Torture - From J.F.K. to Baby Bush
By Steve Weissman
Stating the alternatives so baldly, I make my own answer obvious. Others are free to weigh the issues in whatever moral, legal, political, or military terms they want. But, however they weigh it, no decent Democrat can duck the dilemma, and certainly not when the President's lawyer Alberto Gonzalez appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend his qualifications to become Attorney General.
Theater of the Absurd
The hearing, to be held early in the New Year, will provide a good taste of Absurdist Theater. Everyone knows how the play will end. Short of a new Abu Ghraib or a sudden flood of photos showing how the Americans used dogs and pigs to sexually assault Iraqi women, the Senators will confirm Gonzales for his new post.
The drama comes in how thoroughly the Democrats expose him for his role in the American torture machine. At stake is how relevant the party will be to a large number of anti-war activists. Knowing Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, I believe the anti-warriors will like what they see.
Much of the attack will focus on the infamous memo to President Bush, in which Gonzales made his mark on American judicial thinking.
As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.... The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions ...
"Geneva" refers to the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which the Bush Administration wanted to avoid applying to captives that American military commanders suspected of belonging to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. As a signatory to the various Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, the United States had made their requirements part of American law. Not to worry, said Gonzalez. Mr. Bush could override the law whenever he believed that some "paradigm" had changed.
It was a bizarre reading of how the American legal system is supposed to work.
Why did Team Bush find it so important to deny captives the most minimal rights? Because, as Gonzalez wrote, the goal was "to quickly obtain information" from them. As Gonzalez no doubt knew at the time, the military and C.I.A. would get the information by applying the techniques we've since seen in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo:
Hood and shackle the captives.
Disorient them.
Stress them psychologically.
Subject them to sensory deprivation and extremes of hot and cold.
Deny them food and sleep.
Withhold medical treatment and needed medication, especially painkillers.
Keep them standing or kneeling in painful positions for hours at a time.
Force them into other agonizing postures.
Strip them naked.
Humiliate them non-stop.
Threaten them.
And kick them around a bit, just to show them who's boss.
From his discussions with the military and C.I.A., Gonzales would have known this approach as "Stress and Duress." No thumbscrews. No wheel. No rack. But, no matter. Under whatever paradigm or set of conditions, the International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and an overwhelming list of distinguished military and civilian lawyers call it torture.
In other words, Mr. Gonzalez bent American and international law to enable war crimes. Who better to head the U.S. Department of Justice?
No Double Standard
But let's be fair: Republicans have no monopoly on American torture. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy Administration made Stress and Duress a specialty of J.F.K.'s much-beloved Green Berets, and torture became common during much of the Vietnam War. Just as in Mr. Bush's "War on Terror" - or in colonial wars throughout the ages - the explicit goal was to get information. New paradigms to the contrary, 9/11 did not change the world.
Kennedy and Johnson also led the way in having U.S. troops teach "Stress and Duress" to client armies throughout the world, notably at the School of the Americas, which has trained some of the hemisphere's worst torturers.
Nor was Gonzales the first to concoct legal arguments to help American and allied torturers ply their trade. From Camelot on, government lawyers have exhausted themselves trying to explain why Stress and Duress was not really torture, you know, but only Torture-Lite. Their arguments over decades of both Democratic and Republican administrations gave President Bush just the definitional dodge he needed when he declared after Abu Ghraib:
Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.
Potentially more troubling for my Democratic friends is how the Clinton Administration relied on torture. One story stands out. Sometime after the February 1993 attempt to blow up New York's World Trade Center, three highly ambitious terrorists with roots in Pakistan and Kuwait moved to the Philippines to pursue their life's work. Their names now sound familiar:
Ramzi Yousef, convicted in 1997 as the mastermind of the trade center bombing.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi's uncle, captured in 2003, reportedly tortured by the C.I.A., and described in the 9/11 Commission Report as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks."
Abdul Hakim Murad, Ramzi's old friend, a licensed commercial pilot and accident-prone bomb maker.
Following a fire in the group's Manila apartment, the local police captured Murad, while Yousef fled the country, only to be captured a month later in Pakistan. Shaikh Mohammed later showed up in Qatar.
The Philippine police held Murad incommunicado for 67 days. According to journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria, authors of Under the Crescent Moon, his captors tortured him with old fashioned brutality, got him to talk, and turned him over to their American allies. Federal prosecutors in New York then used Murad's testimony to help convict Ramzi Yousef in the World Trade Center Bombing, one of the Clinton Administration's most celebrated anti-terrorist successes.
To Clinton aides, the Murad case helped rationalize the idea of flying captives to other countries to be tortured. How often did they do it? We need to find out. On November 20, 2001, the Wall Street Journal told how the Clinton-era C.I.A. snatched five suspected members of the Egyptian Jihad from Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans and flew them to Egypt. The details are nasty.
Other stories will emerge. But however often the Clintonistas cooperated in foreign torture, or even allowed the C.I.A. itself to engage in torture, they did it in a limited, carefully controlled way. Out of sight. Out of mind. And nothing they did compared to the way the infantile Bush institutionalized torture on an industrial scale, which led in time to scores of secret C.I.A. detention centers around the world, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and - inevitably - public exposure.
Brazenly touting their rejection of the Geneva Conventions as a symbol of American resolve in fighting Islamic terrorists, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales too often acted as if they wanted the world to know. They wanted, it seems, to send "the ragheads" a message: "Don't Step on Superman's Cape."
Democrats should hammer attorney Gonzalez for his central role in this shameful disgrace. But they need to be straight in doing it. They, too, violated American and international law. They, too, fell into the ethical cesspit. And, worst of all, they left in place people, programs, and precedents on which the Bush Administration built far worse. If Democrats hide from all this, most fair-minded Americans will rightly dismiss them as unprincipled partisans.
But far more is at stake. Without exposing the whole range of American torture, any reform will leave much of it in place. Is that something most Democrats - or decent Republicans - want to let happen?
As always, I would love to see your response.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.
-------
PART II
Torture - From J.F.K. to Baby Bush:
Gonzales and the Horse He Rode In On
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 04 January 2005
"Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms."
-- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Legal Counsel
30 December 2004
"For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession ..."
-- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, signed and ratified by the United States
When Alberto Gonzales assured Mr. Bush that presidential war powers trumped anti-torture laws and treaties, the White House lawyer was doing what too many of his profession do. Like an ENRON tax lawyer or Mafia consigliere, he was helping his client commit crimes.
Big crimes. War crimes. Not Private Lyndie England having a good time forcing naked Iraqi captives with sacks of over their heads to masturbate at Abu Ghraib, though Gonzales's words certainly led to the subsequent scandal. His sin was far more substantial. As Counsel to the President, he enabled and encouraged the systematic use of torture, duly authorized by the Commander-in-Chief.
Rule of law? Due process? Fair trials? The presumption of innocence? Don't be silly. In the new post-9/11 paradigm propounded by Gonzales, these hard-won victories of the past sound as "quaint" as the Geneva Conventions with their old-fashioned idea that Prisoners of War need reveal only their name, rank, and serial number.
Former Attorneys General like Eliot Richardson, who resigned during Watergate, would have highlighted the limits prescribed by American and international law. Attorney Gonzales elaborated legal language to dodge those limits. His job, as he saw it, was essentially political - to give Mr. Bush cosmetic cover to do exactly what he wanted.
Other political lawyers - the ones we call judges and Justices - might or might not subsequently tell the President that he'd overstepped the line. But Gonzales knew they would not even consider the issue until long after Mr. Bush had done most of the damage he intended. And, when finally in court, the President's lawyers would have his legal defense in hand, ready to show that he tried to remain within the law as it was explained to him.
Gonzales was performing a legal burlesque, much as he will on Wednesday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee examines whether he is suited to become Attorney General. Will the Senators applaud the charade? Or will a few brave souls among them stand up and say what, on the face of it, seems hard to deny - that Mr. Gonzales has shamed his country, his profession, and himself.
For a people who talk so much about "moral values," it seems bizarre even to consider a conspirator in war crimes to be our top legal officer. But after four years of pious John Ashcroft, I suppose we need a new low.
Adding to this shameful mockery, the Department of Justice has just issued a new memo on torture, dated December 30, 2004, and signed by the Acting Assistant Attorney General, Daniel Levin. Senators, beware! The new memo does not challenge Mr. Gonzales's earlier advice that presidents have the power to reject the Geneva Conventions in dealing with "unlawful enemy combatants."
The administration uses the term to describe enemy fighters who - like al-Qaeda terrorists - belong to no regular national army. Mr. Bush could as easily apply the designation to terrorists, insurgents, rebels, and resistors fighting American occupation, whether in Iraq or any other country he chooses to "liberate."
Mr. Levin's memo does make marginal changes, but none that will stop most C.I.A. and military interrogators from continuing to do what they've been doing in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and at scores of secret American detention centers all over the world.
Earlier, Mr. Gonzales and the Bush Administration had defined torture as inflicting excruciating pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." This gave a bogus legality to the C.I.A. and military as they inflicted on their captives a whole range of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.
In Levin's new definition, the word torture now encompasses lesser degrees of physical pain, as well as mental pain and suffering. But the T-word still seems purposely to exclude such primarily psychological techniques as making prisoners remain for hours in uncomfortable positions, assaulting them with loud music or repetitive sounds, prolonged sensory deprivation, denial of food and sleep, forced enemas, and leaving captives shackled for long periods in their own excrement.
These are some of the Stress and Duress techniques that insiders like to call Torture-Lite. As a now declassified C.I.A. manual explains, the goal is not to inflict pain, excruciating or otherwise, but "to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist."
More obvious brutality often stiffens resistance by creating a battle of wills between torturer and victim. Stress and Duress sets the conflict within the captive's own body and mind, eating away at his or her adult personality and creating a child-like state of dependence.
Arguably, this does more lasting psychological damage to victims and causes them far greater mental suffering. In any case, competent international authorities like the Red Cross consider many Stress and Duress techniques a form of both physical and psychological torture. The new U.S. definition - like the old - does not, leaving the C.I.A. and military free to continue using them.
Senators, the ball is now in your court. Please do not let Mr. Gonzales fool you - or the American people - into believing that torture has stopped or that the U.S. has returned to the Geneva Conventions. We've had enough lies. It's time to clean out the stables.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your Feedback
In my last column, I wrote:
Without exposing the whole range of American torture, any reform will leave much of it in place. Is that something most Democrats - or decent Republicans - want to let happen?
The vast majority who replied agreed that we should expose all American torture, whether done under Democratic or Republican administrations. Only two felt we should lay off the Democrats. Two others supported torture, whether Democratic or Republican.
Beverly Crane offered her own confirmation of what I wrote:
In the late 60's, after college, I lived in West Berlin for a year. During most of that time I was a nanny in the home of an American diplomat who was in charge of security for the American sector. Nearly every day he would almost proudly regale me with thinly disguised allusions to how he tortured people in order to get them to talk. ("The poor guy fell down the stairs and broke about every bone in his body. Imagine that, ha ha.") As an idealistic young college graduate from a staunchly Republican family, I was appalled, and remain so until this day.
As much as I dislike Bush and all he stands for, perhaps his excesses will bring the light of day to what has too long been hidden. Thank you for shining the first light. Hopefully more will come.
Edmund McWilliams left me a bit stunned:
I was myself a military interrogator in Vietnam - though that was at the end of the war and my exposure to such measures was indirect and pedestrian in comparison to what had gone on there before ... and since.
Mr. McWilliams also served as a State Department foreign service officer for 27 years, helping expose the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union and its client states. But, he writes, "I began to realize the hypocrisy of attacking the Soviets and their allies - without condemning what our allies in Indonesia, Egypt, etc. were doing."
I did some checking and discovered - in the t r u t h o u t archives, of all places - that Mr. McWilliams had served as the State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89. From that experience, he warned that "American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan."
In response, C.I.A. officials spread stories that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic, and he was subsequently forced to resign for telling the truth. (See Chalmers Johnson, Abolish the CIA)
Mr. McWilliams, you honor us all.
Personally, the most useful comment came in an email from Bill O'Connor:
I view myself more as a Republican although not so registered. It demeans your point when you say "Is that something most Democrats - or decent Republicans - want to let happen?" There are many decent Democrats and Republicans, to use a broad brush to taint others is shameful. People have honest differences of opinion and using such language makes the recipient react to the package, not the message. You seem to defeat your purpose of trying to reach out, unless you've written off folks like me.
Bill, you are absolutely right, and I was absolutely wrong. I'll try to be more open.
Please keep your emails coming. I read them all, and try to answer as many personally I can. Please indicate if you have any objection to my using your name or reprinting your comments.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.
-------
PART III
Torture - From J.F.K. to Baby Bush:
Torture in the Senate
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 13 January 2005
We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.
President George W. Bush
June 22, 2004
U.S. senators now face a clear-cut choice: Will they go along with President Bush and confirm Alberto Gonzales as his new Attorney General. Or will they take a strong, principled stand against America's use of torture.
Democratic and Republican senators alike can hem, haw, and hedge, as did Mr. Gonzales when he testified last week before the Judiciary Committee. They can pretend that the vote is no big deal and only business as usual. But they cannot hide how they vote on the nomination. And, unless a handful of brave souls block confirmation with a filibuster, senators will not escape blame when America becomes - in fact and in the eyes of the world - even more of a rogue nation.
Americans barely see how much damage torture does to our interests, to say nothing of our values. In last week's hearing, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat - Senator Patrick Leahy - gave two chilling examples.
"The searing photographs from Abu Ghraib have made it harder to create and maintain the alliances we need to prevail against the vicious terrorists who threaten us," he told Mr. Gonzales. "And those abuses serve as recruiting posters for the terrorists."
Leahy and others worried as well about the Bush Administration's rejection of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan, at Guantánamo, and - we now learn - for non-Iraqis captured in Iraq. Saying no to Geneva, senators warned, threatens the safety of America's fighting men and women everywhere, undermines military discipline, and puts GIs at risk of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which specifically makes it a crime to abuse, let alone torture, a detainee.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a southern Republican and military lawyer in the Air Force Reserve, went in some ways even further. While he agreed with Gonzales that the U.S. had no legal obligation to apply the Geneva Conventions to "unlawful enemy combatants," he feared that rejecting Geneva did far more harm than good.
"We have lost our way," he told Gonzales. "We lost the moral high ground."
One last fear - too often ignored - hits even closer to home. If we torture foreigners, we will increasingly torture American citizens. Witness the brutal treatment in Afghanistan of the so-called "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, of the Louisiana-born Yaser Hamdi in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and of the Virginian Ahmed Abu Ali, whom U.S. officials reportedly got the Saudis to arrest and torture. And these are just the start of the slippery slope.
Testifying to the senators, the Harvard-trained Gonzales skillfully fudged and filibustered. He abhorred torture, he told them. He was sickened by the photos of Abu Ghraib. And he was certain that President Bush never did - and never will - order or tolerate the use of torture "under any circumstances."
Was attorney Gonzales lying?
Well, as we learned from Bill Clinton, in Washington everything depends on definitions. Mr. Gonzales and the administration define "torture" NOT to include water boarding, where we strap detainees to a board, wrap them in a wet towel, force them under water, and make them believe they will drown.
Nor does their definition include burying alive, extended sensory deprivation, stress positions, sexual humiliation, and other Stress and Duress techniques that the United States military and C.I.A. continue to use regularly at Guantánamo and America's gulag of secret detention centers around the world.
The International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and most of the rest of the world call what America does torture. Mr. Gonzales and the Bush Administration do not. Not in their earlier "Torture Memos." And not in the new definitions that the Department of Justice issued on December 30.
As I tried to show last week, this definitional dodge goes back as far as J.F.K., and all subsequent presidents - Democrat as well as Republican - have gone along with it. So has the U.S. Senate, especially in its official reservations in confirming the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
Senators, it's time now to come clean. Vote for Gonzales and you back America's continuing use of torture. Filibuster his confirmation, and you tell the world that at least some Americans are beginning to find the way back.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------