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Waterboarding for God and Country
By Ray
McGovern
10/02/08
"ICH"--
-After one
spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally
throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an
acid test of my equilibrium.
I missed the National Prayer Breakfast—for the 45th time in a
row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as
President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:
“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his
sight. We’re all equally precious...In prayer we grow in mercy
and compassion.... When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor
as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow
man — and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.”
Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday’s prayer
breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he
gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action
Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise
careful words to extol “the interrogation program run by the
CIA...a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11,” without conceding that
the program has involved torture.
But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney’s remarks, as
he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that
America is a “decent” country.
After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed publicly on
Tuesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other “high-value”
detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden
added that the technique has since been discontinued.
An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as
the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as
torture by just about everyone—except the hired legal hands of
the Bush administration.
On Wednesday President Bush’s spokesman Tony Fratto revealed
that the White House reserves the right to approve waterboarding
again, “depending on the circumstances.” Fratto
matter-of-factly described the process still followed by the
Bush administration to approve torture—er; I mean, “enhanced
interrogation techniques” like waterboarding:
“The process includes the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency bringing the proposal to the attorney
general, where the review would be conducted to determine if the
plan would be legal and effective. At that point, the proposal
would go to the president. The president would listen to the
determination of his advisers and make a decision.”
Dissing Congress
Cheney’s task of reassuring us about our “decency” was
made no easier Thursday, when Attorney General Michael Mukasey
stonewalled questions from the hapless John Conyers, titular
chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers tried, and
failed, to get straight answers from Mukasey on torture.
Conyers referred to Hayden’s admission about waterboarding and
branded the practice “odious.” But Mukasey seemed to take
perverse delight in “dissing” Conyers, as the expression goes in
inner city Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the
disrespect stoically.
He did summon the courage to ask Attorney General Mukasey
directly, “Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into
whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was
illegal?”
“No, I am not,” Mukasey answered.
Mukasey claimed “waterboarding was found to be permissible under
the law as it existed” in the years immediately after 9/11;
thus, the Justice Department could not investigate someone for
doing something the department had declared legal. Got that?
Mukasey explained:
“That would mean the same department that authorized the
program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed
that advice.”
Oddly, Mukasey himself is on record saying waterboarding
would be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell,
Director of National Intelligence, was even more explicit in
taking the same line in an interview with Lawrence Wright of
New Yorker magazine. McConnell told Wright that, for him:
“Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water
draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how
painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for
me it would be torture.”
Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if
done to others? Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer
breakfast and the president’s moving reminder that we are called
“to love a neighbor as ourselves.” Is there an exception,
perhaps, for detainees?
Cat Out of Bag
When torture first came up during his interview with the
New Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the
obligatory bromide “We don’t torture,” as former CIA Director
George Tenet did in five consecutive sentences while hawking his
memoir on 60 Minutes on April 29, 2007. As McConnell
grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the rationale for
Mukasey’s effrontery and the administration’s refusal to admit
that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention,
that rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is
McConnell inadvertently articulating it:
“If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge
penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”
Like death. Even Alberto Gonzales could grasp this at the
outset. That explains the overly clever, lawyerly wording in
the Jan. 25, 2002 memorandum for the president drafted by the
vice president’s lawyer, David Addington, but signed by
Gonzales. Addington/Gonzales argued that the president’s
determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do
not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:
“Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal
prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441)...enacted
in 1996...
“Punishments for violations of Section 2441include the death
penalty...
“[I]t is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and
independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue
unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination
would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does
not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future
prosecution.”
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT, January 25, 2002, p. 2
Mike McConnell needs to get his own lawyers to bring him up to
date on all this. For that memorandum was quickly followed by
an action memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002.
The president’s memo incorporated the exact wording of Addington/Gonzales’
bottom line; to wit, the U.S. would “treat the detainees
humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with
military necessity, in a manner consistent with the
principles of [Geneva]. (emphasis added)
That provided the loophole through which then-defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George Tenet and their
subordinates drove the Mack truck of torture. Even the
Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington
Post saw fit on Friday to declare torture “illegal in all
instances,” adding that “waterboarding is, and always has been,
torture.”
Waterboarding has been condemned as torture for a very long
time. After WW-II Japanese soldiers were hanged for the “war
crime” of waterboarding American soldiers.
Patriots and Prophets
Patriots and prophets have made it clear from our
earliest days that such abuse has no place in America.
Virginia’s Patrick Henry insisted passionately that “the rack
and the screw,” as he put it, were barbaric practices that had
to be left behind in the Old World, or we are "lost and
undone." Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently
refused to say whether he considers the rack and the screw forms
of torture, dismissing the question as hypothetical.
As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological
Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the
National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130
religious organizations from left to right on the political
spectrum. Hunzinger puts it succinctly: “To acknowledge that
waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in
the east,” adding:
"All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking
abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will
undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held
accountable.... A special counsel is an essential first step.”
Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to
overcome the pious complacency of the vast majority of
institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country
and their reluctance to exercise moral leadership.
How It Looks From Outside
Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw
light on our moral failures.
South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain
to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of
apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to
preach more than platitudes:
“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your
culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to
expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness,
compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless
way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by
the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how
they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.
“All around the world there are those who long to see your human
goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of
relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”
Mukasey’s thumbing his nose at Conyers’ committee yesterday
was simply the most recent display of contempt for Congress on
the part of the Bush administration. The Founders expected our
representatives in Congress to be taken seriously by the
executive branch, and expected that Members of Congress would
hold senior executives accountable—to the point of impeaching
them, when necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more
outlandish behavior. Not any more.
No Worries, George
One reads George Tenet’s memoirs with some nostalgia for
the days of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a
strong sense of irony—as he confesses concern that Congress
might one day hold him and others accountable for taking
liberties with national and international law.
It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
and David Addington counseled Tenet that his concerns were
quaint and obsolete and, alas, they may have been right, the way
things have been going. But Tenet apparently entertained
lingering misgivings—perhaps even qualms of conscience.
In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the
president “our only real ally” on the Afghan border was
Uzbekistan, “where we had established important
intelligence-collection capabilities.” We now know from UK
Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that those “collection
capabilities” included the most primitive methods of torture,
including boiling alleged “terrorists” alive.
Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to
detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His
worries shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:
“We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities
as CIA ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them,
could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives
justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to
act.”
At the
Center of the Storm, p. 177-178
Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from
accountability by a timid Congress as well as an arrogant White
House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to
shield those it wished to protect.
Setting the Tone
It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from
the outset. After his address to the nation on the evening of
9/11, he assembled his top national security aides in the White
House bunker—the easier, perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality.
Among them was counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted
the president in his memoir:
“I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay
at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is
available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your
way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our
only agenda...
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going
to kick some ass.” Against
All Enemies, Free Press, 2004
Clarke, of course, took his book’s title from the oath of office
we all swore as military officers and/or senior government
officials: “To defend the Constitution against all enemies,
foreign and domestic.”
John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time,
fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president’s comment
dismissing any concern with international law—or, as would
quickly be seen, domestic law, as well. With the enthusiastic
assistance of David Addington, the affable Ashcroft assembled a
cabal of Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on
torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and other abuses mark them
forever as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution.
Add Mukasey to this distinguished roster.
Torture: the Hallmark
What is not widely known is that Justice
Department-approved torture was first applied on an American
citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in
late November 2001. The White House and corporate press
immediately sensationalized Lindh as “the American Taliban.”
Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal advisor in the Justice
Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, which
gives ethics advice to Department attorneys, insisted that Lindh
be advised of his rights before any interrogation. Instead, he
was tortured mercilessly during the first few days of his
internment and denied medical care.
Lindh had had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time; i. e., in a large group of prisoners
rounded up by CIA and Army paramilitary forces—too large a
group, it turned out.
A spontaneous uprising took place, and CIA paramilitary officer
Johnny “Mike” Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes
before, was shot dead. Outraged, Spann’s colleagues applied
“frontier justice,” totally ignoring the Constitutional cautions
of Ms. Radack.
The Department of Justice moved quickly to fire Radack for her
principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save
emails providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in
which she had insisted on respect for Lindh’s rights as an
American citizen. Newsweek carried the story briefly,
but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much
interest.
Radack’s book recounting this experience, The Canary in the
Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of “American Taliban”
John Walker Lindh, is available on line at: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net/.
Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and
prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Patrick Henry’s
warning remains a challenge for our time: Are we “lost and
undone?” I think not; but we had better get it together soon,
for, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., cautioned, “There is such a
thing as too late.”
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was
an Army intelligence officer before joining the CIA where he had
a 27-year career as an analyst. He is now on the Steering Group
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
A shorter version of this article appeared on
Consortiumnews.com.
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