Crimes Without Consequence

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report [PDF] begins with the words of Gen. David Petraeus -- who the right has convinced themselves sits directly at Jesus's side in the pantheon of the unquestionable:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.

It's ironic then, that the report details not humanity, but monstrosity. The document, titled "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," kills neocon blame-shifting on its very first page:

The Abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the committees inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

In their cowardice, top Bush administration officials blamed everything on personnel acting on their own. Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony to the committee, said, "In recent days, there has been a good deal of discussion about who bears responsibility for the terrible activities that took place at Abu Ghraib. These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. It is my obligation to evaluate what happened, to make sure those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to make changes as needed to see that it doesn't happen again."

After taking "full responsibility," Rumsfeld almost immediately blamed it on others.





"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of the U.S. military," he said, "they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." Rummie had nothing to do with it and was grateful that good people brought it out in the open. "It's all my fault -- although it pays to remember that I had absolutely nothing to do with it."

"I take full responsibility" has always been a magic incantation the Bush administration has used to avoid taking responsibility and avoid consequence. The theory seems to be that saying it is the consequence of wrongdoing. Say the magic words -- even if you contradict them right away -- and you're off the hook. Meanwhile, right wing media argues that what you did was exactly the right thing to do and that you're a freakin' hero -- no matter how lousy and stupid and counterproductive your actions were. As I've already said, the White House neocons are cowards -- and right wing media applauds them for it.

But cowardice only works for so long. You can hide behind others, but they drop one by one and you're left with no one to hide behind. You can keep throwing sacrifices into the volcano, but sooner or later, you run out of people to throw. The Senate report places the blame squarely where it belongs:

New York Times:

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. It represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other episodes of abuse.

There are no surprises in the report. The testimony used in compiling it was public and commented on again and again. Bush, Rumsfeld, and other top White House officials are ultimately responsible for the actions of their "few bad apples." Even Bush rhetoric was so inconsistent that taking it at face value would be absurd. The White House argued that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to detainees, since they were "unlawful combatants." But, at the same time, we were assured that the US doesn't torture. Why point out that you think you legally could torture these guys if you weren't planning to? As always, Team Bush believed that anyone who doesn't work in the White House is stupid. You'd never figure out the obvious, because only neocons are capable of thought.

In fact, Bush himself authorized torture, at least indirectly, by arguing in favor of it's legality. The report tells us:

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would've afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees...

Why say that international law didn't apply if you weren't planning on violating it? Wouldn't that make the "fact" you've just made up an uninteresting bit of trivia? "We could torture these guys -- of course, we're not going to -- but remember, it'd be totally legal if we did" doesn't do much to put down suspicion.

There's a lot more -- 19 pages in all -- but there isn't anything there we didn't know. Bush, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Yoo, various and sundry other morons, are all torturers. They didn't do it personally, but they had it done. And they did it in the most cowardly way possible, but trying to avoid responsibility with what they thought would be plausible deniability.

They needn't have bothered trying to hide their guilt. The Senate Armed Services Committee report is just that -- a report. It comes with no consequence. The torturers in the White House get the wagging senatorial finger and they'll go on to write books and make big money on speaking tours. Having already established that there is no such thing as an impeachable offense, the congress is poised to set the precedent that it's impossible for Executive branch officials to commit war crimes. There is no longer any offense so heinous, so evil, so contrary to our common decency that the offender can't possibly avoid paying for it. The bottom has dropped out of the shebang -- there is no bottom, no lower limit to just how lousy and criminal and morally repellant an American president is allowed to be. The White House is the world's smallest anarchy, a patch of land about one city block where no law applies.

Richard Nixon once said, "If the president does it, that means it is not illegal." All these years later, Richard Nixon has won that argument.

-Wisco

Justice Delayed -- For Centuries

There are two opinions by two candidates on the Boumediene et al v Bush ruling by the Supreme Court that restored habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Gitmo. One is from a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, the other's from an ex-Navy pilot.

Hell, we could quit right here; it's pretty obvious who'd be right. But soldier on we will. First, the senior lecturer from the law school. Barack Obama said, "that principle of habeas corpus, that a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process -- that’s the essence of who we are. I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday."

The ex-Navy pilot weighed in. "These are enemy combatants," John McCain said of the ruling. "These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that people in this country have. And, my friends, there are some bad people down there, there are some bad people."

Have I ever mentioned that these neocons always talk to you like you're a freakin' three year-old? Yeah, there are some "bad people" at Guantanamo. Perhaps even a boogeyman or two. But there are "bad people" in civilian jails right now. What McCain seems to be arguing is habeas corpus rights should only be granted to prisoners the state believes are innocent. That's no one. McCain, not surprisingly, doesn't seem to understand the purpose of "The Great Writ."

The surest way to get out of jury duty is to tell interviewers, "If he wasn't guilty, he wouldn't have been arrested." Anyone who doesn't understand why that makes you an unfit juror should probably shut up now. People who equate incarceration with guilt just plain don't understand the concept of justice.

Yet that's the test that the Bush administration has been putting their prisoners to. If they aren't terrorists, they wouldn't be at Guantanamo. That's all the proof that you or I or anyone is supposed to need -- their say-so.

But given what the Bush administration's word has been proven to be worth -- over and over and over, scandal after scandal, crime after crime, lie after lie -- it's kind of worth the effort to just go ahead and doublecheck.

Which is what an independent study of detainees at Gitmo has done.

McClatchy Newspapers:

A study published by a professor at the Seton Hall School of Law found that 45 percent of 516 Guantanamo detainees examined had committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies, and that only 8 percent of them had been al Qaida fighters. The study drew on unclassified Department of Defense transcripts and documents from military tribunals at Guantanamo.

To be fair, a study by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center found that 73% posed a "demonstrated threat." No matter which study you believe, that adds up to a lot of people who aren't a threat. And West Point's study is deeply flawed. "West Point included in its 'demonstrated threat' category anyone who'd committed hostile acts; been identified as a fighter; received training at a camp run by al Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces; or received training in combat weapons other than rifles or other small arms," McClatchy reports.

It's that identification "as a fighter" that's problematic. "The system of identifying men as fighters..." the report goes on, "depended on the accounts of the men who initially detained the 'fighters,' often Afghan commanders looking for bounties from U.S. forces who paid more for men alleged to be Taliban or al Qaida leaders."

In other words, anyone looking to make a few bucks and get rid of someone they didn't like could sell them -- there is no other way to put it -- to the Bush administration and the US military. Another McClatchy article tells us the story of Mohammed Akhtiar, a prisoner at Guantanamo.

"American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed 'infidel' and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't," we're told. "The U.S. government had the wrong guy." He was "imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops."

In an investigation of released detainees, McClatchy found that most were "low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals." At least seven had worked for the US-backed Afghanistan government and had no ties to militants.

"The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners," the report reads.

But they still get those military tribunals, right? Even without habeas rights, they still get their day in court.

I guess so, if you can call the kangaroo courts of the military tribunals anything other than a sham. Prisoners are denied evidence that would help in their case -- either because such evidence was destroyed to cover up war crimes or because the evidence has been classified. And that "day in court" is entirely theoretical. So far, one has been held (other cases never went to trial). The wheels of phony justice grind slow, I guess. At this rate of one trial every six years, the final detainee of maybe 500 held can expect to see justice in the year 5008 -- 3,000 years from now.

Of course, that ratio's about to be thrown by a whopping five trials of high profile detainees -- just in time for the elections. None of these detainees' guilt is in very much doubt. The highest profile trial will be that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the so-called "Mastermind of 9/11" who broke under torture. He admits he did it and wants to be martyred. Anyone whose guilt is iffy isn't getting anywhere near a even a kangaroo court any time soon. Even with this new ratio of six trials every seven years, we're looking at 583 years of pre-trial detention. Being found innocent nearly six centuries from now isn't exactly justice.

So, of the two candidates, the senior law lecturer has a better argument than the ex-pilot. Yes, there are "bad people" at Gitmo. But habeas corpus isn't going to set any of them free. It's the people who aren't so bad that the writ is designed to protect. In fact, letting prisoners exercise the right of habeas corpus would help sort out the mess the Bush administration has made of the detainee situation and keep us from wasting time and money on people who are no threat.

And those are, apparently, people John McCain and the rest of the neocons can't be bothered with worrying about.

-Wisco

Techorati tags: politics; law; Constitution; human rights; torture; Guantanamo; habeas corpus; Bush's and John McCain's "War on Terror" would keep people in Guantanamo for life without trial

Losing the Fight Against Evildoers

I've never been comfortable using the word "evil." It's too simple for what it describes, too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Dracula is evil, the devil is evil, Lex Luthor is evil. In children's stories, evil does evil for the sake of evil. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't describe anything that happens in the real world. When someone uses the word, it goes straight to the part of my brain that detects ridiculousness. When George W. Bush talks about "evildoers," the first thing I think of is Cesar Romero as "The Joker" on Batman. Evil has become a word to describe either impossible supernatural creatures or absurd criminals who steal diamond encrusted jack-in-the-boxes.

For me, evil is a word to be used sparingly -- the word has already been abused into near meaninglessness, I don't want to further the erosion. As a result, when I do use the word, I'm either using it correctly (about 10% of the time) or as comic hyperbole ("According to Jim is a horrific evil that must be erased from human history").

Now is one of the 10% of times. When I say evil, I mean evil. Because torture is evil. Don't agree with that? How about this? Torturing children is evil. Agreed? How about people who "you could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" about ways to torture people?

Now that we're all on the same page -- excepting, of course, the deluded and the genuinely evil -- let's look at evil in America today.

Let's look at the Bush administration.

Washington Post:

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."

Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.

Interrogators, according to Yoo, would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense." Of course, this is such crazy BS that you wonder how anyone could make the claim with a straight face. If someone came over to my house and beat me up, I wouldn't then be able to sit around for a while thinking, "That sucked," before kidnapping the guy and torturing him. Claiming the right to self-defense would get you laughed out of court and straight into prison. As it should. I guess there are times when evil really is as ridiculous as the word makes it seem. To bring it back to the reality of evil, it was John Yoo who argued that we have every right to torture children -- including crushing some kid's testicles.

Yoo had this exchange with Human Rights scholar Doug Cassel:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

To those who occasionally defend torture in the comments -- defend this.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that this is purely academic, that this is a hypothetical situation that -- while repulsive -- has never happened. That brings up a damned good question; how do you know that?

The Bush administration hasn't exactly been the most transparent in history. And we didn't find out about the abuses at Abu Ghraib until after they'd occurred. You can't say it's never happened. You can't even say it's probably never happened. The best you can logically argue is that you hope it's never happened. If the belief is that it's not illegal, then there's nothing actually stopping it from happening -- other than conscience and shame. Few in the Bush administration have either.

I think history has proven that the Bush administration rules nothing out -- no matter how boneheaded or how cruel. This has been a lawbreaking administration, with no respect for human dignity or the rights of the individual. For them, the Constitution and law are merely impediments to be sidestepped. They exist only to slow down the weak-willed and the less-than-visionary. There's a new neocon world to be built. A New American Century of what amounts to military domination of the globe. Law applies to the menschen, not the ubermenschen. Visionary supermen are the new tomorrow.

Writes Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson:

[The Yoo memo argues] The president is unbound by international law -- ever -- and not constrained by either federal law or the Constitution in his role as commander in chief, which gives him carte blanche authority to have illegal enemy combatants who are detained on foreign soil assaulted, maimed, tortured, and otherwise subjected to war crimes, so long as the president deems it necessary or in “self-defense” of the nation.

I’m literally sick.

As am I. Dickinson's reading of the memo shows that Yoo argues that there are laws that "would conflict with… Commander in Chief power": "assault… maiming… interstate stalking… war crimes… and torture."

And John Yoo's mind is not the only repugnant little slice of hell in all of this. The whole damned administration thinks like this -- and have acted on these beliefs. This has gone beyond the acedemic and theoretical into the realm of the actual and the practical. This reasoning has been applied.

In a very thorough piece in Vanity Fair ("The Green Light: Politics & Power"), Phillippe Sands reveals that these "legal theories" aren't theories at all, but practices that have been applied since 2001.

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option. This is the story of how the torture at Guantánamo began, and how it spread.

It's much more expansive than I can comment fully on here -- I advise you to go read it when you have the chance. Suffice it to say that no one gets off easy -- not Alberto Gonzales, not Dick Cheney, not Bush himself. What Sands details are not theories or hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenarios. What he finds is a direct link between the White House and war crimes. He finds evil.

One last quote and then I'll wrap it up. From a Gitmo interrogation log, relayed by Sands:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah...

Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

Let me remind you that this is done in your name and on your behalf. Is this the very best we can be? Is this the government you want? When the president asserts that he has the legal authority to kick anyone he wants in the nuts, the question isn't who'll protect you from the terrorists, but who'll protect you from the president.

When your government is evil, terrorists are the least of your problems.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; law; Constitution; Guantanamo; human rights; war crimes; John Yoo; neocon; The Bush administration -- torture central