[Peace-discuss] Obama and torture

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The Torture Paradigm

Over the past sixty years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's "torture 
paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to 
historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture 
methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the 
infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title 
of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the US torture record: Truth, 
Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, 
when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers lament that 
"in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce 
important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed 
out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own 
government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out 
some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: 
"What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage 
of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the 
system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could 
stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely 
repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to 
the victims. "His is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the 
torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more 
US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 
study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow 
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens 
... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human 
rights." Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also 
suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a 
favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of 
labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, 
yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human 
rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth 
studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward--a 
convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them 
tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance...

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie 
violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were 
struck down by the courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our 
unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially 
reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. 
Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush 
administration claim that prisoners in Guantánamo are not entitled to the right 
of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve 
the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due 
process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the US prison at Bagram 
Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most 
basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- 
fly your abducted prisoners to Guantánamo and they have constitutional rights, 
but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no 
judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two 
sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this 
issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in 
the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United 
Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as 
long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantánamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama 
position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to 
Bagram as it does to Guantánamo." The Obama administration announced that it 
would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department of Justice, Greenwald 
concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, 
pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and 
due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama's campaign promises 
and earlier stands.

The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The 
plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for 
their torture in Guantánamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki 
warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to 
Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a 
leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, 
India, Turkey and the Central Asian states, and the US as it attacked 
Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to US custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush 
administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama's Department 
of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials 
are not liable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds 
that the courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive military 
commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the 
Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York 
Times: "Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers 
have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some 
terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to 
prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to 
use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." A serious flaw in the 
criminal justice system, it appears...

[From <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090601/chomsky>]