Our Barbarian Nation - Democratic Underground

Time for change

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Sat Oct-18-08 02:00 PM
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Our Barbarian Nation

Edited on Sat Oct-18-08 02:52 PM by Time for change

I’m sure that the Sarah Palin types would become hysterical at me for posting this. Their sensibilities are much too frail to contemplate the idea that a President and Vice President of their own party have brought great shame upon their country. But the fact is that those people are part of the problem rather than the solution. They would rather sit passively by and turn a blind eye to atrocities than acknowledge that their country could be less than perfect.

There are a multitude of reasons why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should have been impeached long ago. And there is probably no better list and discussion of those reasons than Dennis Kucinich’s 35 Articles of Impeachment. Each of those articles is very serious and probably justifies impeachment even when considered alone. But in my opinion, the most important reasons can be found in articles XXVII through XX, which include the indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, torture, kidnapping and rendition of the kidnapped for the purpose of being tortured, and the imprisonment of children. This post explains some of my reasons for feeling that way.

How the detention of our first “War on Terror” prisoner led to the suspension of habeas corpus

There is perhaps nothing more basic to our system of justice than habeas corpus, which grants the right of prisoners to challenge the right of government to hold them in detention. According to Article I, Section 9 of our Constitution, a person’s right to habeas corpus cannot be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it”. Well, our country has not been in rebellion or under invasion for more than a few hours since George W. Bush took office, and yet he has suspended habeas corpus indefinitely for the first time in our ancestral history since it was first enacted in 1215. Though it has often been pointed out that Abraham Lincoln also suspended habeas corpus during his Presidency, Lincoln did it on a much smaller scale and with the consent of Congress, and as a state of rebellion existed at the time, he did it on an emergency basis.

John Walker Lindh was an American citizen who converted to Islam as a young man. Consequently, he felt it his duty to go to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance in the summer of 2001, which he did. This was at a time when the Taliban was not an enemy of the United States, which in fact had recently given them $43 million. Shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in December 2001, Lindh and others of his unit turned themselves in to the U.S. Army, following a battle in which an American intelligence officer was killed.

Jane Mayer, in her book, “The Dark Side – The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals”, describes how Lindh was treated after being taken into American custody:

Lindh was often kept blindfolded, naked, and bound to a stretcher with duct tape… For days, Lindh was … left cold and sleep-deprived in a pitch-dark steel shipping container. The physician described Lindh as “disoriented” and “suffering lack of nourishment”, adding that “suicide is a concern.”…

Nonetheless, Lindh was interrogated repeatedly… When noting the right to counsel, the agent acknowledged, he ad-libbed, “Of course, there are no lawyers here”…

In order to escape his confinement, Lindh signed a waiver of his right to counsel and “confessed”, and subsequently the U.S. Justice Department charged him with ten counts of mostly terrorism-related crimes.

But at Lindh’s trial, numerous incidents of procedural misconduct came to light, and subsequently Lindh’s lawyer obtained a plea bargain whereby Lindh pleaded guilty to one non-terrorist related crime (rendering services to the Taliban) in return for the government dropping the other nine counts. Mayer describes the lessons that the Bush administration learned from its first prosecution of a “terrorist”:

What John Walker Lindh taught the Bush Administration was that open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk (of embarrassment to the Bush administration that is). In the future, enemy prisoners would have to be held safely outside the reach of U.S. law, where they could by questioned without legal interference and tried under rules more favorable to the prosecution – if they were tried at all.

Documented examples of our torture of prisoners

The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote a book called “Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush.” One of the four articles of impeachment recommended in the book deals with human rights abuses, including torture. Numerous examples and sources are cited in the book. Here is a partial list:

 Often held in solitary confinement, some for more than a year
 Punched and kneed, shackled and repeatedly picked up and dropped, resulting in serious injuries.
 Strangled and had lit cigarettes put in their ears.
 Beaten, deprived of sleep, exposed to temperature extremes, and subject to sexual and religious humiliation.
 Threatened with rape and other torture, execution, and harm to their families.
 Suffered debilitating psychological effects.
 Prisoners were regularly beaten; one was beaten with a chair until it broke, and was kicked and choked until he lost consciousness.
 Beaten with a broom, liquid chemical poured all over him, and sodomized with a police stick while MPs threw a ball at his genitals.
 One detainee witnessed the rape of a teenage prisoner.
 Detainees were left naked, hooded, and chained to the doors of their cells.
 Boys were stripped and cuffed together facing each other.
 Detainees being placed in a pile and told to masturbate, then being ridden like animals.
 Prisoners were placed in solitary confinement with poor air quality and extreme temperatures.
 Electrical wires placed on his fingers, toes and penis and being threatened with electrocution.
 Being urinated on.
 Dogs were placed in the cell of juvenile prisoners and permitted to “go nuts.”
 Continuously shackled, held naked, and intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time.
 Being forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.
 Doused with freezing water in the winter.
 Interrogators play on their prisoners’ phobias, such as fear of rats or dogs…
 Isolated in constantly lit cells about 5 x 10 feet, let out for 10-20 minutes per week to exercise, with virtually no contact with family or outside world

Numerous additional examples, from the FBI, a the Guantanamo Bay Muslim Chaplain, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the journalist Seymour Hersh, and former President Jimmy Carter can be found in this post.

Homicide in our torture camps

Rush Limbaugh and other right wing idiots have belittled evidence of torture by claiming, even when the photographic evidence at Abu Ghraib was publicized, that U.S. treatment of its prisoners is no different than fraternity “hazing” of pledges.

However, a 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities, exposes those claims for the lies that they are. That study found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

Keep in mind that that study involved only a small fraction of the total number of detainees dying in the largely secret U.S. prison system since September 11, 2001. We will probably never know for sure the full extent of these barbaric homicides.

The scope of our detention, interrogation and torture program

Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000:

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had put the blame on Dick Cheney for much of the administration’s “torture guidance”, claims that the number of “disappeared” approximates 35,000.

Lack of concern about the guilt or innocence of our victims

Though we have repeatedly been told that our prisoners in George Bush’s “War on Terror” are “the worst of the worst”, the facts tell a very different story from that: Major General Antonio Taguba, charged with investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said that “A lack of proper screening meant that many innocent Iraqis were being detained (in some cases indefinitely) and that 60% of civilian prisoners at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society. And the International Red Cross said that between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.

A study of our Guantanamo Bay detainees, using our government’s own records, sheds further light on George Bush’s fake “War on Terror”. The study found that 60% of our detainees at Guantanamo were thrown into prison for an indefinite period of time without charges or trial merely because they were claimed to be “associated with” a group or groups that our government asserts to be a terrorist organization. And only 8% were deemed to be associated with al Qaeda.

But what is even worse is that all the evidence points to the fact that the
Bush administration just doesn’t care that most of its victims are guilty of little or nothing. This is clear from the experience of a CIA intelligence analyst who was summoned to Guantanamo Bay to discover why the CIA was able to obtain so little useful information from its detainees. Jane Mayer describes what he found:

He concluded that an estimated one third of the prison camp’s population of more than 600 captives… had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. If the intelligence haul was meager, his findings suggested, one reason was that many of the detainees knew little or nothing… Many, he felt sure, “were just caught in a dragnet. They were not fighters… They should not have been there…. By imprisoning innocent Muslims indefinitely, outside the reach of any legal review", he said, “I thought we were going to lose a whole damn generation” in the Arab world… Guantanamo was making the world more dangerous…"

The report made its way to the highest ranking national security lawyer in the White House, John Bellinger, and the top terrorism expert at the NSC, John Gordon. Bellinger and Gordon became alarmed at the report of the CIA analyst, so they scheduled a meeting with White House Council Alberto Gonzalez. But when they arrived at the meeting, David Addington, Chief Council to the Vice President, was also there. Mayer describes the meeting:

ADDINGTON: No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!

GORDON: This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness… Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?

ADDINGTON: We are not second-guessing the President’s decision. These are ‘enemy combatants’. Please use that phrase. They’ve all been through a screening process. There’s nothing to talk about.

The purpose of our torture program

Then what could the purpose of our detention and torture program be? Detainees are rarely charged or tried for crimes. There appears to be very little concern with the guilt or innocence of our prisoners. Little information of any significant use is obtained from our detainees. And the Bush administration has been repeatedly warned that, far from making Americans safer, their policies are putting us all at greater risk for terrorist attacks.

One major clue to the purpose of the Bush detention and torture program is its use of a program called SERE, an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. The theoretical purpose of the program was that by subjecting U.S. soldiers to near torture-like conditions, they could be programmed to resist breaking under torture by the enemy and revealing national security secrets. But in actual practice, the program was “reverse-engineered” to become a blueprint for torture of our prisoners. Mayer explains the significance of that:

The SERE program was a strange choice for the government to pick if it was seeking to learn how to get the truth from detainees. It was founded during the Cold War in an effort to re-create, and therefore understand, the mistreatment that had led thirty-six captured U.S. airmen to give stunningly FALSE CONFESSIONS during the Korean War.

Speaking of false confessions, one of the first “high value” detainees captured in our “War on Terror” was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The first to interrogate him was the FBI, who used standard interrogation techniques – i.e. without the use of torture or any other harsh treatment. It worked great. Al-Libi opened up and gave the agents “specific actionable intelligence – information that could save American lives.”

But there was just one problem. Al-Libi refused to admit to any ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But no problem. Al-Libi was taken away from his expert handlers at the FBI and given to the CIA. They tortured him, but al-Libi tried to explain to them that he didn’t know enough about the subject to even make up a good story. So they sent him to Egypt for more torture, whereupon al-Libi admitted to ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Mission accomplished! Al-Libi’s “confession” became an integral part of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq – even though intelligence agents warned Bush that the “confession” was unreliable.

I’m sure that there are other purposes for the Bush/Cheney torture program as well. Undoubtedly, it provides a degree of intimidation against domestic enemies of the Bush administration, which in turn has a dampening effect on protest movements. Maybe the physical intimidation factor even influences Congressional votes. It serves the political purpose of making it appear to some that George Bush actually has something useful to contribute to our country. And I don’t doubt that there is an element of sadism behind it as well.

The source of our torture program

So who’s behind all this? For anyone who has any doubt that George W. Bush is behind this program, rather than it all being the result of a few “bad apples” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, I recommend reading Philippe Sands’ “Torture Team – Rumsfeld’s memo and the betrayal of American Values”.

The most obvious contribution of George W. Bush was when he declared in a signed order on February 7, 2002, that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply” with regard to his “War on Terror”. That was a remarkably irresponsible action, overturning more than half a century of international law designed to introduce some civility and decency into the way that wars are prosecuted. And as Sands shows, that assertion by George Bush set the framework for all subsequent legal advice and rulings by White House, Justice Department, and Pentagon lawyers. Any subsequent “legal” ruling by the federal government had to take into account that George W. Bush, by the stroke of his mighty pen, had trashed more than half a century of international law.

Other major points in Bush’s February 7th memo that violated U.S. and international law and our Constitution included:
 The U.S. must treat prisoners humanely only “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.”
 The CIA and other non-military personnel are exempt even from the above limitation concerning military necessity.
 Limitations on torture do not apply at all to non- U.S. citizens outside the U.S.

An article in the New York Times by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen described the extent to which these policies were unprecedented in U.S. history, and yet of little or no value in combating terrorism:

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

A terrible shame

It is a terrible shame that the American people don’t know more about this, that our news media has done such an dismal job of informing them, and in short, that this isn’t considered within our country a national scandal of monumental proportions. That we have tolerated such activities means that we have truly become a barbarian nation, in many ways.