Rene — CIA Torture and Other War Crimes
Topic(s): Torture | Comments Off on Rene — CIA Torture and Other War CrimesRene — CIA Torture and Other War Crimes
Published on Wednesday, December 26, 2007 by Huffington Post
by Philip Giraldi
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.
Philip Giraldi is a recognized authority on international security and
counterterrorism issues. He is a regular contributor to www.antiwar.com
in a column titled `Smoke and Mirrors’ and is a Contributing Editor who
writes a column called `Deep Background’ on terrorism, intelligence,
and security issues for The American Conservative magazine.