War Crimes, Obviously

Tuesdays are no good, and Tuesday, December 11, was no exception.  The latest tweak to fix the economy caused the stock markets to fall into a deep hole.  The markets may claw out of that hole one day, but there’s a general feeling around that a deep recession is inevitable, at best, and at the worst that the whole system of leveraged debt based on derivatives of derivatives of derivatives and money borrowed from the Chinese will seize up and kind of stop working.  No one quite knows what happens when the world’s financial system just freezes up – 1929 might not be a good model.  It is a tad worrying.

 

But bigger things were up, secret testimony in Washington.  That was just as disconcerting –

 

CIA Director Michael Hayden, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors Tuesday, failed to answer central questions about the destruction of secret videotapes showing harsh interrogation of terror suspects, the panel’s chairman said.

 

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., called the committee’s 90-minute session with Hayden “a useful and not yet complete hearing” and vowed the committee would get to the bottom of the matter. Among lingering questions: Who authorized destruction of the tapes, and why Congress wasn’t told about it?

 

Actually, the issue is not the destruction of the tapes and who ordered that.  The issue is why they were destroyed, which is a matter of obstruction of justice, as it has become obvious someone is worried about being charged with some rather serious war crimes.

 

We’re talking about matters that have been on the books for a long time.  Article 22 of the Hague IV – Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907 – states that “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.”  Over the last century there have been subsequent treaties that introduced all sorts of laws that place constraints on belligerents.  We signed the treaties, we’re a party to them, and that makes the restrictions our own law.  And now we’re talking about “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, which we nudged into existence and proudly signed – torture or inhumane treatment, sometimes leading to willful killing, or causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, depriving a prisoner of war of a fair trial, unlawful deportation, confinement or transfer and now and then taking hostages.  We seem to have done it all, although we have said it wasn’t what it seemed, and anyway it was all necessary, and sometimes, in the case of Abu Ghraib, unfortunate.  But for the work of the low-level creeps at Abu Ghraib, all reports of what we have done were essentially not documented – until now.  The CIA taped their key interrogation sessions.   Bad idea – and someone realized it.

 

With the tapes gone there is no problem, save for slapping the wrist of whoever got rid of the documentation.  It would end there, but for what preceded the closed door hearings.  That would be the ABC News coup, the Brian Ross interview with a former CIA interrogator, John Kiriakou, who actually tortured one Abu Zubaydah.  That was odd, and you can read the full transcript here and here (both in PDF format).  And not only was it odd, it took away the usual “we do not torture” explanation that no one high up authorizes the really bad stuff.  They did just that.  According to Kiriakou, everything was closely monitored and approved up the chain of command.  The president absolutely knew and approved of the waterboarding.  President Bush personally authorized the torture of a prisoner, via the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA.  No one was winging it –

 

BRIAN ROSS: And did you know the CIA officers feel without a doubt you had the legal right to do what you were doing?

 

JOHN: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  I remember – I remember being told when – the President signed the – the authorities that they had been approved – not just by the National Security Counsel, but by the – but by the Justice Department as well, I remember people being surprised that the authorities were granted.

 

Yeah, well, you don’t expect the president to authorize torture – but waterboarding was not the only torture technique.  Sleep deprivation was just as important.  And this fellow knew that was torture too –

 

JOHN: You know, you may not think about it, but– but exhaustion is– is a very difficult thing to handle.  It’s one thing to be tired.  It’s another thing to be so tired that you begin to hallucinate.  And after a while some people just can’t take it anymore.  And they’ll tell you if– “Just give me an hour.  Give me two hours of sleep, I’ll tell you anything you wanna know.”

 

BRIAN ROSS: Really?

 

JOHN: Uh-huh (AFFIRM)

 

BRIAN ROSS: And that’s after how long generally?

 

JOHN: I recall the handful of times it was used on people it was usually 40 hours plus.  They just simply couldn’t take it anymore.

 

Ah well – this guy, Kiriakou, says that the information Zubayhdah gave was quite good and confirmed from other sources.

 

Maybe so, but here’s how Ron Suskind described what happened, starting with what CIA investigators found in Zubaydah’s diary –

 

“The guy is insane, certifiable, split personality,” [Dan] Coleman told a top official at FBI after a few days reviewing the Zubaydah haul…. There was almost nothing “operational” in his portfolio. That was handled by the management team. He wasn’t one of them…. “He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights…. He was expendable, you know, the greeter…. Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace, shaking hands.”

 

… According to CIA sources, he was water-boarded… He was beaten…  He was repeatedly threatened… His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights.

 

… Under this duress, Zubaydah told them that shopping malls were targeted by al Qaeda…. Zubaydah said banks = yes, banks –  were a priority…. And also supermarkets – al Qaeda was planning to blow up crowded supermarkets, several at one time. People would stop shopping. The nation’s economy would be crippled. And the water system – a target, too. Nuclear plants, naturally. And apartment buildings.

 

Thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each flavor of target. Of course, if you multiplied by ten, there still wouldn’t be enough public servants in America to surround and secure the supermarkets. Or the banks. But they tried.

 

This was what we got?  Zubaydah said his decision to cooperate came in a dream where Allah gave him permission to talk.  Andrew Sullivan doubts that – “I have no doubt it was related to the breakdown caused by waterboarding, but with religious fanatics, a religious sanction is also necessary. Torture alone was not enough”

 

But the reason doesn’t matter.  Sullivan goes to the bigger issue –

 

If we are to have a serious debate about what to do about torture, all these facts need to be taken into consideration. The facts are these: the president of the United States directly broke the law and the Geneva Conventions by authorizing the torture of a prisoner; he did so in the absence of any actual knowledge of any actual, dire threat to the United States; the evidence of the torture has been destroyed.

 

There are no excuses –

 

The Zubaydah torture does not fit the category laid out by Charles Krauthammer as the criterion for legalized torture. It was done not because we knew something and needed to nail it down. It was done because we knew nothing and needed to find out more. The attacks it allegedly foiled were not catastrophic and not on the mainland of the United States. It was accompanied and monitored by medical professionals to ensure that the victim did not die. Those medical professionals need to be identified and stripped of their licenses.

 

But what’s even more important, this stuff wasn’t contained, really –

 

Instead, incidents of torture and abuse were subsequently documented throughout the theater of war. We have evidence of over a hundred deaths in interrogation, of which less than a score have been acknowledged by the Pentagon as examples of torturing-to-death. Whatever moral decision we come to with respect to the torture of Abu Zubaydah, it is essential to understand that no authorized act of torture stands alone. By sending a clear signal that the United States has crossed the Rubicon of torture, the commander-in-chief told the entire military and intelligence world that the gloves are off.

 

There is a direct line from the president’s authorization of torture to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Bush is responsible for Abu Ghraib.

 

It hard to argue with that, save for the Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh view of things – that even if they knew nothing they deserved what they got.  But Sullivan has more to say about those who scoff at all this girly outrage over torture –

 

The legal definition is clear enough: the infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering to extract information. But the notion of “severe” has obviously been interpreted to mean different things, to carve out a zone where prisoners can be subjected to pain and suffering to elicit information that is not somehow torture. You’ve heard all the euphemisms by now: “enhanced interrogation”; “coercive interrogation”; “aggressive questioning”; “harsh interrogation.” Not only have leading politicians and torture apologists used these terms but the mainstream media have adopted them as well, as if writing news stories in which the United States is described as practicing torture is so unimaginable a concept that it requires obfuscating.

 

To my mind, the biggest misconception has been the conflation of torture with sadism as it is understood in comic books or lurid spy novels. Throughout human history, some of the most disgusting torture has taken these forms: pulling out fingernails, drilling into skulls, electrocution, etc. But most human torture is less dramatic than this, even banal. Sleep deprivation, for example, can easily be dismissed as non-torture by those, like Rudy Giuliani, who have not taken the time to learn what it actually is.

 

Sullivan notes that many victims of torture describe sleep deprivations as among the worst of what they do –

 

Menachem Begin, a terrorist and no softy, experienced it under Stalin and believed that “not even hunger or thirst are comparable” with the desire to sleep after a certain amount of time. The same can be said for being forced to stand for 48 hours.

 

That leads back to the ABC interview – ” I recall the handful of times it was used on people – it was usually forty hours plus.  They just simply couldn’t take it anymore.”

 

Sullivan –

 

That last phrase seems to me to be the critical one: They just simply couldn’t take it anymore.

 

This is the central criterion of torture. It takes sleep deprivation 40 hours to get there; and it takes water-boarding ten seconds. But the destination is the same: the surrender of will to another because of intolerable pain or suffering. That’s why a mock execution is also regarded as torture under the law – because it takes a person to the edge of psychological breakdown.

 

Or look at it this way. If a prisoner were subjected to electric shocks to get him to cooperate, how long would the process take? A matter of seconds, perhaps a minute. How long does it take when waterboarding someone? According to Kiriakou, who was there: “He was able to withstand the water boarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds.”

 

So the mental and physical pain or suffering was so severe that it was an achievement for a prisoner to endure it for more than 30 seconds. Kiriakou says he lasted 5 seconds in a context where he knew he was safe.

 

One way to look at it –

 

This is not just torture; it is among the most severe forms of torture that we know. It is completely indistinguishable from non-fatally electrocuting someone. That it doesn’t leave physical marks is immaterial. That argument is one the Nazis used in defending the use of sleep deprivation and hypothermia. What matters is the severity of the suffering.

 

So we get this –

 

I wish these were not the facts. But they are. We now have a direct witness to the torture – and one who inflicted it – describing it as torture; we have all the legal precedents that do not begin to question whether waterboarding is torture; we know the president directly authorized it; we know the epidemic of torture that ensued. These are crimes, committed by the executive branch in full awareness of the law and with premeditation. They place the United States in violation of the Geneva Conventions. And the president bears the final responsibility.

 

I hate to ask the inevitable question: Who will now hold him criminally responsible?

 

No one, probably.  We don’t want to face the whole mess.

 

And it only gets worse with more CIA photos –

 

Lawyers for a British resident who the US government refuses to release from Guantanamo Bay have identified the existence of photographs taken by CIA agents that they say show their client suffered horrific injuries under torture.

 

The photographic evidence will be vital to clear Binyam Mohammed, 27, who the Americans want to bring before a Military Commission on charges of terrorism, say his lawyers.

 

Last week it emerged that Britain had negotiated the release of four detainees who have British residence status but Mr Mohammed, who speaks with a London accent, and at least three others are being held back.

 

In a letter sent to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Britain is urged to ask the US to stop the CIA destroying the pictures.

 

Clive Stafford-Smith, the legal director of Reprieve representing Mr Mohammed, said that he also knows the identity of the agents who were present when his client was allegedly beaten and tortured. Writing to Mr Miliband, he said: “Given the opportunity, we can prove that the evidence was the fruit of torture. Indeed, we can prove that a photographic record was made of this by the CIA. Through diligent investigation we know when the CIA took pictures of Mr Mohammed’s brutalised genitalia, we know the identity of the CIA agents who were present including the person who took the pictures (we know both their false identities and their true names), and we know what those pictures show.”

 

He added: “I have been privy to materials that allegedly support the finding that Mr Mohammed should be held, and while I cannot discuss some here (due to classification rules), I can state unequivocally that I have seen no evidence of any kind against Mr Mohammed that is not the bitter fruit of torture.”

 

As Digby ruefully notes – “But hey, I’m sure he deserved it. After all, the Bush administration insists that all of these people at Guantanamo are terrorists. And they had to torture them to confirm it.”

 

War crime trials seem inevitable, one day.  If so, this new, handy Official CIA Torture Tape Timeline – too bad it’s not a joke at all.  But we’ll not admit we got ourselves into this.  We don’t want to think such things of ourselves.

 

“Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.” – Franklin P. Adams

 

At least we’re on side of the side of right and justice in Iraq, except that women who don’t dress modestly enough are being gunned down in Basra –

 

Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against “violating Islamic teachings,” the police chief said Sunday.

 

Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf blamed sectarian groups that he said were trying to impose a strict interpretation of Islam. They dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves, he added.

 

But that’s not the government we got up and running in Iraq, thank goodness.  That would be these guys –

 

The Iraqi government has ordered all policewomen to hand in their guns for redistribution to men or face having their pay withheld, thwarting a U.S. initiative to bring women into the nation’s police force.

 

… Critics say the move is the latest sign of the religious and cultural conservatism that has taken hold in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s ouster ushered in a government dominated by Shiite Muslims. Now, that tendency is hampering efforts to bring stability to Iraq by driving women from the force, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, who has led the effort to recruit female officers.

 

Oh well.  We tried.  And the Washington Post reports that the national police force, which the Jones Commission said was so thoroughly corrupted by sectarian rancor that it should be scrapped, will instead have its mission “adjusted” by “gradually withdrawing its forces from neighborhoods and moving them to regional garrisons across the country, where they will serve as an emergency response force.”

 

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, who rounded up this stuff, adds this –

 

Which sounds to me suspiciously like scrapping them as an actual police force while still keeping them around as a none-too-subtle reminder to the Sunni minority about who’s in charge these days.

 

Good stuff. Certainly well worth a trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, no?

 

But we can explain it all.  Karen Hughes, whose job was to explain to the world that we’re the good guys, may be gone, but the administration found someone even better, James Glassman, the man who seven years ago wrote the famous book on economics, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.  How’s that going, Jim?

 

Duncan Black comments – “As with most things the administration does, the desired impact is domestic, not foreign. You don’t hire Jim Glassman for his awesome rapport with the Arab world. You hire him for his ability to launder horseshit through the American PR-journalism circuit.”

 

And on we go.  Maybe Glassman can be the defense attorney at the war crime trials.