The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after
the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President
was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized
on
Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third
Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy
prisoners
taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the
Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It
stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his
presidency.
Where’s the Outrage?
The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling
out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark
Side.
But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate
Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the
committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary
was
published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure
military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and
Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to
prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they
might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush
Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its
interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked
at Abu Ghraib?")
It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these
techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators
believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated
confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle
psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable
information. But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured — first at
Guantánamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services
Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner:
"Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani.
He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end,
stripped
naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform
dog tricks."
Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be
legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush
Administration proudly produced it. Memos authorizing the use of
"enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department's Office
of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide,
David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved
by
Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific
interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like
Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit
disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions:
"I
stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to
four hours?"
It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to
subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position — standing stock
still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two
hours' sleep. But that's not going to happen. Indeed, it seems
probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush
Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars
consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there's some theoretical
exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says
Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I
don't think there's much public appetite for that sort of action."
There is, I'm told, absolutely no interest on the part of the
incoming
Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors.
"We're focused on the future," said one of the President-elect's
legal
advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly
unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas — one imagines
the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway
—
just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain
and arrested in London for his crimes.
If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then
they'd have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in
perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure — through his
excellent team of legal appointees — that no such behavior happens
again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the
U.S.
government that the Bush Administration's policies were
reprehensible,
and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the
torture business. If Obama doesn't want to make that statement,
perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington:
a
statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position
— the real Bush legacy.
See pictures of the abuse revelations that rocked the U.S. and Iraq.
See pictures from inside Guantánamo Bay.
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