Originally from Revolution Newspaper
Last December a scandal surfaced
momentarily when the New York Times revealed that the CIA destroyed
thousands of hours of videotapes of waterboarding and other torture
used during interrogation of detainees in 2001. Now we learn that these
torture sessions were deliberately and meticulously planned by top
White House officials in dozens of meetings. A source told ABC News,
which broke the story on April 9, that the tortures “were almost choreographed.”
The torture planning cabal
included Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
CIA head George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Asked about
this, George Bush said that he knew about these torture meetings of
his top national security team-“And I approved.”
Here it is in plain daylight.
In meeting after meeting, those at the top of the American power structure
discussed in gruesome detail how to nearly drown and inflict other extreme
physical and mental pain on human beings. The President himself-after
claiming for years that “we don’t torture”-now openly says he
approved. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity. Anyone who
argues otherwise is refusing to look at reality and to take a basic
stand on what is right versus what is wrong and immoral.
But did the revelation of these
White House torture planning meetings become banner-headline news on
the front page of every newspaper and dominate the TV news shows? No-it
was pretty much treated as minor news if at all, with even ABC News,
which broke the scoop, putting it fourth in its list of stories. Were
there outraged calls in Congress for Bush and Cheney to be impeached
for these war crimes and driven out of office? No such thing happened.
The fact that there has been
no society-wide uproar about the Bush team’s torture sessions speaks
to how much the open use of torture by the U.S. has become legitimized
in official American politics, policy, and discourse-and how far things
have gone in the direction of ripping up the old legitimating norms
and setting up new, fascistic norms. The ban on “cruel and unusual
punishment” was among the “core” rights of the U.S. from its beginnings.
These rights have always been applied narrowly by this country’s rulers
(and, of course, they did not apply at all to slaves and Native people)-and
they have often been violated outright. But it is a new and very dangerous
thing when things like torture that were formal violations of law are
now openly approved by those at the heights of the government who have
declared that the law is whatever they say it is.
During those White House meetings,
the only participant to raise any qualms was John Ashcroft-not because
he opposed torture, but because (according to ABC News) “he argued
that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim
details of interrogations.” Ashcroft’s worry was that he and others
would get directly associated with the torture and other crimes they
were mapping out. And it is known that others in the Bush regime, the
military, and the CIA were concerned that the open use of torture-in
direct violation of domestic and international laws-would harm the
overall interests of the U.S. empire.
John Yoo’s Torture Memos
This is where the lawyers for
the Bush regime came in. The White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told
Bush that the Geneva conventions against torture were “quaint” and
did not apply to the U.S.’s so-called “war on terror.” And a team
of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced
a series of infamous secret memos designed to give legal cover for the
torturing of detainees under American control.
One memo, written by Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee,
declared that what CIA interrogators did to prisoners did not meet the
legal definition of torture unless it was “equivalent in intensity
to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily functions or even death.” In any case, Yoo claimed,
laws against torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners did not matter
because the American president has unlimited war-time powers as commander-in-chief.
Another secret memo by Yoo
in March 2003 applied these arguments to the interrogation of prisoners
by the U.S. military. In the 81-page memo, Yoo coldbloodedly discussed
whether the president could allow American interrogators to poke out
a prisoner’s eye or throw “scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic
substance” on a detainee, which are among the brutal assaults specifically
banned in a U.S. statute (law) against “maiming.” Yoo’s answer
was that it depends on the circumstances or which “body part the statute
specifies.” But again, in Yoo’s perverse argument, none of that
matters in any case because the president’s ultimate authority as
commander-in-chief trumps any existing laws.
After this second memo finally
became public a few weeks ago, the National Lawyers Guild and others
began a campaign to get John Yoo dismissed from UC Berkeley’s Boalt
Hall, the prestigious law school where Yoo has been a professor since
he left the Bush administration in 2003. The dean of Boalt Hall and
some others are opposing the demand for Yoo’s firing, saying that
dismissing him from his tenured position would harm academic freedom.
There is
a heavy assault on academic freedom in America today. Professors are
being hounded, suppressed, and fired for their critical or unorthodox
thinking. But this is a systematic right-wing offensive spearheaded
by forces like David Horowitz with connections high in the ruling circles
of this country, including the Bush regime that Yoo served. Yoo is not
just an academic who has published controversial scholarly works or
espouses unpopular views. He was one of the key legal architects for
the use and legitimization of torture by the Bush regime. His role can
be likened to that of the Nazi lawyers who advised Hitler on how to
legally carry out atrocities, like disappearing people in occupied territories
into secret detention camps-and who were convicted for war crimes
in the Nuremberg trials after World War 2.
Not only should Yoo be dismissed
from his position as a “respectable” legal scholar-he, along with
the whole Bush regime from Bush on down, are war criminals!
Yoo and others deliberately
crafted their legal memos to justify and give cover to the torture that
was already going on, under the direction of the top levels of the Bush
regime. And these memos cleared the way for even more war crimes and
crimes against humanity. Center for Constitutional Rights Executive
Director Vincent Warren has written that the Yoo memos “were the keystone
of the torture program, and were the necessary precondition for the
torture program’s creation and implementation.”
We know about some of the horrors
of this torture program: The deaths of at least 108 people under U.S.
detention since 9/11, many from torture. The use of attack dogs, sexual
assaults, and other terror against prisoners at Abu Ghraib in occupied
Iraq. The hundreds of prisoners isolated for years at the Guantánamo
torture camp, more than a few driven insane or to suicide. The horror
of waterboarding-where the torturer straps down a prisoner, covers
the victim’s face with cloth or plastic, and pours water down the
nose and throat to “simulate” drowning. Many more bloody horrors
still remain hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
The Military Commissions Act:
Institutionalizing Torture
Some of the torture memos by
Yoo and others were later “rescinded.” But the Military Commissions
Act, passed by Congress in 2006 and signed by Bush, institutionalizes
the use of torture by the U.S.-and gives retroactive immunity to government
and military officials for torture already carried out. In March of
this year, Bush vetoed a Congressional bill that would have outlawed
the CIA’s use of waterboarding and certain other forms of torture.
This legitimization and rampant
use of torture is part of the whole agenda of those in power in the
U.S. to go for a qualitative leap in consolidating and expanding their
global dominance and to achieve an unchallenged and unchallengeable
empire. This agenda means reactionary violence and suffering on a massive
scale for people around the world-the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
have already killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions from
their homes, and Iran is now in the U.S. target sights. And it means
a radically repressive shift in society-fascistic laws like the Patriot
Act, government wiretapping and spying on an unprecedented scale, the
rise of a theocratic Christian fundamentalist movement reaching high
into the government, as well as Gestapo raids to round up and deport
thousands of immigrants.
This is the reality that millions
throughout society here in the U.S. must fully confront-and mobilize
to politically resist in their millions, with moral conviction and fearless
determination. “Our” rulers are openly torturing and carrying out
other war crimes. Silence in the face of this is unacceptable complicity
with these horrendous crimes.