³Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George
W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he
strained to turn his violation of national and international
law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His
tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians
leveled at Socrates - making the worse case appear the
better.²
This echoes the strategy the regime followed during its terrorist campaign in
Nicaragua, when Colonel North's criminal activities were spun as high
patriotism.
³And the artful offensive will succeed if - but only if -
the mainstream media is as cowed, and the American people
as dumb, as the president apparently thinks we are.²
This is quite naive. The mainstream media is not 'cowed'; it is part of the
machinery of deception. The assumption that the American people are 'dumb' is
not founded on asking the people what they think; it is based on the mistaken
notion that 'everyone else' believes the six o'clock news.
Whether the "artful offensive will succeed" depends on only one thing: whether
or not our behind-the-scenes rulers have decided to dump Bush.
rkm
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Original source URL:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090906X.shtml
Bush: A "Plenty Tough" Torturer's Apprentice
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 09 September 2006
Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the
baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national
and international law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His
tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians leveled at Socrates -
making the worse case appear the better. Bush's remarks made it abundantly
clear, though, that he is not about to take the hemlock.
As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches and with the midterm elections just
two months away, the president's speechwriters succeeded in making a silk purse
out of the sow's ear of torture. And the artful offensive will succeed if - but
only if - the mainstream media is as cowed, and the American people as dumb, as
the president apparently thinks we are. Arguably a war criminal under
international law and a capital-crime felon under US criminal law, Bush is in
even more serious legal jeopardy than when he deserted in time of war (Vietnam).
And this time, his father's friends will not be able to fix it.
Bush's Official Authorization of Torture: Download It
Bush in jeopardy? Yes. The issue is torture, which George W. Bush authorized in
a memorandum of February 7, 2002, in contravention both of the Geneva Accords
and 18 US Code 2441, the War Crimes Act approved by a Republican-led Congress in
1996. That law incorporates the Geneva provisions into the federal criminal
code. Heeding the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, David
Addington, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and Assistant Attorney
General Jay Bybee, the president officially opened the door to torture in that
February 7, 2002, memorandum. His remarks yesterday reflect the determination of
Cheney and Bush to keep that door open and accuse those who would close it of
being soft on terrorists.
The administration released that damning memorandum in the spring of 2004 after
the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib were published. It provided the basis for
talking points showing that the president wanted "humane" treatment for captured
al-Qaeda and Taliban individuals. And - surprise, surprise - mainstream
journalists like those of the New York Times swallowed the bait, clinging safely
to the talking points, and missed altogether Bush's remarkable claim that
"military necessity" trumps humane treatment. That assertion over the
president's signature provided the gaping loophole through which Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director George Tenet drove the Mack
Truck of officially sanctioned torture.
Using the arguments adduced by the Addington/Gonzales/Bybee team, Bush's
February 7, 2002, memo made the point that the bedrock provision of Geneva -
common Article 3 - does not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban detainees, but that the
US would "continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate
and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the
principles of Geneva." (Emphasis added.)
Sounding very much like Mafia lawyers, the president's legal troika felt it
necessary to warn him that playing fast and loose with the US War Crimes Act
(Section 2441) could conceivably come back to haunt him. The bizarre passage
that follows is the best they could offer in terms of reassurance:
It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and
independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue
unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your
determination would create a reasonable basis in law that
Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid
defense to any future prosecution.
While the imaginative lawyering of Addington (now Cheney's chief of staff),
Gonzales (now Attorney General), and Bybee (now a federal judge) may have
qualified for a presidential "heck-of-a-job" at the time, Bush is learning the
hard way that, while sycophants are fun to have around, they can do a president
in. Between the lines of Bush's rhetoric yesterday lies belated acknowledgement
that his decision to condone the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban captives is now
back to haunt him - big time.
The Supreme Court decision on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, announced on June 29, 2006,
stripped the president of the magic suit of clothes procured by his courtiers,
when it found illegal the "military tribunals" invented by the Cheney-Rumsfeld
cabal to try terrorists. The Court rejected the artifice of "unitary executive
power" used by the Bush administration to "justify" practices like torture,
indefinite detention without judicial process, and warrantless eavesdropping. In
other words, the Supreme Court of the US reaffirmed that ours should be a
government of laws, not of the caprice of the vice president or president. And
in condoning torture they are, demonstrably, outlaws.
The Defense Rests Not
The president's performance yesterday reflects the time-honored adage that the
best defense is an aggressive offense - and especially with a mere two months
before the midterm elections. Bush devoted fully half of his speech to
cops-and-robbers examples, none of them persuasive - indeed, several of them
grossly inaccurate - of how "tough" interrogation techniques have yielded
information preventing all manner of catastrophes.
But someone in the White House apparently forgot to tell the Army, for Army Lt.
Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, spoke from a very different script
at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. Kimmons explained why the new Army manual for
interrogation is in sync with Geneva. Conceding past "transgressions and
mistakes," the general said:
No good intelligence is going to come from abusive
practices. I think history tells us that. I think the
empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells
us that.
Grabbing recent headlines today is the fact that Bush actually admitted that the
CIA has taken high-value captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using
"tough" techniques. More telling are the facts that (1) CIA interrogators are
not bound by the strictures in the new army field manual, and (2) the president
is determined to maintain in place detention centers where CIA interrogators can
ply their trade with more permissive guidelines.
The president brags about how his government "changed its policies," giving
intelligence personnel "the tools they need" to fight terrorists, and makes it
clear that the CIA was given permission to use "an alternative set of
procedures." He said he could not describe the specific methods used, "But I can
say the procedures were tough." Bush went on to recount how several plots were
stopped, allegedly "because of the information from this vital program." The
alumni of this school of hard knocks are now on their way to Guantanamo, but
Bush made it clear that he wanted to keep the schools open for freshmen and
transfer students.
Acknowledging that other terrorists are waiting in line to take the place of
captured leaders, the president made it clear that he wants the "CIA program"
for interrogating advanced placement terrorists to continue. Bush conceded that,
after the Hamdan decision, "some believe" that intelligence personnel "could now
be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act - simply for doing their jobs
in a thorough and professional way." Thus, he is asking Congress to pass
legislation squaring the circle, so that even while using "alternative"
procedures, CIA personnel can be said to be in compliance with common Article 3
of Geneva. (The not-so-hidden threat, of course, is the virtual certainty that
any member of Congress opposing this kind of legerdemain will be branded soft on
terrorism in the weeks leading up to the November election.)
In a telling twist, the retroactive nature of this legislation, which the
president said "ought to be the top priority," would immunize from subsequent
prosecution Bush himself, as well as intelligence practitioners of "alternative
procedures." It takes no lawyer to see how the legislation Bush proposes would
complicate any effort to charge him under the US War Crimes Act in effect when
he authorized torture and other abuse.
And so the stage is set, and Bush's advisers see still more opportunity to
highlight "national security" issues on which they hope to put Democrats on the
defensive. The president can now be expected to focus more on playing up the
importance of being able to eavesdrop on Americans without the court warrant
required by law. This practice has been ruled unconstitutional and illegal by
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit on the grounds that it violates the Fourth
Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But, speaking in
Atlanta yesterday, the president reiterated that his administration "strongly
disagrees" with Taylor's ruling and hopes to reverse it on appeal. Still more
grist for the political mill.
The White House has been putting pressure on Senate Judiciary Committee chair
Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who initially called the warrantless eavesdropping
activity extralegal and vowed to put it under close scrutiny. Specter has now
come full circle, drafting legislation that would hold harmless the president
and others involved in that program - again, retroactively. Hard to tell what
changed Specter's mind. Not to be ruled out is the possibility that NSA coughed
up some juicy detail on his political or even personal life - and that the
administration used the kind of "alternative procedure" employed so successfully
by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It is worth remembering that it was
precisely this kind of illegal activity that the FISA law was designed to stop.
Accountability
Is there no one to hold our leaders to account? The Bush Crimes Commission, a
grass-roots citizens' initiative determined not to follow the example of the
obedient, passive Germans of the thirties, has taken testimony on torture and
other key issues to establish whether President Bush is guilty of war crimes.
Testimony was given in October 2005 and January 2006, indictments have been
brought and served on the White House, and the judges will issue their verdict
on Wednesday, September 13 in Washington (See http://bushcommission.org.) (Full
disclosure: I was privileged to have been invited to take part in the
proceedings of the Bush Crimes Commission.) Join us next week.
--------
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer, then a CIA
analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article first appeared on TomPaine.com.
--
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