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Volume
13, Number 23 |
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Also
in this section: What
did you know and when did you know it? On October 10, 2007 CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked former President Jimmy Carter, "But by your definition, you believe the United States, under this administration, has used torture?" Carter replied, "I don't think it --- I know it, certainly." Each American takes a different approach to this truth. It depends upon where you have been situated in life, what you have been reading or watching, and how robustly your denial system rejects uncomfortable news. A high-ranking Republican appointee at the State Department Had you been State Department legal adviser William H. Taft IV, you might have suspected in early 2002 that President Bush was getting legal advice supporting abuse of prisoners of war and detainees. Taft, the great-grandson of a former US President and US Supreme Court Justice, sent a January 23, 2002 memo to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo complaining of Yoo's flawed legal reasoning regarding the proposed status of alleged terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Little did Taft (or his boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell) know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already sent out a January 19, 2002 order denying prisoner of war status to al Qaida and Taliban detainees. Taft and Powell were already "out of the loop" and would not discover the extent of President Bush's new detainee interrogation policies for years. William H. Taft IV left government service in 2005. He was one of 28 co-signers to a September 12, 2006 letter to then-Senate Armed Services committee chairman John Warner and ranking committee member Carl Levin, warning that the Bush Administration's attempt to redefine Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention posed "a grave threat" to US service members. A high-ranking Navy Department Republican appointee If you were US Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora, you would have received information from subordinates and colleagues leading you to suspect detainees were being treated cruelly or tortured as early as mid-December of 2002. You would have been further troubled to learn that your early warnings to superiors, especially Department of Defense General Counsel William J. Haynes, were ignored. When Mora directly asked John Yoo in January of 2003 whether he thought President Bush could legally order application of torture, Yoo replied, "Yes." A few months after the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the news Alberto Mora wrote a long memo to the Navy Department's Inspector General entitled, "Statement For The Record: Office Of General Counsel Involvement In Interrogation Issues." The entire July 7, 2004 memo is available at the footnote reference links to Wikipedia's webpage for Alberto J. Mora. Additional details about what happened to Mora's long career in public service are recounted in Jane Mayer's article, "The Memo" from the February 27, 2006 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Alberto J. Mora retired from federal service in January of 2006. He was honored with the Profile in Courage Award on May 22, 2006 by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for his efforts at trying to stop detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A Republican US senator If you had been Arizona US Senator John McCain, you surely would have known that torture was a Bush administration policy by September of 2005. That was when Army Captain Ian Fishback sent his famous September 16, 2005 letter to McCain charging that statements coming from his military leadership indicated that United States policy apparently did not require application of the Geneva Conventions to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fishback, a West Point graduate, contended that "this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment." Eventually having the benefit of testimony from soldiers such as Ian Fishback, Senator McCain sponsored a bill in Congress that became known as the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. McCain's push to enact the Detainee Treatment Act was contentious during the fall of 2005 and encountered vigorous lobbying by Vice President Cheney to water down or kill McCain's bill. Cheney's efforts presented such an embarrassing public spectacle that former CIA Director Stansfield Turner referred to Dick Cheney as a "vice president for torture." One can read some of the history behind the Detainee Treatment Act's roots in the August 2006 issue of Esquire magazine with an article by John H. Richardson entitled, "Acts of Conscience." President Bush reluctantly signed the veto-proof Detainee Treatment Act into law on December 30, 2005. But Bush also issued a "signing statement" indicating he did not have to obey the Detainee Treatment Act if it interfered with his authority as supervisor of the unitary executive branch and his role as the commander in chief. During a November 28, 2007, debate exchange with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, John McCain chided Romney for his reluctance to recognize waterboarding as torture and to rule it out as a permissible interrogation technique. McCain said torture was a "defining issue" of what America is all about. Any reasonable person following the news Had you been living in the United States or reading almost any international news web sites in mid-2004 you would have been aware of the developing detainee scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad by early May. Thereafter, newspapers such as the Washington Post would have informed you in a June 10, 2004 article entitled, "Guantanamo List Details Approved Interrogation Methods," that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved a list of 24 classified interrogation methods for use on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Or, if you had been a reader of the December 8, 2004 Boston Globe, you could have encountered a news story entitled, "Interrogators Objected to Tactics." The Globe story recounted FBI complaints about unlawful interrogation methods being used on prisoners in Iraq even after details of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison became public. A later Boston Globe article published on December 26, 2004, entitled, "US Disclosures Signal Wider Detainee Abuse," told of widespread detainee abuse that may have been approved by high-level Bush administration officials. By December 23, 2004, the Washington Post had uncovered enough reliable information about systematic unlawful detainee abuse to publish an editorial entitled "War Crimes." This editorial confirmed that thousands of pages of released government documents left little doubt torture was a government policy authorized at the highest levels. Over the years since 2004, the details about what interrogations methods the Secretary of Defense approved have become clear to any informed American. Memoranda of law authorizing cruel treatment of detainees and loosening the legal definition of torture that were issued by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel have leaked to the press. The appalling reasoning contained in these memos and their conscious attempt to immunize illegal human rights abuses are available for anyone with an online computer to read. Hundreds and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles summarize and explain to what thousands of official pages bear witness. The separate authorizations for abuse of terrorism suspects in CIA custody have even been obliquely confirmed by President Bush. The transcript of his September 6, 2006 East Room press statement is available on the White House web site. When the President says that the CIA used an "alternative set of procedures" to interrogate Abu Zubaydah, it is now clear that such procedures were illegal under US federal law. In law enforcement parlance, Bush's September 6, 2006 statement is called a "confession." And it's on White House video available for immediate downloading. Still unclear whether the Bush administration committed torture? Maybe you think the world is flat, too. Also
in this section:
Make
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©
2007 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or phone: (507) 6-632-6343 Mailing
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