Archive for Torture
Closing in on the Torturers
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a great article by Ray McGovern analyzing the recently released CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogation techniques and results. Mr. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 30 years, and offers an insider’s view into the controversy surrounding torture of terrorist suspects.
CIA Torture Guidelines Released
Posted by: | CommentsI’m really getting tired of seeing news about torture. Every new revelation sickens me. I’m not sure what to do, how to face this, how to confront the horror that is the U.S. government. I am complicit through my inaction. Who are the real enemies here? Those who were never convicted, never given trial, never confronted with evidence of crimes? Or those who convince us that this is all okay, that it was necessary, the ticking time bomb scenario necessitated this? This makes me crazy. I think immediate truth and reconciliation commissions should be formed, and the American public needs this in their face 24/7 until it is stopped permanently. NO MORE MONEY FOR A GOVERNMENT THAT TORTURES.
From the Washington Post, check this out:
“After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face — to get the detainee’s attention — followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or “walling,” which can be tried once “to make a point,” or repeated again and again.
“Twenty or thirty times consecutively” is permissible, the guidelines say, “if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question.” And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.”
“After slamming a detainee’s head against the plywood barrier multiple times, the interrogator could douse him with water; deprive him of toilet facilities and force him to wear a soiled diaper; or make him stand or kneel for long periods while shackled in a painful position. The captive could also be forced into a wooden box for up to 18 hours at a stretch.”
I like this…using soiled diapers. Wooden box…threaten wife and children, threaten with immediate death….all wonderful. You see, the torturers could “take the gloves off” and work in the “black world” where this was permissable, and no law held. No law regulated this because they said so.
“The CIA also counteracts the psychological effects of isolation by providing detainees with a wide variety of books, puzzles, paper and ’safe’ writing utensils, chess and checker sets, a personal journal, and access to DVD and VCR videotapes,” the document said.”
See…they were really being nice to these men held indefinitely without charge. DVDs, VCR, checkers!!! We were so nice to them!
US names CIA Torture Investigator and Propaganda Campaign Begins
Posted by: | CommentsJohn Durham has been appointed the US Special Prosecutor in charge of investigating accusations of torture by prisoners held in US custody. Accusations and allegations are more immediately dismissed by those drowning in fear and information overload, so pitching the story like this leads to a willful suspension of disbelief for the forseeable future. CIA abuse is “old news” and of course, a “few bad apples” spoiled the good times for everyone. If only we had never learned that our tax dollars go to men threatening to rape and kill the children (yeah, we know that the actual rape and murders happened too) of the presumed “bad guys”, then all would be right in the world.
Read the CIA report here: 2004 CIA Report
Check out this BBC article US Special Prosecutor Named in Torture Investigation
Note the following:
Nine signatories of a letter to Mr Holder said they were “deeply disappointed” at a decision that “could have a chilling effect on the work of the intelligence community”.
Of course this will be chilling only to those committing international war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some of the signatories to that letter were: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the minority whip; Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee; and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the judiciary committee.
Read this article for information about the Republican letter: GOP Senators Warn Holder against CIA Abuse Inquiry
Sweet. Those sworn to uphold the Constitution are “warning” the US Attorney General that an investigation into torture and war crimes will “leave the US open to attack”.
This next part would be laughable if it wasn’t so obviously a lie:
In their letter, the GOP lawmakers emphasized that the Justice Department had had the CIA report for more than five years, and that career prosecutors who previously reviewed the cases concluded that there was not enough evidence to warrant criminal prosecutions. “It is difficult to understand what rationale could drive the Justice Department to now reverse course, reopen a 5-year-old matter, and tarnish the careers, reputations and lives of intelligence community professionals,” the letter said.
Yes, of course, the Justice Department headed by Bush appointees, who signed off on the abuse and torture and killings, certainly found nothing surprising in the reports of the abuse, torture and killings. The “brave men” who tortured have really great “careers” to which they must return, to keep us safe from the terrorists they work actively to create. This is shameless and criminal. Let’s call out the traitors to the Constitution. What “reputation” does a man hold who threatens to kill the family members (including children) of our prisoners?
I’m pretty sure that a coup has occurred, and whether Bush or Obama stand as President makes no difference–the killing will continue, and with kid gloves, the US “Justice” Department will box around a few low level lackeys so the citizenry can feel a little better about themselves.
Report on CIA Interrogations Leaked
Posted by: | CommentsA long suppressed CIA report documents the torture of prisoners held by the U.S., including holding mock executions, threatening prisoners with electric drills, and threatening prisoners with the rape or death of family members.
Here are links to a few interesting stories. The Salon article contains a link directly to the CIA Report in PDF format. Much of it is redacted, but it makes for good reading.
Salon.com offers selections of the CIA Report here
Click Here to read an overview of the CIA report from the Guardian
Proof that America is a Sick Country
Posted by: | CommentsBy Dave Lindorff
8-24-2009
You see, here’s the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted things that America’s torturers have been doing, courtesy of President George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting average was pretty lousy.
According to even the Pentagon’s own reckoning, for example, probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number–probably the majority–weren’t even fighting anyone when they were captured. I’m sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people to get the reward money.
Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are learning were used by our side–things that make waterboarding sound like a walk in the park. We’re now getting confirmation of things that we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the worst yet–the threat to kill a captive’s children. And of course there is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up of captives who were simply killed during torture….
For the rest of this story, please go to:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11
Posted by: | CommentsBy Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
August 19, 2009
The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
Major Alexander’s attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. “It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights,” he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. “People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop,” he says. “They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped.”
In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the “ticking bomb” argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?
Major Alexander says he faced the “ticking time bomb” every day in Iraq because “we held people who knew about future suicide bombings”. Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. “It hardens their resolve. They shut up.” He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, “even if my mother was on a bus” with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.
A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.
Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. “Many of them had never been out of the States before,” he recalls. “When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim.” In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was “an old guard” of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The “old guard’s” methods, he says, were based on instilling “fear and control” in a prisoner.
He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are “based on relationship building and a degree of deception”. He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa’ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa’ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa’ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa’ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.
The objective of Major Alexander’s team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa’ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi’s associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.
What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa’ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. “He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa’ida,” he says.
In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama’s declaration against torture as “a historic victory”, though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, “If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?” His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.
The Truth: Americans Love Torture
Posted by: | CommentsToday, I am sad and disheartened. The myth of the United States being a beacon of hope and peace for the poor and oppressed of the world can no longer be sustained. I have taken careful note of the ability of most Americans to avoid admitting their fundamental love and approval for government sanctioned murder and torture. I am growing increasingly convinced that U.S. special interests require torture to achieve their ends, and that these interests have lobbied both the Congress and the Senate directly to prevent any serious inquiries into murder, assassination squads and government involvement in destruction of international treaties and human rights norms. Some evidence:
1) I sent the following message to my representative Tammy Baldwin, and Senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold on June 30, 2009 at 10:30pm:
I today read information that is shocking and sickening to my conscience. The June 22nd edition of The New Yorker Magazine (Jane Mayer is the author) has reported that the Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that the prisoner died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms in a hood, and suffered broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. Mayer notes that no CIA personnel have been criminally charged.
Further, recently released Justice memos contain numerous references to CIA medical personnel participating in coercive interrogation sessions.
I’m not sure what to do with this information. I am passing this on to you today to bring the issue of the United States role in torture to your attention again. I know that you have spoken out against this in the past, but I think we need a truth and reconciliation commission in place immediately so that Americans can face this and work through the implications of such behavior done in our name. Suppression of such information will only lead to further horrors executed in the name of securing our liberty. My conscience can not support any government that sanctions and indirectly supports such atrocities.
I think I would like to hear a plan from you for confronting and publicly working through this information, so that such horrors can be prevented in the future, and so those responsible are held accountable. I’m writing with great sadness today. Please let me know your thoughts about this.
Sincerely,
Matthew Carlson
Here is Rep. Baldwin’s response. I received this at 9:30am on July 1st! She “apologizes” for not getting this to me sooner! How would that have been possible? In any case, note that it is a form letter:
Dear Mr. Carlson:
Thank you for contacting me about the duty of Congress to hold the executive branch accountable. It is good to hear from you and I apologize for the delay in my response.
Over the past several years, serious questions were raised about the conduct of high ranking Bush/Cheney Administration officials in relation to some of the most basic elements of our democracy: respect for the rule of law, the principle of checks and balances, and the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The list of abuses of executive branch power was long, as were the Bush/Cheney Administration’s attempts to impede congressional oversight.
Like you, I believe that unchecked executive power invites abuse. I fully support efforts that hold the executive branch accountable to the Constitution and ensure that abuse of executive power does not occur again. On April 16, 2009, the United States Department of Justice released memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005, detailing techniques used for the interrogation of terrorism subjects. The gruesome details in these memos indicate that more needs to be done to declare that no American-even the President and the Vice President of the United States-is above the law.
You may be pleased to know that on May 8, 2009, I reintroduced the Executive Branch Accountability Act, H. Res. 417, calling on President Obama to reverse the damaging and illegal actions taken by the Bush/Cheney Administration and to collaborate with Congress to proactively prevent any further abuses of executive branch power. Specifically, the bill directs the President to:
w Fully investigate Bush/Cheney administration officials’ alleged crimes and hold them accountable for any illegal acts;
w Affirm that it is the sole legal right of Congress to declare war;
w Restore the writ of habeas corpus as an essential principle of our democracy; and
w Ensure that torture and rendition are uniformly prohibited under United States law.
Please know that I will keep your views in mind as I continue to press for expanded oversight of the executive branch by Congress.
Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let me know. As a security precaution, all mail sent to Congress is first irradiated. This process causes significant delays. To ensure the fastest response, I encourage all constituents who have access to the internet to contact me through my website at http://tammybaldwin.house.gov.
Sincerely,
Tammy Baldwin
Member of Congress
So…it took my House member staff about an hour to get this back to me (given that her office likely opens around 8am). Just yesterday, I received the following from the office of Senator Russ Feingold (Senators, being more important, take more than a month to reply):
Dear Mr. Carlson,
Thank you for contacting me with your views on President Bush and his administration. I appreciate hearing from you.
It is important that we learn the full extent of the wrongdoing of the Bush Administration. As President Obama and Attorney General Holder have said, nobody is above the law. There needs to be accountability for wrongdoing by the Bush Administration, including the illegal warrantless wiretapping and interrogation programs. I agree with you that we cannot simply sweep these assaults on the rule of law under the rug.
President Obama has stated that it is not his administration’s intention to prosecute those who acted reasonably and relied in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice. I have urged the President not to rule out investigations or prosecutions of those who authorized torture, or provided the legal justification for it. Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way. The final decision is up to the attorney general and the president, but I am hopeful that the Justice Department will take this matter very seriously.
I am pleased that President Obama chose to release memos produced by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that approved the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, and I agree with OLC’s action to officially withdraw these memos. More recently, news reports have indicated that the Attorney General is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate individuals who may have gone beyond the legal authorization for that program provided by the OLC. I sent a letter to the Attorney General on July 14, 2009, about this issue. I have enclosed a copy of that letter for your review.
I thought you might also be interested to know that in September 2008, I chaired a hearing in the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution entitled “Restoring the Rule of Law.” During the hearing, the Subcommittee heard testimony from legal experts and historians on what steps the president and Congress must take to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. The hearing was an effort to come up with a full range of recommendations for reestablishing appropriate checks and balances in a variety of areas, including wiretapping, interrogations, detention policy, executive privilege, government secrecy, privacy protections and Congressional oversight.
In addition to the testimony of the witnesses at the hearing, I solicited input from a number of other law professors, historians, advocates and other experts to help craft a blueprint for restoring the rule of law for the president and Congress. All of the testimony is available for your review on my website at http://feingold.senate.gov/ruleoflaw/. There are also links there to my opening statement at the hearing, and to a speech I delivered on the Senate floor.
On December 10, 2008, I sent a letter to then President-elect Obama outlining specific executive branch actions that I hope he and his administration will take to begin the process of restoring the rule of law. I have also enclosed a copy of that letter for your review.
Thank you again for contacting me. I look forward to hearing from you again.
Here’s the letter Senator Feingold sent to the Attorney General:
Holder investigation letter 7-14-09
Well, this is all fine I suppose. I appreciate that my representatives in Washington are doing _something_ to address these horrors. However, consider the following: The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Attorney General Holder is planning an inquiry that will be narrow in scope. The investigation, which would focus solely on CIA crimes, would examine “whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized” in memos issued by Bush administration lawyers.
Narrow in scope. Limited. Meaningless and purposeless. Investigating whether people went “beyond” illegally authorized crimes. Torture, crucifixion and murder met with lame excuses and never ending attempts to sweep this under the rug. None held accountable. Not one doctor, not one CIA official, not one Bush Administration official confronted about war crimes and crimes against humanity. This “investigation” has been approved at the highest levels in the Obama administration. The investigation is limited in scope specifically because the government wishes to retain the privilege to torture in the future. You see, the 100 waterboardings a month authorized by the previous administration for one detainee were done relying on “good faith” in the judgments of the DOJ. If slamming a prisoner’s head against a wall is found to conform to the “law” as interpreted by the DOJ, then none need call it torture.
Authorizing a thorough investigation would hold complicit actors currently involved in covert torture of prisoners. Our government officials are being paid now to let these horrors continue. As if endless war, domestic spying, murder of innocents was not enough….now I have to pay for the destruction of the previously noble U.S. standard of justice (whether this is reality or not is irrelevant to my point). We are all paying for this through our taxes. This is why I am convinced that Americans love torture. They continue to pay for it with no outcry. They work to further it. I’m disgusted, terrified and saddened for my people.
One final thought…note the irony of a nation filled with Christians paying for the crucifixion of a prisoner of war!
Hooded in Bush’s Hood by Ray McGovern
Posted by: | CommentsBy RAY McGOVERN
The hellish-hot weather persuaded me that I was wise to ignore the caution expressed by a close friend who grew up in Dallas, as I set off to give talks there. Better wear a bulletproof vest, he told me.
I was, nonetheless, feeling a bit anxious, given what had happened during my last major speech there, when I addressed the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas on Jan. 20, 2004. Then my topic was “Intelligence and War: Lessons From the Recent Past,” and I was very intentional about being, well, fair and balanced in devoting equal time to listing the baleful lies of two Texans — Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush — both of whom got a lot of people killed in unnecessary war.
I even reached back into history to enlist help from a former president whom Bush had called his favorite — Teddy Roosevelt, who said:
“To announce that there is to be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but morally treasonable to the American people.”
Suffice it to say that my attempt at evenhandedness failed miserably, even though I used up a lot of precious time rehearsing LBJ’s perfidy on Vietnam — dissecting, in particular, his exploitation of dubious intelligence regarding the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident of Aug. 4, 1964. I gave pride of place to that well deserved castigation before I delved into a reconstruction of what was already discernible as of January 2004 with respect to the lies told by George W. Bush to “justify” attacking Iraq exactly 10 months before.
Okay, so maybe I laid it on a little thick in citing what Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering told his American interrogator in Nuremberg:
“Naturally, the common people do not want war. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a communist dictatorship….
“The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Oil executives and other Dallas insiders in the audience took that as a signal to bolt — and did. One of the early departed, Herbert Hunt of the Hunt Oil family expressed chagrin at having been tricked into attending on false pretenses. He told an associate that, hearing of my continuing friendship with George Herbert Walker Bush, he was deceived into thinking I was “one of us.”
Following the Q & A session after my presentation, the World Affairs Council president at the time, Jim Falk, was icily proper. It was not until much later that I learned that he labeled my speech “awful,” and that the WAC Executive Committee member who had invited me became the target of a whispering campaign for not really being “one of us.” My inviter was declared persona non grata and removed from the Executive Committee.
I had made what I thought was an honest effort to be fair and balanced but, clearly, my attempt had fallen far short in Dallas.
This Time It Would be Different
Now, five and a half years later, the task of exposing lies and spreading some truth around had become much less daunting, given the abundant material that had become available in the interim. And Dallas seemed the ideal place to do so, since George W. Bush had just moved in, causing not a ripple of concern — much less disapproval — among the indigenous, so to speak.
Indeed, far from the embarrassment I thought I would encounter among Dallasites over having a suspect war criminal as neighbor, the vast majority seemed utterly pleased — with one notable exception. There were recurrent complaints over inconvenient delays on the golf course, when the former president and his friends insisted on playing through.
Neither George nor Laura Bush came to the Dallas Peace Center dinner at which I spoke on July 9 (although I extended them a cordial invitation). And the nouveau riche were conspicuously absent. Fine by me. Except for a few predictable grimaces when I mentioned the dangerous Israel-centric policy pursued by Bush-43 in the Middle East, I enjoyed an audience that was, in Ciceronian terms, “benign [and] attentive.” No one stormed out this time.
The week before my talk, I had offered an op-ed draft, “Is Texas Harboring Torture Decider,” to the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, both of which rejected it (surprise, surprise).
That homework having been done, I rang some changes on the theme of the op-ed — namely, that a “smoking-gun” executive memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, signed by George W. Bush, is confirmation that the responsibility for torture is correctly attributed to rotten apples, but that they fouled the barrel from the top, not the bottom.
The four nauseating “torture memos” under Department of Justice letterhead show (1) that the “banality of evil” did not stop with Adolf Eichmann and other functionaries of the Third Reich; and (2) that top CIA officials displayed fawning obeisance in their eagerness to go over to “the dark side.” But the sum total of ALL the memos and investigations now at hand shows with embarrassing clarity that there was only one “decider” — the one now playing 18 holes in a fancy Dallas neighborhood.
And if further proof were needed, we now have the full text of the Senate Armed Services Committee report, approved by the full Committee without dissent, the executive summary of which was released by Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008.
Its conclusions are equally nauseating, showing — among other things — that not one of the eight addressees of Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002, directive demurred about his decision to exempt al Qaeda and Taliban detainees from Geneva protections — a violation of the War Crimes Act of 1996, as well as the Geneva agreements.
The Senate report asserts that the president’s memorandum “opened the door to considering aggressive techniques.”
Conclusion Number One states:
“Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions … were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.”
None of the guests at the Dallas Peace Center dinner did a Cheneyesque shrug, as if to say, “So…?” That was encouraging, and an easy segue into What Do We Do Now?
Accountability Are Us
Dallas progressives were receptive to the notion that, by happenstance, they may bear a special responsibility to face into the reality that one of their new neighbors is, arguably, a war criminal. How does one actually deal with that? It seems a matter of conscience; ignoring the situation does not seem quite right. And yet, an American is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
A dilemma. Because, those who are not captives of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) are aware of so much incriminating evidence of such heinous crimes, that the prospect of walking down the street with a, “Hi, George; how’s Laura?” really jars.
A consensus seems to be building that perhaps Dallasites are uniquely situated to bring their dilemma to the attention of the country as a whole. How do we Americans handle this unprecedented set of circumstances?
By investigating what happened and, if warranted, initiating a judicial process.
As one Dallas Peace Center activist put it, “We are here in Dallas, with George W. Bush playing golf and living a life of ease, while a library and institute are built to enshrine his version of history. Our struggle for clarity and accountability must intensify, not out of vindictiveness but because there will be dire consequences in the future, if no one is held accountable for the suffering and devastation of torture.”
Even Dick Cheney now says that the former president knew everything Cheney knew about “enhanced interrogation techniques.” On May 10 the former vice president told Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer that Bush “knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.”
This is not to suggest we have to take Cheney at his word, but is there not a compelling need to get to the bottom of this? The question answers itself. No One Is Above the Law cannot become an empty slogan.
And so, it was very encouraging to have a good turnout on Saturday morning, July 11, at the Dallas city branch library nearest the new Bush residence. We took some time to think these things through, and ponder Cesar Chavez’ dictum: Without action, nothing good is going to happen.
A dozen of us decided to exercise our First Amendment rights and go see if George and Laura were home.
And you know the best news? As one hardened activist put it:
“For some of those joining us this was their first such march. There was the distinct possibility we might end up in the pokey, but they did not blink an eye. It was a small group, but the point was, we took it right to the belly of the beast. I think we all knew that we were doing what has to be done. We were jacked!”
No pious platitudes for peace. Rather, placards for justice and accountability. And BLOCK LETTER reminders that no one, no one is above the law.
It is, no doubt, too early to know for sure. But it does seem as though a sturdy group of George W. Bush’s neighbors are determined to hold their new neighbor accountable, and may become an example — a catalyst — for the whole country.
Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
