by Malcolm Shore
Who gives a shit if there is a naked woman reflected
in Dick Cheney’s sunglasses?
There is a river of blood on his hands. And now,
those red-drenched paws have been held up to the light for the whole world to
see, thanks to a report that broke last week from ABC News: ABC revealed that
in the aftermath of 9/11, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Colin
Powell, and George Tenet held dozens of top-secret meetings in the White
House.
On the agenda for these meetings?
Planning, in vivid and gruesome detail, exactly how to torture
people-and how many times. These
top-level Bush Regime officials approved techniques including waterboarding,
physical abuse, and sleep deprivation.
According to the report, former CIA director Tenet proposed combining
these torture methods into a single interrogation, and Cheney personally gave
him the thumbs up.
Later, in 2004, after the Justice Department had
ostensibly rescinded one of its infamous torture memos, Tenet again asked for permission to
torture. According to ABC News, Condoleeza Rice responded, “This is your baby.
Go do it.”
Finally, are you ready for this? George W. Bush knew about and approved these
torture meetings. How do we know? Because Bush told us himself, last Friday,
when he spoke to ABC News : “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met
on this issue. And I approved,.” Bush said.
This unbelievably damning piece of evidence has,
thus far, been almost completely ignored by the rest of the mainstream media,
just like another unbelievably damning piece of evidence: A Feb 7, 2002 memo
written by Bush in which he personally rules the Geneva Conventions do not
apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban (see Ray McGovern’s recent article).
Regarding the secret White House meetings, the
Associated Press had reported last week that Bush Regime officials were careful
to give the president plausible
deniability “The officials also took
care to insulate President Bush from a series of
meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which
simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved,” the AP reported
Thursday.
Apparently, Bush’s arrogance has mushroomed to the
point where he no longer even feels the need for such deniability. He is now announcing his war criminality to
the world.
So there you have it, in broad daylight-the Bush
Regime directly, and meticulously planned torture. Even some sections of the
mainstream media are now acknowledging that the implementation of torture-a
clear war crime under international law- goes all the way up to the president
of the United States.
Hey, America:
Can we all please agree to make a big deal out of this?
Can we make a pact to let our anger override our
despair? Is it too much to ask for us to
make sure that everyone we know is aware that Dick Cheney is confirmed to have
ordered the drowning, beating, and psychological torment of human beings, and
that George Bush has admitted to approving the meetings where this was planned? And, while we”re at it, can we finally come
together to raise the demand for Bush, Cheney, and the whole crew to be driven
from office and prosecuted for war crimes?
Endless List
of Crimes Against Humanity
The list of crimes against humanity and impeachable
offenses committed by the Bush Regime is-of course-so long, and expands so
rapidly, that it is often hard to keep track of. But let’s say that the only
thing you knew about this government was that it ordered torture to be carried
out. That’s not outrageous enough to inspire you to resist? Seriously?
Some progressives, including those already actively
resisting the Bush Regime, may greet this news with a sarcastic “Big surprise.
We already knew that.” Well, whether we
already knew it is not the point.
The point is that massive sections of American society are
ignorant-whether willfully or not-of the crimes their government is
committing. And far too many of those
who are not ignorant are pretending to be-perhaps because their personal
responsibility in the face of these crimes is an uncomfortable reality to face,
and perhaps because they feel the absence of a mass independent movement of resistance
reinforcing them if they do speak out.
The louder and more persistently we call out Bush,
Cheney, and the gang for being the war criminals they so clearly are, the fewer
Americans will remain ignorant or complicit, and the more who will feel inspired
and compelled to act.
Reacting to last week’s reports that Cheney, Rice,
and other top Bush officials planned torture , Senator Ted Kennedy observed, in
chilling fashion: “Who would have
thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top
officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to
approve torture?” What is equally
astonishing-if not surprising-is that with the exception of the ABC News and
the AP, the mainstream media has basically ignored this story. As of April 14, the New York Times apparently
didn’t classify news that the vice-president of the United States authorized torture-or
that the president himself approved the torture meetings- as “fit to
print.” And CNN’s Web site didn’t carry
the story either, although apparently there was space, time, and resources
available for the site to report on Britney Spears getting in a minor car
accident.
Shout It From the Rooftops
However,
while the silence of CNN, The Times, and other major news outlets is an
appalling reminder of the complicity of our nation’s media in war crimes, this
is no excuse for we the American people to join in this complicity. We must, as the saying goes, “shout from the
rooftops” that our nation is being ruled by war criminals, and not cease until
these criminals are brought to justice.
The good news is that, while its crimes are certainly premeditated and
planned with precision, the Bush Regime also ranks as one of the sloppier
criminal enterprises in world history.
In its mammoth crime of systematic torture ordered from top levels of
government, the regime has left behind mountains of evidence. It has gotten to
the point where this government may as
well convene a press conference with top officials holding a giant reading:
“YES, WE ARE WAR CRIMINALS!”
For instance,
on February 5, CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted to Congress that his agency
had waterboarded detainees. Two days later, the U.N. Commissioner for Human
Rights, Louise Arbour, officially deemed waterboarding torture and declared
that those who committed it should be prosecuted for war crimes. You do the math: Michael Hayden admitted that
his agency committed war crimes for which he and other officials should be
prosecuted. (True to form, the New York Times devoted mere sentences to this
news).
Then there are the numerous “torture memos” –
official government documents written since 9/11 in which the Bush Regime has
sought to establish a legal basis to carry out torture. To cite just a few of these documents : On
February 7 2002, Bush himself explicitly
opened the gates to torture, as mentioned earlier in this article and as
discussed at length by Ray McGovern in another piece linked on this site: “I
accept the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and determine that
none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world, because, among other reasons,
al-Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva,” Bush wrote. He stated further down in the memo: “I also
accept the legal opinion of the Department of Justice and determine that common
article 3 of Geneva
does not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees because, among other
reasons, the relevant conflicts are international in scope and Common Article 3
applies only to “armed conflict not of an international character.””
In August of
2002, the Justice Department issued a memo that suggested international law
banning torture did not apply to the “war on terror,” defined physical torture
as pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,”
and described the threshold for mental torture as psychological abuse spanning
months or years.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a March
2003 Justice Department memo written by John Yoo, a war criminal employed by
the University of
California at Berkeley
who will one day have his own wing in the Torture Hall of Shame. Yoo, who was
then the deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Office of Legal
Counsel, explicitly stated that the Bush Regime did not have to follow
international law outlawing torture. “Our
previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal
law,” Yoo wrote, “and that the president is free to override it at his
discretion.” Yoo went on to say that for
prisoner abuse to constitute torture, it must involve the “intended sum” of
severe mental pain, threat of death, and physical pain that
causes organ failure or death. And he
suggested that if interrogators were charged with violating international law,
they could use “necessity” or “self-defense”
as a justification.
In early 2005, the Justice Department issued a memo
that explicitly authorized torture methods including waterboarding detainees,
beating them, and subjecting them to
freezing temperatures.
Then, of course, in 2006, Congress passed and Bush
signed the Military Commissions Act, which in addition to allowing Bush to
order the indefinite detention without trial of anyone he pleases, gave him the
exclusive right to define what is and is not torture and discarded the Geneva
Conventions for those deemed “enemy combatants.”
And now, on top of all this, comes the news that
Cheney, Rice, and other top government officials planned, in detail, the
execution of specific torture methods on specific detainees, and that Bush knew
about and approved the meetings where the implementation of these methods was
planned.
Brazen
Admission of Torture
Precisely because this administration is seeking to
legalize torture in order to prevent prosecution of those who carry it out, the
Bush Regime has-out of necessity-been very open about its use of torture. In
other words, the harder the regime pushes to legalize torture, the more it has been
forced to leave behind overwhelming evidence of its own criminality. But here’s
some bad news for the Bush Regime: Legalizing torture is itself a violation
of international law.
Article 4 of the United Nations Convention on
Torture, which the United
States has signed and ratified-and which the
ACLU identifies as “the
most important international human rights treaty that deals exclusively with
torture” – makes it illegal for individual nations to rewrite their laws
to permit torture. The article states: “Each State Party shall ensure that all
acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an
attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes
complicity or participation in torture.”
So, in other words, when Yoo said in the 2003
torture memo that, “customary
international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override
it at his discretion,” this was complete bullshit. That memo is illegal, as are all the other
torture memos written by the Bush Regime.
The Military Commissions Act?
ILLEGAL! The meetings held in the
White House to plan torture? ILLEGAL! Bush’s
approval of these meetings? ILLEGAL!
Also, as McGovern points out in his aforementioned
article, numerous articles of the U.N. Convention Against Torture
require
states who signed the document-and again, this includes the United
States-to prosecute those
who carry out torture. For instance, Article 6 reads: “Upon being
satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that
the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a
person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4
is present, shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to
ensure his presence.”
In case you”re looking for some other quick
reference points to show people who don’t believe the Bush Regime has really
violated international law, here you go: To begin with, let’s look further at
the Convention Against Torture. This document defines torture as “any act by
which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person
information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has
committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him
or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the
consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an
official capacity.”
That’s a mouthful, but the meaning is clear:
Intentionally inflicting mental or physical pain for the purpose of obtaining
information is torture. Compare that definition to the one John Yoo tried to
establish in his infamous torture memo to the Justice Department in 2003-that
torture refers to the “intended sum”of severe mental pain, threat of
death, and physical pain that causes organ failure or death.
Other articles of the U.N. Convention Against
Torture apply so directly to the actions of the Bush Regime that one could be
forgiven for thinking its authors anticipated the methods by which this
government would seek to justify torture.
Article 2, for instance, clearly states, “No exceptional circumstances
whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political
instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of
torture.” It also states that “an order from a superior officer or a public
authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Article 3 bans rendition: “No State Party shall
expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State
where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of
being subjected to torture.”
Here, for reference and to pass along to as many
other people as you can, is a link to the UN Convention Against Torture: http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html
Or let’s look at the Third Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949. This convention
clearly states that its provisions apply to “all cases of declared war or of
any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High
Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them.”
This Convention further states that, in relation to
those outside of combat-a category that explicitly includes detainees and
prisoners of war-“the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any
time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned
persons: (a) Violence to life and
person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and
torture; b) Taking of hostages; (c)
Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading
treatment.”
Article 13 of the third Geneva Convention reads:
“Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly
against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public
curiosity.”
So, when current Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez
infamously referred to the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and claimed they did
not apply to detainees of the war on terror, this statement was not only
morally despicable but-much like Yoo’s argument that the Bush Regime can override
international law-complete bullshit.
And so, here we are in the spring of 2008, living
under a regime whose arrogance and cruelty have reached such heights that its
leaders are committing war crimes in broad daylight, practically daring the
citizenry to stop them.
It is a challenge the American public is long
overdue in answering.
According to the ABC News, during the top secret
White House meetings authorizing torture, former Attorney General John Ashcroft
exclaimed at one point: “Why are we talking about this in the White House?
History will not judge this kindly.”
Indeed, let us hope that when all is said and done,
it is the Bush Regime-and not us-that lives in historical infamy.