Deep Blade Journal

Dictators declare their own law for themselves

Bush gave a pathetic press conference on Monday.

Yesterday, in a news release the ACLU describes to which rotten apple the trail of US torture planning leads:

A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as “torture” and a June 2004 “Urgent Report” to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

From his press conference:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it’s important to let the world know that we fully understand our obligations in a society that honors rule of law to do that. But I also have an obligation to protect the American people, to make sure we understand the nature of the people that we hold, whether or not there’s possible intelligence we can gather from them that we could then use to protect us. So we’ll continue to work the issue hard.

So, Mr. President, why the coverup? If “inhumane interrogation methods” protect America, why not just say so?

The truth is that the Bush Administration feels that it can make its own law, or be lawless, as it alone chooses. This, to Bush, constitutes “the rule of law”. The president is not accountable, his decisions not “reviewable”. These are characteristics of dictatorship.

And the premise that this torture will “protect the American people” is false. It invites retaliation by new-formed enemies.

Bush established torture regime under theory of absolute power

Boot kicking detainees in distress positions happens under the color of high-level authority.

A report by Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Hirsh of Newsweek in the Dec. 27 / Jan. 3 issue underscores the very clear reasons why torture of detainees under US care is not just the work of a few bad-apple, low-level grunts. They write about meetings held in the office of now Attorney-General nominee Alberto Gonzales during July 2002:

And partly out of the discussions in Gonzales’s office came the most notorious legal document to emerge from last spring’s Abu Ghraib interrogation scandal. This was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo — drafted by [Justice Department lawyer John] Yoo, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and addressed to Gonzales — which provoked outrage among human-rights advocates by narrowly defining torture. The memo concluded, among other things, that only severe pain or permanent damage that was “specifically intended” constituted torture. Mere “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment did not qualify.

So the usual definition of torture was set aside by those at the top, and if a technique was not intended to be torture under these self-defined criteria, it simply no longer would be called such.

Furthermore, Bush was the direct recipient of ethically-questionable legal gymnastics intended to neutralize US law and the Geneva Conventions:

…memos reviewed by Newsweek and interviews with key principals show that Gonzales’s advice to the president reflected the bold views laid out in the Aug. 1 memo and other documents. Sources close to the Senate Judiciary Committee say a chief focus of the hearings will be Gonzales’s role in the so-called “torture memo,” as well as his legal judgment in urging Bush to sidestep the Geneva Conventions. In a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on terror “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” Some State Department lawyers charge that Gonzales misrepresented so many legal considerations and facts (including hard conclusions by State’s Southeast Asia bureau about the nature of the Taliban) that one lawyer considers the memo to be “an ethical breach.” In response, a senior White House official says Gonzales’s memo was only a “draft” and just one part of an extensive decision-making process in which all views were aired.

In an accompanying article, Isikoff describes the royal theory of absolute presidential power in matters of torture, and indeed the entire legal backing for invading Iraq that Bush and his shady lawyers declared for themselves:

Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them — regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the president’s authority to wage war — a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department….

What is particularly striking is that it goes beyond the joint congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to respond to the terror attacks. Although the White House had initially sought authority for the president to “preempt any future acts of terrorism” without any limitation on those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress deleted the pre-emption request and narrowed the scope of the president’s authority to attack only those connected with September 11. “The authority granted is focused on those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11,” Sen. Joe Biden stated on the Senate floor in explaining what Congress intended to authorize.

But Yoo’s memo, written 11 days later, essentially argued that what Congress authorized didn’t matter. “It should be noted here that the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President’s constitutional authority,” Yoo wrote in the memo, adding that the resolution “does not reach other terrorist individuals, groups or states which cannot be determined to have links to the September 11 attacks.”

“Nonetheless,” he added, “the President’s broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters.” The memo was written at a time when, unknown to the public, officials in the Pentagon — including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — were privately pushing the president to consider attacking Iraq. Indeed, according to the September 11 commission, a memo apparently written by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith just five days before Yoo’s memo suggested “hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.”

Aggression is the supreme crime under international law. The record under the Bush regime is an open declaration that these precepts no longer apply to the US post-911. If this declaration sticks, the post-WWII international order is dead and a new era of international Aggression is upon us.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that coalition forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib. Witnesses claim that the detainees — some as young as 10 — are also being subjected to rape and torture. (Sunday Herald, Aug.1.2004)

That’s what they’re doing. Now here’s what he said:

…political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured….Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.

–President Bush, Oct.7. 2002

By our actions, our coalition removed a grave and gathering danger. We also ended one of the cruelest regimes in our time. Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers and children’s prisons are closed forever. His mass graves will claim no victims. The world was right to confront the regime of Saddam Hussein, and we were right to end the regime of Saddam Hussein.

–President Bush before Philippine Congress, Oct.18.2003

The systematic use of rape by Saddam’s regime to dishonor families has ended.

–President & Mrs. Bush during event to “globally promote women’s human rights”, Mar.12.2004

This sickening mess is intentional policy, not aberration. For God’s sake, they’re doing it all over the place in Iraq, how can it not be policy?

If the president can make a mockery when he speaks about child rape and torture, can there be anything else he says that is not a mockery? I hope to God the citizens of America come to their senses and remove this cruel administration.

Please see also the previous post with the link to Sy Hersh’s talk on this subject.

“When something like this comes to light, the United States acts quickly and swiftly to bring people to justice and to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again”. (Whitehouse Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, May 10, 2004)

Deep Blade Journal has emphasized often ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) that torture of prisoners under US auspices is hardly an aberration.

Contrary to the whitewash McClellan and other administration officials wish to promote, the United States is mostly concerned with keeping quiet its atrocious policies and practices. These practices are then clandestinely approved and repeated again, and again, and again.

Take for example the torture training center generally known as the School of the Americas, now officially renamed (in an attempt at image cleansing) the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). A new story in LA Weekly by Doug Ireland describes how the US Congress has maneuvered below the radar to renew appropriations for the institution, “where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years”. An amendment with 128 cosponsors to cut off WHINSEC appropriations was killed procedurally in the House of Representatives. The US Senate is now the final hurdle before the School’s funding is renewed.

The LA Weekly reminds readers of the documentary history of US-promoted torture recently revealed in documents obtained by the National Security Archive through Freedom of Information act requests and released to the public in May 2004. This article by Thomas Blanton and Peter Kornbluh appearing on Counterpunch for May 12, 2004 provides an excellent summary of how

CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described “coercive techniques” such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq…. [Also,] a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warn[ed] that U.S. Army intelligence manuals…incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques [and] contained “offensive and objectionable material” that “undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment.”

Ireland writes, “Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates”, and goes on to quote a May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail piece by Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture:

The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix position in Abu Ghraib was la cama, named for a former Chilean prisoner who survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case, electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit, reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing torture at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes, U.S.-backed dictator John-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier’s right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince in 1984. The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary, Sister Diana Ortiz [who was tortured and gang-raped repeatedly under supervision by an American in 1989, according to her testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus].

The depraved story of how seriously the United States has in the past taken its own declared “steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again” should give little comfort to current and future detainees facing torture at the hands of the empire.

Thanks to The Angry Arab News Service for the LA Weekly link.