The full extent of what was done in our name remains unclear, and there are still big gaps in our understanding of how it all came to pass. Just how many people were detained by the U.S. government in the so-called “war on terror”? How many of them should never have been held in the first place? How many of them were mistreated, and how badly? Did torture and abuse produce valuable information? How much did it embolden our enemies? How many people knew what was going on? Where in the chain of command does the responsibility lie? Why didn’t more people object? How direct was the link between what happened in the offices of the president and vice president and the cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How willful was the administration’s corruption of the law?And it’s not just torture and detention. When it comes to warrantless surveillance, for instance, what little we know about the program as it still exists today is still considerably more than we know about the program as it operated before the revolt in Bush’s own Justice Department. What were we doing from 2001 to 2004 such that even John Ashcroft couldn’t bring himself to approve it any longer? How many people have been wiretapped without a warrant? What happened to all the data?
The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed “interrogation plans” to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time.
The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important.
At the same time that allegations are coming out that are very unfortunate for his boss:
Condoleezza Rice, John D. Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials approved as early as the summer of 2002 the CIA’s use at secret prisons of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, a technique that new Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has described as illegal torture, according to a chronology prepared by the Senate intelligence committee and declassified by Holder.
…..
Rice gave a key early green light when, as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, she met on July 17, 2002, with the CIA’s then-director, George J. Tenet, and “advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaida,” subject to approval by the Justice Department, according to the timeline.
And it is even possible that the ‘Torture Memos’ meant to provide legal cover for criminal activities were too late in some cases:
As regards the front-line officials who actually laid hands (or insects, as the case may be) on detainees and tortured them, the somewhat plausible claim has been that they were not lawyers, that they were entitled to rely on opinions of the OLC, and that it would be wrong to punish them for trusting the Justice Department.
There are two problems with this argument…Some of the CIA torture, and it appears at least one likely murder, preceded the torture memos.
See also FOARP, who has been on this beat for some time.
Jonathan Turley, of Georgetown Law, is unequivocal:
Georgetown University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley says the evidence is insurmountable. “There is an undeniable claim of a crime here, a war crime,” he said.
[Update]
Opinio Juris:
Scholars who believe that the individuals who wrote the OLC memos authorizing torture should be criminally prosecuted — as I do — …[should cite] the Ministries Case, in which a number of government ministers, state secretaries, and high-ranking members of the Nazi party were convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
…
The parallels between the Foreign Office’s role in the SS deportations and the OLC’s role in the CIA’s torture regime are uncanny. Nothing is lost if we simply substitute “Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury” for “Woermann and von Weizsaecker,” “OLC” for “Foreign Office,” and “torture” for “deportations.”
The way this story has just blown up, having been at least something that anyone of reasonable intelligence should have given some credence to at least since the Abu Ghraib scandal, is just amazing. One gets the sense that a lot of people had wanted to speak on this but were afraid to jump at the wrong time. The debate is useful, in that the longer it goes on, the more that is revealed, the less useful a ‘peace and reconciliation/truth commission’ becomes, because such a commission could only go forward on the basis of granting some form of immunity in exchange for information. The more of the ‘truth’ the public has, the less those who ordered, facilitated, and approved torture have in the way of bargaining chips.
Nor do people seem to be so stupid as to imagine that slamming a man’s head against a wall 30 times a day, depriving him of sleep for 180 hours, waterboarding him 183 times in one month, threatening to kill his family, playing on phobias, keeping him shackled in ‘stress positions’, keeping naked except for an ‘adult diaper’, and beating him around the face and abdomen are things that can be done without inflicting ‘severe pain and suffering’, even if most of the people subjected to the treatment are not those you would normally feel much sympathy for. If this does not result in charges being brought, it will be extremely difficult for the Attorney General to explain why – especially given that people went to jail for doing pretty much the same thing in Abu Ghraib.
Opinio Juris is right to point out the historical parallels, especially given that the intended victims were ‘non-citizens’, who apparently deserved no minimal standard of care as they were neither suspected criminals, nor convicts, nor POWs, nor persons awaiting deportation and were not within US control or jurisdiction. The urge to re-define human beings as non-people seems to be one common to all tyranny.