Donald Rumsfeld

Tomgram: An American Hell

Tom Engelhardt — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:24:18 -0700

Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

Don't Turn the Page on History: Facing the American World We Created

We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn't keep that body's "Gang of Eight" informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We're told that the CIA -- being the president's private army and part of the executive branch of our government -- has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even "be illegal," according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA's own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations -- sometimes wiping out innocent civilians -- from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never -- we're told -- off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there's much that we don't know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration's deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA's-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we're told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to "look forward, not backward."

Of course, he's not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but -- just for a moment -- let's not.

Admittedly, we're a people who don't really believe in history -- so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we -- not just the Obama administration -- have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn't been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn't we do? Let's review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques -- known to the previous administration and most of the media as "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the "cleansing" of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out -- and still carry out -- assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined "torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don't think that that's anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It's only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what's missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It's a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared "war," made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don't believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don't face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson -- the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson -- of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam -- and Laos and Cambodia -- because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush, "kicked the Vietnam syndrome." It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country -- and they remain monstrously large -- we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of... well, of us and our "safety." We need to face who we've been and just how badly we've acted, if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren't we the people your mother warned you about?

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Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Obama is a Neocon Liar

TomUsher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:00:45 -0700

The following is my commentary concerning, "UN Official Demands Torture Accountability," (by Edger. Antemedius.com. July 2, 2009) and specifically Edger's comment at the end of that post as follows, "Where is the line between avoiding the issue, and becoming complicit and an accessory?"

Hi Edger,

Yours is an excellently posed question: "Where is the line between avoiding the issue, and becoming complicit and an accessory?" There is definitely an element of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" in Obama's tightrope walking. His handlers and he are trying to get away with not calling a spade a spade -- not calling waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation techniques" what they are: torture. Due to Obama's approach to life (his severely deficient worldview), he cannot roundly expose and denounce all the lies going back to the beginning of time while at the same time calling for peace and reconciliation without being directly confronted with having to include his stated arch enemies, the Pashtuns, he has conflated with the Taliban, conflated with al Qaeda, ignored as a CIA creation.

To advance the construction of purely worldly Empire, hypocritically, Obama murders Pashtuns while feigning he wants only to look forward or "just move on," as the neocons are so fond of saying concerning all neocon evils (your point, Edger: "avoiding the issues").

So, Obama has his war in Pakistan that he's managed to get the Pakistani military to wage as an illegal imperial proxy. It is estimated that he's now directly responsible for the murder of 600-800 civilians, including many women, children, and babies via his use of predator drones (that some are moving to declare illegal, but why stop there?). He has created some 2-3 million internal war refugees. We don't know how many have been killed by the Pakistani military, but those deaths as well are on Obama's and Obama's accomplice's hands.

What were the capital crimes of the Pakistani Pashtuns, that they wanted their local brand of sharia? When was the evidence presented to the world and a ruling made under international law, which is the law of the land in the United States by virtue of explicit language in the U.S. Constitution? Such evidence was never provided and no such ruling occurred.

The border with Afghanistan is porous. The Pashtuns live on either side. They are close relatives. Under the illegal President, George W. Bush (illegal via an illegal ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court), the U.S., gave only trumped-up reasons for making war on the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban had asked for evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. No such evidence was supplied to the Taliban or to the world because no such evidence was available. All the neocons and Bush simply ignored that and went to war, which is a war crime for which he should have been impeached, tried, and removed from office posthaste.

Obama should likewise have already been impeached, tried, and removed from office. Obama's Vice President, Joe Biden would then be held to the same standard, which isn't very high at all.

When George W. Bush had Osama bin Laden in his sights, he gave the order not to shoot. He rather allowed the CIA operative to cross Afghanistan in a caravan of vehicles on the road that the U.S. didn't attack or block even though the U.S. "owned" the roads at that point. Then Bush had Afghani proxies surround Tora Bora on only three sides, leaving the Pakistan border wide open for Osama and Osama's people to exit the mountain stronghold (via clearly known passes easily targeted by U.S. airpower) into Pakistan. In addition, the U.S. military actually conducted an air evacuation of thousands from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Middle-and lower-level U.S. personnel were not allowed to hinder the mass exodus, even though the group couldn't help but contain al Qaeda. Even general officers were stunned by the Pentagon's (Donald Rumsfeld's and Bush's, et al's) complicity.

So, why did Bush want Osama bin Laden from the Taliban in the first place? Was he sure that they wouldn't give him up without evidence?

Now, just how afraid was Bush that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden would attack within U.S. borders in any attack not coordinated with and approved by the neocons? He had little to no such fears.

Bush did all of that (was the front man) to keep the "War on Terrorism" alive for an excuse for the U.S. with Israel and Britain to takeover the whole Middle East, which if one looks at the maps where the U.S. is now calling the shots, is quickly becoming part of the Empire in the most megalomaniacal sense.

We've read recently that as a sign to Iran and others, Egypt, which is headed by a U.S. propped-up dictator, Hosni Mubarak, allowed an Israeli submarine, no doubt equipped with nuclear missiles, to go through the Suez Canal. We've also read that the Saudi Royal Family, another antidemocratic, fascistic, U.S. propped-up dictatorial regime, has announced that it will allow the Israelis to over fly the Saudi Kingdom in an air raid on Iran. Add to this the recent asinine statement of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. would not block such an attack, even where Israel has provided no more evidence against Iran than has been so far presented, which is absolutely zero, and one is left to conclude that the Empire is floating all of this to gauge the attention span, awareness, understanding, and resolve of the righteous-minded.

Speak out now loudly and widely that they will all yet be held to account for hard, substantiated, publicly provided evidence or watch it all unfold and be complicit yourselves.

Hosni Mubarak is nominally Sunni. The Saudis profess Islam as Sunnis, but they are forced to pretend greater devotion by reason of Mecca (the second choice of Mohammed for the geographical center of his misleading religion) being within their borders. King Hussein of Jordan is on Obama's lap as well. Certainly, Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan is there, as evidenced by his willingness to destroy his own people on orders from Obama. Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq may baulk as much as possible for a show (being Shia), but he does not defy the U.S. where it matters. The U.S. fortress embassy is to remain. The U.S. bases are to be consolidated but some forward troops are to remain just in case. The oil will flow but only as okayed by the U.S. That's the crux. If anyone in Iraq tries to gain ultimate control of Iraqi oil, he is to be eliminated and replaced one way or another. Al-Maliki and all other Iraqis know this full well, despite Bush's ambiguous proclamations that the oil under Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. The war was first and foremost to control oil. Bush and Cheney didn't invade for the sand or even the precious water. Oil is still big money. Money buys individual souls and whole nations and eventually the world, so hopes the person on the planet richest in mammon, who is not Bill Gates but whose identity is rather completely hidden from public view.

So, what areas are at all still in mundane question? Syria is Shia and not completely on board with the Empire, yet. Lebanon is in turmoil, but as the Empire's proxy, Israel is largely responsible for handling them directly, much in the fashion Zardari is now "handling" the Pashtuns. Turkey is a NATO member, and while it has it's concerns about the Kurds, it's been allowed to show the Kurds that the U.S. will not sacrifice Turkey for Kurdish impunity. So, concerning the Stans that fall outside the former Soviet Union and the other Islamic nations in the area, only Iran stands squarely and defiantly against Anglo-American-Israeli imperial domination.

The U.S. neocons (Anglo-American-Israeli worldly and clearly self-admitted Machiavellian empire-builders) are doing all the things in their minds to demonize and destabilize the Iranian Islamic theocracy. They point to all the evils, and even concerning the more righteous aspects, they twist those too to cause the gullible to perceive them as more evil than the U.S. alternative.

I don't hold with Islamic theocracy. Obviously, I don't though hold with the neocons. In fact, the neocons are wickeder, even wickedest.

Obama is a neocon. Know it. He's a liar. Don't trust him, ever.

Cross-posted at: http://www.realliberalchristianchurch.org/?p=3257

John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and the Systematic Torture of Prisoners

Jason Leopold — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:44:34 -0700

On January 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon's top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the US Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," the directives said.

Among the issues to be addressed were "policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured US military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of US armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Defense Department] interrogators."

John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. It essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the Executive Branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

The legal opinion for military interrogators was virtually identical to an earlier memo that Yoo had written in August 2002 for CIA interrogators. Widely called the "Torture Memo," it provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.

But Yoo did not work on the legal opinions alone.

Pentagon Frustrations

In early January 2003, commanders stationed at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba complained to Rumsfeld that military officials were unable to glean information from prisoners about alleged terrorist plots in the US and abroad using conventional interrogation methods.

Following his conversation with military officials, on January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld sent William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, a memo requesting that he form a "working group" to determine what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

Haynes asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for guidance and selected Walker to chair a "working group" to write a report on legally permissible interrogation techniques.

The members of the group included former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAGs) from all four branches of the military.

By the time Walker's group had settled in for its first meeting, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had already begun to violate the Geneva Conventions.

To ratchet up pressure on prisoners, US military personnel were experimenting with unusual tactics, including placing women's underwear on prisoners' heads, a technique that later reappeared in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

A military official, who took part in discussions with Walker's group, told The Wall Street Journal in June 2004 that there was a growing frustration among interrogators.

"We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them," the official said, adding that threats were even made against the families of detainees.

The official said the message to a detainee would be: "I'm on the line with somebody in Yemen and he's in a room with your family and a grenade that's going to pop unless you talk."

Framing the Debate

While Walker's report was being drafted, the group discussed 35 different interrogation techniques that could be used to obtain information from prisoners.

Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners' clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of methods still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."

Such degrading tactics violated the Geneva Conventions, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

The more extreme interrogation methods that made it into the final draft of the report rankled some of the JAGs, who feared the methods would put US soldiers in danger if they were captured - and would tarnish the reputation and image of the US abroad.

"Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values," wrote Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, a member of the "working group," in a February 2003 letter to Walker.

"How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism?" asked Lohr.

The admiral was so upset with the draft report and the advice provided by the Justice Department that he requested Walker include a sentence in the final report making it clear that the legal findings were based exclusively on attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Lohr was not alone. Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, who at the time was judge advocate general of the Air Force, also wrote a letter to Walker warning that the interrogation techniques in the report would violate military law.

"Several of the exceptional techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice]," Rives wrote. "Treating detainees inconsistently with the [Geneva] Convention arguably 'lowers the bar' for the treatment of US POW's in future conflicts."

Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, an Army JAG, and Brig. Gen. Kevin M. Sandkuhler, a Marine Corps JAG, also voiced concerns, specifically the determination that the president has the power to override the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other federal statutes and international treaties in the name of national security.

Defending Bush's Authority

Walker's group addressed these concerns, according to the report, by stating, in legal terms, that the president had the constitutional authority as commander in chief to ignore torture laws if national security were in jeopardy.

On March 6, 2003, eight days before Yoo issued his legal opinion, Walker sent Rumsfeld a draft 53-page "working group" report that said international treaties forbidding torture did not apply to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The report, which asserted that President Bush had "sweeping" powers as commander in chief, said Bush could suspend international laws and treaties governing torture in the name of national security.

"In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority," the report stated.

The Justice Department could not prosecute military interrogators "who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the President's constitutional power," the report added.

Further, the report said that if a prisoner died as a result of a brutal interrogation technique, the interrogator would not be subject to prosecution if he had acted in a "good faith" effort to save lives.

"Good faith may be a complete defense," the report said. "Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law."

The report cited a legal text, "Substantive Criminal Law" by Wayne LaFave and Austin W. Scott, to support the legality of the interrogation methods: "In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person ... so long as the harm avoided is greater."

Rumsfeld signed the final report on April 2, 2003, two weeks after Bush ordered US forces to invade Iraq.

One year later, photos depicting US soldiers abusing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicly released.

Congressional Reaction

The tide began to turn against Yoo's and Walker's expansive attitudes toward presidential authority when Jack Goldsmith took over as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and, by early 2004, had rescinded Yoo's opinions.

On June 15, 2004, the Senate passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill backed by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, to give JAGs the same legal authority as military attorneys, like Walker, who are appointed by the president.

The amendment, dubbed the "Mary Walker bill," was spurred by complaints from JAGs, who said Walker had ignored their legal concerns about the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

In February 2008, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed that it had launched a formal investigation into whether Yoo and other attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel gave the White House poor legal advice in authorizing CIA interrogators to use waterboarding to glean information about terrorist plots from prisoners.

In effect, the legal opinions from Walker and Yoo sought to provide a basis for the Bush administration to circumvent US and international laws prohibiting torture of prisoners.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the United Nations Committee Against Torture reaffirmed the prohibitions contained in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The Convention - approved by 145 nations, including the United States - states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors.

The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as "a significant step" in preventing torture, which he called "an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today."

In a May 20, 1988, message to the US Senate, Reagan noted that "the core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called 'universal jurisdiction.'

"Each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Walker, Yoo, and other Bush administration officials sought to bypass.

Although the treaty mandates that the United States cooperate in the criminal prosecution of torturers, the administration's post-9/11 legal opinions sought to shield American interrogators.

The Walker report, which was tailored to fit with Yoo's legal arguments, advised military interrogators that they could defend their actions by saying Justice Department lawyers told them that their methods were legal.

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Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

Detainees Were Also Murdered at Bagram in Afghanistan

Jason Leopold — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:18:12 -0700

A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan Congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of prisoners held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side."

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibullah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

According to a detailed account in 2005 in The New York Times, Dilawar, a taxi driver, was apprehended December 5 by US forces and taken to Bagram and interrogated about a rocket attack on an American base.

Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on December 10, 2002.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar's leg was pummeled so badly that the "tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified."

"Had Dilawar lived," Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."

In fact, as The New York Times reported in May 2005, when Dilawar was murdered, "most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time."

The US military never produced any evidence to prove that either Habibullah or Dilawar had connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The detainees interviewed by the BBC during a two-month investigation said they were also apprehended and indefinitely imprisoned at Bagram on suspicion of being members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

The details of the murders of Dilawar and Habibullah at the hands of military interrogators have been previously reported. But the Senate report included new information about the behind-the-scenes meetings that took place between high-level Pentagon officials in the months before their deaths where "enhanced interrogation" policies implemented at Bagram were discussed.

Those policies were also directly responsible for the torture of some of the prisoners who were interviewed by the BBC.

Previous reports, including one from the Army's criminal investigative unit, pinned Dilawar's and Habibullah's murders on rogue soldiers and on-the-ground military officials, but had never linked the murders directly to the interrogation policies enacted by the Bush administration.

Indeed, a report into detainee abuse commissioned by Rumsfeld and completed by his handpicked investigator in 2004, former Naval inspector general Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, cleared Pentagon officials stating they "did not promulgate interrogation policies ... that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees."

The Church report said Dilawar's and Habibullah's deaths were isolated incidents that a few rogue soldiers were responsible for. But the Church report failed to take into account Rumsfeld's directive to military officials at Bagram to get tougher with detainees and obtain "actionable intelligence" through "detainee exploitation," which, according to the Armed Services report, resulted in widespread abuse at Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

In February, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained, under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, two pages from the Church report that had been classified for the past five years. Those documents included details of two detainee deaths at Bagram in December 2002 believed to be Dilawar and Habibullah, but those pages did not identify the detainees who were killed by name. The ACLU said they believed the two pages were withheld by the Bush administration to cover-up evidence of war crimes.

A declassified version of the 360-page Church report, delivered to Congress in March 2004, said there was "no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture," which critics of the Bush administration believed was a cover-up.

But the Armed Services Committee report undercuts those specific conclusions and flatly states that policy directives authorized by Rumsfeld were a contributing factor to the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah.

The report says, "The use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands of Bagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides."

The report makes clear it was Rumsfeld's interrogation directives and a February 7, 2002, action memorandum signed by Bush suspending the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners that "opened the door" to the systematic abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The committee traced the murders of Dilawar and Habibullah to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the US launched an attack against the Taliban government.

At that time, a Special Mission Unit Task Force (SMU TF) was charged with interrogating prisoners they believed were linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Armed Services Committee report said in October 2001 the SMU TF was sent to Afghanistan "with a mission," and the rest of the description contained in the report from that point was redacted.

"While SMU TF operators conducted a limited amount of direct questioning, or, 'screening' of detainees while on the battlefield, it appears that they did not conduct interrogations until at least October 2002," the report says. "Prior to that point, SMU personnel had observed interrogations conducted by Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF-180), which had assumed control of US and coalition forces in Afghanistan at the end of May 2002."

A footnote contained in the Armed Services Committee report notes that Vice Admiral Church "examined interrogation techniques used by SMU in the USCENTCOM area of responsibility."

But Church's report "did not discuss the SMUs" work interrogating prisoners.

The Armed Services Committee report goes on to say that SMU TF members gleaned interrogation techniques for Bagram from Guantanamo during a two-day visit there in October 2002.

The visit took place "just as the [Joint Task Force-170 stationed at Guantanamo] were finalizing a request submitted to SOUTHCOM ... to use interrogation techniques including stress positions, removal of clot?ing, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, hooding, use of detainee phobias such as dogs, exposure to cold weather or water, and non-injurious contact such as grabbing, poking and pushing."

Dilawar and Habibullah were subjected to a combination of those techniques, such as stress positions and hooding, and that played a major role in their deaths, the Armed Services Committee report concluded.

In late October 2001, the SMU TF returned to Afghanistan and a proposal was made to the SMU Commander there. SMU TF "outlined a rationale" for conducting its own interrogations at Bagram.

They recommended the "imaginative but legal use of non-lethal psychological techniques (i.e., battlefield noises/chaos, barking dogs, etc.)" as well as stress techniques such as "sensory deprivation (hoods, silence, flex cuffs), sensory overload (shouting, gun shots, white noise, machinery noise) and manipulation of the environment (hot, cold, wet. windy, hard surfaces)."

Those methods are identical to the torturous techniques the two-dozen detainees interviewed by the BBC said they endured while imprisoned at Bagram. SMU TF also proposed to Lt. Gen. Dan McNeil, the commander of the Joint Task Force-180, building an interrogation facility for "high-value" detainees co-located at the Bagram Collection Point, where Dilawar and Habibullah were held and interrogated.

When The New York Times revealed in 2005 that Dilawar and Habibullah were tortured to death, McNeil was quoted denying reports that the detainees were chained by their wrists to the ceilings in their prison cells.

"The briefing stated that CJTF-180 was focused on the detention mission rather than the interrogation mission, that 'no advanced interrogation techniques' including 'sensory deprivation/overload, sleep deprivation, psychological manipulation' were employed by CJTF-180, and that current procedures were having only 'limited success[es]," the report says.

"While the SMU briefing noted that 'advanced interrogation techniques' were not in use at Bagram prior to November 2002, Army investigations into the deaths of two detainees at Bagram in early December revealed that, by early December 2002, at least one of the techniques, sleep deprivation, was apparently in wide use there."

Again, a torture technique the prisoners interviewed by the BBC said they had endured.

A day before Habibullah was taken to Bagram, Pentagon general counsel William Haynes sent Rumsfeld an action memo advising the defense secretary to approve a list of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, including standing for up to four hours and the use of military dogs, to use against prisoners at Guantanamo. But, as the Armed Services Committee report stated, the interrogation policy "became known to interrogators in Afghanistan."

Two days before Habibullah was killed, Rumsfeld signed the action memo presented to him by Haynes.

The Armed Services Committee report said those "aggressive interrogation techniques conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody."

"Shortly after Secretary Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 approval of his General Counsel's [William Haynes] recommendation to authorize aggressive interrogation techniques, the techniques - and the fact the Secretary had authorized them - became known to interrogators in Afghanistan. A copy of the Secretary's memo was sent from GTMO to Afghanistan."

The Armed Services Committee report further added, "Captain Carolyn Wood, the Officer in Charge of the Intelligence Section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, said that in January 2003 she saw a power point presentation listing the aggressive techniques that had been authorized by the Secretary" a month earlier.

Wood was singled out in an Army criminal investigative report as having lied to investigators by saying that the shackling of prisoners in prolonged standing positions was done to protect interrogators from being harmed. The Army's internal report said the technique - authorized by Rumsfeld - ?as used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation.

Wood went on to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib where the systematic torture of prisoners has been well documented. Defense Department reports into the abuse at the prison said she was responsible for interrogation procedures there that went above and beyond those approved by Army commanders.

On Wednesday, Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said, "Torture and abuse at Bagram is further evidence that prisoner abuse in US custody was systemic, not aberrational, and originated at the highest levels of government."

In April, the ACLU filed a FOIA request for documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at Bagram, including the number of people currently detained, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention.

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Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

Red Cross Informed Powell About Torture

Jason Leopold — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:27:01 -0700

The International Committee of the Red Cross began an investigation of US war crimes in Iraq from the first days of the invasion, interviewing Iraqi captives from March to November 2003.

On January 15, 2004, Red Cross President Jakob Kellenberger expressed his concern to Secretary of State Colin Powell about the Bush administration's attitude regarding international law.

An ICRC January 16, 2004, news release, which summarized Kellenberger's meeting with Powell, said, "the ICRC is increasingly concerned about the fate of an unknown number of people captured as part of the so-called global war on terror and held in undisclosed locations."

Kellenberger, according to minutes of the meeting, "raised ICRC concerns over detention issues in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Mr. Kellenberger echoed previous official requests from the ICRC for information on these detainees and for eventual access to them, as an important humanitarian priority and as a logical continuation of the organization's current detention work in Guantanamo and Afghanistan."

Kellenberger's meeting with Powell also centered on an op-ed piece by then-State Department legal adviser William Taft IV in the Financial Times four days earlier.

In that op-ed, Taft wrote that there was no law that required the US to afford due process to foreigners captured in the "war on terror."

"American treatment of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is fully consistent with international law and with centuries-old norms for treating individuals captured in wartime," Taft wrote. "We are engaged in a war."

It's unclear exactly what Kellenberger cited in Taft's column, because the minutes of the meeting were heavily redacted. But the conversation segued into Powell asking Kellenberger "where, in addition to Afghanistan, did ICRC have problems with notification and access to detainees?"

Powell is quoted as saying, "we are confident of our legal position, (referring to legal adviser Taft's op-ed), but we also know the world is watching us."

Notes of the meeting state that Powell "indicated that he would have to talk to his colleagues [including Taft] on ICRC's issue of access to detainees in Afghanistan and elsewhere."

The next month, February 2004, the ICRC gave Bush administration officials a confidential report, which found that US occupation forces in Iraq often arrested Iraqis without good reason and subjected them to abuse and humiliation that sometimes was "tantamount to torture" in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Some excessive violence, including the use of live ammunition against detainees, had led to seven deaths, the ICRC report said.

"According to the allegations collected by the ICRC, ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence' value," the report said.

"In these cases, persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators."

Trickle-Down Torture

One recipient of the ICRC confidential report was Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, senior US military officer in Iraq, an ICRC official said later. Sanchez had instituted a "dozen interrogation methods beyond" the Army's standard interrogation techniques that comply with the Geneva Conventions, according to a 2004 report by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.

Sanchez said he based his decision on "the President's Memorandum" justifying "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, the Schlesigner report said. The memorandum Sanchez referred to was an order that President George W. Bush signed on February 7, 2002, excluding "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions protections.

As the ICRC gathered more information about the Bush administration's detention policies, it began to make some of its concerns public. On March 1, 2004, for instance, Gabor Rona, the ICRC's legal adviser, wrote an op-ed also in the Financial Times that took issue with the Bush administration's posture on the Geneva Conventions.

"The US is proceeding with plans to subject prisoners to military commission trials, citing the Geneva Convention provision that prisoners of war be tried by military courts. How can it do so while maintaining that no detainees are entitled to PoW status?" Rona wrote.

"That aside, the US risks throwing into the military-trial pot people whose alleged crimes have no connection with armed conflict, as understood in international humanitarian law. Such people can and should face trial, but not by military courts," Rona added.

Taft responded with an angry letter to Kellenberger on March 16, 2004.

"Your staff states categorically that detainees are entitled to an individualized procedure to challenge the basis of their detention," Taft wrote. "No citation or support is provided for this assertion. There is, in fact, no such entitlement in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

"However, the implication in the article is that the Geneva Conventions do provide such entitlement. This again has the unfortunate effect of misleading the public."

The Abu Ghraib Scandal

The behind-the-scenes dispute over detainee treatment went public in another way in April 2004, when photos were leaked showing US prison guards at Abu Ghraib forcing naked Iraqi detainees into fake sexual positions, intimidating detainees with attack dogs, committing other abuses and posing with the corpse of an Iraqi who had died in custody.

After a public scandal erupted, Bush blamed the Abu Ghraib abuses on low-level prison guards.

"I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," Bush said. "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people."

However, Bush's finger-pointing at a few "bad apples" was soon contradicted when the contents of the February 2004 ICRC report were leaked to The Wall Street Journal in May 2004. The ICRC findings made clear that the Abu Ghraib abuses were not an isolated case.

After The Wall Street Journal published excerpts of the ICRC report in May 2004, ICRC Director of Operations Pierre Krähenbühl held an unusual press conference to respond to reporters' queries on the findings.

"Various aspects of its contents had been discussed with the Coalition authorities at different times and at different levels during 2003 and included in documents submitted to them; I won't go into the details, but ... they don't concern only issues of water and food, but also clearly of treatment," Krähenbühl said.

Eleven enlisted soldiers, who were guards at Abu Ghraib, were convicted in courts-martial. Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. received the harshest sentence - 10 years in prison - while Lynndie England, a 22-year-old single mother who was photographed holding an Iraqi on a leash and pointing at a detainee's penis, was sentenced to three years in prison.

Superior officers at Abu Ghraib were cleared of wrongdoing or received mild reprimands.

But the February 2004 ICRC report on Iraq took on added meaning with the disclosure of another ICRC report, dated February 14, 2007. Based on interviews that the ICRC finally arranged with 14 "high-value" detainees held at secret CIA prisons, the report concluded those prisoners had been subjected to similar humiliating and abusive treatment, including forced nudity and stress positions, as well as the drowning sensation of waterboarding.

The ICRC concluded that the treatment "constituted torture," a finding that has legal weight because the ICRC is responsible for ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war.

Taken together, the two reports suggest that the Bush administration adopted a policy of torture against "high-value" detainees captured in 2002 and that the policy spread to Iraq in 2003 when US forces were grappling with a rising Iraqi insurgency against the American occupation.

A recently declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report reached a similar conclusion, tracing the US abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and later Abu Ghraib to Bush's February 7, 2002, action memorandum that excluded "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions protections.

The report said Bush's memo opened the door to "considering aggressive techniques," which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials.

The public record - as it now exists - also makes clear that the Bush administration had a selective view of international law. When it worked to American advantage - as when Iraqis videotaped captured US soldiers in March 2003 - Bush and his aides saw the rules as binding, but not when the laws of war constrained their own behavior.

After Iraqi troops captured several US soldiers and let them be interviewed on Iraqi TV, senior Bush administration officials expressed outrage over this violation of the Geneva Conventions.

"If there is somebody captured," Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

No one in the Bush administration, however, acknowledged the extent of US violations of rules governing humane treatment of enemy combatants. Nor did the US news media offer any context, ignoring the US handling of Afghan war captives at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and the fact that the US military also had paraded captured Iraqi soldiers before cameras.

During those heady days of "embedded" war correspondents reporting excitedly about Bush's "shock and awe" invasion, what Americans got to see and hear was how the Iraqi violation of the Geneva Conventions - the videotaped interviews - demonstrated the barbarity of the enemy and justified their punishment as war criminals.

Bush's fury over the POW interviews echoed across Washington. "It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way," declared Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke on March 24.

That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the BBC, "The Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners. They're not supposed to be tortured or abused, they're not supposed to be intimidated, they're not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we're going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they've got to stop."

On March 25, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added, "In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions."

In other words, international law applied to the other guy, but not to Bush. He surely didn't mean to implicate himself when he declared "the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

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Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

Going for Broke: Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding

Tom Engelhardt — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:36:18 -0700

Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak -- that is, expanded -- war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches" -- to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words -- that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here's the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the Army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'"

It's no different today in what's left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..." and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal... I think of no body fat."

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the "elite" world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we're told here and elsewhere, what's so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we're assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to "take the gloves off" on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."

Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage -- far more ominous than he means it to be:

"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a "surge" of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a "civilian surge" of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn't be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region's "desert of death." When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the "largest such project in the world in a combat setting."

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a "targeted" assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks -- the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 -- have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:

"According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed 'at least 25 militants.' In the local media, the dead were simply described as '29 tribesmen present there.' That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors."

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq "surge" months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. ("Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent -- hardly 'precision.'") As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, "Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports -- hotly denied by Holbrooke and others -- broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to "undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government." Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to "figurehead" status, while a "chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers" not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He "could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials." He would then be "the chief executive officer of Afghanistan."

Cooper's report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.

Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It's best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration's 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.

5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military -- pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) -- has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call "the Pakistani Taliban."

It's been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.

With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, U.N. officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.

In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an "Islamic Pashtunistan" would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true," applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.

6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).

Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban "militants"; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as "thinly sourced"); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were "extremely over-exaggerated," and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.

An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a "very exhaustive" investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.

Two things make this "incident" at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines' version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself "Taskforce Violence"), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal's appointment, reports Starkey, has "prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban."

Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai's repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "Well, I think he understands that... we have to have the full complement of... our offensive military power when we need it... We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back..."

In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. "No hands," he said, "are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam."

Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge "I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back" is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.

Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one "hand" tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.

The Pressure of an Expanding War

President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General McKiernan believed that, "as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas."

That the "responsibilities" of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War "ended at the border with Pakistan," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an "old mind-set." McChrystal represents those "fresh eyes" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, "Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border."

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already "Obama's war." With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.

So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive "team" in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn't go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint."

And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the "Washington coalition" is the one that cracks first? What then?

..............................

The Bush Administration's Stunning Geneva Hypocrisy

Jason Leopold — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:58:25 -0700

Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions' protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

"If there is somebody captured," President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq's government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Conventions in particular.

"It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found and punished as war criminals," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.

That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the BBC that "the Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners.. They're not supposed to be tortured or abused; they're not supposed to be intimidated; they're not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we're going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they've got to stop."

At a March 25, 2003, press briefing about progress in the US-led invasion, Secretary Rumsfeld said, "This war is an act of self-defense, to be sure, but it is also an act of humanity.... In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions."

The US news media also assisted in this one-sided indictment by uncritically reporting the administration's complaints while staying silent on the fact that, just days earlier, American TV had run scenes of captured Iraqi soldiers, some forced to kneel down at gunpoint to be patted down by US soldiers.

This behavior of the US news media during the early phase of the Iraq war fit with its lack of skepticism in the months leading up to the March 19, 2003, invasion as Bush administration officials spoon-fed the press false intelligence alleging secret Iraqi WMD stockpiles and covert links to al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So, perhaps it should have come as no surprise when the US news media treated the TV footage of American POWs as further evidence that Iraq was run by a lawless regime with no respect for the rules of war. [For a contemporaneous account of the POW issue, see Consortiumnews.com's "International Law a la Carte."]

Stunning Hypocrisy

In retrospect - now with much more of the documentary record available - the disparity between the administration's outrage toward the Iraqis for showing the video and the abuse inflicted by the US government on captives from the Iraq and Afghan wars is stunning.

Declassified documents reveal that the Bush administration concocted legal theories to justify sidestepping the Geneva Conventions when it came to prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, at secret CIA prisons, and at various locations in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, where shocking photos were leaked of sexual and physical abuse in 2004.

Indeed, while US government officials were preaching to Iraqis about the rules of war, the Bush administration was seven months into a secret interrogation program that authorized CIA interrogators to question Afghan and al-Qaeda detainees using brutal methods.

The techniques included painful "stress positions," forced nudity in cold conditions and the simulated drowning of waterboarding, practices that human rights organizations say violated Geneva and anti-torture laws.

The Bush administration also ordered the CIA to engage in "extraordinary renditions," which involved kidnapping terror suspects and shipping them to countries that are known to practice torture.

If held to the same standards that the Bush administration demanded of the Iraqi military, US officials implicated in these policies would be guilty of violating the Geneva Conventions, said Claire Tixeire, a human rights attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

"They clearly knew that the laws of war were supposed to apply to prisoners apprehended by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they found every legal loophole to find ways it didn't apply to the US side," Tixeire said in an interview.

Tixeire, whose organization is defending some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, said that while US officials may have had a point in accusing the Iraqi military of violating the Geneva Conventions over the TV interviews, the way the US treated Iraqi captives was much worse.

"It's clear to me these actions came down from the very top," Tixeire said. "Denying prisoners of war humane treatment is the greatest breach of the Geneva Convention. It's a war crime. They put US troops at risk for being treated inhumanely if they were captured."

When asked recently about the past statements about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Conventions, representatives for Clarke, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld said the now-former officials would not comment for this story.

Anti-Torture Laws

The actions of the Bush administration also flouted the 1984 "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment," which was approved by 145 nations, including the United States. It declares that:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

According to that provision, "each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Bush administration officials sought to bypass with legal memos, many drafted by John Yoo of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

The administration memos argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees in the "war on terror" and that President Bush's commander in chief powers allowed him to ignore laws in the interest of protecting the nation.

The record now shows that during the same week in March 2003 - when Rumsfeld was publicly berating Iraq for violating the Geneva Conventions by broadcasting footage of American POWs - he was engaged in drafting a top-secret plan that would give military interrogators at Guantanamo wide latitude to use harsher techniques to obtain information from prisoners.

Rumsfeld signed off on the plan on April 2, 2003, according to documents declassified and turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union last month in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of interrogation methods Rumsfeld approved still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."

Such degrading tactics would appear to contravene the Geneva Conventions, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

Reports of Abuse

Weeks after the Iraq invasion, human rights groups started receiving information about the abuse of dozens of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, and the deaths of two prisoners, one of whom died of a crushed larynx, and the other with a hard blow to the head.

Amnesty International sent a letter to the head of the US occupation, Paul Bremer, on June 26, 2003, raising concerns about abuses during house searches, treatment during arrest and detention, people being forced to lie face down on the ground, use of hoods or blind folds, exposure to sun and heat for hours, limited amount of water supplied and lack of proper washing and toilet facilities.

One month later, Amnesty International released a report, "Iraq: memorandum on concerns relating to law and order," warning of allegations of torture and abuse in US prisons, including Abu Ghraib.

"Regrettably, testimonies from recently released detainees held at Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib Prison do not suggest that conditions of detention have improved," the report said.

There are "a number of reports of cases of detainees who have died in custody, mostly as a result of shooting by members of the Coalition forces." A Saudi national "alleged that he was subjected to beatings and electric shocks."

Photographs backing up these allegations would surface a year later in two investigative news reports, one by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and the other by "60 Minutes II," which detailed the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Months before the worldwide condemnation of the treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Rumsfeld sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to "hit back at the [Iraqi] insurgents ... through unorthodox means," according to a May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Hersh wrote in The New Yorker's May 24, 2004, issue that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year [2003] by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq....

"The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.... Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, [bringing] unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.... The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation."

Tarnished Image

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project and the co-author of "Administration of Torture," added that Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials by "holding up the Geneva Convention and saying it did not apply to some prisoners have tarnished the image of the US throughout the world."

Even after the programs governing interrogations were exposed, Rumsfeld made sure that a loophole in a new Defense Department (DoD) policy issued in November 2005, which barred torture and called for the "humane" treatment of detainees, gave him and his deputy the authority to override it.

"Intelligence interrogations will be conducted in accordance with applicable law, this directive and implementing plans, policies, orders, directives, and doctrine developed by DoD components and approved by USD (I), unless otherwise authorized, in writing, by the secretary of defense or deputy secretary of defense," the policy says. "USD (I)" refers to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Hypocrisy Exposed

It would take months and years - as documents from Bush's first term were gradually released to the public - to reveal the extent of the Bush administration's hypocrisy.

For instance, it's now known that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began an investigation of US war crimes in Iraq from the first days of the invasion, interviewing Iraqis captives from March to November 2003.

On January 15, 2004, ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger expressed his concern to Secretary of State Colin Powell about the Bush administration's attitude regarding international law, specifically an op-ed by then-State Department legal adviser William Taft IV in The Financial Times four days earlier.

In that op-ed, Taft wrote that there was no law that required the US to afford due process to foreigners captured in the "war on terror."

It's unclear what Kellenberger cited in Taft's column, because the recently released minutes of the meeting were heavily redacted. But the conversation segued into Powell asking Kellenberger "where in addition to Afghanistan, did ICRC have problems with notification and access to detainees?"

Powell is quoted as saying "we are confident of our legal position [referring to legal adviser Taft's op-ed], but we also know the world is watching us."

The next month, the ICRC gave Bush administration officials a confidential report, which found that US occupation forces in Iraq often arrested Iraqis without good reason and subjected them to abuse and humiliation that sometimes was "tantamount to torture" in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Some excessive violence, including the use of live ammunition against detainees, had led to seven deaths, the ICRC report said.

"According to the allegations collected by the ICRC, ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an 'intelligence' value," the report said.

Trickle-Down Torture

One of the recipients of the ICRC confidential report was Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US military officer in Iraq, an ICRC official said later. Sanchez had instituted a "dozen interrogation methods beyond" the Army's standard interrogation techniques that comply with the Geneva Conventions, according to a 2004 report by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.

Sanchez said he based his decision on "the President's Memorandum" justifying "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, the Schlesinger report said. The memorandum Sanchez was referring to was an order that Bush signed on February 7, 2002, excluding "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions' protections.

As the ICRC gathered more information about the Bush administration's detention policies, it began to make some of its concerns public. On March 1, 2004, for instance, Gabor Rona, the ICRC's legal adviser, wrote an op-ed, also in The Financial Times, that took issue with the Bush administration's posture on the Geneva Conventions.

Taft responded with an angry letter to Kellenberger on March 16, 2004.

"However, the implication in the article is that the Geneva Conventions do provide such entitlement. This again has the unfortunate effect of misleading the public."

The Abu Ghraib Scandal

The behind-the-scenes dispute over detainee treatment went public in another way in April 2004 when photos were leaked showing US prison guards at Abu Ghraib forcing naked Iraqi detainees into sexual positions, intimidating detainees with attacks dogs, committing other abuses, and posing with the corpse of an Iraqi who had died in custody.

After a public scandal erupted, President Bush blamed the Abu Ghraib abuses on low-level prison guards.

"I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," Bush said. "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people."

Nevertheless, 11 enlisted soldiers, who were guards at Abu Ghraib, were convicted in courts-martial. Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. received the harshest sentence - 10 years in prison - while Lynndie England, a 22-year-old single mother, who was photographed holding an Iraqi on a leash and pointing at a detainee's penis, was sentenced to three years in prison.

Superior officers were cleared of wrongdoing or received mild reprimands.

But the February 2004 ICRC report on Iraq took on added meaning with the recent disclosure of another ICRC report, dated February 14, 2007. Based on interviews that the ICRC finally arranged with 14 "high-value" detainees held at secret CIA prisons, the report concluded those prisoners had been subjected to similar humiliating and abusive treatment, including forced nudity and stress positions, as well as the drowning sensation of waterboarding.

In December 2008, a Senate Armed Services Committee report reached a similar conclusion, tracing the US abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and later Abu Ghraib to President Bush's February 7, 2002, action memorandum that excluded "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions' protections.

In other words, international law applied to the other guy, but not to George W. Bush. He surely didn't mean to implicate himself when he declared "the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

..............................

Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

Neo-Con Ideologues Launch New Foreign Policy Group

Edger — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:38:25 -0700

PNAC attempts to resurrect themselves?

By Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe*
IPS Inter Press Service, 2009

WASHINGTON, Mar 25 (IPS) - A newly-formed and still obscure neo-conservative foreign policy organisation is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came to fruition under the George W. Bush administration.

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) - the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor - has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. "surge" in Afghanistan.

But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

PNAC’s charter members included many figures who later held top positions under Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

FPI was founded earlier this year, but few details are available about the group, which has so far attracted no media attention. The organisation’s website lists Kagan, Kristol, and Senor, who came to prominence as a spokesman for the occupation authorities in Iraq, as the three members of its board of directors.

Two of FPI’s three staffers, policy director Jamie Fly and Christian Whiton, have come directly from foreign policy posts in the Bush administration, while the third, Rachel Hoff, last worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee. Contacted by IPS at the group's office, Fly referred all questions to Senor, who did not return the call.

The organisation’s mission statement argues that the "United States remains the world’s indispensable nation," and warns that "strategic overreach is not the problem and retrenchment is not the solution" to Washington's current financial and strategic woes. It calls for "continued engagement - diplomatic, economic, and military - in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down the path to isolationism."

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including "rogue states," "failed states," "autocracies" and "terrorism", but gives pride of place to the "challenges" posed by "rising and resurgent powers," of which only China and Russia are named.

Their prominence may reflect the influence of Kagan, who has argued in recent years that the 21st century will be dominated by a struggle between the forces of democracy (led by the U.S.) and autocracy (led by China and Russia). He has called for a League of Democracies as a mechanism for combating Chinese and Russian power, and the FPI statement stresses the need for "robust support for America’s democratic allies".

This emphasis may also indicate that FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged "appeasement" of Beijing.

For its formal coming out, however, FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled "Afghanistan: Planning for Success".

The lead speaker will be Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and long a favourite of both Kagan and Kristol. In February, McCain gave a well-publicised speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) arguing that the U.S. could not afford to scale back its military commitment in Afghanistan and calling for a redoubled effort to win the war.

Other speakers will include AEI fellow Frederick Kagan, Robert's brother and one of the key proponents of the "surge" strategy in Iraq, counterinsurgency expert Lt. Col. John Nagl, the new director Centre for a New American Security, and hawkish Democratic Representative Jane Harman.

FPI has inevitably drawn comparisons to PNAC, a "letterhead organisation" founded by Kristol and Kagan shortly after their publication in 'Foreign Affairs' of an article entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" which called for Washington to exercise "benevolent global hegemony" and warned against what they saw as the post-Cold War drift of the Republican Party toward "neoisolationism" after it lost the White House to Bill Clinton.

"This reminds me of the Project for the New American Century," said Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation. "Like PNAC, it will become a watering hole for those who want to see an ever-larger U.S. military machine and who divide the world between those who side with right and might and those who are evil or who would appease evil."

PNAC’s membership was a veritable who’s-who of neoconservatives and other future Bush administration hawks. In addition to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, charter members included then-Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was at the time considered a more likely presidential candidate than his elder brother; Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who left the administration after being indicted for perjury in October 2005; and Elliott Abrams, who became Bush’s top Middle East aide at the National Security Council; among several others who later served in senior Bush administration posts.

The group’s June 1997 statement of principles called for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" that entailed "increas[ing] defence spending significantly" and "challeng[ing] regimes hostile to our interests and values".

In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to President Clinton calling for "the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power", by military force if necessary. The letter was signed by many who would become architects and backers of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, future deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and future U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

In September 2001, only days after the 9/11 attacks, another PNAC letter called on President Bush to broaden the scope of the "war on terror" beyond those immediately responsible for the attacks to include Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

And in April 2002, the group labeled Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) "a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism," compared Arafat to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and called on the U.S. to end support for both the PA and the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as a whole.

"Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight," it said, urging Bush to "accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power."

That FPI's debut public event should focus on why Washington should escalate its involvement in Afghanistan is ironic given the role played by PNAC and other hawks in and outside the administration in pushing for the invasion of Iraq so soon after the U.S. campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in late 2001. Many experts believe the diversion of military and intelligence resources to Iraq made it possible for both the Taliban and al Qaeda's leadership to survive and rebuild.

The top priority given by the Bush administration - again, with the strong encouragement of PNAC and its supporters - to Iraq as the "central front in the war on terror" also meant that aid needed to bolster the western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai was unavailable.

PNAC effectively ceased its activities at the beginning of Bush’s second term. This may partly have been due to the large amount of bad publicity the group attracted for its seminal role in bringing about the Iraq war.

But the formation of FPI may be a sign that its founders hope once again to incubate a more aggressive foreign policy during their exile from the White House, in preparation for the next time they return to political power.

.*****
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Article republished by permission: Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe, IPS Inter Press Service, 2009

A Buccaneer's Arrogance

Big Fella — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:05:50 -0700

Edward M. Liddy grew up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, earned a bachelor's degree from Catholic University of America in 1968 and a master's in business administration from George Washington University in 1972. He then began a long career in corporate America, including stops at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, drug maker G.D. Searle & Co in Skokie, Illinois, and Allstate Corporation in Northbrook, Illinois.

During Edward Liddy's apprenticeship in the buccaneering life he was exposed to the most influential teachers and lasting experiences. While at Searle, Liddy who was CFO worked for a CEO , Donald Rumsfeld, who has always epitomized the height of arrogance as demonstrated by a successful buccaneer. When he was at Allstate, Liddy presided over the company during and after hurricane Katrina, and Liddy observed first hand the effects of over exposure to risk and subsequent loss of trust when Allstate was faced with the massive losses suffered by homeowners in New Orleans, and Allstate subsequently canceled insurance policies and exited the business of insuring homeowners against casualty, lucrative as the business might have once been and could be.

He joined Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a private equity firm operating in New York and London in 2008, and became a partner for a brief time, before being tapped for his latest expedition in the world of corporate insurance and finance.

Liddy who was a former director of Goldman Sachs (elected in 2003 when Goldman Sachs' CEO was Henry Paulson, who would go on to be treasury secretary under George W. Bush), was then appointed as CEO of AIG after the ouster of Robert Willumstad by Paulson when the federal government seized AIG in June of 2008.

Throughout his apprenticeship, Edward Liddy was trained by the masters, and had plenty of practice in the art of separating the gullible from the coin of the realm. He became a wizard of the sorcery of making other people's money in to greater treasure for himself and his backers, while exposing little, if any assets of their own, as part of the risk or underlying cost to produce the treasure chest. In June of 2008, Edward Liddy took the helm of one of the largest privateers ever to sail the financial oceans, which was crewed by a host of cut throat pirates, AIG. Liddy embraced his new shipmates with gusto, when in October of 2008, after United States taxpayers had sunk $84 billion in to loans to AIG to address its insolvency, he defended the decision of his fellow buccaneers to blow $400,000 on a corporate junket to the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California. In his subsequent testimony before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, Liddy stated that such retreats "are standard practice in our industry."

Despite being hired by the American people to bring a sense of order, and propriety to AIG, to manage the remaining assets of AIG, to take appropriate actions to staunch the flow of more good money after bad money on behalf of the American people, Edward Liddy hoisted the pirate flag ever higher on his mast when he refuted the wishes of the president of the United Statess and the American people in his letter to Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner on March 14, 2008. Liddy refused to back down on the demand that he rescind the multimillion dollar bonuses paid out to the AIG staff and managers that were responsible for the company's massive losses in 2008 which resulted in its take over by the United States government.

In closing his letter to the Treasury secretary, Edward Liddy had the pure arrogance to state:

I would not be doing my job if I did not directly advise you of my grave concern about the long-term consequences of the actions we are taking today. On the one hand, all of us at AIG recognize the environment in which we operate and the remonstrations of our President for a more restrained system of compensation for executives. On the other hand, we cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff the AIG businesses - which are now being operated principally on behalf of the American taxpayers - if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury

Edward Liddy seems to have forgotten any early education he might have had at Catholic University of America and George Washington University relative to human moral values and business ethics. Mr. Liddy also seems to have never learned anything about Actuarial Science, which is defined on Wikipedia as:

Actuarial science is the discipline that applies mathematical and statistical methods to assess risk in the insurance and finance industries. Actuaries are professionals who are qualified in this field through education and experience. They must demonstrate their qualifications by passing a series of professional examinations.

Instead of sound, prudent, ethical business practices, instead of recognizing his fiduciary responsibility to the owners of AIG (the American taxpayers), Mr. Liddy is concerned about losing the services of those negligent AIG management and staff who made the decisions, made the deals, sold the dubious credit default swap "products" which destroyed the financial viability of AIG. The people and institutions who created, promoted and sold credit default swaps, the people and institutions who packaged the obviously dubious mortgage derivative products that were based upon substandard, and likely in many cases, patently fraudulent loans. The "financial geniuses" at the top of the buccaneering clan, who through gross negligence, if not out and out greed and avarice, who administered the coup de gras to our financial system, might not be incented to continue providing their "expertise and services" to those of us who ultimately are footing the bill for their egregious performance. This attitude, conveyed by Edward Liddy is the height of arrogance.

Maybe it is a Wall Street thing, or more precisely a buccaneering thing. That regardless if someone who may have a prior history of prudent management as an executive in the early stages of his career, may have an educational and work background that indicates a high level of intellectual development, that once that person becomes a member of the Wall Street financial plutocracy, the buccaneering clan, that person loses all ability to identify with or understand or empathize with the lot of the vast majority of the common folk who make up the population of the United States. Those common, hard working folk who through their consumerism, those folk who through their efforts to build their own bit of shared wealth and provide for their families, those folk who sacrifice and try to put something away for the future higher education of their children, those folk who manage to put something aside for their future retirement, so they will not be a burden upon their families or society when they are too old and infirm to work.

The common folk do not exist in the mind or the sphere of influence that the Wall Street managers cocoon themselves in, the world of buccaneers sailing the financial seas on their privateers, trolling not just for gullible common folk, but actually any person or entity, even relatives in the buccaneering clan itself, as targets of opportunity. Once arriving on "the street", the Wall Street management and sales classes become mesmerized by the riches they see available for plucking, and embrace their role as a part of a buccaneering clan, becoming drunk on their booty. They sneer at the rest of us awash in the roiling seas in their wake, secure in their superior position aboard their privateers, arrogant til the end of time.

The only thing that will hinder, if not sink the current crew of buccaneers, will be to relieve their captain of duty, and clawback, a very apropos term, the treasure distributed as bonuses, and for those crew members who did not already jump ship, even after being paid "retention bonuses", make them walk the plank. AIG and the American tax paying public do not need to bribe cut-throat pirates to stay aboard while the mess on the deck of AIG is swabbed up, there are plenty of other, honest, ethical, qualified members of the financial seafaring community who are capable of passing out life vests and unwinding the remaining risk exposures at AIG.

They Are Not People, According To Obama's DOJ

Edger — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:47:55 -0700

From RawStory Sunday morning...
Obama administration: Guantanamo detainees have 'no constitutional rights'
Joe Byrne, Published: Sunday March 15, 2009

Court documents filed Friday reveal that Obama's lawyers are arguing that Ex-Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights.

The Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR), a non-profit legal advocacy group, is supporting four British citizens - Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al Harith – in their suit alleging religious mistreatment and torture at Guantanamo Bay. Defendants in the case include Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The four men say that they were “beaten, shackled in painful stress positions, threatened by dogs and subjected to extreme medical care,” according to the Miami Herald. In addition, they reported being forced to shave their beards, being banned from prayer, being denied prayer mats, and watching a copy of the Koran get tossed in the toilet.

Last year, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in D.C. voted unanimously against the 4 ex-detainees. The Appeals Court claimed that the men did not fit the definition of 'person' in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, because they were foreigners being held outside the United States. Months later, the Supreme Court instructed the Appeals Court to reconsider their decision, based on a Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo detainees have some rights under the constitution. On Friday, the CCR re-filed their brief in the D.C. Court of Appeal.

Obama's justice department is using an old strategy employed by the Bush administration. Their primary argument is that Ex-Guantanamo detainees don't have any constitutional rights.

Even if they did, the brief continues, Rumsfeld and other officers should be immune from prosecution because detainees’ right not to be tortured and to practice their religion without abuse was “not clearly established” at the time of their detention. The Obama administration supports the earlier decision by the Appeals Court that the ex-detainees do not have constitutional person-hood. The case should be dismissed because of special factors “involving national security and foreign policy,” the government's brief concludes.

However, “it has long been established that there is an irreducible constitutional minimum that government officials owe to human beings under their control – whether citizen or alien – that necessarily includes the prohibition of torture,” the plaintiff's brief contends. CCR is disappointed the new administration “squandered this opportunity to separate themselves from the policies of the past and to speak with moral force about torture and religious freedom,” said Michael Ratner, president of the organization.

Obama has decided to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility by 2010. On the same day as the ex-detainee's brief was filed, the White House dropped the term 'enemy combatant' from legal documents. The assertion that ex-detainees have no constitutional rights is a problem for non-citizens being detained outside of U.S. borders, who worry that this case will set precedent and enable the military to legally disobey the constitution.