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Blunderov
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The Story Behind Obama's Torture Ban
« on: 2009-01-30 02:25:24 » |
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[Blunderov] An American friend of mine recently happily observed that "it was nice to hear a US president saying something smart for a change". Indeed. (This was in the context of Obama's remark that the issue was not whether government was too big or too small but whether it worked properly. Again; indeed.)
Sadly, smarts is not all that it takes to dissuade persons who have gone out all the way along a very dangerous legal limb from frantically advocating the morality of their "cause" very loudly indeed; moral authority is required even though morality is not actually the issue at all. Torture is simply stupid. Not to mention illegal.
So, a good beginning for Obama. But this not tabula rasa; the horrendous damage is not so easily undone. History will not look the other way. It remains to be seen whether Obama himself will look the other way in respect of the many and various deposed criminal neocons that are currently infesting the landscape.
Dispatches from the culture wars
The Story Behind Obama's Torture Ban
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Posted on: January 29, 2009 9:16 AM, by Ed Brayton
One of the highly dishonest ways that many on the right frame the torture issue is to present it as weak-kneed liberals who care about the rights of bad guys vs realistic patriots from the military and intelligence community who know what it really takes to protect the nation. The New Yorker has a blog post that demolishes that frame and tells the history of how Obama's executive order banning torture came about as a result of a group of military officers approaching him about the need to do so. The article describes a meeting that took place between Obama and this group of officers in Iowa during the primaries:
It was there that Obama met with a handful of former high-ranking military officers who opposed the Bush Administration's legalization of abusive interrogations. Sickened by the photographs from Abu Ghraib and disheartened by what they regarded as the illegal and dangerous degradation of military standards, the officers had formed an unlikely alliance with the legal-advocacy group Human Rights First, and had begun lobbying the candidates of both parties to close the loopholes that Bush had opened for torture.
Obama was "very excited" that day in Iowa, one participant in the off-the-record meeting recalled, "because he had just gotten polls showing that he was ahead," but he didn't seem particularly "comfortable" with the military delegation. The group of military men, which included the retired four-star generals Dave Maddox and Joseph Hoar, lectured Obama about the importance of being Commander-in-Chief. In particular, they warned him that every word he uttered would be taken as an order by the highest-ranking officers as well as the lowliest private. Any wiggle room for abusive interrogations, they emphasized, would be construed as permission.
Obama "asked smart questions, but didn't seem inspired by it. He totally understood the effect that Abu Ghraib had on America's reputation," the participant said. But, in general, "he was very businesslike. He didn't flatter the officers," as most of the other candidates had. In addition, Obama's staff, the participant said, approached the meeting with the retired officers with less urgency than some of the other campaigns had. "But," the participant said, in retrospect, "it started an education process."
Last month, several members of the same group met with both Craig, who by then was slated to become Obama's top legal adviser, and Attorney General-designate Eric Holder. The two future Obama Administration lawyers were particularly taken with a retired four-star Marine general and conservative Republican named Charles (Chuck) Krulak. Krulak insisted that ending the Bush Administration's coercive interrogation and detention regime was "right for America and right for the world," a participant recalled, and promised that if the Obama Administration did what he described as "the right thing," which he acknowledged wouldn't be politically easy, he would personally "fly cover" for them.
Last week, as Obama signed the executive order, sixteen retired generals and flag officers from the same group did just that. Told on Monday that they were needed at the White House, they flew to the capital from as far away as California, a phalanx of square-jawed certified patriots providing cover for Obama's announcement.
Shortly before the signing ceremony, Craig said, Obama met with the officers in the Roosevelt Room, along with Vice-President Biden and several other top Administration officials. "It was hugely important to the President to have the input from these military people," Craig said, "not only because of their proven concern for protecting the American people--they'd dedicated their lives to it--but also because some had their own experience they could speak from." Two of the officers had sons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them, retired Major General Paul Eaton, stressed that, as he put it later that day, "torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It's also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have." The feeling in the room, as retired Rear Admiral John Hutson later put it, "was joy, perhaps, that the country was getting back on track."
It is absurd that having military officers to "fly cover" for this is necessary. It is only necessary because the Republicans have been so successful at framing this issue. Given that reality, it is important to recognize that there is strong support for doing away with torture from the military and intelligence community.
Comments
<snip>
abb3w (whose was the last comment I saw, since I was pulled away several times during writing this):
Thanks for what might have been the most important comment I've seen -- even on this forum -- for months. I seem to have spent much of my life watching political arguments over unworkable propositions descend into moral arguments about whether the proposition is 'right' or 'wrong' that inherently assume the proposition might accomplish what it is sold for.
(Comparison: We might get into a long discussion whether it was 'right' or 'wrong' for parents to sell their house and go into bankruptcy to be able to afford a medicine that promises to keep their dying child alive another six months. But if the 'medicine' is homeopathic there is no argument, because it can't possibly do what it promises.)
Sometimes the moral question is important, as with slavery, segregation, homophobia, etc. These things actually 'worked' in the sense of achieving what they tried to accomplish. So it was important to point out that 'what they tried to accomplish' was evil and convince people it was an evil that had to be rejected. (Arguments that they would have broken down 'eventually' aren't that important if the level of suffering was too great to wait for 'eventually.')
But, in most cases, switching the argument to a moral one weakens our position, because it assumes that what is being opposed could work if we didn't stop it. And, barring cases like the above, it is usually possible to make a solid-sounding argument on both sides of a question.
Were we 'right' to oppose the spread of Communism in Vietnam, or 'wrong' to attempt to impose a government on a country which didn't support it? Were we 'patriotic' to stand by our country in a time of crisis, or 'patriotic' to oppose our country because of the damage it was bringing on itself? Both questions were fascinating 'bull-session' topics, sure, but they were irrelevant to the Vietnam War because it was never winnable in the first place -- and supporters never were able to describe what 'winning' entailed.
Are we right to use extreme measures to protect our citizens and our children from the scourge of Drug X? Or are we wrong to infringe on civil liberties to do so? Who cares, if the efforts don't work to begin with? (okay, protecting civil liberties is a good in itself, but it is irrelevant to the question of drug laws.)
Tax breaks for the rich? Trickle-down? Deregulation? Torture? The proper answer to 'are they good or bad?' is "Neither. They are stupid, which makes the moral question irrelevant."
"It's worse than a crime, it's a blunder" is a saying that has a lot more truth than is usually realized.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | January 29, 2009 4:06 PM </snip>
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Re:The Story Behind Obama's Torture Ban
« Reply #1 on: 2009-02-02 09:51:04 » |
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How Obama's New Rules Keep Intact
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture
Source: Counterpunch
Authors: Allan Nairn Allan Nairn writes the blog News and Comment at www.newsc.blogspot.com
Dated: 2009-01-26
If you're lying on the slab still breathing, with your torturer hanging over you, you don't much care if he is an American or a mere United States - sponsored trainee.
When President Obama declared flatly this week that "the United States will not torture" many people wrongly believed that he'd shut the practice down, when in fact he'd merely repositioned it.
Obama's Executive Order bans some -- not all -- US officials from torturing but it does not ban any of them, himself included, from sponsoring torture overseas.
Indeed, his policy change affects only a slight percentage of US-culpable tortures and could be completely consistent with an increase in US-backed torture worldwide.
The catch lies in the fact that since Vietnam, when US forces often tortured directly, the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed.
That is, the US tended to do it that way until Bush and Cheney changed protocol, and had many Americans laying on hands, and sometimes taking digital photos.
The result was a public relations fiasco that enraged the US establishment since by exposing US techniques to the world it diminished US power.
But despite the outrage, the fact of the matter was that the Bush/Cheney tortures being done by Americans were a negligible percentage of all of the tortures being done by US clients.
For every torment inflicted directly by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the secret prisons, there were many times more being meted out by US-sponsored foreign forces.
Those forces were and are operating with US military, intelligence, financial or other backing in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Nigeria, and the Philippines, to name some places, not to mention the tortures sans-American-hands by the US-backed Iraqis and Afghans.
What the Obama dictum ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage.
Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.
His Executive Order instead merely pertains to treatment of "...an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict..." which means that it doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of "armed conflict," which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict.
And even if, as Obama says, "the United States will not torture," it can still pay, train, equip and guide foreign torturers, and see to it that they, and their US patrons, don't face local or international justice.
This is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.
Under the old -- now new again -- proxy regime Americans would, say, teach interrogation/torture, then stand in the next room as the victims screamed, feeding questions to their foreign pupils. That's the way the US did it in El Salvador under JFK through Bush Sr. (For details see my "Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the U.S. role in El Salvador’s official terror," The Progressive, May, 1984 ; the US Senate Intelligence Committee report that piece sparked is still classified, but the feeding of questions was confirmed to me by Intelligence Committee Senators. See also my "Confessions of a Death Squad Officer," The Progressive, March, 1986, and my "Comment," The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 1990,[regarding law, the US, and El Salvador]).
In Guatemala under Bush Sr. and Clinton (Obama's foreign policy mentors) the US backed the army's G-2 death squad which kept comprehensive files on dissidents and then electroshocked them or cut off their hands. (The file/ surveillance system was launched for them in the '60s and '70s by CIA/ State/ AID/ special forces; for the history see "Behind the Death Squads," cited above, and the books of Prof. Michael McClintock).
The Americans on the ground in the Guatemalan operation, some of whom I encountered and named, effectively helped to run the G-2 but, themselves, tiptoed around its torture chambers. (See my "C.I.A. Death Squad," The Nation [US], April 17, 1995, "The Country Team," The Nation [US], June 5, 1995, letter exchange with US Ambassador Stroock, The Nation [US], May 29, 1995, and Allan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, "Bureaucracy of Death," The New Republic, June 30, 1986).
It was a similar story in Bush Sr. and Clinton's Haiti -- an operation run by today's Obama people -- where the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) helped launch the terrorist group FRAPH, the CIA paid its leader, and FRAPH itsef laid the machetes on Haitian civilians, torturing and killing as US proxies. (See my "Behind Haiti's paramilitaries: our man in FRAPH," The Nation [US], Oct 24, 1994, and "He's our S.O.B.," The Nation [US], Oct. 31, 1994; the story was later confirmed on ABC TV's "This Week" by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher).
In today's Thailand -- a country that hardly comes to mind when most people think of torture -- special police and militaries get US gear and training for things like "target selection" and then go out and torture Thai Malay Muslms in the rebel deep south, and also sometimes (mainly Buddhist) Burmese refugees and exploited northern and west coast workers.
Not long ago I visited a key Thai interrogator who spoke frankly about army/ police/ intel torture and then closed our discussion by saying "Look at this," and invited me into his back room.
It was an up to date museum of plaques, photos and awards from US and Western intelligence, including commendations from the CIA counter-terrorism center (then run by people now staffing Obama), one-on-one photos with high US figures, including George W. Bush, a medal from Bush, various US intel/ FBI/ military training certificates, a photo of him with an Israeli colleague beside a tank in the Occupied Territories, and Mossad, Shin Bet, Singaporean, and other interrogation implements and mementos.
On my way out, the Thai intel man remarked that he was due to re-visit Langley soon.
His role is typical. There are thousands like him worldwide. US proxy torture dwarfs that at Guantanamo.
Many Americans, to their credit, hate torture. The Bush/Cheney escapade exposed that.
But to stop it they must get the facts and see that Obama's ban does not stop it, and indeed could even accord with an increase in US-sponsored torture crime.
In lieu of action, the system will grind on tonight. More shocks, suffocations, deep burns. And the convergence of thousands of complex minds on one simple thought: 'Please, let me die.'
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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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