[Peace-discuss] History Will Not Absolve Us. Henthoff

[Morton K. Brussel]

 From the Village Voice.

by Nat Hentoff
September 02, 2007


If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg  
trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in  
Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there  
will be mounds of evidence available from documented international  
reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the  
European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen  
Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St.  
Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The  
Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American  
Democracy (Little, Brown).


While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious  
investigation into what many European legislators already know about  
American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the  
International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would  
surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The  
Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of  
its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else  
governments wouldn't let them in.

But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of  
the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret  
prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also  
reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do—on the orders of  
the president—to "protect American values."

She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of  
darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your  
best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place  
without it changing you."

Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA  
does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that  
continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush  
administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to  
continue using these techniques—without disclosing anything about them.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our  
complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo  
those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers  
were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on  
finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress  
discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities  
that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has  
insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques—so much so  
that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo,  
from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002,  
has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's  
2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it  
caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any  
infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr.  
Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.

As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found  
in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive  
research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in  
chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of  
abuse that was signed off on—at the White House, really—and then  
implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . .  
They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they  
were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any  
sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a  
sense of where they were."

She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not  
only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he  
was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small cage, about  
one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up  
for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."

Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial—and Congress  
continues to stay asleep—future historians of the Bush administration  
will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation  
Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human  
Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on  
CIA interrogations—which, though it is classified, was widely hailed  
as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"—"fails  
explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the  
CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval  
(emphasis added).

In 2002, then–Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the "torture"  
memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that  
reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also tell us. But  
Powell's objections should keep him out of the defendants' dock in  
any future international trial.

 From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American  
statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice  
Department have utterly violated:

In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into U.S.  
law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention Against  
Torture, which is defined as "an act 'committed by an [officially  
authorized] person' . . . specifically intended to inflict severe  
physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within  
his custody or physical control."

The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act "criminalizes . . . specifically  
enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as 'grave  
breaches' of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], including  
the war crimes of torture and 'cruel or inhuman treatment.'"

The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme Court—  
before Chief Justice John Roberts took over—into the war-crimes  
record of this administration. I strongly suggest that Human Rights  
First and Physicians for Social Responsibility send their report—with  
the following section underlined—to every current member of the  
Supreme Court and Congress:

"The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to violate  
substantive due process if the treatment 'shocks the conscience,' is  
bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or offends 'a principle  
of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people  
as to be ranked as fundamental.'"

Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the  
report continues, are "the rights to bodily integrity [and] the right  
to have [one's] basic needs met; and the right to basic human  
dignity" (emphasis added).

If the conscience of a majority on the Roberts Court isn't shocked by  
what we've done to our prisoners, then it will be up to the next  
president and the next Congress—and, therefore, up to us—to alter, in  
some respects, how history will judge us. But do you see any  
considerable signs, among average Americans, of the conscience being  
shocked? How about the presidential candidates of both parties?
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