Page 2 of 2 Torture memos and historical amnesia
By Noam Chomsky
Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie
violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were
struck down by the Courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our
unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially
reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene vs
Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush
administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right
of habeas corpus.
Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve
the power to abduct people from around the
world" and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided
to ship them to the US prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the
Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as
though it was some sort of a silly game - fly your abducted prisoners to
Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram
and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process".
Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two
sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this
issue", arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in
the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United
Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind - as
long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo".
In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama
position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to
Bagram as it does to Guantanamo". The Obama administration announced that it
would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department of Justice, Greenwald
concludes, "squarely to the right of an extremely conservative,
pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and
due-process-less detentions", in radical violation of Obama's campaign promises
and earlier stands.
The case of Rasul vs Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The
plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for
their torture in Guantanamo, where they were sent after being captured by
Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to
Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious character, was
then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia,
Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, and the US as it attacked
Afghanistan in October 2001.
Dostum turned them over to US custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush
administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama's Department
of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials
are not liable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds
that the Courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners
enjoy.
It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive military
commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the
Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York
Times: "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers
have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some
terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to
prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors
to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." A serious flaw in
the criminal justice system, it appears.
Creating terrorists
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in
eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is
effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua
captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane
delivering aid to US-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him,
found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Instead, they
should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information
about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington,
no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the
global superpower.
By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief
terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then US ambassador in Honduras (later
appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially
counter-terrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the
same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro
government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to
bring up what their victims should have done to former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose
exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information
that could have prevented further "ticking bomb" attacks.
Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.
There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is
benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill.
Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were
discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is,
in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of
the most seasoned US interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that
led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of
al-Qaeda in Iraq", correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.
Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration's harsh
interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the US," he believes, not only
elicits no useful information but "has proved so counter-productive that it may
have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in the
[September 11, 2001 attack]". From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander
discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to
suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.
There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Cheney and Rumsfeld
encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah
al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the charge of "engaging in two or
three fire fights with the Northern Alliance". He ended up in Afghanistan after
having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.
After four years of brutal treatment in Guantanamo, he was returned to Kuwait.
He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck
into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers - "the single
most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,"
according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct
result of his abusive imprisonment.
All much as a reasonable person would expect.
Unexceptional Americans
Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on terror" that
Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law
"quaint" and "obsolete" - so George W Bush was advised by his legal counsel
Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been
widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.
The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns
were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the
first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States
since the British burned down Washington in 1814.
Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state
actor.
Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the
perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established
a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and
tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out
assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere,
and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy
that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.
That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened
in Salvador Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often call "the first 9/11"
in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita US equivalents, a
realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup
against Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the
otherwise quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the US,
while the facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the naive call
"history".
It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the "war on terror", he
re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, Reagan's administration came into office
declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror,
"the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time" - to
sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.
That first US war on terror has also been deleted from historical
consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the
canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central
America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in
the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally,
apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela's
African National Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more notorious terrorist
groups," as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added
that, 20 years later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of
terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the US
without obtaining a waiver from the government.
The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called "American
exceptionalism". It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal
habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing mission" in its
colonies, while the French minister of war called for "exterminating the
indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the
world", John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay
no longer in completing its liberation of India.
Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in
the 1930s, who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign
Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all,
loot all, kill all" campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with
similar glorious episodes.
As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly implanted, however, the
occasional revelations of the "abuse of history" often backfire, serving only
to efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the
vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while
indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.
Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably
worse crimes at home and abroad, including the Federal Bureau of
Investigation-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part
of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention
just two egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq
was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.
Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines
moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for
crimes that still lie ahead.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of
many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues,
and a long-time participant in activist movements.
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