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Topic: Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq (Read 1363 times) |
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Blunderov
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Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« on: 2008-03-17 10:41:49 » |
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[Blunderov] The results of the "humanitarian intervention" in Iraq by the United States. Apparently they were, to massively understate the case, better off under Saddam Hussein.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080317/wl_mideast_afp/iraq5yearsredcrossamnestyrights
Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
Mon Mar 17, 6:37 AM ET
GENEVA (AFP) - Five years after the US-led invasion, Iraq faces a major humanitarian crisis, with law and order and economic recovery a distant prospect, international aid and human rights groups said Monday.
The International Committee of the Red Cross highlighted the plight of millions of Iraqis who still have little or no access to clean water, sanitation or health care.
"The humanitarian situation in most of the country is among the most critical in the world," the Swiss-based agency said in a report.
"Better security in some parts of Iraq must not distract attention from the continuing plight of millions of people who have essentially been left to their own devices," said Beatrice Roggo, the ICRC's head of operations for the Middle East and North Africa.
Although security has improved in some parts of the country, the Red Cross report stressed that Iraqis were being killed or injured on a daily basis in fighting and attacks.
Civilians are often deliberately targeted, in complete disregard for the rules of international humanitarian law, it added.
A recent World Health Organisation and Iraqi health ministry report estimated that 151,000 people were killed between the start of the invasion on March 20, 2003 and June 2006.
Other estimates have put the number of civilian deaths as a result of the conflict between nearly 48,000 and as high as 601,000.
The ICRC said hospitals lacked qualified staff and basic drugs, and therefore struggled to provide suitable care for the injured. Many health-care facilities have not been properly maintained, and the care they provide is often too expensive for ordinary Iraqis.
"To avert an even worse crisis, more attention must be paid to the everyday needs of Iraqis," Roggo said. "Everyone should have regular access to health care, electricity, clean water and sanitation."
In a separate report to mark the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion, Amnesty International said the rights situation in Iraq was "disastrous".
"Five years after the US-led invasion that toppled (former president) Saddam Hussein, Iraq is one of the most dangerous countries in the world," the 24-page report said.
Against a backdrop of insecurity, law and order and economic recovery were a "distant prospect" while most Iraqis were living in poverty, with food shortages, lack of access to safe drinking water and high unemployment.
More than four in 10 Iraqis lived on less than one US dollar a day -- the UN standard for measuring poverty -- while the health and education systems were at near collapse and women and girls at risk of violence from extremists.
"Saddam Hussein's administration was a byword for human rights abuse," said Amnesty's director for Middle East and North Africa, Malcolm Smart. "But its replacement has brought no respite at all for its people."
The failure to investigate alleged abuses "is one of the most worrying aspects for the future", he added.
"Even when faced with overwhelming evidence of torture under their watch, the Iraqi authorities have failed to hold the perpetrators to account -- and the US and its allies have failed to demand that they do so," he said.
Amnesty also criticised the extensive use of the death penalty, the international community's failure to cater for Iraqi refugees and despite the more stable situation, the lack of free speech in the Kurdistan region.
"Despite claims that the security situation has improved in recent months, the human rights situation is disastrous," the London-based group said, highlighting the kidnap, torture and murder of civilians by armed groups.
"All sides have committed gross human rights violations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity," it added, referring to militia groups, Iraqi security forces, US-led troops plus private and military security guards.
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #1 on: 2008-03-17 11:14:09 » |
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Contra this article, the only credible studies of surplus deaths, extrapolated to the current time, indicate greatly in excess of a million deaths. Combined with the surplus deaths caused by the American lead sanctions against Iraq through the 1990s the death toll appears to exceed two million. In terms of percentage of population the US has been much more effective at eliminating Iraqis than any other western regime outside of the Catholic Church.
An additional factor, not addressed here is the ongoing and worsening refugee situation with between ten and thirty percent of the population of Iraq bing displaced or de facto refugees.
Neither of these facts affects the conclusion. Iraq was recognized as the most industrialized and educated country in the Middle East, with the greatest sexual equality of any Middle Eastern country outside of the Lebanon and Israel. It was much better off under Saddam Hussein.
To put it in terms that Americans might begin to comprehend, and taking only 1 million surplus deaths into account, as a percentage of the Iraq population this is equivalent to two 9/11s worth of casualties each and every day since George Bush began his illegal war in Iraq. Even if you take the "official" figures above, it calculates out to the equivalent, in US population terms, to being worse than a 9/11 a week.
Does it really require a remarkable degree of empathy to conceive that this might have a negative impact on the people involved?
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #2 on: 2008-03-17 12:40:05 » |
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[Blunderov] Some detail of the hideous fiasco which are the results of this monstrous war crime. The world will forever be waiting its chance to prosecute those verminous men (and women) who perptrated it. They have murdered sleep. Remember Pinochet!
http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2008/03/over-one-million-murdered-and-nothing.html
Monday, March 17, 2008
Over One Million Murdered -- and Nothing Has Been Learned
March 15, 2008
To mark the fifth anniversary of the war crime against Iraq, The New York Times "asked nine experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate." All nine entries are listed
Of course, neither the NYT nor any of the "nine experts" refer to the invasion and ongoing occupation as a war crime. Not a single one of these eminent personages acknowledges that Iraq had never attacked us, that Iraq constituted no threat to the U.S. of any consequence whatsoever, and that these facts -- which are the only facts relevant to a determination of whether the U.S. had any justification at all to launch this criminal war -- could have been known in the winter and spring of 2002-2003, and that these facts were known to many "ordinary" persons in the United States and around the world. But none of the "ordinary" persons who understood the truth were "experts." None of them belonged to the ruling class.
Therefore, there is no mention in the august pages of the august NYT of the [url=http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2006/10/missing-moral-center-murdering.html]only judgment that matters:
There is one final point to be made about all this -- and that has to do with the supreme value of a single human life. In our desensitized, dehumanized age, most people have almost no appreciation for what I'm talking about, and our political establishment and media only make this grievous failing worse. Each of us is unique; not one of us can be replaced. Each of us has a family, loved ones, friends and a life that is a web of caring, interdependence, and joy. When even one of us is killed or horribly injured for no justifiable reason, the damage affects countless people in addition to the primary victim. Sometimes, the survivors are irreparably damaged as well. Even the survivors' wounds can last a lifetime.
This is of the greatest significance. There is nothing more important or meaningful in the world. No moral principle legitimizes our invasion and occupation of Iraq, just as it will not justify an attack on Iran. Therefore, when the first person was killed in Iraq as the result of our actions, the immorality was complete. The crime had been committed, and no amends could ever suffice or would even be possible. That many additional tens or hundreds of thousands of people have subsequently been killed or injured does not add to the original immorality with regard to first principles. It increases its scope, which is an additional and terrible horror -- but the principle is not altered in the smallest degree.
So think of the five-year-old Iraqi girl who is no more, or think of any one of the countless other victims of this criminal war and occupation. Think of their families and friends. Think of the lives that have been altered forever, and of the wounds that will never heal. Think about all of that.
Contemplate the devastation and the horror. Make it real to yourself. And ask yourself if forgiveness is possible.
You can read the views of all nine "experts," and you will also find not a single mention of the genocide that the actions of the U.S. government have unleashed. You will not read the following in the pages of the "paper of record":
Since Americans' narcissism is so all-encompassing, and because the superior value of American lives and goals as compared to those of all other peoples is regarded as an axiom never to be questioned, let's put these horrors in terms that Americans might understand. Let's make it about you.
For ease of computation, we'll use approximate figures. Assume the U.S.'s war crimes have resulted in one million deaths. That is roughly 1/26 of the total Iraqi population. An equivalent number of American deaths would be 11.5 million people. 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11. In terms of casualties, 11.5 million deaths represent 3,800 9/11s -- or a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.
Let me repeat that: a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.
Perhaps you think these casualty figures are highly inflated. Fine. Cut them in half. That's a 9/11 every day for a little over five years.
Every day.
Do you begin to understand now?
There is, however, one common theme that arises from the nauseating mewlings of these "experts." Paul Bremer:
[A]fter arriving in the country, I saw that the American government was not adequately prepared to deal with the growing security threats. Looting raged unchecked in major cities. By late 2003, as the insurgency and terrorism grew, it became clear that the coalition also lacked an effective counterinsurgency strategy.
Our troops on the ground were valiant and selfless, but prewar planning provided for fewer than half the number of troops that independent studies suggested would be needed in Iraq. And we did not have a plan to provide the most basic function of any government — security for the population. Terrorists, insurgents, criminals and the Iraqi people got the impression that the coalition would not, or could not, protect civilians.
Richard Perle:
Rather than turn Iraq over to Iraqis to begin the daunting process of nation building, a group including Secretary of State Colin Powell; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet — with President Bush’s approval — reversed a plan to do that.
Instead, we blundered into an ill-conceived occupation that would facilitate a deadly insurgency from which we, and the Iraqis, are only now emerging. With misplaced confidence that we knew better than the Iraqis, we sent an American to govern Iraq. L. Paul Bremer underestimated the task, but did his best to make a foolish policy work. I had badly underestimated the administration’s capacity to mess things up.
Kenneth Pollack:
[W]hat I most wish I had understood before the invasion was the reckless arrogance of the Bush administration. I had inklings of it to be sure, and warned of the inadequacy of some of what I saw. But I did not realize that as skillfully, cautiously and patiently as George H. W. Bush’s administration had handled its Iraq war, that was how clumsy, careless and rash George W. Bush’s administration would treat its own.
Anthony D. Cordesman:
It was even more of a surprise to watch the Bush administration fail, from 2003 to 2006, to come to grips with creating effective counterinsurgency programs, focused aid and development efforts, political accommodation and effective Iraqi forces. As a Republican, I would never have believed that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would waste so many opportunities and so much of America’s reputation that they would rival Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy for the worst wartime national security team in United States history.
Behold the wisdom of the ruling class, now increased by benefit of the deaths of more than a million innocent people: the next time the United States wages a war of aggression, the next time the United States violates the Nuremberg Principles, the next time the United States installs a brutally cruel colonial occupation force -- do it efficiently.
Manage future wars of conquest and future occupations competently. Commit your crimes -- and your murders -- with skill and expertise.
In this way, the ruling class is now prepared to do it all again -- against Iran, or Syria, possibly China in five or ten years. It will not matter that another nation will not have attacked us, or even had the capability of doing so. All that will be of consequence is that the United States manages its future crimes expertly and efficiently.
Commit your crimes against humanity -- but do it neatly, and without unnecessary fuss and bother. Don't leave guts and pieces of brain splattered across the pavement, or over the sand. Be sure to clean up all the blood stains.
Our government is a government of monsters, advised by "experts" who are monsters.
If the United States should suffer another horrifying attack on a scale equal to or even worse than 9/11, do not wonder why. You know why, but most of you don't want to acknowledge the explanation or face what it means, even now.
A million deaths will not deter them. Will five million? Ten million?
No. They will not. This is your government, and it will be your government under a new Democratic or Republican administration.
So I ask again: Why do you support?
UPDATE: Patrick Cockburn, writing from Baghdad:
Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.
The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel killing 70 people the police beat and drove away television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left. More than most wars the war in Iraq remains little understood outside the country.
...
The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. There was later to be much bitter dispute about who was responsible for the critical error of dissolving the Iraqi army. But at the time the Americans were in a mood of exaggerated imperial arrogance and did not care what Iraqis, in the army or out of it, were doing.
...
The Sunni defeat in the battle for Baghdad in 2006 and early 2007 was the motive for many guerrillas, previously anti-American, suddenly allying themselves with American forces. They concluded they could not fight the US, al Qa'ida, the Iraqi army and police and the Mehdi Army at the same time. There is now an 80,000 strong Sunni militia paid for and allied to the US but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq the country has become a geographical expression.
Cockburn has more. For further discussion of Cockburn's very valuable work, and of certain issues touched on only briefly above, see an earlier essay of mine, "Sacred Ignorance."
posted by Arthur Silber at 9:48 PM
Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON at 10:03 AM
Labels: deaths, Iraq, war
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #3 on: 2008-03-18 02:46:43 » |
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Iraq turning to a nation of refugees
Source: Press TV
Authors: Not credited
Dated: 2008-03-18
Iraqis are still fleeing into Europe five years after the US-led invasion, contradicting US claims that violence is down in the country.
In 2007, the number of Iraqi refugees seeking asylum in 43 industrialized countries rose 10 percent compared to previous year, the UN High Commissioner for refugees said in a report on Monday.
Iraqis now account for the biggest national group of refugees, UNHCR reports.
The numbers fleeing the country have almost reached the peak seen in 2002 when record numbers escaped Saddam Hussein's regime.
The total of Iraqis applying for asylum in the EU countries rose from 19,375 in 2006 to 38,286 last year, an increase of 98 per cent.
"It is important to bear in mind, however, that Iraqi asylum seekers in industrialized countries represent only one percent of the estimated 4.5 million Iraqis uprooted by the conflict," the report said.
Since the 2003 invasion two million Iraqis have fled to neighboring Jordan and Syria while another 2.5 million people are internally displaced.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #4 on: 2008-04-10 05:00:52 » |
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Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
Travel Plans?
What Travel Plans?
Some War Criminals Identified Beyond Doubt
Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld
Colin Powell, George Tenet and John Ashcroft
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects
Source: ABC News
Authors: Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard L Rosenberg and Ariane de Vogue
Dated: 2008-04-09
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were "hundreds of [Principals] meetings" on a wide variety of topics and that he was "not at liberty to discuss private meetings."
The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today.
Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.
"I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us the information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and across the world," Bush said in a speech in September 2006. [ Hermit : Need I point out the obvious and say that Bush was lying about the threat, the consequences and his effectiveness - as usual?]
In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: "It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States."
But this is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them.
The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.
It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the gun battle.
At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed another attack as imminent -- and with information on al Qaeda scarce -- the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical breakthrough.
Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah's capture, was ordered to remain at the wounded captive's side at all times. "I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed," Kiriakou said.
But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative.
"I told him I had heard he was being a jerk," Kiriakou recalled. "I said, 'These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.' It was after that he became defiant."
The CIA wanted to use more aggressive -- and physical -- methods to get information.
The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA's plans for Zubaydah.
The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects subjected to waterboarding.
After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation.
COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from these people?
KSM: Statement for whom?
COURT: To any of these interrogators.
KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me...
Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the "enhanced" questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called "Golden Shield" for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.
Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix Program" of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a "rogue agency" out of control.
But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.
According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.
Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.
"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"
Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.
"These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it's legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it."
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.
At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice President Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.
A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.
But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it." [ Hermit : Note that this was after the phony opinions issued by the Justice department shysters had been withdrawn - if this was in a similar meeting at which all of them were present then they are all indisputably guilty of war crimes under US law no matter what came before or after - and unfortunately for them, as we learned previously, necessity is not a defense for war crimes. ]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #5 on: 2008-04-10 10:01:57 » |
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[Blunderov] The atrocious and despicable neocon war criminals will have to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders. Universal jurisdiction. Mmm.
Countercurrents : Israel's 60th Approaches,
But Israeli Minister Of Public Security Can’t Even Secure Himself!
<snip>
Mr. Dichter had to cancel a trip to the UK last year out of fears of being arrested their where he is wanted for war crimes. The irony is that Mr. Dichter [Bl. The Israeli Security Minister] was going to the UK to lecture on "counter terrorism"!!!</snip>
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SAN20080408&articleId=8592
Will Bush be tried for War Crimes: The Green Light
by Phillippe Sands
Global Research, April 8, 2008
Vanity Fair
The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush. Its military beginnings, however, lie not in Abu Ghraib, as is commonly thought, or in the “rendition” of prisoners to other countries for questioning, but in the treatment of the very first prisoners at Guantánamo. Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks. In his story lies the answer to a crucial question: How was the decision made to let the U.S. military start using coercive interrogations at Guantánamo?
The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration?by some of the most senior perssonal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees?lawyerss?who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option. This is the story of how the torture at Guantánamo began, and how it spread.
“Crying. Angry. Yelled for Allah.”
One day last summer I sat in a garden in London with Dr. Abigail Seltzer, a psychiatrist who specializes in trauma victims. She divides her time between Great Britain’s National Health Service, where she works extensively with asylum seekers and other refugees, and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. It was uncharacteristically warm, and we took refuge in the shade of some birches. On a table before us were three documents. The first was a November 2002 “action memo” written by William J. (Jim) Haynes II, the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, to his boss, Donald Rumsfeld; the document is sometimes referred to as the Haynes Memo. Haynes recommended that Rumsfeld give “blanket approval” to 15 out of 18 proposed techniques of aggressive interrogation. Rumsfeld duly did so, on December 2, 2002, signing 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 dayy. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
The second document on the table listed the 18 proposed techniques of interrogation, all of which went against long-standing U.S. military practice as presented in the Army Field Manual. The 15 approved techniques included certain forms of physical contact and also techniques intended to humiliate and to impose sensory deprivation. They permitted the use of stress positions, isolation, hooding, 20-hour interrogations, and nudity. Haynes and Rumsfeld explicitly did not rule out the future use of three other techniques, one of which was waterboarding, the application of a wet towel and water to induce the perception of drowning.
The third document was an internal log that detailed the interrogation at Guantánamo of a man identified only as Detainee 063, whom we now know to be Mohammed al-Qahtani, allegedly a member of the 9/11 conspiracy and the so-called 20th hijacker. According to this log, the interrogation commenced on November 23, 2002, and continued until well into January. The techniques described by the log as having been used in the interrogation of Detainee 063 include all 15 approved by Rumsfeld.
“Was the detainee abused? Was he tortured?,” I asked Seltzer. 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.
A careful and fastidious practitioner, Seltzer declined to give a straight yes or no answer. In her view the definition of torture is essentially a legal matter, which will turn on a particular set of facts. She explained that there is no such thing as a medical definition of torture, and that a doctor must look for pathology, the abnormal functioning of the body or the mind. We reviewed the definition of torture, as set out in the 1984 Convention, which is binding on 145 countries, including the United States. Torture includes “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”
Seltzer had gone through the interrogation log, making notations. She used four different colors to highlight moments that struck her as noteworthy, and the grim document now looked bizarrely festive. Yellow indicated episodes of abusive treatment. Pink showed where the detainee’s rights were respected?wheree he was fed or given a break, or allowed to sleep. Green indicated the many instances of medical involvement, where al-Qahtani was given an enema or was hospitalized suffering from hypothermia. Finally, blue identified what Seltzer termed “expressions of distress.”
We talked about the methods of interrogation. “In terms of their effects,” she said, “I suspect that the individual techniques are less important than the fact that they were used over an extended period of time, and that several appear to be used together: in other words, the cumulative effect.” Detainee 063 was subjected to systematic sleep deprivation. He was shackled and cuffed; at times, head restraints were used. He was compelled to listen to threats to his family. The interrogation leveraged his sensitivities as a Muslim: he was shown pictures of scantily clad models, was touched by a female interrogator, was made to stand naked, and was forcibly shaved. He was denied the right to pray. A psychiatrist who witnessed the interrogation of Detainee 063 reported the use of dogs, intended to intimidate “by getting the dogs close to him and then having the dogs bark or act aggressively on command.” The temperature was changed, and 063 was subjected to extreme cold. Intravenous tubes were forced into his body, to provide nourishment when he would not eat or drink.
We went through the marked-up document slowly, pausing at each blue mark. Detainee 063’s reactions were recorded with regularity. I’ll string some of them together to convey the impression:
Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah.
The blue highlights went on and on.
Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.
Was Detainee 063 subjected to severe mental pain or suffering? Torture is not a medical concept, Seltzer reminded me. “That said,” she went on, “over the period of 54 days there is enough evidence of distress to indicate that it would be very surprising indeed if it had not reached the threshold of severe mental pain.” She thought about the matter a little more and then presented it a different way: “If you put 12 clinicians in a room and asked them about this interrogation log, you might get different views about the effect and long-term consequences of these interrogation techniques. But I doubt that any one of them would claim that this individual had not suffered severe mental distress at the time of his interrogation, and possibly also severe physical distress.”
The Authorized Version
The story of the Bush administration’s descent down this path began to emerge on June 22, 2004. The administration was struggling to respond to the Abu Ghraib scandal, which had broken a couple of months earlier with the broadcast of photographs that revealed sickening abuse at the prison outside Baghdad. The big legal guns were wheeled out. Alberto Gonzales and Jim Haynes stepped into a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Gonzales was President Bush’s White House counsel and would eventually become attorney general. Haynes, as Rumsfeld’s general counsel, was the most senior lawyer in the Pentagon, a position he would retain until a month ago, when he resigned?“returning to private liife,” as a press release stated. Gonzales and Haynes were joined by a third lawyer, Daniel Dell’Orto, a career official at the Pentagon. Their task was to steady the beat and make it clear that the events at Abu Ghraib were the actions of a few bad eggs and had nothing to do with the broader policies of the administration.
The famous Haynes Memo, recommending enhanced “counter-resistance” techniques, as signed and annotated with a jocular comment by Rumsfeld.
Gonzales and Haynes spoke from a carefully prepared script. They released a thick folder of documents, segmented by lawyerly tabs. These documents were being made public for the first time, a clear indication of the gravity of the political crisis. Among the documents were the Haynes Memo and the list of 18 techniques that Seltzer and I would later review. The log detailing the interrogation of Detainee 063 was not released; it would be leaked to the press two years later.
For two hours Gonzales and Haynes laid out the administration’s narrative. Al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy, deadly and shadowy. It targeted civilians and didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions or any other international rules. Nevertheless, the officials explained, the administration had acted judiciously, even as it moved away from a purely law-enforcement strategy to one that marshaled “all elements of national power.” The authorized version had four basic parts.
First, the administration had moved reasonably?with care and deliberation, and always within the limits of the law. In February 2002 the president had determined, in accordance with established legal principles, that none of the detainees at Guantánamo could rely on any of the protections granted by Geneva, even Common Article 3. This presidential order was the lead document, at Tab A. The administration’s point was this: agree with it or not, the decision on Geneva concealed no hidden agenda; rather, it simply reflected a clear-eyed reading of the actual provisions. The administration, in other words, was doing nothing more than trying to proceed by the book. The law was the law.
Relating to this was a second document, one that had been the subject of media speculation for some weeks. The authors of this document, a legal opinion dated August 1, 2002, were two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: Jay Bybee, who is now a federal judge, and John Yoo, who now teaches law at Berkeley. Later it would become known that they were assisted in the drafting by David Addington, then the vice president’s lawyer and now his chief of staff. The Yoo-Bybee Memo declared that physical torture occurred only when the pain was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” and that mental torture required “suffering not just at the moment of infliction but ? lasting psychological harm..” Interrogations that did not reach these thresholds?far less stringennt than those set by international law?were allowed. Although findings that issue from the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice typically carry great weight, at the press conference Gonzales went out of his way to decouple the Yoo-Bybee Memo from anything that might have taken place at Guantánamo. The two lawyers had been asked, in effect, to stargaze, he said. Their memo simply explored “the limits of the legal landscape.” It included “irrelevant and unnecessary” discussion and never made it into the hands of the president or of soldiers in the field. The memo did not, said Gonzales, “reflect the policies that the administration ultimately adopted.”
The second element of the administration’s narrative dealt with the specific source of the new interrogation techniques. Where had the initiative come from? The administration pointed to the military commander at Guantánamo, Major General Michael E. Dunlavey. Haynes would later describe him to the Senate Judiciary Committee, during his failed confirmation hearings for a judgeship in 2006, as “an aggressive major general.” The techniques were not imposed or encouraged by Washington, which had merely reacted to a request from below. They came as a result of the identification locally of “key people” at Guantánamo, including “a guy named al-Qahtani.” This man, Detainee 063, had proved able to resist the traditional non-coercive techniques of interrogation spelled out in the Army Field Manual, and as the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, an intelligence spike pointed to the possibility of new attacks. “And so it is concluded at Guantánamo,” Dell’Orto emphasized, reconstructing the event, “that it may be time to inquire as to whether there may be more flexibility in the type of techniques we use on him.” A request was sent from Guantánamo on October 11, 2002, to the head of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom), General James T. Hill. Hill in turn forwarded Dunlavey’s request to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ultimately, Rumsfeld approved “all but three of the requested techniques.” The official version was clear: Haynes and Rumsfeld were just processing a request coming up the chain from Guantánamo.
The third element of the administration’s account concerned the legal justification for the new interrogation techniques. This, too, the administration said, had originated in Guantánamo. It was not the result of legal positions taken by politically appointed lawyers in the upper echelons of the administration, and certainly not the Justice Department. The relevant document, also dated October 11, was in the bundle released by Gonzales, a legal memo prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. That document?describedd pointedly by Dell’Orto as a “multi-page, single-spaced legal review”?sought to provide legal authority for all the interrrogation techniques. No other legal memo was cited as bearing on aggressive interrogations. The finger of responsibility was intended to point at Diane Beaver.
The fourth and final element of the administration’s official narrative was to make clear that decisions relating to Guantánamo had no bearing on events at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Gonzales wanted to “set the record straight” about this. The administration’s actions were inconsistent with torture. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized and unconnected to the administration’s policies.
Gonzales and Haynes laid out their case with considerable care. The only flaw was that every element of the argument contained untruths.
The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies. Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse.
Killing Geneva In the early days of 2002, as the number of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan began to swell, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon was Douglas J. Feith. As undersecretary of defense for policy, he stood directly below Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. Feith’s job was to provide advice across a wide range of issues, and the issues came to include advice on the Geneva Conventions and the conduct of military interrogations.
I sat down with Feith not long after he left the government. He was teaching at the school of foreign service at Georgetown University, occupying a small, eighth-floor office lined with books on international law. He greeted me with a smile, his impish face supporting a mop of graying hair that seemed somehow at odds with his 54 years. Over the course of his career Feith has elicited a range of reactions. General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, once called Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Rumsfeld, in contrast, saw him as an “intellectual engine.” In manner he is the Energizer Bunny, making it hard to get a word in edgewise. After many false starts Feith provided an account of the president’s decision on Geneva, including his own contribution as one of its principal architects.
“This was something I played a major role in,” he began, in a tone of evident pride. With the war in Afghanistan under way, lawyers in Washington understood that they needed a uniform view on the constraints, if any, imposed by Geneva. Addington, Haynes, and Gonzales all objected to Geneva. Indeed, Haynes in December 2001 told the CentCom admiral in charge of detainees in Afghanistan “to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted” in the questioning of John Walker Lindh. (Lindh, a young American who had become a Muslim and had recently been captured in northern Afghanistan, bore the designation Detainee 001.)
A month later, the administration was struggling to adopt a position. On January 9, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, at the Justice Department, prepared an opinion for Haynes. They concluded that the president wasn’t bound by traditional international-law prohibitions. This encountered strong opposition from Colin Powell and his counsel, William H. Taft IV, at the State Department, as well as from the Tjags?the military lawyers in the office of the judge advocate general?who wanted to maintain a strong U.S. commitment to Geneva and the rules that were part of customary law. On January 25, Alberto Gonzales put his name to a memo to the president supporting Haynes and Rumsfeld over Powell and Taft. This memo, which is believed to have been written by Addington, presented a “new paradigm” and described Geneva’s “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners” as “obsolete.” Addington was particularly distrustful of the military lawyers. “Don’t bring the Tjags into the process?they aren’t reliable,” he was once overheard to say.
Feith took up the story. He had gone to see Rumsfeld about the issue, accompanied by Myers. As they reached Rumsfeld’s office, Myers turned to Feith and said, “We have to support the Geneva Conventions If Rumsfeld doesn’t go along with this, I’m going to contradict them in front of the president.” Feith was surprised by this uncharacteristically robust statement, and by the way Myers referred to the secretary bluntly as “Rumsfeld.”
Douglas Feith had a long-standing intellectual interest in Geneva, and for many years had opposed legal protections for terrorists under international law. He referred me to an article he had written in 1985, in The National Interest, setting out his basic view. Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; those who chose not to follow the rules, he argued, shouldn’t be allowed to rely on them, or else the whole Geneva structure would collapse. The only way to protect Geneva, in other words, was sometimes to limit its scope. To uphold Geneva’s protections, you might have to cast them aside.
But that way of thinking didn’t square with the Geneva system itself, which was based on two principles: combatants who behaved according to its standards received P.O.W. status and special protections, and everyone else received the more limited but still significant protections of Common Article 3. Feith described how, as he and Myers spoke with Rumsfeld, he jumped protectively in front of the general. He reprised his “little speech” for me. “There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States,” he told Rumsfeld, according to his own account, “and there is no institution in the U.S. government that has a stronger interest than the Pentagon.” So Geneva had to be followed? “Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional,” Feith replied. “The Geneva Convention is a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute.” Myers jumped in. “I agree completely with what Doug said and furthermore it is our military culture It’s not even a matter of whether it is reciprocated?it’s a matter of who we are.”
Feith was animated as he relived this moment. I remained puzzled. How had the administration gone from a commitment to Geneva, as suggested by the meeting with Rumsfeld, to the president’s declaration that none of the detainees had any rights under Geneva? It all turns on what you mean by “promoting respect” for Geneva, Feith explained. Geneva didn’t apply at all to al-Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state and therefore couldn’t claim rights under a treaty that was binding only on states. Geneva did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva’s own terms Taliban fighters weren’t entitled to P.O.W. status, because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia. That would still leave the safety net provided by the rules reflected in Common Article 3? but detainees could not rely onn this either, on the theory that its provisions applied only to “armed conflict not of an international character,” which the administration interpreted to mean civil war. This was new. In reaching this conclusion, the Bush administration simply abandoned all legal and customary precedent that regards Common Article 3 as a minimal bill of rights for everyone.
In the administration’s account there was no connection between the decision on Geneva and the new interrogation rules later approved by Rumsfeld for Detainee 063; its position on Geneva was dictated purely by the law itself. I asked Feith, just to be clear: Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo? “Oh yes, sure,” he shot back. Was that the intended result?, I asked. “Absolutely,” he replied. I asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke. What was the difference for the purpose of interrogation?, I asked. Feith answered with a certain satisfaction, “It turns out, none. But that’s the point.”
That indeed was the point. The principled legal arguments were a fig leaf. The real reason for the Geneva decision, as Feith now made explicit, was the desire to interrogate these detainees with as few constraints as possible. Feith thought he’d found a clever way to do this, which on the one hand upheld Geneva as a matter of law?the speech he made to Myers and Rumsfeld?and on the other pulled the rugg out from under it as a matter of reality. Feith’s argument was so clever that Myers continued to believe Geneva’s protections remained in force?he was “well and truly hoodwinked,” one seasonned observer of military affairs later told me.
Feith’s argument prevailed. On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum that turned Guantánamo into a Geneva-free zone. As a matter of policy, the detainees would be handled humanely, but only to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. “The president said ‘humane treatment,’?” Feith told me, inflecting the term sourly, “and I thought that was O.K. Perfectly fine phrase that needs to be fleshed out, but it’s a fine phrase?‘humane treatment.’?” The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone.
“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. 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.”
“I Was on a Timeline” As the traditional constraints on aggressive interrogation were removed, Rumsfeld wanted the right man to take charge of Joint Task Force 170, which oversaw military interrogations at Guantánamo. Two weeks after the decision on Geneva he found that man in Michael Dunlavey. Dunlavey was a judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Erie, Pennsylvania, a Vietnam veteran, and a major general in the reserves with a strong background in intelligence.
Dunlavey met one-on-one with Rumsfeld at the end of February. They both liked what they saw. When I met Dunlavey, now back at his office in Erie, he described that initial meeting: “He evaluated me. He wanted to know who I was. He was very focused on the need to get intelligence. He wanted to make sure that the moment was not lost.” Dunlavey was a strong and abrasive personality (“a tyrant,” one former jag told me), but he was also a cautious man, alert to the nuances of instruction from above. Succinctly, Dunlavey described the mission Rumsfeld had given him. “He wanted me to ‘maximize the intelligence production.’ No one ever said to me, ‘The gloves are off.’ But I didn’t need to talk about the Geneva Conventions. It was clear that they didn’t apply.” Rumsfeld told Dunlavey to report directly to him. To the suggestion that Dunlavey report to SouthCom, Dunlavey heard Rumsfeld say, “I don’t care who he is under. He works for me.”
He arrived at Guantánamo at the beginning of March. Planeloads of detainees were being delivered on a daily basis, though Dunlavey soon concluded that half of them had no intelligence value. He reported this to Rumsfeld, who referred the matter to Feith. Feith, Dunlavey said, resisted the idea of repatriating any detainees whatsoever. (Feith says he made a series of interagency proposals to repatriate detainees.)
Dunlavey described Feith to me as one of his main points of contact. Feith, for his part, had told me that he knew nothing about any specific interrogation issues until the Haynes Memo suddenly landed on his desk. But that couldn’t be right?in the memo itself Haynes hhad written, “I have discussed this with the Deputy, Doug Feith and General Myers.” I read the sentence aloud. Feith looked at me. His only response was to tell me that I had mispronounced his name. “It’s Fythe,” he said. “Not Faith.”
In June, the focus settled on Detainee 063, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national who had been refused entry to the United States just before 9/11 and was captured a few months later in Afghanistan. Dunlavey described to me the enormous pressure he came under?from Washington,, from the top?to find out what al-Qahtani knew. Thhe message, he said, was: “Are you doing everything humanly possible to get this information?” He received a famous Rumsfeld “snowflake,” a memo designed to prod the recipient into action. “I’ve got a short fuse on this to get it up the chain,” Dunlavey told me, “I was on a timeline.” Dunlavey held eye contact for more than a comfortable moment. He said, “This guy may have been the key to the survival of the U.S.”
The interrogation of al-Qahtani relied at first on long-established F.B.I. and military techniques, procedures sanctioned by the Field Manual and based largely on building rapport. This yielded nothing. On August 8, al-Qahtani was placed in an isolation facility to separate him from the general detainee population. Pressure from Washington continued to mount. How high up did it go?, I asked Dunlavey. “It must have been all the way to the White House,” he replied.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Dunlavey and the others at Guantánamo, interrogation issues had arisen in other quarters. In March 2002 a man named Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda official, was captured in Pakistan. C.I.A. director George Tenet wanted to interrogate him aggressively but worried about the risk of criminal prosecution. He had to await the completion of legal opinions by the Justice Department, a task that had been entrusted by Alberto Gonzales to Jay Bybee and John Yoo. “It took until August to get clear guidance on what Agency officers could legally do,” Tenet later wrote. The “clear guidance” came on August 1, 2002, in memos written by Bybee and Yoo, with input from Addington. The first memo was addressed to Gonzales, redefining torture and abandoning the definition set by the 1984 torture convention. This was the Yoo-Bybee Memo made public by Gonzales nearly two years later, in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Nothing in the memo suggested that its use was limited to the C.I.A.; it referred broadly to “the conduct of interrogations outside of the United States.” Gonzales would later contend that this policy memo did “not reflect the policies the administration ultimately adopted,” but in fact it gave carte blanche to all the interrogation techniques later recommended by Haynes and approved by Rumsfeld. The second memo, requested by John Rizzo, a senior lawyer at the C.I.A., has never been made public. It spells out the specific techniques in detail. Dunlavey and his subordinates at Guantánamo never saw these memos and were not aware of their contents.
The lawyers in Washington were playing a double game. They wanted maximum pressure applied during interrogations, but didn’t want to be seen as the ones applying it?they wanted distance and deniability. They also wanted legal cover for themselves. A key question is whether Haynes and Rumsfeld had knowledge of the content of these memos before they approved the new interrogation techniques for al-Qahtani. If they did, then the administration’s official narrative?that the pressure for neew techniques, and the legal support for them, originated on the ground at Guantánamo, from the “aggressive major general” and his staff lawyer?becomes difficult to sustain. More crucially, that knowwledge is a link in the causal chain that connects the keyboards of Feith and Yoo to the interrogations of Guantánamo.
When did Haynes learn that the Justice Department had signed off on aggressive interrogation? All indications are that well before Haynes wrote his memo he knew what the Justice Department had advised the C.I.A. on interrogations and believed that he had legal cover to do what he wanted. Everyone in the upper echelons of the chain of decision-making that I spoke with, including Feith, General Myers, and General Tom Hill (the commander of SouthCom), confirmed to me that they believed at the time that Haynes had consulted Justice Department lawyers. Moreover, Haynes was a close friend of Bybee’s. “Jim was tied at the hip with Jay Bybee,” Thomas Romig, the army’s former judge advocate general, told me. “He would quote him the whole time.” Later, when asked during Senate hearings about his knowledge of the Yoo-Bybee Memo, Haynes would variously testify that he had not sought the memo, had not shaped its content, and did not possess a copy of it?but he carefully refrainedd from saying that he was unaware of its contents. Haynes, with whom I met on two occasions, will not speak on the record about this subject.
The Glassy-Eyed Men As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, Joint Task Force 170 was on notice to deliver results. But the task force was not the only actor at Guantánamo. The C.I.A. had people there looking for recruits among the detainees. The Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) was interrogating detainees through its humint (human intelligence) Augmentation Teams. The F.B.I. was carrying out its own traditional non-aggressive interrogations.
The source of the various new techniques has been the stuff of speculation. In the administration’s official account, as noted, everything trickled up from the ground at Guantánamo. When I suggested to Mike Dunlavey that the administration’s trickle-up line was counter-intuitive, he didn’t disabuse me. “It’s possible,” he said, in a tone at once mischievous and unforthcoming, “that someone was sent to my task force and came up with these great ideas.” One F.B.I. special agent remembers an occasion, before any new techniques had been officially sanctioned, when military interrogators set out to question al-Qahtani for 24 hours straight?employing a variation on a method that would later apppear in the Haynes Memo. When the agent objected, he said he was told that the plan had been approved by “the secretary,” meaning Rumsfeld.
Diane Beaver, Dunlavey’s staff judge advocate, was the lawyer who would later be asked to sign off on the new interrogation techniques. When the administration made public the list, it was Beaver’s legal advice the administration invoked. Diane Beaver gave me the fullest account of the process by which the new interrogation techniques emerged. In our lengthy conversations, which began in the autumn of 2006, she seemed coiled up?mistreated, hung out to dry. Before becoming a military lawyer Beaver had been a military police officer; once, while stationed in Germany, she had visited the courtroom where the Nuremberg trials took place. She was working as a lawyer for the Pentagon when the hijacked airplane hit on 9/11, and decided to remain in the army to help as she could. That decision landed her in Guantánamo.
It was clear to me that Beaver believed Washington was directly involved in the interrogations. Her account confirmed what Dunlavey had intimated, and what others have told me?that Washington’s views were being fed into the process by people physically present at Guantánamo. D.I.A. personnel were among them. Later allegations would suggest a role for three C.I.A. psychologists.
During September a series of brainstorming meetings were held at Guantánamo to discuss new techniques. Some of the meetings were led by Beaver. “I kept minutes. I got everyone together. I invited. I facilitated,” she told me. The sessions included representatives of the D.I.A. and the C.I.A. Ideas came from all over. Some derived from personal training experiences, including a military program known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape), designed to help soldiers persevere in the event of capture. Had sere been, in effect, reverse-engineered to provide some of the 18 techniques? Both Dunlavey and Beaver told me that sere provided inspiration, contradicting the administration’s denials that it had. Indeed, several Guantánamo personnel, including a psychologist and a psychiatrist, traveled to Fort Bragg, sere’s home, for a briefing.
Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV’s dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. “We saw it on cable,” Beaver recalled. “People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular.” Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. “He gave people lots of ideas.”
The brainstorming meetings inspired animated discussion. “Who has the glassy eyes?,” Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, 30 or more of them. She was invariably the only woman present?as she saw it, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even. “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas,” Beaver recalled, a wan smile flickering on her face. “And I said to myself, You know what? I don’t have a dick to get hard?I can stay detached.”
Not everyone at Guantánamo was enthusiastic. The F.B.I. and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service refused to be associated with aggressive interrogation. They opposed the techniques. One of the N.C.I.S. psychologists, Mike Gelles, knew about the brainstorming sessions but stayed away. He was dismissive of the administration’s contention that the techniques trickled up on their own from Guantánamo. “That’s not accurate,” he said flatly. “This was not done by a bunch of people down in Gitmo?no way.”
That view is buttressed by a key event that has received virtually no attention. On September 25, as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration’s most senior lawyers arrived at Guantánamo. The group included the president’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who had by then received the Yoo-Bybee Memo; Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, who had contributed to the writing of that memo; the C.I.A.’s John Rizzo, who had asked for a Justice Department sign-off on individual techniques, including waterboarding, and received the second (and still secret) Yoo-Bybee Memo; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld’s counsel. They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” Dunlavey told me, “and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.” I asked what they had to say. “They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.,” Dunlavey said. “They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was “directly and regularly involved.”
Beaver confirmed the account of the visit. Addington talked a great deal, and it was obvious to her that he was a “very powerful man” and “definitely the guy in charge,” with a booming voice and confident style. Gonzales was quiet. Haynes, a friend and protégé of Addington’s, seemed especially interested in the military commissions, which were to decide the fate of individual detainees. They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations. Beaver spent time with the group. Talking about the episode even long afterward made her visibly anxious. Her hand tapped and she moved restlessly in her chair. She recalled the message they had received from the visitors: Do “whatever needed to be done.” That was a green light from the very top?the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the C.I.A. The administration’s version of events?that it became involved in the Guant?ánamo interrogations only in November, after receiving a list of techniques out of the blue from the “aggressive major general”?was demonsttrably false.
“A Dunk in the Water” Two weeks after this unpublicized visit the process of compiling the list of new techniques was completed. The list was set out in a three-page memorandum from Lieutenant Colonel Jerald Phifer, dated October 11 and addressed to Dunlavey.
The Phifer Memo identified the problem: “current guidelines” prohibited the use of “physical or mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to inhumane treatment as a means of or aid to interrogation.” The prohibition dated back to 1863 and a general order issued by Abraham Lincoln.
The list of new interrogation techniques turned its back on this tradition. The 18 techniques were divided into three categories and came with only rudimentary guidance. No limits were placed on how many methods could be used at once, or for how many days in succession. The detainee was to be provided with a chair. The environment should be generally comfortable. If the detainee was uncooperative, you went to Category I. This comprised two techniques, yelling and deception.
If Category I produced no results, then the military interrogator could move to Category II. Category II included 12 techniques aimed at humiliation and sensory deprivation: for instance, the use of stress positions, such as standing; isolation for up to 30 days; deprivation of light and sound; 20-hour interrogations; removal of religious items; removal of clothing; forcible grooming, such as the shaving of facial hair; and the use of individual phobias, such as the fear of dogs, to induce stress.
Finally came Category III, for the most exceptionally resistant. Category III included four techniques: the use of “mild, non-injurious physical contact,” such as grabbing, poking, and light pushing; the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences were imminent for him or his family; exposure to cold weather or water; and waterboarding. This last technique, which powerfully mimics the experience of drowning, was later described by Vice President Cheney as a “dunk in the water.”
By the time the memo was completed al-Qahtani had already been separated from all other detainees for 64 days, in a cell that was “always flooded with light.” An F.B.I. agent described his condition the following month, just as the new interrogation techniques were first being directed against him: the detainee, a 2004 memo stated, “was talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.”
Ends and Means Diane Beaver was insistent that the decision to implement new interrogation techniques had to be properly written up and that it needed a paper trail leading to authorization from the top, not from “the dirt on the ground,” as she self-deprecatingly described herself. “I just wasn’t comfortable giving oral advice,” she explained, as she had been requested to do. “I wanted to get something in writing. That was my game plan. I had four days. Dunlavey gave me just four days.” She says she believed that senior lawyers in Washington would review her written advice and override it if necessary. It never occurred to her that on so important an issue she would be the one to provide the legal assessment on which the entire matter would appear to rest?that her word would be the last word. As far as she was concernned, getting the proposal “up the command” was victory enough. She didn’t know that people much higher up had already made their decisions, had the security of secret legal cover from the Justice Department, and, although confident of their own legal protection, had no intention of soiling their hands by weighing in on the unpleasant details of interrogation.
Marooned in Guantánamo, Beaver had limited access to books and other documents, although there was Internet access to certain legal materials. She tried getting help from more experienced lawyers?at SouthCom, the Joiint Chiefs, the D.I.A., the jag School?but to no avail.
In the end she worked on her own, completing the task just before the Columbus Day weekend. Her memo was entitled “Legal Review of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques.” The key fact was that none of the detainees were protected by Geneva, owing to Douglas Feith’s handiwork and the president’s decision in February. She also concluded that the torture convention and other international laws did not apply, conclusions that a person more fully schooled in the relevant law might well have questioned: “It was not my job to second-guess the president,” she told me. Beaver ignored customary international law altogether. All that was left was American law, which is what she turned to.
Given the circumstances in which she found herself, the memo has a certain desperate, heroic quality. She proceeded methodically through the 18 techniques, testing each against the standards set by U.S. law, including the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution (which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”), the federal torture statute, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The common theme was that the techniques were fine “so long as the force used could plausibly have been thought necessary in a particular situation to achieve a legitimate government objective, and it was applied in a good faith effort and not maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm.” That is to say, the techniques are legal if the motivation is pure. National security justifies anything.
Beaver did enter some important caveats. The interrogators had to be properly trained. Since the law required “examination of all facts under a totality of circumstances test,” all proposed interrogations involving Category II and III methods had to “undergo a legal, medical, behavioral science, and intelligence review prior to their commencement.” This suggested concerns about these new techniques, including whether they would be effective. But in the end she concluded, I “agree that the proposed strategies do not violate applicable federal law.” The word “agree” stands out?shhe seems to be confirming a policy decision that she knows has already been made.
Time and distance do not improve the quality of the advice. I thought it was awful when I first read it, and awful when I reread it. Nevertheless, I was now aware of the circumstances in which Beaver had been asked to provide her advice. Refusal would have caused difficulty. It was also reasonable to expect a more senior review of her draft. Beaver struck me as honest, loyal, and decent. Personally, she was prepared to take a hard line on many detainees. She once described them to me as “psychopaths. Skinny, runty, dangerous, lying psychopaths.” But there was a basic integrity to her approach. She could not have anticipated that there would be no other piece of written legal advice bearing on the Guantánamo interrogations. She could not have anticipated that she would be made the scapegoat.
Once, after returning to a job at the Pentagon, Beaver passed David Addington in a hallway?the first time she had seen him sinnce his visit to Guantánamo. He recognized her immediately, smiled, and said, “Great minds think alike.”
The “voco” On October 11, Dunlavey sent his request for approval of new techniques, together with Diane Beaver’s legal memo, to General Tom Hill, the commander of SouthCom. Two weeks later, on October 25, Hill forwarded everything to General Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in Washington. Hill’s cover letter contains a sentence?“Our respective staffs, thee Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Joint Task Force 170 have been trying to identify counter-resistant techniques that we can lawfully employ”?whhich again makes it clear that the list of techniques was no surprise to Rumsfeld’s office, whatever its later claims. Hill also expressed serious reservations. He wanted Pentagon lawyers to weigh in, and he explicitly requested that “Department of Justice lawyers review the third category of techniques.”
At the level of the Joint Chiefs the memo should have been subject to a detailed review, including close legal scrutiny by Myers’s own counsel, Jane Dalton, but that never happened. It seems that Jim Haynes short-circuited the approval process. Alberto Mora, the general counsel of the navy, says he remembers Dalton telling him, “Jim pulled this away. We never had a chance to complete the assessment.”
When we spoke, Myers confessed to being troubled that normal procedures had been circumvented. He held the Haynes Memo in his hands, looking carefully at the sheet of paper as if seeing it clearly for the first time. He pointed: “You don’t see my initials on this.” Normally he would have initialed a memo to indicate approval, but there was no confirmation that Myers had seen the memo or formally signed off on it before it went to Rumsfeld. “You just see I’ve ‘discussed’ it,” he said, noting a sentence to that effect in the memo itself. “This was not the way this should have come about.” Thinking back, he recalled the “intrigue” that was going on, intrigue “that I wasn’t aware of, and Jane wasn’t aware of, that was probably occurring between Jim Haynes, White House general counsel, and Justice.”
Further confirmation that the Haynes Memo got special handling comes from a former Pentagon official, who told me that Lieutenant General Bantz Craddock, Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, noticed that it was missing a buck slip, an essential component that shows a document’s circulation path, and which everyone was supposed to initial. The Haynes Memo had no “legal chop,” or signature, from the general counsel’s office. It went back to Haynes, who later signed off with a note that said simply, “Good to go.”
Events moved fast as the process was cut short. On November 4, Dunlavey was replaced as commander at Guantánamo by Major General Geoffrey Miller. On November 12 a detailed interrogation plan was approved for al-Qahtani, based on the new interrogation techniques. The plan was sent to Rumsfeld for his personal approval, General Hill told me.
Ten days later an alternative plan, prepared by Mike Gelles and others at the N.C.I.S. and elsewhere, using traditional non-aggressive techniques, was rejected. By then the F.B.I. had communicated its concerns to Haynes’s office about developments at Guantánamo. On November 23, well before Rumsfeld gave formal written approval to the Haynes Memo, General Miller received a “voco“?a vocal command?authorizing an im immediate start to the aggressive interrogation of al-Qahtani. No one I spoke with, including Beaver, Hill, and Myers, could recall who had initiated the voco, but an army investigation would state that it was likely Rumsfeld, and he would not have acted without Haynes’s endorsement.
Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log for Saturday, November 23, registers the immediate consequence of the decision to move ahead. “The detainee arrives at the interrogation booth His hood is removed and he is bolted to the floor.”
Reversal Four days after the voco, Haynes formally signed off on his memo. He recommended, as a matter of policy, approval of 15 of the 18 techniques. Of the four techniques listed in Category III, however, Haynes proposed blanket approval of just one: mild non-injurious physical contact. He would later tell the Senate that he had “recommended against the proposed use of a wet towel”?that is, against waterboarding?but to the contrary, in his memo he sstated that “all Category III techniques may be legally available.” Rumsfeld placed his name next to the word “Approved” and wrote the jocular comment that may well expose him to difficulties in the witness stand at some future time.
As the memo was being approved, the F.B.I. communicated serious concerns directly to Haynes’s office. Then, on December 17, Dave Brant, of the N.C.I.S., paid a surprise visit to Alberto Mora, the general counsel of the navy. Brant told him that N.C.I.S. agents had information that abusive actions at Guantánamo had been authorized at a “high level” in Washington. The following day Mora met again with Brant. Mike Gelles joined them and told Mora that the interrogators were under extraordinary pressure to achieve results. Gelles described the phenomenon of “force drift,” where interrogators using coercion come to believe that if some force is good, then more must be better. As recounted in his official “Memorandum for Inspector General, Department of the Navy,” Mora visited Steve Morello, the army’s general counsel, and Tom Taylor, his deputy, who showed him a copy of the Haynes Memo with its attachments. The memorandum describes them as demonstrating “great concern.” In the course of a long interview Mora recalled Morello “with a furtive air” saying, “Look at this. Don’t tell anyone where you got it.” Mora was horrified by what he read. “I was astounded that the secretary of defense would get within 100 miles of this issue,” he said. (Notwithstanding the report to the inspector general, Morello denies showing Mora a copy of the Haynes Memo.)
On December 20, Mora met with Haynes, who listened attentively and said he would consider Mora’s concerns. Mora went away on vacation, expecting everything to be sorted out. It wasn’t: Brant soon called to say the detainee mistreatment hadn’t stopped. On January 9, 2003, Mora met Haynes for a second time, expressing surprise that the techniques hadn’t been stopped. Haynes said little in response, and Mora felt he had made no headway. The following day, however, Haynes called to say that he had briefed Rumsfeld and that changes were in the offing. But over the next several days no news came.
On the morning of Wednesday, January 15, Mora awoke determined to act. He would put his concerns in writing in a draft memorandum for Haynes and Dalton. He made three simple points. One: the majority of the Category II and III techniques violated domestic and international law and constituted, at a minimum, cruel and unusual treatment and, at worst, torture. Two: the legal analysis by Diane Beaver had to be rejected. Three: he “strongly non-concurred” with these interrogation techniques. He delivered the draft memo to Haynes’s office. Two hours later, at about five p.m. on January 15, Haynes called Mora. “I’m pleased to tell you the secretary has rescinded the authorization,” he said.
The abusive interrogation of al-Qahtani lasted a total of 54 days. It ended not on January 12, as the press was told in June 2004, but three days later, on January 15. In those final three days, knowing that the anything-goes legal regime might disappear at any moment, the interrogators made one last desperate push to get something useful out of al-Qahtani. They never did. By the end of the interrogation al-Qahtani, according to an army investigator, had “black coals for eyes.”
The Great Migration Mike Gelles, of the N.C.I.S., had shared with me his fear that the al-Qahtani techniques would not simply fade into history?that they would turn out to have been horribly contagious. TThis “migration” theory was controversial, because it potentially extended the responsibility of those who authorized the Guantánamo techniques to abusive practices elsewhere. John Yoo has described the migration theory as “an exercise in hyperbole and partisan smear.”
But is it? In August 2003, Major General Miller traveled from Guantánamo to Baghdad, accompanied by Diane Beaver. They visited Abu Ghraib and found shocking conditions of near lawlessness. Miller made recommendations to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. On September 14, General Sanchez authorized an array of new interrogation techniques. These were vetted by his staff judge advocate, who later told the Senate Armed Services Committee that operating procedures and policies “in use in Guantánamo Bay” had been taken into account. Despite the fact that Geneva applied in Iraq, General Sanchez authorized several techniques that were not sanctioned by the Field Manual?but were listed in the Haynes Memo. The abuses for which Abu Ghraib became infamous began one month later.
Three different official investigations in the space of three years have confirmed the migration theory. The August 2006 report of the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded unequivocally that techniques from Guantánamo had indeed found their way to Iraq. An investigation overseen by former secretary of defense James R. Schlesinger determined that “augmented techniques for Guantanamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.”
Jim Haynes and Donald Rumsfeld may have reversed themselves about al-Qahtani in January 2003, but the death blow to the administration’s outlook did not occur for three more years. It came on June 29, 2006, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, holding that Guantánamo detainees were entitled to the protections provided under Geneva’s Common Article 3. The Court invoked the legal precedents that had been sidestepped by Douglas Feith and John Yoo, and laid bare the blatant illegality of al-Qahtani’s interrogation. A colleague having lunch with Haynes that day described him as looking “shocked” when the news arrived, adding, “He just went pale.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, joining the majority, pointedly observed that “violations of Common Article 3 are considered ‘war crimes.’?”
Jim Haynes appears to remain a die-hard supporter of aggressive interrogation. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy reminded him that in 2003 Haynes had said there was “no way” that Geneva could apply to the Afghan conflict and the war on terror. “Do you now accept that you were mistaken in your legal and policy determinations?,” Leahy asked. Haynes would say only that he was bound by the Supreme Court’s decision.
As the consequences of Hamdan sank in, the instinct for self-preservation asserted itself. The lawyers got busy. Within four months President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act. This created a new legal defense against lawsuits for misconduct arising from the “detention and interrogation of aliens” between September 11, 2001, and December 30, 2005. That covered the interrogation of al-Qahtani, and no doubt much else. Signing the bill on October 17, 2006, President Bush explained that it provided “legal protections that ensure our military and intelligence personnel will not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists simply for doing their jobs.”
In a word, the interrogators and their superiors were granted immunity from prosecution. Some of the lawyers who contributed to this legislation were immunizing themselves. The hitch, and it is a big one, is that the immunity is good only within the borders of the United States.
A Tap on the Shoulder The table in the conference room held five stacks of files and papers, neatly arranged and yellow and crisp with age. Behind them sat an elderly gentleman named Ludwig Altstötter, rosy-cheeked and cherubic. Ludwig is the son of Josef Altstötter, the lead defendant in the 1947 case United States of America v. Josef Altstoetter et al., which was tried in Germany before a U.S. military tribunal. The case is famous because it appears to be the only one in which lawyers have ever been charged and convicted for committing international crimes through the performance of their legal functions. It served as the inspiration for the Oscar-winning 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, whose themes are alluded to in Marcel Ophuls’s classic 1976 film on wartime atrocities, The Memory of Justice, which should be required viewing but has been lost to a broader audience. Nuremberg was, in fact, where Ludwig and I were meeting.
The Altstötter case had been prosecuted by the Allies to establish the principle that lawyers and judges in the Nazi regime bore a particular responsibility for the regime’s crimes. Sixteen lawyers appeared as defendants. The scale of the Nazi atrocities makes any factual comparison with Guantánamo absurd, a point made to me by Douglas Feith, and with which I agree. But I wasn’t interested in drawing a facile comparison between historical episodes. I wanted to know more about the underlying principle.
Josef Altstötter had the misfortune, because of his name, to be the first defendant listed among the 16. He was not the most important or the worst, although he was one of the 10 who were in fact convicted (4 were acquitted, one committed suicide, and there was one mistrial). He was a well-regarded member of society and a high-ranking lawyer. In 1943 he joined the Reich Ministry of Justice in Berlin, where he served as a Ministerialdirektor, the chief of the civil-law-and-procedure division. He became a member of the SS in 1937. The U.S. Military Tribunal found him guilty of membership in that criminal organization?with knowledge of its crimiinal acts?and sentenced him to five years in prison, which he served in full. He returned to legal practice in Nuremberg and died in 1979. Ludwig Altstötter had all the relevant documents, and he generously invited me to go over them with him in Nuremberg.
I took Ludwig to the most striking passage in the tribunal’s judgment. “He gave his name as a soldier and a jurist of note and so helped to cloak the shameful deeds of that organisation from the eyes of the German people.” The tribunal convicted Altstötter largely on the basis of two letters. Ludwig went to the piles on the table and pulled out fading copies of the originals. The first, dated May 3, 1944, was from the chief of the SS intelligence service to Ludwig’s father, asking him to intervene with the regional court of Vienna and stop it from ordering the transfer of Jews from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt back to Vienna to appear as witnesses in court hearings. The second letter was Altstötter’s response, a month later, to the president of the court in Vienna. “For security reasons,” he wrote, “these requests cannot be granted.” The U.S. Military Tribunal proceeded on the basis that Altstötter would have known what the concentration camps were for.
The words “security reasons” reminded me of remarks by Jim Haynes at the press conference with Gonzales: “Military necessity can sometimes allow ? warrfare to be conducted in ways that might infringe on the otherwise applicable articles of the Convention.” Haynes provided no legal authority for that proposition, and none exists. The minimum rights of detainees guaranteed by Geneva and the torture convention can never be overridden by claims of security or other military necessity. That is their whole purpose.
Mohammed al-Qahtani is among the first six detainees scheduled to go on trial for complicity in the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration has announced that it will seek the death penalty. Last month, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the use by the C.I.A. of the techniques set out in the Haynes Memo and used on al-Qahtani. Whatever he may have done, Mohammed al-Qahtani was entitled to the protections afforded by international law, including Geneva and the torture convention. His interrogation violated those conventions. There can be no doubt that he was treated cruelly and degraded, that the standards of Common Article 3 were violated, and that his treatment amounts to a war crime. If he suffered the degree of severe mental distress prohibited by the torture convention, then his treatment crosses the line into outright torture. These acts resulted from a policy decision made right at the top, not simply from ground-level requests in Guantánamo, and they were supported by legal advice from the president’s own circle.
Those responsible for the interrogation of Detainee 063 face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3.
It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999?iin which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes?and being told by oone of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chil
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #6 on: 2008-04-12 00:16:45 » |
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Yoo's on First?
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Ray McGovern
Dated: 2008-04-11
Is it because John Yoo, the former Justice Department's hired hand, is such an easy target? Is it because of the cheeky, in-your-face way in which Yoo argues that the president has the authority to have your eyes poked out and your sons' testicles crushed, because we are "at war" and he is commander-in-chief?
Or is it because our press is STILL reluctant to go after Yoo's guys – first and foremost his ultimate client – President George W. Bush? Oh, but that would be hard, you say.
Nonsense.
Available on the Web, in its original format, is a 7 Feb. 2002 action memorandum that the president signed to implement the dubious advice he was getting from Yoo and those at Justice who hired Yoo – and from the vice president's office which guided Yoo.
Yoo did their dirty work (and now he takes the rap).
Weren't Yoo's co-conspirators careful to keep their fingerprints off the more blatantly offensive memoranda? Sure they were.
But there was one problem. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director George Tenet could not get their people to torture folks without written, signed authorization by the president.
And we have a copy of that authorization? Yes, it's been available for years. You have to download it to believe it.
In his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum, Bush wrote: "I determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees." (Common Article 3 bans "torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.)
Then, drawing on the lawyerly legerdemain, Bush did something really dumb. Using words drafted by Vice President Dick Cheney's lawyer, David Addington, for a memo dated Jan. 25, 2002, signed by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the president ordered that detainees be treated, "humanely ... to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."
Tacked onto the end of that sentence is a classic circumlocution: "in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." But that is not what Geneva says, and there is no way to square that circle.
This is the giant loophole through which Rumsfeld and Tenet drove the Mack truck of torture ... yes, signed by the president. The rotten apples were – demonstrably – at the very top of the barrel.
Typical of the timid treatment accorded this issue is what initially seemed to be a straightforward article by Don Eggen in Sunday's Washington Post. It spotlighted scapegoat-of-the-hour Yoo, noting that he advised that in time of war the president's ultimate authority as commander-in-chief trumps laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators.
In focusing on Yoo's legal advice, however, Eggen joined his "mainstream" journalist colleagues in omitting the smoking gun – Bush's implementing memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002. That document already had cleared the way for waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity and other abuse of detainees – as well as for further legal musings about the unlimited powers of a wartime president, like Yoo's newly disclosed March 14, 2003, memo.
The omission was all the more conspicuous in that a listing of nine memoranda relevant to the story sits side by side with Eggen's article. Guess which memo did not make it onto that list?
Again, I urge you to download the president's Feb. 7 smoking gun from the Web and read it yourself. The Jan. 25, 2002, memo bearing Gonzales's signature is also available – in its original form.
Supreme Court Has a Problem
On June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.
One senior Bush administration official is reported to have gone quite pale at the time, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes,' punishable as federal offenses."
That threw a real scare into Bush as well, who pressed Congress hard to give administration officials retroactive immunity from prosecution. That came just three months later when Congress passed the "Military Commissions Act."
Ironically, the fact that those violating Geneva have been granted immunity within the U.S. makes it easier for foreign courts to prosecute for torture.
Remember how former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to sneak out of Paris last October? He was not about to wait until a Paris prosecutor decided how to handle a fresh criminal complaint against him.
That complaint cited the failure of U.S. authorities to investigate the role of Rumsfeld and other top officials in torture, despite a documented paper trail of official memos implicating them in direct as well as command responsibility.
The complaint argued that countries like France have a legal obligation to prosecute under the 1984 Convention Against Torture, approved by 145 nations, including the United States.
The Convention states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
It also provides for "universal jurisdiction," meaning that every signing country has a duty to prosecute torturers who are found in their territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.
One of the Bush administration's favorite slogans is that evildoers must be "brought to justice." It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out in the months and years to come.
[For more on Yoo's memos and Bush's powers, see Consortiumnews.com's "All Power to the President" and "Yoo's Memo Hints at Bush's Secrets."]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #7 on: 2008-04-12 00:25:28 » |
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Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
Source: ABC News
Authors: Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard Rosenberg, Ariane de Vogue
Dated: 2008-04-11
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
[ Hermit : Would be enough to convict anybody else in Texas under the "doctrine of common purpose" - Might be enough to get Bush when he steps outside the US after January 2009 ]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #8 on: 2008-04-16 07:37:11 » |
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Torturers in the White House
[ Hermit : A competent reprise of the above - and the news that the administration was warned by Goldsmith at Justice that they were violating the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Which means that the current assertion that because the executive's sleazy lawyers at justice told them it was ok, that it really, really was ok to torture, is as bust as an assertion as it is a failure as a defense. ]
Source: The Progressive
Authors: Ruth Conniff
Dated: 2008-04-15
The biggest news of the last week went virtually uncovered by the mainstream, print media. ABC News first reported last Wednesday that top Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.
The group signed off on specific techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, pushing, and waterboarding, and gave instruction "so detailed . . . some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed, down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic."
If John McCain is seriously considering Condoleezza Rice as a running mate, the former POW should keep in mind that Rice not only condoned torture, but chaired the National Security Council's "Principals Committee" meetings to plan the details of torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was so troubled by the meetings, he was moved to object: "Why are we discussing this in the White House?" he asked, according to ABC. "History will not judge this kindly."
On Friday, ABC added this blockbuster: Bush himself was aware of the meetings. Unlike Ashcroft, he had no compunctions. There was nothing "startling" about the revelations that his top advisers were directing the waterboarding of individual prisoners, Bush told ABC's Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue and I approved," Bush said.
Why is this not bigger news?
Remember when the nation was brought to a virtual standstill over Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern?
We now have confirmation that the President of the United States gave the OK for his national security team to violate international law and plot the sordid details of torture. The Democrats in Congress should be raising the roof.
House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, to his credit, has suggested subpoenaing the members of the Principals Committee, calling their actions "a stain on our democracy."
Conyers also threatened last week to subpoena John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose recently declassified 2003 torture memos attempted to give legal cover to practices such as waterboarding.
Such techniques, as long as their sole purpose wasn't sadism, were acceptable, Yoo wrote. Being a sadist was presumably necessary but not sufficient qualification for employment in the Bush White House.
In his new book The Terror Presidency, Yoo's colleague Jack Goldsmith writes about his evolution from friend and supporter of the officials who brought us to this pass to a conscientious objector to their illegal and morally corrupt practices.
Back when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo warning that Bush Administration officials could be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their actions in the war on terror.
After he went to work for Justice, Goldsmith began standing up to the torture cabal at the White House--to his enduring discomfort. In one incident, recounted in his book and in a September profile by Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times Magazine, he knocked heads with Dick Cheney's advisor (now his chief of staff) David Addington. Goldsmith delivered the bad news that terror suspects were, in fact, covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention against torture of civilians: “'The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,'” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. 'You cannot question his decision.'”
Goldsmith also criticized the torture memos for their “extremely broad and unnecessary analysis of the President’s Commander-in-Chief power” and for their extremely loose definition of torture as limited to causing a level of pain akin to organ failure.
Pointing out that the Administration was violating the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Goldmith withdrew Yoo's torture memos--and promptly resigned his post.
Even after losing that flimsy legal cover, Bush and the other members of the Principals Committee appear unrepentant and undeterred.
Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard, is no civil libertarian, but like John Ashcroft and John McCain, he has spoken out against executive lawlessness.
No doubt he would have plenty to tell the House Judiciary Committee. And perhaps the International Criminal Court as well.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Red Cross, Amnesty paint grim picture of post-invasion Iraq
« Reply #9 on: 2008-04-21 03:37:13 » |
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Hermit : So What illegal torture techniques did Bush and his cronies approve and on whom?
And no, it wasn't "just" waterboarding or "just" three victims
Torture Question Hovers Over Chertoff
Source: Scoop
Authors: Jason Leopold
Dated: 2008-04-21
John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who built the legal framework for torture are now out of the U.S. government, but one still holds a Cabinet-level rank – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
In the summer of 2002, Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, offered assurances to the CIA that its interrogators would not face prosecution under anti-torture laws if they followed guidelines on aggressive techniques approved by the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo worked.
Those guidelines stretched the rules on permissible treatment of detainees by narrowly defining torture as intense pain equivalent to organ failure or death. Specific interrogation techniques were gleaned from a list of methods that the U.S. military feared might be used against American soldiers if they were captured by a ruthless enemy.
Three years ago, when Chertoff was facing confirmation hearings to be Homeland Security chief, the New York Times cited three senior-level government sources as describing Chertoff’s Criminal Division as fielding questions from the CIA about whether its officers risked prosecution if they employed certain harsh techniques.
“One technique the CIA officers could use under circumstances without fear of prosecution was strapping a subject down and making him experience a feeling of drowning,” the Times reported.
In other words, Chertoff appears to have green-lighted the technique known as “waterboarding,” which has been regarded as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition.
Chertoff reportedly did object to some other procedures, such as death threats against family members and mind-altering drugs that would change a detainee’s personality, the Times reported. [NYT, Jan. 29, 2005]
During his Senate confirmation hearings in February 2005, Chertoff denied providing the CIA with legal guidance on the use of specific interrogation methods, such as waterboarding. Rather, he said he gave the agency broad guidance in response to questions about interrogation methods.
"You are dealing in an area where there is potential criminality," Chertoff said in describing his advice to the CIA. "You better be very careful to make sure that whatever you decide to do falls well within what is required by law."
Nevertheless, the evidence continues to build that Chertoff’s assurances gave CIA interrogators confidence they would avoid prosecution as long as they stayed within the permissive guidelines devised by deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo and his boss at the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee.
The Abu Zubaydah Case
Chertoff’s reported assurances to CIA agents appear to have led directly to the use of waterboarding against alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in August 2002.
"The CIA was seeking to determine the legal limits of interrogation practices for use in cases like that of Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda lieutenant who was captured in March 2002," according to the New York Times article.
The Abu Zubaydah case was the first time that waterboarding was used against a prisoner in the “war on terror,” according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.
In The One Percent Doctrine, author Ron Suskind reported that President George W. Bush had become obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.
"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" [ Hermit : In the light of this revelation, does anyone think that Bush doesn't have a copy of the supposedly destroyed tape to masturbate over? ]
The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was videotaped, but that record was destroyed in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA's use of so-called "black site" prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.
John Durham, an assistant attorney general in Connecticut, was appointed special counsel earlier this year to investigate the destruction of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations.
The CIA officials who pressed Chertoff to give assurances protecting CIA interrogators included former CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, according to the New York Times. Muller and Rizzo, who is now the CIA’s general counsel, are at the center of Durham’s probe.
The Times also reported that Chertoff participated in the drafting of a second still-secret memo in August 2002, which allegedly described specific interrogation methods that CIA interrogators could use against detainees.
Those interrogation techniques were derived from the Army and Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Rescue, and Escape (SERE) training program. But those techniques were meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by a brutal regime, not as methods for U.S. interrogations.
New ACLU Document Release
This past week, the American Civil Liberties Union released more than 300 pages of documents showing that in 2003 military interrogators used methods they learned during SERE training against eight Afghanistan detainees held at the Gardez Detention Facility in southeastern Afghanistan.
Those methods included forcing a detainee to kneel outside in wet clothing, spraying the person with cold water, and punching and kicking a detainee over the course of three weeks.
[b]One of the prisoners, an 18-year-old Afghan militia fighter named Jamal Naseer, later died. The documents released to the ACLU say his body was so severely beaten by his interrogators that it appeared to be a black and green color at the time of his death.
Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney, said the SERE tactics that were approved by the Justice Department were never intended to be used by the U.S. government against its detainees.
The latest disclosures further erode claims by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that prisoner abuses at Gardez – or the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib – were isolated acts by a few “bad apples.”
To the contrary, it appears that the policies approved by Bush and the assurances provided by Chertoff and others led to the atrocities at the CIA detention centers as well as the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay
An action memorandum, dated Feb. 7, 2002, and signed by President Bush, stated that the Geneva Convention did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
That, in turn, led Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq to institute a “dozen interrogation methods beyond” the Army’s standard practice under the convention, according to a 2004 report on the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prepared by a panel headed by James Schlesinger.
Sanchez said he based his decision on “the President's Memorandum,” which he said had justified "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, the Schlesigner report said.
Other prisoner abuses resulted from Rumsfeld’s verbal and written authorization in December 2002 allowing interrogators to use “stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, removal of clothing and the use of detainees' phobias (such as the use of dogs),” according to a separate report issued by Army Maj. Gen. George R. Fay.
“From December 2002, interrogators in Afghanistan were removing clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation,” the Fay report said.
Mora’s Complaint
Rumsfeld’s approval of certain interrogation methods outlined in a December 2002 action memorandum was criticized by Alberto Mora, the former general counsel of the Navy.
“The interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary [of Defense] should not have been authorized because some (but not all) of them, whether applied singly or in combination, could produce effects reaching the level of torture, a degree of mistreatment not otherwise proscribed by the memo because it did not articulate any bright-line standard for prohibited detainee treatment, a necessary element in any such document,” Mora wrote in a 14-page letter to the Navy’s inspector general.
Additionally, a Dec. 20, 2005, Army Inspector General Report relating to the capture and interrogation of Mohammad al-Qahtani included a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt. It said Secretary Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of al-Qahtani and spoke “weekly” with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantanamo, about the status of the interrogations between late 2002 and early 2003.
Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents al-Qahtani, said in a sworn declaration that his client, imprisoned at Guantanamo, was subjected to months of torture based on verbal and written authorizations from Rumsfeld.
“At Guantánamo, Mr. al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the ‘First Special Interrogation Plan,’ that were authorized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,” Gutierrez said.
“Those techniques were implemented under the supervision and guidance of Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller. These methods included, but were not limited to, 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation, and threats with military dogs.”
Gutierrez’s claims about the type of interrogation al-Qahtani endured have since been borne out with the release of hundreds of pages of internal Pentagon documents describing interrogation methods at Guantanamo and at least two independent reports about prisoner abuse.
According to the Schlesinger report, orders signed by Bush and Rumsfeld in 2002 and 2003 authorizing brutal interrogations “became policy” at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
In February, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed that it launched a formal investigation to determine, among other issues, whether agency attorneys, including Chertoff, provided the White House and the CIA with poor legal advice when it said CIA interrogators could use harsh interrogation methods against detainees.
Yoo is currently a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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