Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Journey to the dark side
By Tom Engelhardt
"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the
agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been
imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no
lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."
No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of - and a
legacy of - George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at
the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.
Embedded reports from the Dark Side
A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq,
reporters were said to be "embedded" in US military units. That term - so close
in sound to "in bed with" - should have wider uses. You could, for instance,
say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely
willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of
widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known
as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore
Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is
guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally
have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an
institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods
increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite
the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of
freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and
"security."
Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in
December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other
December stories - some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or
in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little
consternation - indicates just how normalized all this has become.
A legacy can often be framed in words. So here's a little rundown of just some
areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment,
2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:
Destroyed tapes: One issue connected to torture - sorry, "enhanced
interrogation techniques" - did get major coverage last month, the revelation
on the front page of the December 6 New York Times of the destruction, in 2005,
of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations,
including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives - in this case, Abu Zubaydah
and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the
decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key
lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President's office brought
into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA's National
Clandestine Service, Jose A Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon
testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.
As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already
been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA
officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those
tapes from the administration's secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn
that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the agency. As yet, by
the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little
to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott
Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, "Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save
Image," with this telling line from the CIA's then number three official, A B
Krongard: "You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes." Think about
that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA's Inspector
General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also
attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same -
unsuccessfully.
Kidnapping is the law: According to the British Sunday Times, "A senior
lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that
kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US
Supreme Court has sanctioned it." According to that lawyer, the precedent "goes
back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s." This applies, it seems, not just to
terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen
wanted for, say, fraud. "The American government has for the first time made it
clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise,
suspected of a crime by Washington." International human rights lawyer Scott
Horton writes at his No Comment blog:
"This is not US law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to US law ...
The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign
states or the solemn commitments of US governments over the last two centuries
in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize
the 'law of nations' referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into
the Constitution."
Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released
in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that
further illuminated the case of the 19-year-old German citizen who "chose a bad
time to travel." Kurnaz was captured by the US Army in Pakistan in 2002 and
transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington
Post's Carol D Leonnig, "his American captors concluded that he was not a
terrorist." This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was
nonetheless declared a "dangerous al-Qaeda ally" by successive military
tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was
flown to freedom in Germany "goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he
was flown to Guantanamo Bay."
Evidence from waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington
Post, Brigadier General Thomas W Hartmann, "[t]he top legal adviser for the
military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress...that he cannot rule
out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation
techniques, including waterboarding." He even refused to say that waterboarding
would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on US military
personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the
administration's nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also
refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it "repugnant."
Torture veto: In December, President Bush threatened to "veto a House
[of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent
practices. The bill would require US intelligence agencies to follow
interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year."
Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with US torture
practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top
al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called
waterboarding "torture," regretted its use ("we Americans are better than
that"), and also insisted that "[t]his was a policy made at the White House,
with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department." In
the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the US Army who served as an
interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the "king of torture" and
"the monster" by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the
Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used
there. ("They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their
wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes
them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of
their children, where they live - we show them satellite photos of their
houses. It is worse than any torture.") He also claimed that 98% of the
prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or
the Taliban, and observed, "In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to
make them suffer, not to get information out of them." Both men denied
themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.
Justice moves fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on
those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional
investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of
torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether
former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC
News, had "illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture
and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect." Consider that a message
about priorities from the powers that be.
Iraqis in American jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis
are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short
of the number of Iraqis American commander General David Petraeus believed
might be arrested during the "surge" months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does
add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of
what's left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000
Iraqis.
Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December's melting
iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer
Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his
commission in response to the unwillingness of General Hartmann "to call the
hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military
torture." In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington,
Williams wrote in part:
"Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now
part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition ...
Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai…
Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng
prison. Most recently, the US Army court martialed a soldier for the practice
in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.
"General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial
in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.
Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by
destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and
congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans
and secret renditions is coming out."
Or you could mention the news that the "Australian Taliban," David Hicks, the
sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released
after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of
non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation
in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA
interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key
Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given "a virtual tour
of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators
had devised to try to make their prisoners talk," including waterboarding,
without objections being raised. Or … but the list is almost unending.
The Bush legacy
As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the
Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst - at the very
heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these
practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For
instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad - "rendition" - began at least in
the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first
practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the
previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure".)
Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in
Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air
America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities
through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the
CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and
police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt
any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of
Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of
the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the
Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency
had three of them - in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone - where they
brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh
interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind
control, and brainwashing".
And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush
legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for
example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They
were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons,
and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name
hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity,
and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.
Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on
the TV serial "24" or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the
local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the
cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100%
all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario).
And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border
fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a
"dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the
movies - and little enough of it in real life.
American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a
realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No
American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to
lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto
congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era
of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part,
simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and
illegal imprisonment.
George W Bush didn't invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and
all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre "torture memos" that will be
hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and
tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has,
nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out
the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey
as possible to the dark side.
It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the
legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the
institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture
chambers, along with those "enhanced interrogation techniques," was primarily
done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is
invariably more primal than that.
Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have
simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can
kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence
anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has
significance. This is one meaning of "globalization" in the 21st century. On
Planet Bush, only one nation remains "sovereign," and that's the United States
of America.
If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from
Erla Osk's landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the
central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine
the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the
public (no matter what General Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the
waterboarding of an American serviceman).
Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not
to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their
"innocence" - even when mocked as "innocents abroad" - and took pride as well
in a system based on the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty".
Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top
officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks
of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way
toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of
torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a "war" against "terror"
supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable,
including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain
somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.
This is the American welcome wagon of the 21st century. If you really want to
catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an
Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic
statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah's living nightmare
- dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow
plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a
torch but a video camera and dragging chains.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory
Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a
newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in
Iraq.
(Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt, used by permission.)
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