"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could -- where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04
"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05
One of the reasons I like the St. Petersburg Times is that they still do some real journalism, not the FOX-and-Judith-Miller kind. This column, for instance: The antitorture law that wasn't by Robyn Clumner St. Petersburg Times 01/22/06. Clumner writes:
Bush appeared to be handing McCain a victory when he eventually acquiesced to language barring the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of anyone in U.S. custody. But it was a Br'er Rabbit protest. Bush was getting more than he was giving up. The protections against abuse that Congress gave with one hand it took back with the other. And Bush declared in an accompanying signing statement that he plans to ignore it all anyway.
The swirl of press surrrounding passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 focused on the provision that protected prisoners from mistreatment and directed the military to abide by the interrogation techniques laid out in the Army Field Manual.
It appeared to be an affirmation of America's finest principles - what made this nation stand as a model of justice and humanity for more than 200 years. But the measure had numerous other provisions, nearly all of which stripped prisoners in Guantanamo of rights and protections. Congress grandly declared the end of cruel treatment, while more quietly making it impossible to assert that right.
Reflecting again how deep the bipartisan tolerance of torture runs, the provision to deny habeus corpus to detainees in the Bush Gulag was sponsored by conservative Repubican Sen. Bob Graham and liberal Democratic Sen. Carl Levin. Graham has gotten some good press, Maverick McCain-style, for grumbling about torture. But it's no real surprise that he would sponsor an obvious pro-torture measure like this.
Then there's Carl Levin, supposedly a liberal, who has been quite critical of Bush's Iraq War policies. Yet he's pro-torture, too. And I don't mean that in some vague sense he's "objectively pro-torture" or something like that. He co-sponsored this measure knowing that the effect would be to allow Bush to continue criminal, sadistic torture in the gulag.
If we had a real press corps, they would have reported this as McCain posturing for the cameras with a Potemkin anti-torture measure. And Graham and Levin would have been highlighted as defenders of torture.
Robyn Clumner, at least, gets it right:
So what we have with the antitorture bill is a whole lot of hoopla signifying nothing. Bush is determined to keep dragging us through the mud, no matter what laws he has to break or manipulate into irrelevance, and Congress seems willing to go along. It's a disheartening, demoralizing disgrace all around.
Are the Big Pundits so supercilious that they really don't get this? Or do they just go along with the script because they don't really care what happens - except for their own status as members of the group we generously call the Washington "press corps"?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues its prosecutions of low-level perpetrators, just this past week giving Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, Jr., a conviction carrying a maximum three-year sentence for suffocating a prisoner to death, a prisoner who had also been badly beaten by Welshofer or somebody else: Carson GI convicted in death of detainee: Negligent homicide found, not murder The U.S. soldier was on trial in the suffocation of an Iraqi general in 2003. He could spend up to three years in prison by Erin Emery Denver Post 01/21/06.
The charges on which he was prosecuted included murder, but the court martial let him off with an incredibly light sentence.
The trial put a spotlight on abuse of the detainee by U.S. forces and the CIA, the types of techniques allowed by interrogators, and the confusing and conflicting guidance issued by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top general in Iraq in the fall of 2003.
During closing arguments Saturday, [lead prosecutor Maj. Tiernan] Dolan said: "This case has been and remains about our officer corps, and our officer corps need to set the standards and maintain the high ground, especially in a country like Iraq, where our presence may be resented.
"And if we can't hold the high ground in a country like Iraq, we can't hold it anywhere."
Dolan said Welshofer should have known that his actions were dangerous and could cause death or serious injury - the theory under which he was charged.
"He treated that general worse than you would treat a dog, and he did so knowing he was required to treat him humanely," Dolan said.
The message being sent by the officer corps is, go ahead and treat the prisoners like dogs, murder them if you feel like it - just don't let it get into the papers.
The implications of the Bush torture policy are wide-reaching and long-lasting. We're only beginning to see the consequences of it.
And while we're on the subject, here are a few other, older articles on the topic.
The soft-pedaling of crimes committed by GI's against Iraqis is not new: U.S. soldiers get off easy for crimes against Iraqis, review finds by Russell Carollo and Larry Kaplow Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service 10/03/05. (The original link is dead, but the text of the article is available as of this writing at this link, near the bottom of the page.)
Juliette Kayyem wrote in The Torture Debate, Some New Disclosures TPM Cafe 09/25/05 about indications that the President's Office of Legal Counsel and the Justice Department had begun to have major reservations about the Unitary Executive Theory promoted by John Yoo as allowing the President to order violations of the law at hisown discretion. She wrote:
What this means is that the myth perpetuated by the right - that their legal theory was sound, but that the disclosures at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo forced them politically to retract - are simply bogus. The legal theorists of the right have consistently argued that their critics are a consortium of human rights activists, international legal theorists and, sometimes, military and State Department lawyers who worry about our standing abroad (rightfully so). If the Office of Legal Counsel found that its own reasoning was unsound (and this wasn't a change of Administrations, afterall), then the legal theories that may have contributed to the unforgivable behavior of detainees - with the resulting loss of confidence in America by our allies and the rest of the world - never had much weightiness in the first place. And now, possibly, you can quote the Bush Administration's Justice Department for that proposition.
This hasn't stopped the administration from using the justifications, though. Bush invoked the unitary executive theory in his now-infamous signing statement nullifying the McCain anti-torture legislation. And the same idea is now used (along with a fatuous interpretation of Congress' 2001 resolution to take all necessary military action against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks) to justify illegal spying on Americans.
Marty Lederman provides amuch more detailed explanation in Silver Linings (or, the Strange But True Fate of the Second (or was it the Third?) OLC Torture Memo) Balkinization blog 09/21/05.
Scott Horton in Shirking Responsibility Balkinization blog 09/25/05 wrote:
We are rapidly arriving at the point where the denials of military senior brass and political appointees who supervise them can only be viewed either as shirking responsibility or as confirmation that torture and abuse are official U.S. policy. It is hard to judge which of these alternatives is more harmful to the nation and its armed forces.
Horton in that post discusses the long-term damage the torture policy has created:
As a highly regarded Army reserve lawyer - now called up to active duty in Iraq - recently wrote, these developments cumulatively reflect "abdication of responsibility by the Defense Department and the Army. The question is not whether these officers actually directed the abuses or participated in them; rather, the question is how they acted as generals and leaders to facilitate the abuses,fail to prevent them, or fail to stop them." The introduction of torture and abuse as interrogation practices has badly corrupted military intelligence and is undermining morale and discipline throughout the service. The decision to scapegoat the "grunts" for decisions that clearly were taken at or near the top of the chain of command has further undermined confidence in the chain of command and in the integrity of the Army as an institution. The systematic denial of the doctrine of command responsibility threatens the ethic of the military on the most fundamental level. One must wonder when and where this whirlwind of destruction that now engulfs our military and threatens to undermine our national security will end. (my emphasis)
"The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear." - Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values (2005)
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