Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (7 page)

During the “shock and awe” barrage of cruise missiles and other airborne weaponry that opened the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill “high value targets” (HVTs), including Saddam Hussein and General Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq’s number two
official. According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike “thought likely to result in the deaths of more than thirty civilians.” The air war commander, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, proposed fifty such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one.

As it turned out, none succeeded. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound south of Baghdad was a major fiasco. American intelligence reported Saddam there in an underground bunker that would require particularly large bombs. He was not there, however, nor was any bunker, but the air force killed a lot of Iraqi civilians. Similarly, an April 7 raid in the Mansur district of Baghdad killed only innocent bystanders. The deaths accomplished nothing except to show off America s lethal, high-tech weaponry. Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the “high-value targeting cell” within the Pentagon, described the entire campaign as an “abject failure” and added, “We failed to kill the HVTs and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population.”
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Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, commented on these and later destructive attacks, “American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion.... The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, American public opinion, media and the [2004] election victory of the Bush administration have left the world’s most powerful military without practical restraint.”
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As a second example of the administration s failure to think and make moral judgments, consider the global network of military prisons it has created in which inmates are routinely tortured. On May 17, 2004, the
Army Times
reported that around the halls of the Pentagon a caustic label had emerged for the enlisted soldiers shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos: “the six morons who lost the war.”
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I would suggest that there were actually seven morons, not six, and they were not enlisted men. The seven are President George W. Bush; his former legal counsel and subsequently attorney general of the United States Alberto Gonzales; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
General Richard B. Myers; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq until mid-2004; Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander at Guantanamo until April 2004, when he took over Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John W. Warner (Republican from Virginia).
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These are the people who disgraced the United States and did nothing about it when the details of Abu Ghraib in particular began to be revealed to the public. As the Israeli court that sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death insisted: “The degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand.”
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This is as true in cases of official torture as it is for genocide.

President Bush was directly responsible for removing the legal restraints against torture. On the evening of September 11, 2001, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he returned to Washington and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Following his speech, he met with his senior officials concerned with the crisis in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, who was there, Bush entered the room and said, “I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.” In the ensuing discussion, according to Clarke, “Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room. T don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ “
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As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, “We got off on the wrong foot on the very first day.”
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Without question Secretary Rumsfeld heeded what the commander in chief told him. Later that autumn, during the interrogations of John Walker Lindh, our first post-9/11 torture victim, Rumsfeld instructed his legal counsel to order the military intelligence officials to “take the gloves off.” In the early stages of his interrogation under torture, Lindh’s responses were cabled to the Pentagon hourly followed by return orders to keep up the pressure.

Lindh was then a twenty-year-old, white, middle-class American citizen
from Marin County, California, who had converted to Islam, gone to Yemen and Pakistan to study religious texts and Arabic, and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, barely a month before the 9/11 attacks. The CIA found him, badly wounded, in a prison of one of the Northern Alliance warlords, our allies in the war against the Taliban.

His American captors stripped and humiliated him, denied him medical treatment, and tortured him for information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. According to Richard A. Serrano of the
Los Angeles Times,
who was shown secret military documents detailing the treatment of Lindh, he “was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days.”
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Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to try Lindh as a traitor but in the end settled for a guilty plea on charges of aiding the Taliban and a twenty-year sentence rather than let Lindh’s lawyers seek testimony from captives held at Guantanamo about his torture. As part of his plea bargain, Lindh was forced to sign a statement saying: “The defendant agrees that this agreement puts to rest his claims of mistreatment by the United States military, and all claims of mistreatment are withdrawn. The defendant acknowledges that he was not intentionally mistreated by the U.S. military.” As journalist Dave Lindorff observes, Lindh “remains almost certainly wrongfully imprisoned.”
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Thus began practices that would ultimately infect and contaminate virtually all aspects of the “war on terror.” Thanks to the research of Alfred W. McCoy, who has studied the history of U.S. government torture and the CIA’s application of it from the early days of the Cold War, its use was not unknown in American clandestine operations.
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In collaboration with the British, the CIA invented new forms of mental torture that relied on inducing terror, which often did irreversible psychological damage, in addition to such techniques as “water-boarding” or what our Latin American military allies call the “submarino.” It involves being held under water until you think you will die. There was, however, great nervousness about using these techniques because laws and international treaties passed and signed during the middle and late years of the Cold War had clearly made torture a crime. Bush and Rumsfeld ordered these restraints removed, and all the old methods were soon back in use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and at secret CIA prisons around the world.

Bush’s responsibility for legalizing torture came in two key decisions.
The first was his September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Agreement, or “finding”—jargon for a presidential directive authorizing a particular CIA covert operation. This vastly expanded the CIA’s activities worldwide, including its payments to the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan to resume the civil war against the Taliban with American air support. Bush also authorized the global pursuit of al-Qaeda “permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations [in some eighty countries] without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation” and—most important—removed ail constraints and safeguards over the CIA’s already existing program of “extraordinary rendition.”
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The latter term is a euphemism for abducting people anywhere on Earth, including inside the United States, and secretly flying them to countries whose police and intelligence personnel are more than happy to torture them for us or where the United States runs its own secret prisons for doing so. Such countries and territories reportedly have included Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia, Pakistan, and unidentified Eastern European nations. The military or the CIA also run some twenty-five prisons in Afghanistan and seventeen in Iraq.
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Rendition is a violation of international law, since the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted December 10, 1984, and ratified by the U. S. Congress in October 1994, specifically says, “No state . . . shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The Geneva Conventions also contain articles stipulating the same prohibition.
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Bush’s most fateful decision on torture, however, came in a presidential memorandum drafted by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, and endorsed by Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the president. Dated January 18, 2002, the memo was (without evident irony) entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.” On February 7, it was disseminated to the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the director of the CIA, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the memo, captives from the battlefields of Afghanistan need not be given prisoner-of-war status and the U.S. government would therefore
not abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war.
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This key decision opened the door to the torture of captives at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo naval base, Cuba, and most infamously at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Why did Bush do it? It was, in a sense, an admission of guilt. Once he got caught up in his own rhetoric about the “global war on terror” and had issued orders to the CIA and military to act secretly against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I believe he felt that he had to protect his agents from being charged under the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty. By declaring captives to be “illegal combatants,” a term that does not exist in international law, and asserting that the Geneva Conventions simply did not apply to them, he freed his agents to torture and do as they pleased. As one intelligence official told
New Yorker
reporter Seymour Hersh, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’“
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Had the president restricted his target explicitly to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which had carried out the 9/11 attacks, and moved against it through law enforcement means, the Geneva Conventions would indeed not have come into play and the whole issue of torture could have been avoided. He would have received global cooperation (including from the governments of most Middle Eastern countries) and would surely have been more successful in countering the threat of terrorism than through the route he actually chose. There is widespread agreement among officials in the field, including FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo, that information extracted under torture is usually worthless, that torture largely compels its victims to say what the torturer wants to hear, and that the use of torture precludes building a legal case against a particular captive. Moreover, the people rounded up in Afghanistan usually did not have valuable information, since most of them had been turned over to the Americans by Northern Alliance warlords for the bounties the United States was paying.
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In October 2004, the deputy commander at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Martin Lucent, said to the press that most of his 550 prisoners had revealed nothing of value: “Most of these guys weren’t fighting, they were running.”
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The president seems to have authorized torture largely for its symbolic value—the desire of his administration and its neoconservative backers to show the world that the United States was indeed a new Rome, that it
could act with impunity unchecked by any established norms of international law. It was the first sign of the administrations determination to overawe the world with American power, soon enough embodied in the new strategy of “shock and awe”—the name the military gave its opening cruise missile and bombing salvos against Baghdad in March 20 03.
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Bush himself said to the
Washington Post’s
Bob Woodward, “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that [sic] was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we’re after ‘em. And that was not only for domestic, for the people at home to see. It was also vitally important for the rest of the world to watch.”
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“There are only two ways to govern,” writes Naomi Klein, the award-winning Canadian journalist, “with consent or with fear.”
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Under George Bush, the United States decided to rule Afghanistan and Iraq through fear, and from this naturally followed disappearances without charges, indefinite detentions, torture, and “extraordinary renditions.” David Brooks, the right-wing pundit for Rupert Murdoch’s
Weekly Standard
and a columnist for the
New York Times,
accurately predicted that after 9/11: “We will care a lot more about ends—winning the war—than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois values like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.”
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