Waterboarders for God
By Ray McGovern, www.consortiumnews.com [1]
After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not
normally throw one off balance. But I found the events of Thursday to
be an acid test of my equilibrium.
I missed the National Prayer Breakfast-for the 45th time in a
row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as
President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:
“When we lift our hearts to God, we”re all equal in his sight.
We”re all equally precious. … In prayer we grow in mercy and
compassion. … When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as
ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man – and
a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.”
Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday’s prayer breakfast in
order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning
to the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words
to extol “the interrogation program run by the CIA … a tougher
program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
mastermind of 9/11,” without conceding that the program has involved
torture.
But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney’s remarks, as he
saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience that America is a “decent”
country.
After all, on Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed
publicly that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other “high-value”
detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden added that
the technique had since been discontinued.
An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as
the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by
just about everyone – except the legal experts of the Bush
administration.
On Wednesday, however, President Bush’s spokesman Tony Fratto
revealed that the White House reserves the right to approve
waterboarding again, “depending upon circumstances.”
Fratto matter-of-factly described the process still followed by
the Bush administration to approve torture-er, I mean “enhanced
interrogation techniques” like waterboarding:
“The process includes the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency bringing the proposal to the attorney general, where the review
would be conducted to determine if the plan would be legal and
effective. At that point, the proposal would go to the president. The
president would listen to the determination of his advisers and make a
decision.”
Dissing Congress
Cheney’s task of convincing the nation about its decency was made
no easier when Attorney General Michael Mukasey stonewalled questions
from the hapless John Conyers, titular chair of the House Judiciary
Committee. Conyers tried, and failed, to get straight answers from
Mukasey on torture.
Conyers referred to Hayden’s admission about waterboarding and
branded the practice “odious.” But Mukasey seemed to take perverse
delight in “dissing” Conyers, as the expression goes in inner-city
Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the disrespect stoically.
Chairman Conyers did summon the courage to ask Attorney General
Mukasey directly, “Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into
whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was illegal?”
“No, I am not,” Mukasey answered.
Mukasey claimed that “waterboarding was found to be permissible
under the law as it existed” in the years immediately after 9/11; thus,
the Justice Department couldn’t investigate someone for doing something
the department had declared legal.
“That would mean that the same department that authorized the
program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that
advice,” Mukasey said.
Oddly, however, Mukasey is on record saying waterboarding would
be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell, Director of
National Intelligence, was even more explicit in taking the same line
in an interview with Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker magazine.
McConnell told Wright that, for him:
“Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining
into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s
torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if done to others?
Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer breakfast and the
president’s moving reminder that we are called “to love a neighbor as
ourselves.” Are detainees not covered?
Cat Out of Bag
When torture first came up during his interview with the New
Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the obligatory
bromide “We don’t torture,” as former CIA Director George Tenet did in
five consecutive sentences while hawking his memoir on 60 Minutes on
April 29, 2007.
As McConnell grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the
rationale for Mukasey’s effrontery and the administration’s refusal to
admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that
rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell
inadvertently articulating it:
“If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”
Well, Mike, you should get yourself a briefing on that. Even the
Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington Post on
Friday saw fit to declare torture “illegal in all instances,” adding
that “waterboarding is, and always has been, torture.”
After World War II, Japanese soldiers were hanged for the war
crime of waterboarding American soldiers. Indeed, patriots and prophets
have made it clear from our earliest days that such abuse has no place
in America.
Virginia patriot Patrick Henry insisted passionately that “the
rack and the screw,” as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to
be left behind in the Old World, or we are “lost and undone.”
Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently refused to say
whether he considers the rack and the screw forms of torture,
dismissing the question as a hypothetical.
As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological
Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the National
Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious
organizations from left to right on the political spectrum.
Hunzinger puts it succinctly: “To acknowledge that waterboarding
is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east,” adding:
“All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking
abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly
continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable…. A
special counsel is an essential first step.”
Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to overcome
the pious complacency of the vast majority of institutional churches,
synagogues and mosques in this country and their reluctance to stick
their necks out.
How It Looks From Outside
Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.
South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain
to Nelson Mandela in prison and outspoken opponent of apartheid, has
this to say to those clergy who would preach more than platitudes:
“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture
from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and
confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and
caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is
experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have
to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their
sinning for them.
“All around the world there are those who long to see your human
goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of
relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”
Mukasey’s thumbing his nose at Conyers’s committee was simply the
most recent display of contempt for Congress on the part of the Bush
administration.
The Founders expected our representatives in Congress to be taken
seriously by the executive branch, and that congresspersons would hold
senior executives accountable-to the point of impeaching them, when
necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more outlandish behavior. No more.
No Worries, George
One reads George Tenet’s memoirs with some nostalgia for the days
of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a strong sense of
irony-as he confesses concern that Congress might one day hold him and
others accountable for taking liberties with national and international
law.
It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
counseled Tenet that his concerns were quaint and obsolete and, alas,
Gonzales may have been right, the way things have been going. But Tenet
apparently entertained lingering misgivings-perhaps even qualms of
conscience.
In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the
president that “our only real ally” on the Afghan border was
Uzbekistan, “where we had established important intelligence-collection
capabilities.”
We now know from UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that
those “collection capabilities” included the most primitive methods of
torture, including boiling alleged “terrorists” alive.
Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to
detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His worries
shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:
“We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as
CIA ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up
spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before
congressional overseers our new freedom to act.”
At the Center of the Storm, p. 177-178
Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from
accountability by a timid Congress as well as by an arrogant White
House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to shield
those it wished to protect.
Setting the Tone
It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from the outset.
After his address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, he assembled
his top national security aides in the White House bunker-the easier,
perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality.
Among them was counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted the president in his memoir:
“I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay at
war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available
for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they”re gone.
Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda…
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to
kick some ass.” Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004
Clarke, of course, took his book’s title from the oath of office
we all swore as military officers and/or senior government officials:
“To defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time,
fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president’s comment dismissing
any concern with international law-or, as would quickly be seen,
domestic law, as well.
With the enthusiastic assistance of David Addington, attorney for
Vice President Dick Cheney, the affable Ashcroft assembled a cabal of
Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on torture,
warrantless eavesdropping and other abuses mark them forever as
“domestic enemies” of the Constitution.
Now add Mukasey to that distinguished roster.
Torture became the hallmark.
What is not widely known is that Justice Department-approved
torture was first applied to an American citizen, John Walker Lindh,
who was captured in Afghanistan in late November 2001. The White House
and corporate press immediately sensationalized Lindh as “the American
Taliban.”
Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal adviser in the Justice
Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office giving ethics
advice to department attorneys, insisted that Lindh be advised of his
rights before any interrogation. Instead, he was tortured mercilessly
during the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.
Lindh simply had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time, i.e., in a large group of prisoners rounded up
by CIA and Army paramilitary forces-too large a group, it turned out.
In a spontaneous uprising, CIA paramilitary officer Johnny “Mike”
Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes before, was shot dead.
Spann’s colleagues were very angry and applied “frontier justice,”
totally ignoring the Constitutional cautions of Ms. Radack.
Eventually, the Department of Justice fired Radack for her
principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save e-mails
providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in which she had
insisted on respect for Lindh’s rights as an American citizen.
Newsweek carried the story briefly, but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much interest.
Radack’s book recounting this experience, The Canary in the
Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of “American Taliban” John
Walker Lindh, is available on line at: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net/ [2].
Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and
prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, Patrick Henry’s question
remains a challenge for our time: Are we “lost and undone?”
I think not; but we had better get it together soon, for, as Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, “There is such a thing as too late.”
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army
intelligence officer before joining the CIA where he had a 27-year
career as an analyst. He is now on the Steering Group of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
