By Kevin Gosztola
If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful,
but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental
relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual
rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right,
not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the
right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just
in America — even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles.
– Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel
Torture has been privatized now, so you
have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners
and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who
are the privatized torturers accountable to? -Arundhati Roy
We do not torture. –George W. Bush
Phillippe Sands, author of the Vanity Fair article
that thrust the issue of torture into the mainstream media where it
should be daily until it is no longer an issue, appeared this week on Democracy Now!
and Bill Moyers Journal.
Sands cuts through the argument that
the issue of torture is something that “trickled up.” He specifically
looks at Detainee 063, a detainee that was tortured in late 2002 for
several weeks.
What does Detainee 063 reveal? It reveals
the crucial answer to how the military began to adopt a procedure that
involved coercive interrogations and torture.
Sands also focuses on an “action
memo” from November 2002 written by William J. (Jim) Haynes II,
the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. In this memo,
often called the Haynes Memoe, Rumsfeld gave “”blanket approval”
to 15 out of 18 proposed techniques of aggressive interrogation.”
On December 2, 2002, Rumsfeld signed
“his name firmly next to the word “Approved.” Under his signature
he also scrawled a few words that refer to the length of time a detainee
can be forced to stand during interrogation: “I stand for 8-10 hours
a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?””
Not only does this exhibit a ghastly
level of callowness and callousness but it is illegal. As Sands points
out in his Vanity Fair piece, “Cruelty, humiliation, and
the use of torture on detainees have long been prohibited by international
law, including the Geneva Conventions and their Common Article 3. This
total ban was reinforced in 1984 with the adoption of the Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
which criminalizes torture and complicity in torture.”
Not to mention 18 interrogation techniques
used violate the U.S. Army Field Manual, which as Sands said in his
appearances, is the “Bible” for the military.
Phillippe Sands did not just appear on
those two shows. His article and newly published book The Torture
Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values earned
him the opportunity to go testify at a hearing before Congress. The
responses to his testimony reveal how America has become accepting of
a “culture of cruelty” and also how the power structures in
this country (our two-party system and the people’s lack of voice, respect,
and representation in government) are abysmal:
REP. STEVE KING:“Wallowing
in self-guilt as a nation, and bringing hearings before this Congress
and pumping this into the media constantly, when we’ve identified that
these are narrow, very narrow, exceptional circumstances, and at our
knowledge on it isn’t complete, that it extends the outrage,That this
panel and this testimony, and those things that supplement it across
this media, also extend the outrage and may be extending this global
war against these people, whom we won’t call terrorists, we’ll call
them Islamic jihadists.”REP. MIKE PENCE: Some, of course,
have suggested that relationship-building interrogation techniques are
preferable and even more reliable in the long-run than stress methods.
They raise the question, though, what about the hard cases? And I can
tell by your grin you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you
could move people who have masterminded the death of more than 3000
Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods.”
Granted, these are Republicans. But what
does Speaker Nancy Pelosi have to say about torture?
In December of last year, John Nichols reported in The Nation
that, “Pelosi knew as early as 2002 that the U.S. was using waterboarding
and other torture techniques and, far from objecting, appears to have
cheered the tactics on.”
The House subpoenaed
David Addington, Cheney’s chief-of-staff who is closely linked to the
torture memos. Others are volunteering to testify.
Phillippe Sands appears to have hit a
nerve in Congress that has caused them to see the need to—I don’t
know—do something other than prepare for winning the election in November.
And so, it must be said that what he has done by making the rounds on
popular progressive news shows, by conducting interviews with several
Internet websites, and by writing an article that was published in the
corporate media and a book is a gift to Americans.
This gift offers us a window of opportunity
to educate the people of America on what this Bush Regime has been doing
and act on it.
We can act on it by organizing to fire
the “torture professors” or those lawyers involved at the
top who are now educating future generations of American lawyers and
leaders. Do you want future lawyers and leaders of America to think
torture is justified by the Constitution like Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia would like us all to believe?
Douglas Feith, closely linked to the
memos and to appear in hearings on torture to be held next month. From
the Vanity Fair article:
I asked him whether, in the end, he was
at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s
moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,”
he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding
with the assholes, to put it crudely.”
He currently teaches at Georgetown University.
John Yoo, teaching Constitution classes
at Berkeley in California, put together the legal justification for
torture, which is that if you cannot prove intent to torture, than you
are immune from prosecution or punishment. In other words, you can be
cruel and inhumane and not have to take responsibility for it.
This exchange
reveals just what kind of mentality these “torture professors”
are harboring:
Cassel:
If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including
by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that
can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the
August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs
to do that.
The Bush Regime is guilty of war crimes.
The most vulnerable members of the criminal
regime are the lawyers who have now moved on to teach (or indoctrinate).
The National Lawyers Guild, Center for
Responsive Politics, American Civil Liberties Union, and World Can’t
Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime! are all working collectively to have
Yoo fired from Berkeley, disbarred from his profession, and tried for
war crimes.
All lawyers/professors connected to the
torture memos (and responsible for their existence) deserve to be held
accountable for engaging in immoral, inhumane, and illegal acts such
as the formulation of legal justifications for torture.
Kevin Gosztola goes to Columbia
College in Chicago where he is studying film. He hopes to become a documentary
filmmaker. He is currently working as a production assistant on a documentary
called “Seriously Green” which traces the development of the
Green Party throughout the 2008 election. He
also has a passion for journalism and writes articles or press releases
in his spare time. Kevin is also a student activist that believes in
questioning the way America’s systems work(it’s electoral system, it’s
military-industrial complex, it’s foreign policy of American exceptionalism,
it’s media which has become the Fourth Branch of government,etc.). He
is raising money right now to go to several conferences involving activism
in America and has taken up the task of starting a media reform group
on Columbia College’s campus.