A short step in the march to justice By Sreeram Chaulia
The decision by the administration of United States President Barack Obama to
release details of harsh interrogation methods employed by Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) operatives on al-Qaeda and other suspects during the "war on
terror" is a welcome development.
For a long time, accusations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees at
"black sites" have come from released victims, their legal counsels and
human-rights organizations. The US Justice Department memos on the use of sleep
deprivation, water-boarding, stripping, insects and other inhumane practices
used by former president George W Bush's operatives are admissions of
the truth from an official source. They put to rest any doubts about the
veracity of the claims made by former detainees.
Obama signaled a change from Bush-era impunity with an uplifting promise in his
first address to the US Congress in February that "America does no torture".
When the US state on its own publicizes the seedy and illegal deeds of its
agents under a previous administration, it is an indicator that a new beginning
is being planned and the ground is being laid for an overhaul of the means
through which American national security is pursued.
The Justice Department memos confirm unambiguously the full horror of former US
vice president Dick Cheney's claim that protecting national security was a
"tough, mean, dirty, nasty business". The CIA's torture chambers spread across
the world under the "war on terror" probably witnessed much worse than all of
Cheney's adjectives convey.
Bits of information began trickling out soon after Obama's inauguration in
January about some of the wrongs of the past committed by the US
military-intelligence complex. The first major disclosure to emerge once Obama
came to power was about alleged corruption by senior US army officers in Iraq's
gigantic reconstruction scam.
An American arms dealer informed US authorities during Bush's reign that "tens
of thousands of dollars" were stuffed into pizza boxes and paper sacks and
delivered secretly to American contracting offices in Baghdad manned by
colonels. Predictably, the lead was suppressed as long as Bush was in charge.
As soon as Obama took office, it was reported that federal authorities were
"taking a fresh look" at the allegations.
Earlier this week, a US army sergeant was convicted of murder for executing
four bound and blindfolded Iraqi detainees and dumping their bodies into a
canal in Baghdad in 2007. Court martial proceedings are usually kept wrapped in
secrecy and verdicts are not covered by the media like regular civilian
proceedings, owing to the principle that the army's morale and image would
suffer if its dirty linen was washed in public.
But the fact that the Obama administration allowed this verdict delivered by US
military judges in Germany to be announced widely through the news media within
the US and abroad is again a pointer to its intentions to clean up the jetsam
floating around from the Bush legacy.
Historically, justice has often been trumped by politics on the question of
culpability of the US military in overseas wars. When the My Lai massacre of
1968 in Vietnam came to light, the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley
was widely covered in the American media as another nail in the coffin of a
deeply unpopular war. Yet, hardly three years into his long sentence, Calley
was pardoned and set free by the Richard Nixon administration in 1974.
Recent inquiries have shown that Calley was a mere fall guy for My Lai because
the massacre which killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians was an illegal
operation planned and coordinated at task force level by a lieutenant
colonel-rank official in the US Army.
The American military's internal inquiry that was hidden from public view
concluded that 30 senior officers were negligent and 14 were charged with
crimes. Neither Nixon nor any succeeding US administrations had the political
will to reopen this denial of justice. Obama's commitment to let the truth come
out is praiseworthy in light of the obfuscating history of American
presidential behavior towards the criminal misconduct of the military in wars.
Some human-rights and legal experts are criticizing Obama for not taking the
Justice Department's torture memos further and prosecuting specific CIA agents
who committed the abuses on detainees. The International Commission of Jurists
has announced disapproval of the blanket amnesty by saying that "without
holding to account the authors of a policy of torture and those executing it,
there cannot be a return to the rule of law". The perception that the
perpetrators of degrading practices in the "war on terror" are getting off
without punishment is valid, but it lacks an appreciation of the political
minefield that Obama is navigating.
Shortly after Obama's inauguration, a chorus of political and media voices
welled up that the "war crimes" of Bush and his neo-conservatives should be
prosecuted or fully accounted for through a "Congressional Truth Commission".
Obama shot down these balloons by holding that "I'm more interested in looking
forward than I am in looking backwards". He expressed a similar sentiment when
confronted with calls to sanction prosecution of the CIA's torturers by saying,
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution."
Obama's philosophy of uniting rather than dividing Americans, as well as the
pragmatic requirement of Republican support for his budget and economic crisis
management, were factors in turning down radical demands for bringing all
Bush-era culprits to book.
But if the Justice Department memos and the muckraking on the US military's
indiscretions in Iraq are considered, Obama is not covering up the ugly past
either. During his recent trip to Turkey, he made a significant comment that
"moving the ship of state is a slow process as this particular ship is like a
tanker, not a speedboat". The message was that he was trying, but the machinery
of the American state and establishment used to imperial ways around the world
cannot be transformed overnight.
While legal scholars are entitled to dispute a free pass for CIA torturers,
they may not realize the sensitivity of the issue of American presidents
confronting the entrenched might of the military-industrial complex. Obama is a
shrewd operator who has learnt the lessons of the 1960s, when John F Kennedy
and Robert Kennedy were assassinated while trying to shake up the national
security system. Should Obama endorse full-fledged prosecutions of all
offenders from the "war on terror", the infamous system could retaliate with
the instrument it knows best - physical violence.
Those impatient for the whole truth to come out and for CIA and US Army
officials to be pilloried in broad daylight have to realize that Obama will be
cautious and gradualist in downsizing the influence of the Pentagon, the armed
forces and their vast panoply of defense contractors, mercenaries ("private
military firms") and civilian bureaucrats. No intelligent American president
can launch a war against his own state's core pillars in a short period.
The question of grave injustices meted out during the "war on terror" will
linger for years to come, but Obama cannot be faulted for not creating the
political space in which slow but definite accountability is being restored to
the world's most powerful military-intelligence machine.
His objective of halving the US's spiraling budget deficit by the end of the
first term of four years could well augur a carefully orchestrated cut in the
Pentagon's humungous appropriations and an eventual reining in of the culture
of torture and covert operations that took root in the Bush years. Even if all
terror warriors are not adequately exposed, Obama is certain to ensure that
their ways will no longer taint American foreign policy.
Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York.
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