N.C. revisits torture ban

RALEIGH -- State legislators are still hoping to get a law on the books banning torture in North Carolina.

This week, legislators, including Reps. Paul Luebke of Durham and Linda Coleman of Knightdale, submitted a bill to create statutory offenses of "torture" and "enforced disappearance."

A similar bill, "North Carolina No Place for Torture Act," languished in the House last session until Luebke moved it to the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission for study. The 30-member commission makes recommendations to the state legislature about sentencing laws.

Luebke said the impetus for the bill was the state Attorney General's refusal to investigate Johnston County-based Aero Contractors' role in allegedly helping the CIA ferry terrorism suspects to secret prisons overseas for interrogation and possible torture.

"The Attorney General's office said they were unable to ask the SBI to investigate Aero Contractors because there wasn't a torture statute," Luebke said.

So lawmakers began crafting a law. Luebke thinks the new bill is stronger because the language was fine-tuned and approved by the sentencing commission's wide membership of judges, sheriffs, district attorneys and other lawyers across the state.

The sentencing commission came down hard against torture. Not only is torture "not who we are," but it betrays American military personnel who might become prisoners of war and be at risk of torture themselves, said Locke Clifford, a commission member and a Greensboro lawyer.

But John Madler, the commission's associate policy director, said that the recommendations represent neither an endorsement of or opposition to the bill.

"The recommendations are for technical issues only," he said.

For instance, the commission recommended the offense of torture be a felony two classes less severe than what lawmakers had originally suggested.

Still, anti-torture activists hail the bill as a big step forward.

"The real point in getting this bill sponsored is to put some elected officials on record in this state for saying this is wrong," said Christina Cowger of N.C. Stop Torture Now.

Proponents said they were not aware of any other state with a similar torture ban. Several laws at the federal level prohibit torture, such as the Detainee Treatment Act. But the enforcement of such laws has hit stumbling blocks, especially when the CIA is involved.

A 437-page report, released Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department, disclosed dissension between agencies when prisoner mistreatment has been alleged. In 2002, for instance, some FBI agents tried to document accusations of prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay in a "war crimes file." The agents expressed concerns about the military and CIA intimidating inmates with dogs, parading them nude before female soldiers and shackling prisoners to the floor for hours in extreme cold or heat. But a senior FBI official ordered the file closed in 2003 because "investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the FBI's mission."

Last year, the Bush administration also invoked the state secrets privilege to boot out the case of a German citizen of Lebanese descent, Khaled El-Masri, from the U.S. court system. El-Masri's lawyers allege he had been abducted in 2003, flown to Afghanistan in an Aero-operated plane and abused. The CIA had mistakenly identified him as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers, they said.

Khaled al-Maqtari, another released detainee, has recently come forward with a similar story. Al-Maqtari said he was arrested in 2004 in Fallujah, detained in Abu Ghraib for nine days and then flown by jet plane to Afghanistan, where he was interrogated and tortured. Nine days after his arrest, a Gulfstream V executive jet operated by Aero Contractors took a similar route from Baghdad to Kabul, according to Amnesty International.