Treatment of “detainees” and “enemy combatants” under the Bush administration following the attacks of September 11, 2001, returned to the news last week with the release of the previously classified, 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report on Torture and the Dept. of Justice’s announcement that it would investigate abuses beyond those sanctioned by the previous administration.

Enough has been written elsewhere about the contents of the highly-redacted CIA report and the limited scope of the Dept. of Justice Investigation; suffice it to say that the matter of “enhanced interrogation techniques” remains disturbingly controversial among some elements of the American public and continues to be portrayed as a legitimate debate in the media.

There should be no controversy here. Humane treatment of prisoners is settled national and international law.

The abuses that occurred were not the actions of a few “bad apples” as earlier investigations concluded. These were not fraternity pranks, nor were were they committed by people under stress letting off steam. These practices were officially sanctioned at the highest level of government, after the fact and in response to the expressed concerns of those carrying out the abuses that what they were doing was illegal and wrong.

Referring to prisoners as “detainees” or “enemy combatants” does not remove them from the protections the Geneva Conventions. Calling abusive practices “enhanced interrogation techniques” does not change the fact that they are and have been internationally recognized as torture and prosecuted as such in the past.

Proponents of abusive practices have attempted to change the subject from human rights and legality to one of effectiveness, claiming that sanctioned techniques prevented additional terrorist attacks. Yet, the overwhelming evidence indicates that torture is not effective, and in fact, leads to false information and false confessions.

Constitutional lawyer, civil rights litigator, author and well-known blogger, Glenn Greenwald, has been covering the issue of prisoner abuse in depth since it was revealed in 2004 and has been critical of both the Bush and Obama administrations for not treating it as the serious matter it is.

In a salon.com article published last week he brings additional historical insights to the argument for humane treatment of prisoners and against justifications that the past administration’s sanctioning of abusive practices made them legal.

In his 1795 essay, which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Can that be any clearer?  Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king” and “in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”  And in his Dissertations, he also wrote:

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto. . . .

For anyone who believes in the basic principles of the founding, the fact that these acts of torture are illegal — felonies — ought to end the discussion about whether they were justified.

The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists — barely human — and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law.  Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty “must guard even his enemy from oppression.”  Could the contrast be any more stark?

Civilized nations long ago recognized the inhumanity of torturous practices and outlawed them. Nothing, not the September 11 attacks nor weak justifications borne out of fear can alter that without undermining the importance of law and stepping backward into a less civilized world in which we all lose a bit of our own humanity.