Page 3 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
urge to confess on
torture By
Tom Engelhardt
one month
into President Bush's first term" and Congress
subsequently passed the American Servicemembers'
Protection Act which prohibited "certain types of
military aid to countries that have signed on to
the International Criminal Court but have not
signed a separate accord with the United States,
called an Article 98 agreement". The Bush
administration, opposed to international "fora" of
all sorts, then proceeded to go individually,
repeatedly, and over years, to more than 100
countries, demanding that the
representatives of each sign
such an agreement "not to surrender American
citizens to the international court without the
consent of officials in Washington".
In
other words, they put the sort of effort that
might normally have gone into establishing an
international agreement into threatening weak
countries with the loss of US aid in order to give
themselves and of course those lower-level
soldiers and operatives on whom so much is blamed
- a free pass for crimes yet to be committed (but
which they obviously felt they would commit).
We're talking here about small, impoverished lands
like Cambodia, still attempting to bring its own
war criminals of the Pol Pot era to justice.
In the process of twisting arms, the
administration suspended over US$47 million in
military aid "to 35 countries that had not signed
deals to grant American soldiers immunity from
prosecution for war crimes". In this attempt to
get every country on the planet aboard the
American no-war-crimes-prosecution train before it
left the station, you can sense once again the
administration's obsessional intensity on this
subject (especially since experts agreed that the
realistic possibility of the ICC bringing
Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).
The Bush administration regularly reached
for its dictionaries to redefine reality, even
before it reached for its guns. It not only wrote
its own rules and its own "law", but when problems
nonetheless emerged from its secret world of
detention and pain and wouldn't go away - at Abu
Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere - it proceeded to
investigate itself with the expectable results.
For Bush's officials, this should have
seemed like a perfect way to maintain a no-fault
system that would never reach up any chain of
command. Indeed, as Mark Danner has commented,
such practices plunged us into an age of "frozen
scandals" in which, as with the latest torture
memos, the shocked-shocked effect repeats itself
but nothing follows. As he has written: "One of
the most painful principles of our age is that
scandals are doomed to be revealed - and to remain
stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished,
unfinished."
How true. And yet, looked at
another way, the administration - with outsized
help from outraged government officials who knew
crimes when they saw them and were willing to take
chances to reveal them - has already created a
remarkable record of its own criminal activity,
which can now be purchased in any bookstore in the
land.
Back in the early autumn of 2004,
when the first collection of such documents
arrived in the bookstores, Mark Danner's
Torture and Truth, America, Abu Ghraib, and the
War on Terror, it was already more than 600
pages long. In early 2005, when Karen J Greenberg,
executive director of the Center on Law and
Security at the New York University School of Law,
and Josh Dratel, the civilian defense attorney for
Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, released their
monumental The Torture Papers, The Road to Abu
Ghraib, another collection of secret
memoranda, official investigations of Abu Ghraib,
and the like, it was already an oversized book of
more than 1,200 pages - a doorstopper large enough
to keep a massive prison gate open. And, of
course, even it couldn't hold all the documents. A
later Greenberg book, The Torture Debate in
America, for instance, has military documents
not included in the first volume.
Then,
there were the two-years worth of FBI memos and
emails about Guantanamo that the ACLU pried loose
from the government and released on line, also in
2005. This material was damning indeed, including
direct reports from FBI agents witnessing - and
protesting as well as pointing fingers at -
military interrogators at the prison, as in an
August 2, 2004, report that said: "On a couple of
occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a
detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position
to the floor, with no chair, food or water ...
most times they had urinated or defecated on
themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24
hours or more."
Or a January 21, 2004,
email in which an FBI agent complained that the
technique of a military interrogator impersonating
an FBI agent "and all of those used in these
scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef", a
reference to deputy secretary of defense Paul
Wolfowitz.
Other paperback volumes have
also been published that include selections from
these and other documents like Crimes of War:
Iraq by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier and
Robert Jay Lifton and In the Name of Democracy:
American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond by
Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith. If
all of these documents, including the latest ones
evidently in the hands of the New York Times, were
collected, you would have a little library of
volumes - all functionally confessional - for a
future prosecutor. (And there are undoubtedly
scads more documents where these came from,
including perhaps a John Yoo "torture memo",
rumored to exist, that preceded the August 2002
one.)
What an archive, then, is already
available in our world. It's as if, to offer a
Vietnam comparison, the contents of The Pentagon
Papers had simply slipped out into the light of
day, one by one, without a Daniel Ellsberg in
sight, without anyone quite realizing it had
happened.
The urge of any criminal regime
- to ditch, burn, or destroy incriminating
documents, or erase emails - has, in a sense,
already been obviated. So much of the Bush/Cheney
"record" is on the record. As Karen J Greenberg
wrote, in December 2006, "What more could a
prosecutor want than a trail of implicit
confessions, consistent with one another,
increasingly brazen over time, and leading right
into the Oval Office?"
Looking back on
these last years, it turns out that the president,
vice president, their aides and the other top
officials of this administration were always in
the confessional booth. There's no exit now.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts
and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
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