a confession must be completely free and voluntary,” she said.

She cited some of the worst examples of detainee abuse in recent years, including putting suspects in small boxes and handcuffing them to ceilings to keep them from sleeping, but said even long rounds of questioning have been declared unconstitutional.

“Don’t start with the waterboarding, start with the sleep deprivation,” Grosso said.

Susan Waltz, a former chair of Amnesty International’s International Executive Committee and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said the United States also bound itself to obey international law by signing on to the Convention Against Torture. The convention stipulated torture would not be allowed under special circumstances and the ban on torture had to extend to all areas under a country’s control.

James Woods, a chemistry senior who attended, said before the panel began there are certain circumstances when torture is acceptable.

“It’s good to keep an open mind and look at all the different views on the subject of torture,” he said. “I believe torture is acceptable only if you’re 100 percent sure a person is a terrorist and all other means of extracting information have been exhausted, but not as a general interrogation method.”

The panelists also discussed what the United States should do next about the torture issue.

“I was ready to say ‘Let us move on to other things’ (but) I have since changed my views,” Waltz said. “We have lawyers who tried to circumvent the laws of our land and international law.”

She said the U.S. Department of lawyers who wrote memos redefining torture should at least be sanctioned or debarred, if the government does not conduct a full investigation.

Grosso said President Barack Obama’s decision to rescind executive orders authorizing torture doesn’t go far enough.

“The Obama administration may have stopped them for now, but it has not made sure they will never happen again,” she said.