Pit Boss:George Bush's Empire of Torture

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Empire Burlesque

 

High Crimes And Low Comedy In The Bush Imperium.

 

 

Pit Boss:George Bush's Empire of Torture

Monday, 05 December 2005

 

 

Mark Follman of Salon.com proves an excellent Virgil in this harrowing

tour through the sulphurous pit of George W. Bush's vast torture Hell.

Bush has wrought a work of genuine evil in America's name,

systematically and deliberately infecting society with moral

corruption and subverting the very nature of law itself in an attempt

to escape responsibility for his crimes.

 

I've been writing articles about Bush's use of torture since January

2002. I don't know what else to say about it. When I look at Bush's

face -- however well-scrubbed, tanned and carefully made-up it is -- I

can no longer see anything but oozing pustules and smears of blood,

the ugliness of his spirit turned inside out.

 

There is no excuse or mitigation for Bush and his minons. They had

ample investigative, enforcement, intelligence, military and

prosecutorial tools already at their disposal to deal effectively with

the problem of international terrorism by Islamic extremism -- if they

had wanted to use them. They didn't want to. They are not actually

serious about terrorism, except as a justification for the kind of

unlimited executive power -- dictatorial power -- that Dick Cheney and

his ilk have been openly dreaming about for decades. Bush and his

minions wanted to torture people. They wanted to kill people. They

wanted to wage war, break nations, loot and destroy. They exult in

death. Their only God is power. They are the mirror-image of the

oh-so-convenient " enemies " they affect to despise. Who can look on

them and not be revolted?

 

The Salon story is behind the r firewall, but you can read

the entire piece on the continuation below. First though, a quick

quote, from security expert Thomas Powers, to alert us to the fact

that despite the increasing amount of attention being given to Bush's

empire of torture, the worst is probably yet to come.

 

[Excerpt]: The rising backlash against torture today indicates more

military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush

administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented

moral quagmire -- one that could lead to an especially dire end. " The

problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now, " Powers

says. " How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to

be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are

you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not

they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them.

It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual --

it's complete madness. " [End excerpt]

 

Madness, indeed. But summary execution is the logical conclusion --

the final solution -- of Bush's deliberately chosen policy. In the

end, he will have to destroy the evidence of his foulest crimes: the

bodies, the minds, the lives of his victims.

 

America can't take it anymore

 

The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the " war

on terror. " Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are

speaking out against the abuse.

 

By Mark Follman. Salon.com

 

Dec. 05, 2005 | Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice

President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government

would begin working " the dark side " to defeat its enemies in a new

global war. " A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done

quietly, without any discussion, " Cheney declared on NBC's " Meet the

Press. " He added, " It's going to be vital for us to use any means at

our disposal. "

 

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on

Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and

accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects --

conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House --

have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands

of American soldiers and interrogators.

 

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel

and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and

other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world.

In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert

CIA prisons known as " black sites, " top-secret interrogation

facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern

Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

 

" There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as

being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine

and regular basis, " says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security

and the author of two books on the CIA.

 

In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only

been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the

front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the

fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished -- such as Pvt.

Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy -- while commanders in the field

and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military

and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that

the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11,

have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four

years of war.

 

In October, the Senate passed the McCain amendment with overwhelming

bipartisan support. It would impose uniform standards for

interrogation on both the military and CIA, adhering to the Geneva

Conventions' ban on torture and other " cruel, inhuman or degrading

treatment " of prisoners. As the amendment makes it way to the House,

the Bush administration is fighting it every step of the way. Cheney

is wielding his influence on both Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon,

seeking to water down language in the McCain amendment and exempt the

CIA from new guidelines.

 

Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated:

" We do not do torture. " Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else

could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is

both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has

undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq

and the greater Middle East. It has done profound damage to America's

image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, including

CIA director Porter Goss, agree that when it comes to gathering useful

information, torture simply doesn't work.

 

By now, the public may be desensitized to all the personal

testimonials of torture brought to light in the media. In some cases,

skepticism is warranted: Captured al-Qaida training manuals revealed

instructions for prisoners to lie about being tortured to undermine

the enemy. Military investigators have said they've found instances of

prisoners at Guantánamo Bay making false allegations.

 

But evidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under

the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of

rendition, or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like

Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been

in an uproar as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly

used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

 

The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports

by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000

prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and

Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in

Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that

many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military

officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in

Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000

prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred

held for multiple years.

 

As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S.

military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked

Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At

least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

 

Particularly troubling, says Powers, is that the Bush White House has

taken no responsibility for the long trail of illegal abuses committed

in the name of fighting terror: " Has anybody high up been held

accountable for those 26 homicides? Not that I know of. And I'd be

very surprised if we ever learn the full extent of all this. My guess

is that if we could see the whole picture, it'd be extremely dark and

unpleasant. "

 

Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that

interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and

categorically wrong. In an interview with Salon, he said it also

causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

 

" Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the

torturer, " said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at

West Point. " We already have enough soldiers dealing with

post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences.

But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting

wanton pain on another human being. You tell a soldier to go out there

and 'waterboard' someone " -- strap a prisoner to a board, bind his

face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by

drowning -- " or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about

what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it

comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences.

We're talking about serious psychic trauma. "

 

A few courageous soldiers, including Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the

elite 82nd Airborne Division, have spoken out against policies they

say have cultivated torture on the battlefield. For 17 months,

Fishback sought clarification within the military for the proper

treatment of prisoners, and could find none. " I am certain that this

confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death

threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, " Fishback wrote in an open

letter to Sen. John McCain in September. " I and troops under my

command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "

 

Coercion used on detainees, Fishback wrote, " is morally inconsistent

with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable ... If we

abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those

ideals were never really in our possession. "

 

More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups

like Human Rights Watch, which conducts leading research on torture in

the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear

of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers

who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the

torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some

soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make

the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are

taking the sole blame for the abuses.

 

" A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered

by military intelligence to torture, " Sifton told Salon. " And not just

at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq. " According

to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their

superiors told them to take a hike.

 

One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an

interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit

that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report

wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military

and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

 

" It's all over Iraq, " Lagouranis, now retired, told the PBS show

" Frontline " in late September. " The worst stuff I saw was from the

detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were

using things like ... burns. They would smash people's feet with the

back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs. " At the root of the

abuses, he said, was a lot of " frustration that we weren't getting

good intel, " and murky directives regarding the treatment of

prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to

instances of " pure sadism, " like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

 

There are other accounts of stonewalling and coverup by the military:

One Army whistleblower who tried to report abuses in Iraq in 2003 was

suddenly declared psychologically ill and forcibly shipped out of the

country. " They were determined to protect their own asses no matter

who they had to take down, " said Sgt. Frank " Greg " Ford, in a Salon

report last year.

 

In a joint effort with Human Rights First and NYU's Center for Human

Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch has been amassing a

database of " literally hundreds and hundreds of cases of torture " at

the hands of the U.S. military and CIA that have gone uninvestigated

or unresolved. " There are only two cases I know of in which an officer

or senior NCO has been accused of criminal conduct because of actions

of those under their command, " Sifton said. While some lower-level

troops who committed abuse have been rightfully punished, he said,

" it's simply shocking that nobody higher up has been held criminally

liable. "

 

" The message that's going out to guys is, as long as you're a senior

military member or administration staffer, you're golden, " says one

active-duty Army officer, a veteran of combat in Iraq. " Just make sure

either you've got a fall guy, or you're high enough up in the

hierarchy, and you'll be fine. "

 

Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,

policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for

rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and

months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White

House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos

that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants,

those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army

or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not

entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law,

including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a

treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing

" torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or

punishment " of prisoners.

 

The administration also relied on a classified document known as a

" presidential finding, " authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to

capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The

finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful,

was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted

the administration additional power by authorizing the use of " all

necessary and appropriate " military force at the discretion of the

president.

 

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon

issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be

conducted using " humane " treatment. That term replaced language in an

earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules

against torture -- a change that was made following intense pressure

from Cheney's office.

 

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has

been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue,

reaching a consensus on what constitutes " humane " treatment can be

exceedingly difficult -- and vague language remains precisely the

strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention

and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field

manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's

office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the

current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for

interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing

-- at least until the Bush administration began calling for " the

gloves to come off " in the war on terror.

 

According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to

the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and

military officers feel that the administration has long since veered

into dubious territory. " There are plenty of us who think that the

legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable

from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests.

The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's

views, and that we're just beginning to pay them. "

 

It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls

over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an

ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and

interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and

Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that

torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But

according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of

anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S.

intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the

Middle East well before the war even began.

 

" Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign

country that had an OGA site operating on it, " says the Army officer.

(OGA, or " other government agency, " is parlance for a nonmilitary

agency, typically the CIA.) " The airfield was prepped for any number

of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were

self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we

didn't like that, that was too damn bad. "

 

Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the

Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works

with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He

says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as

well as at the " black sites, " which, according to the Washington Post,

were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

 

A recent report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint

operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for

torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S hands at Abu Ghraib

in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky

circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The

prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy

SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison.

The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head,

bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top

forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken

ribs, suffocated to death.

 

Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations

in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear

within the military's detention system with no record of their

captivity -- a practice known as " ghosting. " To date, only one agency

employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor -- but not an

officer -- charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

 

The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says

author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit

to using torture. " They've also said they don't commit

assassinations, " Powers says wryly. " They don't, except when they do. "

 

Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an

unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar

intelligence meltdown -- Powers says analysts were made to " hop on one

leg and whistle " while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD --

the CIA has become an " operational arm " of the Bush White House.

 

The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers

says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability

even dimmer. As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and

file will be held accountable. " Over the last 50 years the agency has

been asked many times to do extreme things, " Powers says. " But almost

always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the

White House takes a hit. "

 

Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful

information from prisoners, especially insurgents. " I've never seen

torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse, " Baer

says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA

officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak

out against torture on moral grounds.

 

" It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to

recruit, " Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist

interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. " This is a 180-degree

turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further. "

 

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and

intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is

sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire -- one

that could lead to an especially dire end. " The problems with this are

huge and they're hitting home now, " Powers says. " How do you let these

people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value,

after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them

forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the

stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already.

This policy isn't just ineffectual -- it's complete madness. "

 

Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who

co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged by the White House for

pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military

prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking

back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully

-- but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain

amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on

the front lines, and an " incredible contradiction " from the White

House on torture.

 

For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last

January, the revelation of the CIA " black sites " has raised new,

troubling questions. " To my knowledge, it was never discussed --

whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going

on inside, " Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol

Hill. " I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But

we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on

statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets

that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has

refused to step in. "

 

That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney,

he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. " There is a close

relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence

Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or

nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a

thorough review of our treatment of prisoners. "

 

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept

in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the

committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of

torture from Abu Ghraib. According to Durbin, a number of the images

they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to

date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain

classified. " In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget

that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of

whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and

hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners. "

 

" I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on

this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp

issue, " Durbin says. " It's further illustration that when a nation is

in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do

things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history. "

 

Comments

 

Wealth Rules

Written by Guest on 2005-12-06 11:32:24 " Politicians are puppets pulled

by individuals with greater wealth. People of great wealth become

wealthier at any cost, from drugs to war. "

 

Bingo. Anyone who doesn't understand this, doesn't understand the

world at all.