With God on My Side

GQ magazine published on its website yesterday a series of covers used by the Pentagon in the daily international security reports, personally carried to the White House by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that included Biblical statements as captions on optimistic photographs of the initial attack on the sovereign state of Iraq.

The First Amendment establishes a nation state that neither has a religious mission nor interferes with anyone's right to practice his or her religion.

This is the danger of violating that Amendment, this is the danger of turning Iraq into a holy war, if only to manipulate George W. Bush, then president. GQ suggests a cynical manipulation at work orchestrated by Rumsfeld.

Read the story and then decide whether we must have a fair and open hearing about how the Bush administration operated.

Every time Dick Cheney opens his mouth, every time we get distracted as to what and when Nancy Pelosi was told (we all knew something was wrong when the Washington Post leaked the story in 2003), whether a court forces Obama to release the interrogation photos or he does voluntarily, whether torture was used to establish a false link between Iraq and the team who planned 911, the case is being made that we have to create a structure and process for learning who, what, where, and how.

Sorry, Christine, I wanted to write something light and gardeny, but the news this morning, after a wonderful dinner last night, well, I couldn't help myself!

Corrupting the Character

In his press conference last night, President Obama spoke about the corrupting of the character of America because of waterboarding, which he stated unequivocally was torture.

Here is a link to the briefing and to the press conference itself.

To date it's the strongest statement he has made although he avoided speaking about accountability, at least last night. In prior statements, he said it would be a decision for Attorney General Eric Holder. That's where it belongs, too: it should be a prosecutorial decision not a political one.

But back to the waterboarding, in Spain, five former prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, have joined in the case where a judge has authorized an investigation into the circumstances of American interrogations. According to an interview with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, on WBAI last evening, if indictments result, so will arrest warrants against those found to have authorized and implemented torture. Since we can't expect that the United States will extradite those US officials, there will be arrest warrants issued. The impact of those will be that Bush, Cheney, and any others will not be able to travel to any European country.

That might not effect Bush, who never likes to leave Texas anyway, but will impede Cheney and Rumsfeld and their capacity to make more money through speaking fees.

That Rumsfeld is making yet more money through the swine flu spread is making me sick. He is one of the founding directors of Gilead Sciences, which owns the world wide patent for the anti-viral.

Pressure is certainly mounting on the United States to act itself, to purge itself, to correct itself. The discussion about whether torture works is a distraction. Imagine what George Washington might think! Let's see how true to the constitution those "originalists" really are.

Sidebar: There was something quaint, and I never thought I would use the word "quaint" about his directions on how to avoid the swine flu: wash your hands, cover your mouth, stay home if you or your children are ill.

He said it twice.

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.

Use the Rule of Law to End the Lawlessness

Four more Bush era memos authorizing the use of torture on detainees held by the US in the "war on terror" were released yesterday by the Obama administration. Download the memos here. Before the documents were distributed, only one of which was redacted to any real measure (taking out mentions of agents who participated in the inhuman and degrading behaviors), Obama differentiated between the agents who did the dirty work, and it was disgusting, and the officials who promoted and authorized it:

According to the New York Times: "Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty."

Reading through one of the memos yesterday, written by now federal appeals court judge Jay Bybee, I was horrified at the detailed descriptions of the techniques--walling, sleep deprivation, stress positions, slapping, confinement in small cages, use of insects, and of course, waterboarding. That the Office of Legal Counsel was hijacked to write particularized authorizations for the use of inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques is evidence enough of the abuse of authority conducted by Dick Cheney, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, at a minimum. The role of George Bush himself is less clear.

Consider the Bybee memo on sleep deprivation, which held that it wasn't torture to keep Abu Zubaydah, an allegedly high-ranking al Qaeda member (but he wasn't and they knew he wasn't) awake, so long as it didn't last for more than eleven days: Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual's ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of such sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep. You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation. Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction. You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

One memo admits that the technique of waterboarding was used too often and too violently: Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

Immediately Senator Patrick Leahy called for a full investigation. America needs more. We need investigations and prosecutions of the principals who authorized and promoted the use of torture. I agree that the agents themselves shouldn't be prosecuted; they should lose their jobs, however. We don't need those kinds of men and women working for our country. But the officials responsible for ordering the abuses, well, they deserve the full force of the rule of law, which they denied to others, in search of the truth.

Mandatory Reading

As painful as it is to read these books, as citizens who desire a more humane and egalitarian world, we must know what has been done in our names. At least three books are mandatory: Philippe Sands "Torture Team"; Jane Mayer "The Dark Side"; and Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine."

Each points a finger at top members of the Bush Administration for taking the reigns of our government and turning our resources to defiling America, eroding a commitment to civil and human rights, devastating the efficacy of government, and all the while making exorbitant profits. The hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by the Bush Administration during the course of its "war on terror" is horrifying in and of itself. However, the profits made by American corporations as the functions of government here and abroad were privatized add another dimension to the last eight years, especially when one sees just how much Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Bush, Sr. made through the war in Iraq and the more pervasive "war on terror."

As informed citizens of this country and of the world, we must insist that the Obama Administration take the steps necessary to investigate, prosecute, and undo the damage done by the ideologues of the last presidency. We have no choice. This information is out there, and to choose not act is an act of such hubris and arrogance that I doubt the rest of the world will ever respect the United States again. No matter how popular Obama might seem today.

What Spain is Doing for the United States

Since President Obama doesn't seem to quite have the stomach yet, a Spanish Court last week began a criminal investigation into charging six former Bush administration officials with war crimes. The six under the prosecutorial microscope are: Douglas Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, infamous for the torture memos that tortured legal analysis, precedent, and international law; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Why Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President Bush aren't on the list bewilders me.

According to Jane Meyer, the National Book Award author of "The Dark Side," the basis for the investigation is the work of Philippe Sands, the British professor whose book "The Torture Team" blazed the way through the lame excuse that those pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib were the result of a "few bad apples." According to Sands' research, what horrified us in those photographs of degradation was the result of high level authorizations from either the White House or very close by. There is an incredible interview conducted by Bill Moyers of Sands that shouldn't be missed.

Read Jane Mayer's short piece in the April 13, 2009 The New Yorker.

Here is why, no matter what, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush should be investigated. At least Cheney and Rumsfeld made money while in office. Cheney held onto his Halliburton stock and influence, and guess what: Halliburton got a helluva lot of no-bid contracts in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. Rumsfeld made himself richer, too, because he held onto his Gilead stock, which just so happened to own the patent for Tamiflu, the alleged antidote to Avian Flu. Remember that?

As I am finishing Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, the crimes of the Bush administration become more heinous and urgent. It's one thing to be incompetent. It's another thing to make mistakes. But it is indefensible to run government for private enrichment, and that's what Cheney and Rumsfeld did. There is no evidence in Klein's book that Bush did directly benefit, but the doors he opened to privitizing everything will welcome him in his post-White House days.

Getting Ready to Say Goodbye

The Center for American Progress sends out a daily email to those of us who like to remember what the American ideal is all about. Today's alert was perfect, in the glowing aftermath of Bush's farewell speech last night: It's titled "The 43 Who Helped Make Bush the Worst Ever."

Of course, Bush isn't on the list, because he gets to be the worst president ever.

Not surprisingly, Dick Cheney tops the list, followed by Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, and Michael Brown. Surprisingly, Paul Wolfowitz betters David Addington, whom I believe is downright evil. Of course, you will recognize most of the names. However, it's important that we keep these people's names familiar. We have to watch out for where they end up. Hopefully some of them will end up in jail, many will never be able to travel outside the United States, and remember, don't buy their memoirs.

Yet as my anger begins to ebb, just a bit, I spoke with a friend today who is going to the inauguration with her seven year old son. I spoke with another young woman who is going to DC, too. Neither has tickets to anything. They are pulled, like we all are, to be a part of history, to resurrect the American spirit during these hard, hard times. Hope is powerful, more powerful than I ever understood, until now.