|
Commentary
from a former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Rice with
Indefensible Brief; Cheney in
Last Throes European reaction to
visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statements on torture can be
summed up in lead commentary Wednesday in the Sueddeutsche
Zeitung, among the most widely respected German newspapers. Under
the title "Justice à la Rice," the editor "translated" her
message into these words: "The end justifies the means and terrorism can be fought
with borderline methods on the outer edges of legality." He added: "Rice came to Germany to begin a new era.
She has resoundingly failed to do so. Injustice remains injustice, and a wrong
policy remains a wrong policy. On this basis you cannot re-launch the trans-Atlantic
relationship." There was no mushroom
cloud, but Rice is radioactive nonetheless. No matter how much she and the
embedded reporters traveling with her tried to spin her words, they are falling
on deaf ears in Europe. Even here at home, the administration is encountering
unusual skepticism in the heretofore-domesticated media. The normally sleepy
editorial side of the Washington Post, for example, found it possible to lead
its first editorial yesterday by reminding readers that Rice broke no new ground
in claiming Wednesday that US personnel - "wherever they are" - are
prohibited from using cruel or inhuman interrogation techniques. This is hardly
a profile in courage for the Post: The president's spokesman, Scott McClellan,
had already told reporters that Rice was merely expressing existing policy. Trouble on the Home Front With attention
riveted on the cause célèbre occasioned by revelations concerning CIA-run
prisons abroad, kidnapping, and "extraordinary renditions" of
captives to torture-prone foreign countries - and the predictably neuralgic
reaction among our allies - it is easy to miss the likely political fallout
here at home. Vice President Dick
Cheney, whose unbridled chutzpah has led him to take public and well as private
credit for being the intellectual author of US policy on torture, has become
such a glaring liability that his tenure may be short-lived. There is a growing
possibility that the vice president will resign at the turn of the year
"for reasons of health," and that his partner-in-crime - in what
Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence
Wilkerson, has labeled the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" - will choose to
retire to his home in Taos early next year. Never in the sixty
years since World War II has an American secretary of state been received with
such hostility by our erstwhile friends in Europe. In one sense, it can be seen
as poetic justice that Rice, who as national security adviser to the president
never heard a Cheney suggestion she didn't like, is taking the heat, while the
vice president hides behind her skirts. Poetic justice for Cheney himself,
though, may be just around the corner. It is no secret that
Cheney bears primary responsibility for making our country a pariah among
nations by punching a gaping hole in the (until now) absolute ban on torture
under international and US law. Under international treaties, including
treaties ratified by the US Senate and thus the supreme law of the land,
civilized societies have long since prohibited practices widely recognized as
torture. No matter. At the instigation of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, the
inherent human right to physical integrity and personal dignity has become an
early casualty of the US "war on terror." We did not need Col.
Wilkerson to tell us that. What he has revealed in tracing responsibility for
the US rogue policy on torture to the office of the vice president and Rumsfeld
merely confirmed much of what is already known, but reported meagerly - if at
all - in US media. Just five days after
9/11, the vice president told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press: "We
also have to work, though, sort of the dark side ... a lot of what needs to be
done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources
and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies ... it's going to
be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our
objective." At that same time
President George W. Bush reportedly issued instructions to the CIA to take a
no-holds-barred approach when interrogating suspected terrorists and, according
to counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, used colorful language to impress his
attitude upon Clarke and Rumsfeld: "I don't care what the international
lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." The head of the
Counter-terrorism Center at the CIA conveyed the atmosphere quite well when he
testified to Congress that after 9/11 "the gloves were off." This was the message
conveyed to CIA director George Tenet, who dutifully marched off to find
interrogators to be set loose on "suspected terrorists" likely to be
captured in Afghanistan - and then Iraq. For it was clear from the start that
Iraq, too, was in the gun sights of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the president
himself. "Dark-side"
operations, using "any means at our disposal" - like, say,
"enhanced interrogation techniques" - by law require a
"finding" signed by the president. Before signing, Bush would have
sought the advice of his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales - the more so,
since this particular finding raised serious questions with regard not only to
international law but also to US criminal statutes, and particularly the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. 2441). Enter the (in)famous memorandum of January 25, 2002, from Gonzales to the president, in
which some provisions of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war were
described as "quaint" and "obsolete." Referring to the US
War Crimes Act, the author of that memorandum argued that there was a
"reasonable basis in law" that Bush could escape future criminal
prosecution for violating that law. Powell Protests ... Not Too Much Then-Secretary of
State (and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Colin Powell
protested, and his warning, which was inserted into the January 25 memorandum
to the president, speaks volumes: “A
determination that the GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] does not
apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine US military culture which
emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could
introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries." In a memo dated January 26, 2002, Powell also warned that such behavior by
the US would "undermine public support among critical allies [and] reverse
over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions
and undermine the protections of the law of war for our own troops." But
Powell was a day late and a penny short with these latter warnings. And it is
altogether likely that then-national security adviser Rice, at the prompting of
the cabal, never showed the president Powell's January 26 memorandum. As for
the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush-shy Powell, he confined himself to sending memos to
the president's lawyer. And so, on February 7, 2002, Bush signed the watershed memorandum
telling our armed forces "to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent
appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with
the principles of Geneva." Therein lies the gaping loophole that largely
accounts for the widespread practice of torture of the kind so graphically
represented in the photos from Abu Ghraib. It was not a "few bad
apples" at the bottom. The bad apples were at the very top of the barrel. But Who Wrote the January 25 Memorandum? The author was
Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, whom the vice president had the gall
to promote to be his chief of staff after I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby
was indicted. Addington's authorship has been openly acknowledged, and Cheney
appears to regard it as a feather in Addington's cap. One searches in vain,
however, for legal experts who support Addington's tortured (no pun intended)
reasoning. Indeed, in November 2004, 130 prominent jurists - including twelve
federal judges, eight former American Bar Association presidents, and former
FBI director William Sessions - issued a highly unusual statement criticizing
Addington and others by name for failing in their "high obligation to
defend the Constitution." Bypassing the "Six Blind Mice" What is new is the
willingness of patriotic officials within the government to put their country
before their career and go to the media to blow the whistle on the various
indignities and crimes they have witnessed. Those officials, initially cowed by
the object lesson served up by White House retaliation against former
ambassador Joseph Wilson, have become increasingly scandalized at the
jettisoning of long accepted practices like those that used to govern
interrogations. And so, officials with first-hand knowledge have now begun to
come forward and tell what has been going on, in hopes of getting the country
back on track. Cheney no longer has Libby to keep his finger in the dike to
prevent leaks that are fast becoming a flood, and Karl Rove is preoccupied with
his own efforts to avoid indictment. Most important,
Cheney's formidable power has been deeply dented by the indictment of his
closest aide Libby, and the vice president's unabashed support of torture has
prompted old friends and colleagues like Gen. Brent Scowcroft to say, "I
don't know Dick Cheney." Absolute power may still corrupt absolutely even
when it is deeply dented, but then it is not as threatening to those with the
courage to confront it. It is no surprise
that patriotic truth-tellers within the government have chosen to go to the
fourth estate rather than to a Congress controlled by the president's party. Their choice reflects a realization that
little but trouble can be expected in seeking recourse from those who have
become known as "the six blind mice" - Senators Pat Roberts, John
Warner, and Richard Lugar, who chair the committees with jurisdiction in the
Senate; and Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, Duncan Hunter, and Henry Hyde in the
House. Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst with
the CIA for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120905Z.shtml |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
