Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring
to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an
official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of
videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture
techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not
lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not
filed.
Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to
looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The
nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms,
legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false
patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest
levels of government on down.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page
executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any
lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new
revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were
waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived,
threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was
chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”
These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines
torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or
suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the
international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires
prosecution of any acts of torture.
So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these
acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these
claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what
they intended to do was illegal.
In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed
to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be
prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to
prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they
shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically
driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a
legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as
proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the
report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good
faith.
No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the
report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held
accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and
independent criminal investigation.
The American Civil Liberties Union is to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a
letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate
what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law,
to commit torture and other serious crimes.”
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held
accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it
is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new
investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a
former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney;
Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George
Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who
drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that
could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who
ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the
torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s
executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one
notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or
actively defended the indefensible. They cannot even point to any results:
Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no
time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror
attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully
held.”
Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring
that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke
torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the
distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the
crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by
and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their
actions.
A version of this editorial appears in print on December 22,
2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with
the headline: Prosecute Torturers
and Their Bosses.
If we truly
believe ourselves to be exceptional, a model for all the world and an example
for all of history, then why would we practice torture?
That’s what waterboarding is, and that’s why President Obama banned it —
rightly. When you pour water onto someone until he gasps for air and feels as if
he’s drowning, you’re not merely enhancing your interrogation. You’re putting
him through a hell as physical as it is psychological. You’re torturing him, by
any sane definition of the term.
And yet waterboarding was back up for discussion and even back in a kind of
perverse vogue on Saturday night, at the same Republican presidential debate
where Mitt Romney, pivoting to a favorite melody, sang the song of American
greatness and singularity — American exceptionalism. That juxtaposition was odd
in the extreme.
I came away from the debate, which was devoted to foreign policy, with all sorts
of qualms and questions, including why Newt Gingrich has submitted to an
electoral process he feels such palpable condescension toward.
But mostly I came away thinking that a great deal of what the candidates propose
flies squarely in the face of the particular stripe of national pride they
simultaneously trumpet.
This is a crowd that’s big on exceptionalism, and not according to its onetime
definition: as a reference to the peculiar and advantageous circumstances of our
country’s genesis. They’re asserting that we have a unique global standing, our
eminence essential and our values worthy of export.
“This century must be an American century,” Romney said, and he digressed widely
from the specific topic at hand to say it.
“We have a president right now who thinks America is just another nation,” he
added, not representing Obama’s past remarks entirely fairly. “America is an
exceptional nation.”
Romney didn’t get a chance to weigh in on waterboarding, so we don’t know
whether he actually favors its restored use, as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain
said they did, and as Rick Perry seemed to signal as well.
But we know Romney doesn’t consider it torture, because one of his senior aides,
Eric Fehrnstrom, sent out a Twitter message after the debate saying flatly that
it isn’t, and a campaign spokeswoman on Monday confirmed that that was indeed
Romney’s own view. The spokeswoman added: “At the same time, he’s not going to
specify the enhanced interrogation techniques he would use against terrorists.”
From the debate stage in South Carolina came not only calls for waterboarding —
which Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, to their credit, rejected — but also the
churlish suggestion that that the United States withhold even the first dollar
of foreign aid to a country until it proved itself wholly deserving. This came
courtesy of Perry and Gingrich.
From Rick Santorum there were warm thoughts of clandestine missions to kill
Iranian scientists. Immigration wasn’t discussed this time around, but when it
has been in recent months, Cain has mentioned the digging of a moat along the
Mexican border — filled with alligators, no less! — and Bachmann has been all
about the ludicrously impractical construction of a fence, which Cain at one
point suggested electrifying as an extra deterrent to anyone with thoughts of
scaling it. Then he said he was joking. A belly laugh rose up from all seven
continents.
Of course the candidates talk tough in large part as a way to accuse Obama of
being soft. It’s typical political posturing, inevitable political pandering.
But their oft-lofted notion that he has raised a white flag in the war on terror
is absurd. While his presidency has had considerable flaws and disappointments,
that’s not one of them.
Yes, he ended waterboarding — which is also what John McCain, who has real moral
authority on the issue, said he would do. (On Monday McCain said he was “very
disappointed” by the discussion at the debate.)
But Obama has dispatched more drones than Dick Cheney likely ever fantasized
about, including the one that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen never
given any trial. He ordered the mission that ended the life of Osama bin Laden.
These aren’t the actions of a commander in chief apologetic about the use of
force. And they’re proof that you can be plenty fearsome without whipping out
the instruments of torture.
We face difficult decisions and a tricky balancing act when it comes to keeping
this country safe, whether from terrorists abroad or criminals coming across the
southern border. And there’s no doubt we can’t be as high-minded as we’d
sometimes like. I for one am not losing any sleep over Awlaki.
But we have to be careful about how far we go — how merciless our strategies,
how self-serving our positions — because the rightful burden of the leadership
we insist on is behavior that’s better than everybody else’s, not the same or
worse. Exceptionalism doesn’t mean picking and choosing when to be big and when
to be small.
October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
KABUL, Afghanistan — Suspects are hung by their hands, beaten
with cables, and in some cases their genitals are twisted until they lose
consciousness in detention facilities run by the Afghan intelligence service and
the Afghan national police, according to a study released Monday by the United
Nations here.
The report provides a devastating picture of the abuses committed by arms of the
Afghanistan government as the American-led foreign forces here are moving to
wind down their presence after a decade of war. The abuses were uncovered even
as American and other Western trainers and mentors had been working closely with
the ministries overseeing the detention facilities and funded their operations.
Acting on early draft of the report seen last month, NATO stopped handing over
detainees to the Afghans in several areas of the country.
The report found evidence of “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic
torture and ill-treatment” during interrogation in the accounts of nearly half
of the detainees of the intelligence service, known as the National Directorate
of Intelligence, who were interviewed by United Nations researchers. The
national police treatment of detainees was somewhat less severe and widespread,
the report found. Its research covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces.
“Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock,
stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard
of international human rights law,” the report said.
One detainee described being brought in for interrogation in Kandahar and having
the interrogator ask if he knew the name of the office and then, after the man
answered, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban, even
stones confess here.”
The man was beaten for several days for hours at a time with electric wire and
then signed a confession, the report said.
The report pointed out that even though the abusive practices are endemic, the
Afghan government does not condone torture and has explicitly said the abuses
found by the United Nations are not government policy.
“Reform is both possible and desired,” said Staffan de Mistura, the United
Nations special representative for Afghanistan, noting that the government had
cooperated with the report’s researchers and has begun to take remedial action.
“We take this report very seriously,” said Shaida Abdali, the deputy director of
Afghanistan’s National Security Council.
“Our government, especially the president, has taken a very strong stand on the
protection of everyone’s human rights, their humanity, everywhere and especially
in prisons and in detention,” he said, adding since he had not yet read the full
document.
The government issued a lengthy response to the report in which the intelligence
service denied using electric shock, threat of rape and the twisting of sexual
organs, but allowed that there were “deficiencies” in a war-torn country that
routinely faced suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. It also said it
had set up an assessment unit to look in to the problem, and had dismissed
several employees at a unit known as Department 124, where the United Nations
said the torture appeared to have been the most endemic. The intelligence
service is now admonishing newly assigned interrogators to observe human rights,
the government said in its response.
Ultimately the prosecution of the torturers is required, said Georgette Gagnon,
the director of the human rights for the United Nations here, in order to
“prevent and end such acts in the future.”
In the absence of remedial changes by the Afghans, the information could trigger
a provision under American law, known as the Leahy amendment, that would stop
some financing for the Afghan security forces, according to human rights
experts.
The report overall raises broad ethical questions about the American funding of
foreign security forces whose military and law enforcement officials routinely
use torture. There have been a number of instances that raise similar questions
including in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and El Salvador, according to a RAND report
in 2006. Aid to Colombia in fighting its drug cartels and insurgents also has
raised some of these issues.
In the case of Afghanistan, there appears to have been little effort made to
scrutinize the country’s security practices, especially for detainees, perhaps
in part because of political pressure to move as much responsibility as possible
to the Afghans and to reduce American involvement here.
Of the 324 conflict-related detainees interviewed, 89 had been handed over to
the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces
and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. The
United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained
person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for
believing they are at risk of torture.
With that in mind as well as the military’s institutional view that torture is
not a reliable way to obtain usable intelligence, NATO Commander Gen. John
Allen, after seeing a draft of the report in early September, halted transfers
of suspected insurgents to 16 of the facilities identified as sites where
torture or abuse routinely takes place.
Earlier in the summer, NATO already had halted detainee transfers to
intelligence and police authorities in four provinces based on other reports of
torture and mistreatment. General Allen has now initiated a plan to investigate
the facilities, help in training in modern interrogation techniques and then
monitor the Afghan government’s practices. The American Embassy is heavily
involved now in working on a long-term monitoring program for detention
facilities and is working with NATO to put that in place.
Disturbing new questions have been raised about the role of doctors and other
medical professionals in helping the Central Intelligence Agency subject
terrorism suspects to harsh treatment, abuse and torture.
The Red Cross previously documented, from interviews with “high-value”
prisoners, that medical personnel helped facilitate abuses in the C.I.A.’s
“enhanced interrogation program” during the Bush administration. Now Physicians
for Human Rights has suggested that the medical professionals may also have
violated national and international laws setting limits on what research can be
performed on humans.
The physicians’ group, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., analyzed a wide range
of previously released government documents and reports, many of them heavily
censored. It found that the Bush administration used medical personnel —
including doctors, psychologists and physician assistants — to help justify acts
that had long been classified by law and treaty as illegal or unethical and to
redefine them as safe, legal and effective when used on terrorism suspects.
The group’s report focused particularly on a few issues where medical personnel
played an important role — determining how far a harsh interrogation could go,
providing legal cover against prosecution and designing future interrogation
procedures. The actual monitoring data are not publicly available, but the group
was able to deduce from the guidelines governing the program what role the
health professionals played, assuming they followed the rules.
In the case of waterboarding, a technique in which prisoners are brought to the
edge of drowning, health professionals were required to monitor the practice and
keep detailed medical records. Their findings led to several changes, including
a switch to saline solution as the near-drowning agent instead of water,
ostensibly to protect the health of detainees who ingest large volumes of liquid
but also, the group says, to allow repeated use of waterboarding on the same
subject.
Another government memorandum concluded from medical observations on 25
detainees that combining several techniques — say a face slap with water dousing
or a stress kneeling position — caused no more pain than when the techniques
were used individually. That was used to justify the application of multiple
techniques at the same time.
The group concludes that health professionals who facilitated these practices
were in essence conducting research and experimentation on human subjects. The
main purposes of such research, the group says, were to determine how to use
various techniques, to calibrate the levels of pain and to create a legal basis
for defending interrogators from potential prosecution under antitorture laws.
The interrogators could claim that they had acted in good faith in accord with
medical judgments of safety and had not intended to inflict extreme suffering.
The report from the physicians’ group does not prove its case beyond doubt — how
could it when so much is still hidden? — but it rightly calls on the White House
and Congress to investigate the potentially illegal human experimentation and
whether those who authorized or conducted it should be punished. Those are just
two of the many unresolved issues from the Bush administration that President
Obama and Congressional leaders have swept under the carpet.
Ever since Americans learned that American
soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a
disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States
law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?
The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear
knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only
approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of
harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from
justice those who followed the orders.
We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its
Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC
News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national
security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy:
Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the
attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath
of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin
Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House
Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including
brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.
Mr. Bush told ABC News this month that he knew of these meetings and approved of
the result.
Those who have followed the story of the administration’s policies on prisoners
may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department
redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and
offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.
The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very
highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact,
about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in
the name of saving the American way of life.
We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who
has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was
Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who
should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts
captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of
the disastrous effect on America’s standing in the world? Did anyone?
Mr. Bush has sidestepped or quashed every attempt to uncover the breadth and
depth of his sordid actions. Congress is likely to endorse a cover-up of the
extent of the illegal wiretapping he authorized after 9/11, and we are still
waiting, with diminishing hopes, for a long-promised report on what the Bush
team really knew before the Iraq invasion about those absent weapons of mass
destruction — as opposed to what it proclaimed.
At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a
new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and
accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.
Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully
understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law
and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair
the damage and ensure it does not happen again.
Records kept by the SS Oberführer in
charge show the deaths at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar numbered
6,477 in January, 5,614 in February, 5,479 in March, and 915 in April. The April
toll was only up to the 10th of the month. The next day the American Third Army
overran the area and brought release to the 21,000 inmates at this resort of
starvation, torture, hangings and shootings.
Mostly the inmates were pitiful
wrecks. At one time up to 80,000 people from a score of nations were here made
to work long hours on the production of bombs.
When the sound of gunfire from the approaching Americans was heard, thousands of
the inmates were marched off by 600 SS Guards to an unknown destination. Then
the camp underground acted, overpowered the remaining guards, locked them up in
small cells, and ran the camp themselves till the Americans arrived.
There were mass exterminations of 12,500 Jews in May and June, 1938. After the
Nazi occupation of Austria a great influx of political prisoners and Jews took
place.
With the outbreak of war several thousand Vienna and Polish Jews were
slaughtered. One hundred and four Polish snipers taken prisoner were left
foodless until they died. After the Munich beer-cellar bomb incident in 1939, 21
Jews were shot at random and the remainder forbidden food for five days.
In July, 1941, two truckloads of prisoners taken to Pirna died under poison-gas
experiments. In March, 1942, four truckloads of 90 Jews each were taken to
Bernburg experimental laboratory and died there.
In October, 1941, about 7,000 Russian prisoners of war were shot in the stables
at Buchenwald, the usual scene of the shootings. According to prisoners, the
outstanding place of extermination was Auschwitz, near Cracow, where they said
4,000,000 Jewish, Polish and Russian men, women, and children were liquidated.
Buchenwald evidence repeatedly writes off hundreds as transported to Auschwitz.
Some 60,000 to 75,000 opponents of Hitlerism have perished at Buchenwald. Here,
over these acres of suffering and misery enclosed by electrically charged
fencing, is the stark gruesome reality of Fascism, with cells, a crematorium -
in the ovens of which still lay charred skeletons and piles of ashes - a
gallows, an experimental laboratory and a cellar store in which normally 500
bodies awaited transfer to the busy crematorium.
Hangings were carried out in a cellar from which an electric lift carried the
bodies to the incinerators above.
The following are extracts from
letters written by British prisoners of war in Germany.
These letters are censored in
Germany, but sometimes through carelessness, the complaints are not deleted, and
sometimes passages marked by examiners as undesirable are left in or only partly
deleted. In this way we learn what these men are suffering. One writes: "I am
working in chemico-manure works near Stettin. It is heavy work, loading up sacks
of manure in railway trucks and unloading barges of ironstone. We work ten hours
a day, barring Sundays. We get half a pound of bread and three bowls of soup a
day. There is no stay in the food for a man to work on ... I never felt so weak
before."
Another letter runs: "We have been working here three months. It is what they
call a surface mine or an open mine; the hours are too long ... The Germans told
us it was a reprisal, as our people were keeping German prisoners in our
trenches."
Most of the letters complain of the long hours. One man states that he is
working in a coal pit for twelve hours a day, and for this he is receiving the
sum of five shillings a week.
Another writes: "I came to work at six this morning, and won't finish till six
tomorrow morning. I tell you it's no joke." And another writes: "I still manage
to put a letter together, such as it is. Yes, work, and it's all work, only 14
hours per day, not long when you say it quick."
The worst cases are in the mines. Here is a sample: "The bosses in the mines are
all-powerful, and frequently order men who are prisoners of war to work two
shifts, which means 16 hours underground, or 19 hours' absence from their living
quarters, and that on four small slices of brown bread, unless they take some
with them out of their pockets; also they are abused without the slightest
provocation.
"There are 24 young English lads who arrived here last week, and who, ignorant
of the language and mining alike, have been beaten with sticks. Slapping the
face with the hand is a common occurrence, and you have to consider the name
'swine' a term of endearment. In my own case, I have been very savagely attacked
on two occasions by under-bosses, because I resented this face-slapping and
being ordered to work two shifts without reason, and I have ample evidence in
the shape of big scars on my head made by a pit lamp."
These are the things that have escaped the German censor. What of those that he
has blotted out?
