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CIA Torture and
other War Crimes
By Philip Giraldi
12/26/07 "Yahoo"
-- -- Personal accountability has all but disappeared from
the American political system. Bill Clinton lied to his entire
cabinet about Monica Lewinsky and not a single cabinet member
resigned in protest after he was forced to recant. When Alberto
Gonzales lied repeatedly during testimony before Congress
everyone knew exactly what he was doing but no leading Democrat
was willing to impeach him. The hopelessly incompetent Michael
Brown was able to resign from FEMA without sanction to "avoid
further distraction from the ongoing mission" and later even
blamed everyone else for his shortcomings. Condoleezza Rice,
Paul Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul Bremer were
all rewarded for their incompetence, some with medals and some
with promotions. Recent resignations from the Bush
administration stemming from the massive policy failures of the
past seven years have frequently been couched in terms of
"wanting to spend more time with my family" though sometimes a
bit of candor creeps in a la Trent Lott, who believes it is time
to step down and follow the money as a lobbyist. Public
Diplomacy Tsarina Karen Hughes arguably plans to do both,
returning to Texas to rejoin her family while also cashing in
through lucrative speaking engagements. During her two and a
half years of Texas-style soccer mom diplomacy at State
Department and in spite of a large budget, Hughes only succeeded
in increasing the number of foreigners who actively dislike the
United States. Never is a resignation from government service
framed in terms of "Hey, I screwed up."
The embrace of illegal detentions and torture are among the
truly horrific decisions that can be attributed to the Bush
White House. It is ironic to read the media accounts surrounding
the recent discovery by shocked U.S. Marines of an alleged
al-Qaeda torture center in Iraq's Diyala province because the
Marines work for a government that itself publicly embraces
torture as an interrogation technique. And it is not just the
White House. Torture is bipartisan. The recent House of
Representatives intelligence appropriations bill included a
clause that requires CIA to abide by the Geneva Conventions in
its interrogation and detention policies. One hundred and
ninety-nine Congressmen from both parties voted "no." Even if
some of the Congressmen voted against the bill for other
reasons, there is a strong sense that many politicians consider
torture to be perfectly okay. Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and
Fred Thompson have all jumped on that bandwagon, endorsing
"enhanced interrogation" as a counter-terrorism tool. Mitt
Romney, who might bolster his claims to be a Christian by
occasionally perusing the compassionate message of the Sermon on
the Mount instead of the Book of Mormon, even wants to make
Guantanamo prison bigger. Giuliani appears to want to jail and
torture lots of people all the time, but he is, admittedly, a
pagan.
If senior managers at the Central Intelligence Agency actually
worried about committing war crimes more than they cared about
getting revenge on ragheads and advancing their careers, they
wouldn't have tortured anyone in the first place back in 2002.
Shortly after 9/11, the redoubtable armchair warrior Vice
President Dick Cheney, who famously had other priorities and
avoided military service by virtue of five deferments during
Vietnam, announced that the "gloves are off" in reference to
America's enemies. Those comments set the tone and ushered in
the exciting days of "anything goes" when Cofer Black, chief of
the Agency's Counter Terrorism Center, sent out his myrmidons
with orders to come back with Usama bin Laden's head in a box.
Somehow, that head turned out to be Saddam Hussein's.
Ethically, torture degrades the country that permits it, the
organization that carries it out and the individuals who perform
it. Doctors are not present during torture as it would violate
the Hippocratic Oath, so it is up to the torturer to decide how
far to go. If a victim dies while being interrogated by torture,
as has happened a number of times in both Afghanistan and Iraq,
it is both a war crime and murder.
Most intelligence and law enforcement officers reject torture as
an interrogation tool, knowing that it more often than not
produces false information. The FBI claims that the CIA
waterboarding of terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah was unnecessary,
that he was already cooperating. Waterboarding, which was used
extensively both by the Gestapo and by the Spanish Inquisition,
is a particularly heinous form of torture as it simulates death.
With U.S. troops deployed all over the world at the present
time, sanctioning torture lowers the bar for terrorists who
might happen to capture an American soldier or diplomat to do
likewise. Even in 2002 someone with a bit of foresight might
have anticipated the possible consequences arising from the
CIA's use of torture and its more general bull in the china shop
approach. Someone with a bit of backbone and an intact moral
compass might even have even resigned in protest, but, alas,
there were few of those types around.
What has made CIA's so-called leaders really nervous in the
current political environment is not the ethical or moral issue
of torture per se. It is the thought of getting sued by the
victims and victim advocacy groups, which means hiring expensive
lawyers. Donald Rumsfeld's flight from Paris in late November to
avoid war crimes charges also raises the possibility that an
otherwise pleasant trip to Provence or Tuscany might have to be
curtailed if some Euro-version of a pasty-face peace creep tries
to file a lawsuit. Fortunately for all the torturers at CIA,
there is now a government reimbursed private insurance program
designed to cover contingencies. When former Chief of
Clandestine Operations Jose Rodriguez was subpoenaed to appear
before a Congressional committee last week, he was able to
afford representation by the redoubtable Robert Bennett.
The latest CIA scandal began in 2002 when at least two terrorist
suspects were videotaped while they were being subjected to the
waterboarding version of "enhanced interrogation." The
questioning took place somewhere in Asia, possibly in a
Pakistani or Thai prison but more likely at either Bagram
Airbase in Afghanistan or at Diego Garcia Island, in the Indian
Ocean, where the CIA maintains "off-sites." In May 2003, CIA
told Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema that there were no recordings
or other records of the interrogations. That was a lie. In 2003
and 2004, the Congressional 9/11 Commission made "repeated and
detailed inquiries relating to interrogations." The CIA said
there was no additional material, another lie. In June 2005,
Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez ordered the tapes
destroyed. The order came, perhaps not coincidentally, just as
the Italian authorities were entering into the investigative
phase of a major inquiry into CIA renditions in Italy.
CIA now claims that the tapes were destroyed to protect the
identity of the agency interrogators involved. That argument is
complete nonsense. Unless the cameraman was suffering from
delirium tremens and shaking uncontrollably, the camera would
have been focused on the victim of the torture, not on those
administering it. In any event, terrorists would hardly be able
to identify and gain access to an otherwise unremarkable and
nameless CIA employee from what they might see on a tape, even
if they could get hold of a copy.
The real reason for the cover-up on the tapes is because torture
is universally acknowledged to be a war crime and everyone in
the CIA and White House hierarchy knows that to be true. The
denial that the tapes existed in 2003 and 2004 could not have
taken place without the concurrence of Director George Tenet,
Deputy Director John McLaughlin, and General Counsel Scott
Muller. Probably then-Director of Operations James Pavitt would
have also been involved. When Rodriguez destroyed the tapes in
2005, he was not acting alone. Director Porter Goss almost
certainly would have been part of the decision making process as
well as acting General Counsel John Rizzo and it is tempting to
speculate that White House aides like Dick Cheney's David
Addington and President Bush's Harriet Miers might also have
been in the loop.
Looking for war crimes committed by members of the Bush
administration is a complicated exercise because there are so
many to go around. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo come immediately to
mind. The Nuremburg Tribunals at the end of the Second World War
defined an aggressive war against another country if that
country has not attacked you first or threatened to do so as
"essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of
aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the
supreme international crime differing only from
other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole." A number of leading Nazis were
executed for their unprovoked attack on Poland. The Bush
administration has its own Poland in Iraq, and if there is an
American attack on Iran it would also fit the Nuremberg
definition. Unlike at Nuremberg, however, no one will be held
accountable.
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