Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzales Signed off on Torture
McClatchy reports that torture was reauthorized in spring of 2003 by four Bush administration officials: Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. It has already been revealed by McClatchy that the reason for the reaffirmation to the CIA to go on intensively waterboarding and otherwise torturing Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was to get them to allege an operational tie between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, a link that did not exist.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were absent from the reauthorization meeting. (My guess is that they were too smart to come to it, realizing that it could be a one-way trip to the International Court of Justice at the Hague.)
The McClatchy headline also indicates that these four officials may have pressured the lawyers who wrote bizarre legal opinions saying that torture is OK in US law when it is not. (If they had written legal opinions saying that murder was OK, would that also be a matter of mere legal interpretation that might legitimately differ from attorney to attorney? But then what is the difference between torture and murder in the law, or in ethics?)
The reauthorization of torture contravenes the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is signatory, which is to say, it contravenes US law.
Liz Cheney defended her father from charges of authorizing torture on MSNBC.
Liz Cheney should be reminded that the Nuremberg process executed at least one person for persistently advocating crimes against humanity even though he never killed anyone with his own hands.
It is therefore a matter for some concern that the offenses may only be investigated and adjudicated in Europe, relatively toothlessly.
Mark Follman reminds us that the legality or uselessness of torture is not the only issue. There is also the issue of morality and of its warping effect on the torturers.
But note that the March waterboardings were not for the purpose of increasing national security; they were intended to provide a propaganda victory for an illegal war plan. That is not just wrong, it is evil.
See also Tom Engelhardt's essay on the sacrifices (of other people) we think necessary to 'make us safe,' this time in Afghanistan.
John McCain, himself tortured in North Vietnam, is asking that no Bush administration officials be prosecuted for advising or authorizing torture.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/24/2009 12:15:00 AM
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10 Comments:
"It is therefore a matter for some concern that the offenses may only be investigated and adjudicated in Europe, relatively toothlessly."Probably so, perhaps not. In the "Live by the dollar, die by the dollar" department, imagine a future where the dollar is so completely worthless, having been used to inflate away the trillions employed now to prevent state collapse, and the producers of the world, i.e. China, have a dual currency system (ffshore dollars (yuan) for real world trade and onshore dollars, int his case dollars, for trade within national boundaries) that the US trades prestige for oil. So you say, "But China is a foreign country." Response: The US becomes, economically speaking, just another province, or China become the fifty first state.
In this scenario, a toothless USof A might just decide to send Cheney and his little helpers to The Hague in exchange for more credit.
Unlikely? Yes.
Possible. Also yes.
What would be the purpose?
To have the means to try former US leaders for war crimes just because they can't be tried for the more serious stuff - namely denying global warming. The latter will cause billions of premature deaths but there is no recognized criminal process for dealing with excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
Another reason for us to prosecute the enablers of torture would be that it was used - unsuccessfully - to shield them from criticism for the war, which they used to enrich their friends and erode our freedoms.
Illegal acts as part of a criminal enterprise.
This is an amazing story about Dr. Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who was on air at an Israeli TV station when IDF shells killed his three daughters and a niece:
http://thenational.ae/article/20090423/FOREIGN/704229867/0/REVIEW
The Bush administration's philosphy - "The strong do as they wish and the weak suffer as they must."
Perhaps under Catalonian influence, April 23 has already been adopted by UNESCO as the International Day of the Book. However, I don't think very many people know about this day.The Parliament of Man™ is, as Neocomrade Ambassador J. Bolton likes to explain, capable of pretty well anything, perhaps even of picking April 23rd as Book Day without ever having heard of the great Catalan bard Guillem Xacspir .
But I suspect they did vaguely know the name.
Happy reads.
Here's a modest proposal in the original sense of that phrase. Cheney is determined to prove torture produces truths that can't be gotten otherwise. We want to know the truth behind the torture program. So we should waterboard Cheney. If he tells us the truth, everyone will be happy.
Don't hold your breath about Europeans prosecuting anyone. The French courts have already ruled that Rumself enjoyed "head of state immunity" even for war crimes. This was contra the Pinoche case.
See
1. http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSL238169520071123
2. http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2008/05/how-rumsfeld-ev.html
"My guess is that they were too smart to come to it, realizing that it could be a one-way trip to the International Court of Justice at the Hague."
There doesn't seem to be a joke here, so I would just note that the likelihood of high level American officials being tried at the Hague is close to zero. Unless Powell and Rumsfeld are on record opposing torture in other contexts, there's every reason to think they just weren't able to attend, for routine reasons.
"But note that the March waterboardings were not for the purpose of increasing national security; they were intended to provide a propaganda victory for an illegal war plan."
Of course in reality hawks did and do think the "illegal war plan" as you call it was important for national security, albeit national security in the special sense in which state officials use the term. The propaganda point and the national security point are not mutually exclusive. Also, in the broader context of the debate the issue brought up by defenders, including Cheney, is exactly national security, in the form of preventing "another attack," as they say.
I'd be interested in a comprehensive list of attacks prevented through means other than torture. My guess is that it would be pretty impressive.
I love this tradition, good call
T. Christie
PS: you needed *a few* more baby eating jokes--to properly honor J. Swift!
Re the 9/11 path to March 03 torture:
The report released by the Senate Intel Committee is at:
http://intelligence.senate.gov/pdfs/olcopinion.pdf
According to an official narrative, two-bit fixer Zubaydah is captured mid 2002, and torture (by any other name) authorized by WH/NSC on the basis CIA believed he was withholding info on an imminent attack. TV viewers will recognize the "24" ticking bomb plot.
SIX MONTHS LATER, as the US attack on Iraq became imminent, Bush's palace guard re-authorizes a program of several hundred waterboardings (within a span of weeks) of Zubaydah and KSM, trying to force a confession of Iraqi participation in 9/11.
Based on the dates, does it look like they were trying to prevent an attack with this torture, or were they using torture to create a false 'smoking gun' casus belli, as part of an intentional misinformation campaign? Aside from torture and disbarr-able legal malpractice, the latter would be an indictable crime-conspiracy, as well as a violation of the 'false witness' commandment that a blanket US ban on torture is designed to prevent.
We haven't even begun to plumb the depths at our Bagram air base and detention facility in Afghanistan.
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