No One is Innocent

Last night I might have convinced a friend that criminal prosecutions of those who authorized the use of torture on detainees in the “war on terror” are not just feasible, but perhaps necessary. The way I got him to listen was by telling him that it appears that then Secretary of State Colin Powell was intentionally kept out of the loop on issues of torture in the aftermath of September 11th.

Powell’s absence from the decision making is raised by the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, issued on Wednesday, April 22, 2009. According to the chronology in that report, key principals in the White House—John Ashcroft, then Attorney General; Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser; and of course, Darth Vader himself, Vice President Dick Cheney—purposefully kept Secretary of State Colin Powell outside the meetings. Not surprising either.

Of all of the people making the decisions as to whether to use torture on detainees in the “war on terror,” only Colin Powell had served in the military and only Colin Powell had seen action. He knew the importance of the rules of engagement and more particularly, he knew the origins of the SERE training, which provided the basis for the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos permitting cruel and inhuman treatment and torture. Claims that the lack of historical understanding of SERE’s origins were somehow unintentional are disingenuous, since the person who would have balked immediately was left out of the bloody party.

Some people believe that Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, although not at some of these early Principals meetings, was indeed in the loop and knew from the start that torture was being used by the CIA and private contractors. Hence his dismissal of the images from Abu Ghraib that led to the court martial of Lynndie England (who is serving 36 months in the brig and who speaks up in a December 2008 article in Marie Claire) and Charles Granner, her then fiancé (who is serving a ten year sentence), as a “few bad apples” needs to be questioned.

However, as Glenn Greenwald reminds us today, the Washington Post in a December 26, 2002 story by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman exposed the use of “harsh interrogation” techniques by the CIA, so we knew what was going on. If we did, so did Colin Powell, which leads us once again down a familiar path: Did Powell have the moral courage to stand up in opposition to the Commander in Chief?

I hope that because both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld profited financially from their time in public office that this adds to the level of outrage—authorizing wholesale disregard for American and international law, violation of individual rights and liberties, and ordering torture—and that the American public insists on investigations and prosecutions of those responsible.

Read the Los Angeles Times April 23, 2009 story by Greg Miller and Julian Barnes.

However as we grow angrier, we can’t forget that this use of torture is not new to American history. Ask Sister Dianna Ortiz about her kidnap and torture in Guatemala, and the numerous other people throughout Latin America who suffered at the hands of, if not CIA conducted or ordered, CIA trained and supervised torture of those believed to be political opponents to some of the worst tyrants in history.

8:30 pm Update: The Washington Post just obtained a document from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which runs the SERE program that trains U.S. military personnel to resist torture and also helped train interrogators in the methods that were used on terror suspects under former President Bush. Read Alex Koppelman's post in Salon.com.

If the agency with the most knowledge about how SERE worked and whether torture worked, too, said it didn't, the issue remains, did the White House Principals know, or like other information they didn't like, did they disregard this?

Sunday, April 26, 2009 Update: Frank Rich in today's New York Times elaborates on just what I have written here: no one is innocent, especially not the American people, who knew before the 2004 presidential election, when Bush-Cheney scared people into voting for them, that the United States was engaging in torture, had abandoned its public commitment to international treaties, and was using pragmatism as the rationalization.