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America’s Shame
Eric Margolis
Lew
Rockwell.com
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Nations that use torture disgrace themselves. Armed forces
and police that torture inevitably become brutalized and corrupted.
"Limited" use of torture quickly becomes generalized.
"Information" obtained by torture is mostly unreliable.
I learned these truths over fifty years covering dirty "pacification"
wars, from Algeria to Indochina, Central and South America,
southern Africa, the Mideast, Afghanistan, and Kashmir in which
torture was commonly used.
In spite of all the historical evidence that torture is counterproductive,
the Bush administration encouraged torture of anti-American
militants (aka "terrorists") after the 9/11 attacks.
The full story has not yet been revealed, but what we know so
far is revolting and shameful. Britain and Canada were also
complicit as they used information derived from torture and
handed suspects over to be tortured.
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Many Americans and human rights groups are now demanding that
the Bush administration officials who employed and sanctioned
torture face justice. President Barack Obama hinted his new
attorney general, Eric Holder, might investigate this whole
ugly business. But the Obama White House clearly wants to dodge
this issue.
Republicans, who have become America’s champion of war
and torture, are fiercely resisting any investigation, and lauding
torture’s benefits. Just when it seemed impossible for
the dumbed-down Republican redneck party to sink any lower,
it has by endorsing torture as the American way.
So, too, some senior intelligence and Pentagon officials including,
dismayingly, Obama’s new CIA chief, Leon Panetta. He should
know better. Many senior Congressional Democrats who sanctioned
torture, or did nothing to stop it, are equally reluctant that
the torture scandal be further investigated.
Torture is a crime under US law. It is a crime under the Third
Geneva Convention, and the UN’s Anti-Torture Convention,
both of which the US signed. Kidnapping and moving suspects
to be tortured in third countries is a crime. Torture violates
core American values.
In 1945, the US hanged Japanese officers for inflicting "water-boarding"
(near-drowning) on US prisoners, which were deemed war crimes.
Yet this is exactly what the CIA inflicted on its Muslim captives.
FBI agents rightly refused to participate in the torture of
al-Qaeda suspects, warning that it violated US law and could
make them subject to future prosecution.
Republicans and even Obama’s intelligence chief, Adm.
Dennis Blair, claim some useful information was obtained by
torture. That depends on what you call useful. Al-Qaeda is still
in business. Osama bin Laden remains at large. Iraq and Afghanistan
became monstrous fiascoes costing $1 trillion. US military and
intelligence personnel who fall into hostile hands may now face
similar tortures.
In 2004, CIA’s inspector general reported there was no
proof that use of torture had thwarted "specific imminent
attacks." This comes from a recently declassified Justice
Department memo.
The director of the FBI, Robert Muller, one of Washington’s
most upright, respected officials, also declared that torture
had not prevented any attacks against the United States. Both
findings directly contradict claims by America’s own Torquemada,
Dick Cheney, that torture prevented major attacks.
Torture did not protect America from a second major attack,
as Republicans claim. In fact, it appears 9/11 was a one-off
event, and al-Qaeda numbered only a handful of extremists to
begin with, not the worldwide conspiracy claimed by the White
House after it was caught sleeping on guard duty. Bush administration
claims about imminent threats from dirty bombs and germ weapons
such as anthrax were untrue.
CIA "useful" torture information came from two suspects:
Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured by near drowning 183 times
– six times daily for a month; and Abu Zubaydah, 83 times
in August, 2003.
Use a power drill (a favorite "investigative" tool
of America’s Iraqi Shia allies) on Dick Cheney, and it
would take only minutes to get him to admit he’s Osama
bin Laden.
A shocking US Senate report just revealed that after the Bush
administration could not find the links it claimed existed between
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, it tried, in best Soviet style,
to torture its captives to admit that such links did, in fact,
exist. That, of course, would have been a much better excuse
for invading Iraq than the lies about weapons of mass destruction
pointed at America.
The Senate also reported CIA and Pentagon torture techniques
were adopted from torture methods North Korea used in the 1950’s
to compel American prisoners to confess to lies about germ warfare.
In fact, North Korea learned its torture techniques from Soviet
KGB instructors. KGB’s favorite tortures in the 1930’s
and 40’s were merciless beatings, confinement in refrigerated
cells, week-long sleep deprivation, and endless interrogations.
I have seen the torture cells at KGB’s Lubiyanka HQ in
Moscow.
The CIA and US military copied these North Korean/Soviet torture
methods, but also added contorted positions, and nakedness and
humiliation, techniques learned from Israeli interrogators who
used them to blackmail Palestinian prisoners into becoming informers.
Hence all the naked photos from Abu Ghraib prison.
American doctors and medical personnel supervised torture and
devised and supervised techniques to mentally incapacitate prisoners
through isolation, terrifying sensory deprivation, and injections
of potent psychotropic drugs.
Torture was authorized by President George W. Bush, VP Dick
Cheney, Secretaries Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, and carried
out by CIA chief George Tenet and the Pentagon’s secretive
Special Operations Command.
Four lickspittle lawyers and two bootlicking attorney generals
provided sophistic legal briefs sanctioning torture. All should
be disbarred and face an independent judicial commission. Not
a whitewash, like the 9/11 Commission, but a real, independent
legal body. Better, send the case to the UN International Court
in The Hague.
President Obama actually told CIA personnel that he does not
want to prosecute the torturers because they were only following
proper legal advice and orders. So did Nazi officials who killed
millions.
Nazi lawyers legally dismembered Germany’s Weimar democracy
and imposed Nazi dictatorship in only two months after the "terrorist
attack" on the Reichstag in Feb. 1933. Imposition of Hitler’s
dictatorship followed proper legal channels.
When I served in the US Army, I was taught that any illegal
order, even from the president, must be refused and that mistreating
prisoners was a crime.
President Obama must show the world that America upholds the
law, rejects torture of all kinds, and that no officials are
above the law. Otherwise, there is no other way to prevent the
recurrence of torture in the future.
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