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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051904B.shtmlWar Crimes: Was Afghanistan Worse? By Steve Weissman t r u t h o u t | Perspective Wednesday 19 May 2004 If the White House, Pentagon, and CIA thought they could get away with humiliating, torturing, and killing captives in Iraq, they had good reason. They did - and still do - far worse in and around Afghanistan, and few in Congress or the media have raised the slightest complaint. Nor did the public protest in any significant numbers. Like good Germans during the Holocaust, many Americans pretended not to know, while others openly cheered Washington's heavy hand. After 9/11, we would show "them" - the Arabs, the Muslims, the world - the high price they would pay for stepping on Superman's cape. According to counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Bush summed up the mood after bin Laden's maniacal martyrs brought down the World Trade Center. "I don't care what the international lawyers say," Bush declared, "we are going to kick some ass." Bush then signed a series of Presidential Directives empowering the CIA to kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders without any need for legal prosecutions, trials, or other of the usual inconveniences. Our faceless spooks would serve as High Sheriff and Hanging Judge. The President also authorized a global network of detention camps in locations so secret that he reportedly told the CIA not to tell him where they were. Into these dark holes, CIA officers could lock away suspected terrorists and question them using "Stress and Duress" or "Torture-Lite" methods far nastier than those in the Abu Ghraib prison photos. Consider what insiders call "water-boarding," where the spooks tie their prisoner to a board and submerge him or her under water, provoking an intense fear of drowning. Recurring fear, the CIA torture manuals explain, works far better than unbearable pain, which too often encourages victims to tell whatever they think their tormentors want to hear. Contrary to what many news reports now suggest, the Bush Administration was not creating this Brave New World from scratch in the hectic days after 9/11. CIA dragons had long "disappeared" a select group of captives into secret dungeons, where they pried loose unwilling tongues with hooding, sensory deprivation and sensory assault, preventing sleep, withholding food and water, extremes of hot and cold, threats and humiliation, and forced standing or kneeling in painful positions. "The Company" had employed these techniques at least as far back as the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and had taught them to client armies and police forces around the globe, most infamously in Central American and Chile under Gen. Pinochet. The British used the same approach in Northern Ireland and in their imperial counter-insurgency campaigns, while the Israelis have perfected similar methods for years against Palestinian prisoners. Where Bush broke new ground was in the scope of what he set in motion, the industrial scale on which the CIA - and later the Pentagon - violated all but the faintest pretense of providing humane treatment to those they took captive. As the good guys fighting a new kind of war against evil, our side could use whatever means we wanted. Were the interrogation methods legal? As Newsweek reported, White House, Justice Department, and Pentagon lawyers attempted to rewrite the law. They argued - in the words of White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales - that the need to obtain information quickly to prevent terrorist attacks "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Assume that Mr. Gonzales was right. Assume that the terrorist threat required junking all our treaty obligations and legal safeguards back to habeas corpus and the Magna Carta. Even so, the President and his lawyers could not legally decide to do that on their own. Unless they were junking the Constitution as well, lawmaking still lay with Congress, as quaint and obsolete as many of its members might seem. Still, the huge number of legal briefs and memos, the endless guidelines, the ever-changing lists of approved techniques all provided a comfort zone, which Pentagon chief Rumsfeld loves to cite as "the law." We see the same attempt at CYA from many of the anonymous sources who are now giving the game away to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the New Yorker's Sy Hersh. We're not war criminals, the insiders plead. Our consiglieri said we could do it. The argument wears thin. Rule of law means more than having right-wing legal eagles make up new rules when old ones get in the way. Even the Supreme Court Justices who anointed Mr. Bush president show signs of backing away from his more extreme legal claims, which few courts or judicial scholars in the rest of the world would take as anything more than self-serving poppycock. With his legal camouflage still unfolding as American forces invaded Afghanistan, Mr. Bush's torture machine came of age. His lawyers decreed that the Geneva Conventions did not cover Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects, and all hell broke loose. Where a select group of CIA "high priests" continued quietly and out of sight to torture "high value detainees" like al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Abu Zubaida, an army of American grunts, private contractors, and less cautious CIA types now took a turn. Reporters and TV cameras could even catch a glimpse as they frog-stepped anonymous "enemy combatants" in hoods and shackles and forced them into stress positions at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul. For all its secrecy, Guantanamo revealed worse. One early photo clearly showed a group of hooded detainees sitting with their knees under them in an extremely painful position. To get tough guys to sit that way, the guards must have asked very nicely indeed - or used some old-fashioned kicking, beating, and clubbing. Perhaps the Pentagon's recently revealed videos will show us, if the military does not shred them before subpoenas are served. John Walker Lindh, the young American Taliban who was captured in Afghanistan, saw first hand how the system worked. According to his initial statements, his captors kept him hooded, cuffed, and often naked, deprived him of sleep, and withheld food and appropriate medicine for his gunshot and shrapnel wounds. He subsequently withdrew any formal complaint of mistreatment as part of his plea agreement, but Senator John Warner's Armed Services Committee could learn by looking into his original allegations. Lindh's story is a small, easily understood example of how American forces in Afghanistan treated their captives, including an American citizen who presumably had certain Constitutional rights. Far more horrific is what happened to thousands of Afghanistanis who fell into the hands of the Northern Alliance and some 150 to 200 U.S. Special Forces who were leading them. Jamie Doran, a former BBC television producer, tells their story in his film Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death. Broadcast in the United States by Democracy Now, the film appeared on national television in Britain, Germany, Italy, and Australia, and was screened by the European Parliament. Senate investigators would do well to watch it. According to Doran, Northern Alliance soldiers forced some three thousand of their prisoners into sealed containers, which they loaded onto trucks for transport to Sheberghan prison. Having trouble breathing, the prisoners began shouting for air. The soldiers responded by firing directly into the containers, killing several people. The rest of the prisoners remained sealed up for the four-day journey, licking perspiration and even drinking blood from open wounds. When the trucks arrived, most of the prisoners inside were dead. U.S. Special Forces then directed the trucks into desert, where they stood by as their allies and underlings shot the survivors and buried them along with those who had died on the journey. As many as three thousand bodies lie buried in a mass grave. When that grave is found, as it will be, the current crisis over our treatment of Iraqi prisoners could start up all over again. A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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