The Bush Doctrine for torture in the gulag

The Wall Street Journal, despite the rightwing kookiness of its editorial page, still has a solid reputation for its features articles.  Its coverage of the Iraq War has also been good lately.  Monday's edition carried this article by reporter Jess Bravin on the front page: Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture 06/07/04.  (The link is to a version reproduced on another site; the article is behind subscription at the WSJ.)

The Journal obtained access to a partially redacted draft dated 03/06/04 of a 100+ page report devoted to ways the Bush administration might go about evading US and international laws banning torture.  Bravin's sources told him that "there were few substantial changes in legal analysis between the draft and final versions."

The Wall Street Journal Revelations

The first paragraph of the WSJ article says:

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his discretion couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

And the reasoning behind it shows the extent to which ideas that can only be described as anti-democractic and authoritarian are explicitly used (my emphasis):

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere.  It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attewmpt torture, defined as any act intended to "inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."  Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in[-]chief authority," the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in the original document.) The Justice Department "concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power," the report said.  Citing confidential Justice dearment opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised that the executive branch of the government had "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress." ...

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "residential diretive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

There's lots of things that could be said about this, and I quote some of them below.  But this is a dictatorial perspective, pure and simple.  Anyone who can't or won't condemn this kind of thinking straight-out is just not someone who believes in democracy.

Conditions in Guantanamo

Among other things, it makes clear what Bush and Rummy consider "humane" treatment of prisoners in the Guantanamo branch of the gulag:

Methods now used at Guantanamo include limiting prisoners' food, denying them clothing, subjecting them to body-cavity searches, epriving them of sleep for as much as 96 hours and shackling them in so-called stress positions, a military-intelligence officials said.  Although the interrorgators consider the methods to be humiliating and unpleasant, they don't view them as torture, the official said.

I linked earlier to a Nicolas Kristof article (Beating Specialist Baker New York Times 06/05/04) in which he related the experience on a 37-year-old American soldier, Sean Baker, who had been required to act as a practice subject for five other soldiers who "were told that he was a genuine detainee whohad already assaulted a sergeant."  Kristof quotes Baker's description of what happened:

"They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he — the same individual — reached aroundand began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because Icouldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was `red.' . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: `I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' "

Seeing his uniform under his jumpsuit, they were finally convinced he was a soldier.  But in just a few brief minutes, they had done permanent physical damage to Baker.  After suffering seizures, he was in the hospital for 48 days for traumatic brain injury - 48 days is a very long hospital stay by current American standards.  The Army's Physical Evaluation Board formally found, "The TBI [traumatic brain injury] was due to soldier playing role of detainee who was non-cooperative and was being extracted from detention cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during a training exercise."  Baker still suffers from seizures, a year and a half after he was tortured in the gulag.  For a few minutes.

I linked in an earlier post to this account from a British man who found himself in the Guantanamo branch of the gulag:  My Hell in Camp X-Ray Daily Mirror (UK) 03/12/04.

A British captive freed from Guantanamo Bay today tells the world of its full horror - and reveals how prostitutes were taken into the camp to degrade Muslim inmates. ...

The father-of-three, from Manchester, told how he was assaulted with fists, feet and batons after refusing a mystery injection.

He said detainees wereshackled for up to 15 hours at a time in hand and leg cuffs with metal links which cut into the skin.

Their "cells" were wire cages with concrete floors and open to the elements - giving no privacy or protection from the rats, snakes and scorpions loose around the American base.

This kind of torture is what the Bush administration stands for.  It's cruel, its vicious and it has no legitimate intelligence purpose.  It's cruelty for the sake of cruelty and for the sake of terror in the old-fashioned meaning, of spreading fear among the targeted population.

The next time Americans hear about some other country whose government committed atrocities "in the name of" their people, you should remember:  This is what kind of acts of sadistic cruelty are being committed in your name.  Not in any second-hand sense, either.  These are officials of the US government, acting on orders and authorization from senior American officials, doing this. It's not something anyone who cares about democracy or basic decency can be proud of.

Other Views on the Journal Revelations

Josh Marshall writes:

So the right to set aside law is "inherent in the president". That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means -- a government of laws, not men, and all that.

In Presidential Powers, Billmon says:

It's interesting to compare this doctrine of executive supremecy - really, a modern-day version of the Fuehrerprinzip - with the more constricted view taken by conservative legal scholars when Clinton’s lawyers advanced the notion that perhaps, just maybe, the chiefexecutive shouldn’t be subject to private harassment suits during his term in office. But, as we all know, 9/11 changed everything.

The question, however, is whether everything will change back the next time a Democrat takes the oath of office. Having asserted – and made such fateful use of – the dictatorial powers outlined in the Pentagon’s legal torture guide, how comfortable will our GOP legal warriors be when and if the opposition lays its hands on those same powers?

In Germany, they don't think much of the Fuehrerprinzip these days.  Or of torture either.  This Spiegel article (Pentagon-Gutachten gesteht Bush Folterbefehl zu 06/07/04) mostly just recaps the Journal article.  But this does not look good to the citizens of European democracies, where torture, arbitrary arrests, military courts and the death penalty are strongly disapproved.  The title of the Spiegel article is a bit of a reach; the WSJ article didn't report any clear links to Bush himself.

Phil Carter at Intel Dump observes:

... this DoD memo appears to be quite the opposite. It is, quite literally, a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct. This memorandum lays out the substantive law on torture and how to avoid it. It then goes on to discuss the procedural mechanisms with which torture is normally prosecuted, and techniques for avoiding those traps. I have not seen the text of the memo, but from this report, it does not appear that it advises American personnel to comply with international or domestic law. It merely tells them how to avoid it. That is dangerous legal advice.

I'm sure that we'll be hearing much more about this.  We've seen not one but several tips of the iceberg that is the rogue national security operation the Bush administration is running.  Now it's starting to unravel in a serious way.