Guantánamo and the Many Failures of US Politicians

Published on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Future of Freedom Foundation

by Andy Worthington

In the summer of 2002, as Jane Mayer described it in her book The Dark Side, "The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from [Guantánamo], dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was." After interviewing a random sample of two dozen or so Arabic-speaking prisoners, the analyst "concluded that an estimated one-third of the prison camp's population of more than 600 captives at the time, meaning more than 200 individuals, had no connection to terrorism whatsoever."

The analyst expressed his concerns to Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, Guantánamo's senior military commander, and "was further disconcerted to learn that the general agreed with him that easily a third of the Guantánamo detainees were mistakes." "Later," Mayer added, "Dunlavey raised his estimate to fully half the population."

Dunlavey didn't explain what he believed about the other half of the prison's population, but in 2006 a team at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey analyzed the publicly available information about 517 prisoners, which had been released by the Pentagon, and discovered that, according to their own records, which explained the circumstances of the prisoners' capture and described their purported connections to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its allies, and the rest, as Mayer put it, "were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs." She added, "The overwhelming majority - all but 5 percent - had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters."

Analyzing this information, and bearing in mind that, at the time the Seton Hall team compiled its report, records did not exist for 200 other prisoners because they had already been released, the stark conclusion is that, according to the Pentagon's own findings, only around 40 of the prisoners were alleged to have had any connection with al-Qaeda, and the rest were either innocent men, Afghan Taliban recruits, or foreigners recruited to help the Taliban fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.

In 2002, after the CIA analyst completed his survey of the Guantánamo prisoners, he wrote a report about what he had discovered. As Mayer described it,

He mentioned specific detainees by name, so there was no confusion about whom the United States was wrongly holding. He made clear that he believed that the United States was committing war crimes by holding and questioning innocent people in such inhumane ways.

His report soon reached John Bellinger, legal counsel to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. "Immediately distressed," as Mayer put it, Bellinger convened a meeting with the analyst, attended by Gen. John Gordon, the National Security Council's senior terrorism expert (and a former deputy director of the CIA), and the two men then approached White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to discuss the report's significance.

When they went to meet Gonzales, however, they found him flanked by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House Counsel's Office. "Neither had any official national security role," Mayer wrote, "and no one had warned Bellinger that they would be there. But they did all the talking."

According to two sources who told Mayer about the meeting, Addington dismissed Belllinger's concerns by declaring, imperiously, "No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!" After Bellinger fired back, pointing out that this was "a violation of basic notions of American fairness," Addington replied, "We are not second-guessing the President's decision. These are ‘enemy combatants." Please use that phrase. They've all been through a screening process. There's nothing to talk about." Mayer added, "The President had made a group-status identification, as far as he was concerned. To Addington, it was a matter of presidential power, not a question of individual guilt or innocence."

How Cheney and Addington destroyed all notions of justice

I hope Jane Mayer - and her publishers - will forgive me for quoting at length from her book, but these passages - plus the research undertaken by the Seton Hall Law School, and, I believe, my own research for my book The Guantánamo Files, and the many hundreds of articles I have written in the last two years - should demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the administration's claim that its "war on terror" prisoners were so exceptionally dangerous that they should be treated neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, entitled to the protections of the U.S. legal system, was hyperbole of the most reckless and damaging kind.

Far from being a prison for "the worst of the worst," Guantánamo was, in fact, nothing more than a chaotic assemblage of largely random prisoners, mostly bought from the U.S. military's opportunistic allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or from villagers and townspeople desperate for the bounty payments for "al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects," averaging $5,000 a head, which were advertised on leaflets dropped from planes. These stated,

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life - pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

In addition, and contrary to Addington's claims, none of the prisoners had been through a screening process at all. In all previous wars since Vietnam, the U.S. military had held "competent tribunals" under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions. These involved screening prisoners close to the time and place of capture, to ascertain whether they were combatants or civilians caught up in the fog of war, and during the first Gulf War, for example, the military held around 1,200 of these tribunals, and in three-quarters of the cases the prisoners were sent home. In the "war on terror," however, the competent tribunals were ruled out, and, in fact, the orders that came down from on high stipulated that every single Arab who came into U.S. custody was to be transferred to Guantánamo.

Once in Guantánamo, there was no improvement. It was not until June 2004 that the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights, and even when this happened the government responded not by allowing the prisoners to challenge the basis of their unexplained detention in a U.S. court, as the Supreme Court intended, but by introducing the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. A mockery of the Article 5 competent tribunals - given that the military knew almost nothing about the majority of the men in its custody - the tribunals drew largely on confessions made through the use of torture, coercion, or bribery, or "generic" information that had nothing to do with the prisoners. In addition, as was explained by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked on the tribunals, they were, essentially, designed not to ascertain whether the prisoners had been seized by mistake, but to rubberstamp their designation, on capture, as "enemy combatants" who could be held without charge or trial.

As a result, Mayer's description of David Addington's response to the complaints aired by John Bellinger should also confirm that this sinister experiment in arbitrary detention and interrogation - which involved the U.S. not only tearing up the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual, but also attempting to circumvent the anti-torture statute - was based on an arrogant presumption that the president was above the law, that "innocence" and "guilt" were irrelevant constructs, and that it was justifiable to hold any number of prisoners forever, and to interrogate them as often and as coercively as the government wished.

This was done in order to build up a "mosaic" of intelligence not just about the small group of men responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (and the previous attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000), but also about Afghan resistance to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, about every single Muslim resistance group around the world (whether "terrorists" or not), and - from exotic captives like the handful of Russians who were seized, or the 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China's oppressed Xinjiang province, who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban) - about the activities of their own governments.

Fearmongering, cowardice, and terrible policy decisions

I mention all these facts at this particular time because the last few weeks have seen a torrent of scaremongering, misinformation, and woefully misguided policy proposals pour forth from the nation's politicians - and the president - with regard to Guantánamo, and I believe it is important to set the record straight.

First, up were Republicans, inspired, no doubt, by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who appears to be on an endless "Torture Tour," touting lies about the efficacy of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in keeping the nation safe and failing to mention how he used torture to produce lies to justify the invasion of Iraq. In a movement that rapidly snowballed, U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives from across the country repeated unsubstantiated lies about the dangers posed by the prisoners in Guantánamo and sounded fearful warnings about the implications of moving any of them to prisons on the U.S. mainland.

By Wednesday this revival of cowardice and fear had swept up an alarming number of Democrat politicians, and when it came to funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians of both parties happily approved a budget of $91 billion, but refused to give the president the $80 million he had requested for the closure of Guantánamo.

On Thursday, Obama regained some of this lost ground. In a speech in which he made it clear that he was doing his best to clear up the "mess" left by his predecessors, he chastised the fearmongers for muddying a genuine debate about how to proceed. However, Obama too demonstrated that he has been infected by what he described as the Bush administration's "season of fear," by proposing that the prisoners at Guantánamo who will not be freed will either be tried in federal courts, put forward for trial in an amended version of the failed military commissions introduced by Dick Cheney and David Addington, or subjected to "preventive detention."

I have no problem with the first of these proposals, and was encouraged that, on the same day, the Justice Department announced that a former "high-value detainee" at Guantánamo, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, would be tried in a New York court for his alleged participation in the 1998 African embassy bombings. However, I was disturbed that the president thought it worth proposing military commissions as a possible parallel path (given that no sticking plaster can disguise how corrupt the whole process was under the Bush administration), and completely dismayed that he could contemplate introducing a form of "preventive detention," and was advocating legitimizing the Guantánamo regime (which is, of course, a form of "preventive detention") for use on prisoners against whom no case can be brought because the supposed evidence will not stand up to independent scrutiny - meaning, of course, that it is tainted by torture or other forms of coercion, and is therefore not evidence at all.

A global witch hunt

At the start of this article, I presented some dark truths about Guantánamo in the hope that the account would demonstrate why the prison must be closed, and why few of the 240 men still held - perhaps 10 percent, perhaps a little more - represent a threat to the United States. In conclusion, if you'd like a few final, shocking facts about the Bush administration's "war on terror," consider what David Addington, acting as the mouthpiece of the de facto president, Dick Cheney, was really doing when he dismissed John Bellinger's complaints in the fall of 2002.

Far from just defending a detention policy that, with the blessing of Congress, had filled the cell blocks at Guantánamo (on the basis that the Authorization For Use Of Military Force, passed in the first week after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001"), Addington was also defending the expansion and extension of this policy around the world. Taking into account the prisoners held in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those subjected to "extraordinary rendition," the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo actually makes up less than 1 percent of the total number of prisoners (at least 80,000 between 2001 and 2005, according to figures released by the Pentagon), who have been held at some point in the "war on terror," without either the effective protection of the Geneva Conventions or the protections of the U.S. criminal justice system.

This was, if I may be blunt, a witch hunt on the most colossal scale, but I hope these statistics also help to explain why every facet of the Bush administration's "war on terror" needs dismantling, so that only two categories of prisoner are allowed in future: prisoners of war, seized in wartime and protected by the Geneva Conventions, and terrorists, to be treated as criminal suspects and put forward for trial in federal courts.

© 2009 Future of Freedom Foundation

Andy Worthington is a journalist and historian, based in London. He is the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees in America's illegal prison. For more information, visit his blog here.

Obama’s Guantánamo Appeasement Plan

Published on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Marjorie Cohn

Two days after his inauguration, President Obama pledged to close Guantánamo within one year.  The Republicans, led by Senators John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts, immediately launched a concerted campaign to assail the new president.  They claimed his plan would release dangerous terrorists into U.S. communities and allow released terrorists to resume fighting against our troops.  Fox News agitator Sean Hannity and Bush team players like torture-memo lawyer John Yoo filled the airwaves and print media with paranoia.

The Republican attacks were bogus.  A 2008 McClatchy investigation revealed that the overwhelming majority of Guantánamo detainees taken into custody in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent of wrongdoing or bit players with little intelligence value.  A substantial number of those prisoners were literally sold to U.S. officials in exchange for bounty payments offered by the U.S. military. A Seton Hall Law Center report has debunked Pentagon claims that many released detainees have "returned to the fight." And no one has ever escaped from one of the U.S. super-max prisons, which house hundreds of people convicted of terrorist offenses.

The Republicans have continued to oppose the effort to close Guantánamo. In an attempt to burnish his image and forestall war crimes charges, Dick Cheney now leads the charge, making ubiquitous attacks on Obama. Keeping Guantánamo open is "important," Cheney declares. He claims that closing Guantánamo would endanger Americans, and warns that if detainees are brought to the United States, they would "acquire all kinds of legal rights."  Obama is also taking heat from the intelligence community.  Those officials, like Cheney, seek to justify what they did under the Bush regime.

And now even the Democrats are piling on the bandwagon.  Reacting defensively to the Republican attack campaign, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to deny Obama funds to close Guantánamo until he comes up with a "plan" for relocating the detainees there. "We spent hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions on Guantánamo to try these cases," said Democratic Senator Jim Webb on ABC News. "I do not believe they should be tried in the United States," he added.

The pressure has caused Obama to buckle.  Timed to coincide with a Cheney speech to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Obama announced an appeasement plan to deal with the 240 remaining Guantánamo detainees.  Parts of his plan would threaten the very foundation of our legal system - that no one should be held in custody if he has committed no crime.  These are Obama's five categories for disposition of detainees once Guantánamo is closed:

1) Those who violated the laws of war will be tried in military commissions.

Obama's plan would backtrack on an early promise to shut down the military commissions.  Obama now claims that such commissions can be fair because they will no longer permit the use of evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation methods. He fails to mention, however, that the Pentagon is using "clean teams" to re-interrogate people who were previously interrogated using the prohibited methods. When they once again give the same information, it miraculously becomes untainted. Obama also fails to acknowledge that those tried in the military commissions are forbidden from seeing all the evidence against them, a violation of the bedrock principle that the accused must have an opportunity to confront his accusers.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with this part of Obama's proposed plan of action.  In Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court declared military trials of civilians to be unconstitutional if civil courts are available.

Prisoners falling in this category should be tried in the courts of the United States, because the laws of war are actually part of U.S. law.  The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution says that treaties shall be the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, which the United States has ratified, contain the laws of war.

2) Those who have been ordered released from Guantánamo will remain in custody.

Seventeen Uighurs from China were ordered released after they were found not to be enemy combatants. But they continue to languish in custody because they would be imperiled if returned to China, which considers them enemies of the state. Suggestions that they be brought to the United States have been met with paranoid NIMBY (not in my backyard!) protestations.  So, under Obama's plan they will remain incarcerated in a state of legal limbo.

3)   Those who cannot be prosecuted yet "pose a clear danger to the American people" will remain in custody with no right to legal process of any kind.

These are people who have never been charged with a crime. Obama did not say why they cannot be prosecuted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claims as many as 100 people may fall into this category. Included in this group are those who have "expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden." They will suffer "prolonged detention."

Obama's plan for "prolonged detention" is nothing more than a newly-coined phrase for "preventive detention," a policy that harks back to the bad old days of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the internment of people of Japanese extraction in the 1940's.   If Obama succeeds in convincing Congress to legalize "prolonged detention," the United States will continue to be a pariah state among justice-loving nations.  The U.S. Congress, still rendered catatonic by post-9/11 rhetoric, will probably capitulate along with Obama.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that Obama's new system of preventive detention will just "move Guantánamo to a new location and give it a new name."

4) Those who can be safely transferred to other countries will be transferred.

Obama noted that 50 men fall into this category.  It is unclear what will happen to them when they reach their destinations. 

5) Those who violated U.S. criminal laws will be tried in federal courts.

Obama cited the examples of Ramzi Yousef, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was identified as the 20^th 9/11 hijacker. Both were tried and convicted in U.S. courts and both are serving life sentences.

This is the only clearly acceptable part of Obama's plan.  All detainees slated to remain in custody should be placed into this category.  The federal courts provide due process as required by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which does not limit due process rights to U.S. citizens: "No person . . . shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

The federal courts are well suited to deal with accused terrorists. Indeed, federal judges who have presided over such cases say that the Classified Information Procedures Act can effectively protect classified intelligence in federal court trials.

If Mr. Obama proceeds with the plan he announced this week he will empower those who point to U.S. hypocrisy on human rights as a justification to do us harm. Obama's capitulation to the intelligence gurus and the right-wing attack dogs will not only imperil the rule of law; it will actually make us more vulnerable to future acts of terrorism.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild.  She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd).  Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com

Nightmare on Cheney Street

Published on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Foreign Policy In Focus

by John Feffer

Horror movies usually follow the same script. The monster - whether genetically modified, abused as a child, or flown in from Alpha Centauri - picks off the frightened teenagers one by one. After many thrills and chills, the hero drives a stake through the heart of the beast. Finally, just as we're finishing off the last of our popcorn in relief, the not-quite-dead monster makes one last attempt to dispatch the hero. It fails, but not before we've dumped popcorn all over our laps.

If Wes Craven decided to make a horror movie out of the last year of U.S. politics, he would definitely cast Dick Cheney as the monster that can't be silenced. The former vice president is Leatherface, Jason, and Freddie Krueger all rolled into one: lawless, methodical, and unpredictable with firearms. He's had more sequels than Chucky: White House chief of staff, House minority whip, secretary of Defense, CEO of Halliburton, vice president, and now rogue pundit.

In the last presidential elections, the voters repudiated the Cheney legacy. But like Glenn Close in her final scene in Fatal Attraction, Cheney's not yet down for the count. As the various TV appearances and his speech last week at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) suggest, he's still got some fight in him.

Frankly, Barton Gellman's book Angler should have KO'd the man politically. Here's a guy who not only stage-managed the vice-presidential search for George W. Bush and then took the position himself, but also extracted confidential information during the search process that he subsequently used against his potential adversaries. Here's a guy who assembled the crack legal team (or was it a legal team on crack?) that provided the constitutional argument for expanding executive power, upending domestic and international law, and justifying torture. Here's a guy who created a real secret team inside the Bush administration that bypassed the State Department, Congress, and all normal procedures.

And yet, like Nixon emerging from the grave of Watergate, Cheney has sought to rebuild his reputation as the national security conscience of his party. "On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture," he argued in a December interview on ABC. "We never have." He defended the intelligence data that the administration cooked in order to persuade the country to go to war against Iraq. He declared the "global war on terror" still on and Guantánamo still indispensable.

But last week, he went further. At AEI, he attacked The New York Times for uncovering his secret surveillance program that collected untold amount of information about U.S. citizens and should have outraged every privacy-minded conservative in the country. He argued that "enhanced interrogation techniques" provided critical information that prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He warned the Obama administration of closing Guantánamo and bringing terrorists "inside the United States" as though President Barack Obama were about to release them on the streets of New York. It was a speech, to quote Cheney himself, that reeked of "recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

The AEI speech, like Cheney's performance as vice president, was rife with misstatements and calculated distortions. As journalists Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel point out, the CIA inspector general, FBI director, and director of national intelligence all concur that there is no proof that the information gained through torture thwarted any attacks. The Abu Ghraib abuses were not, as Cheney claimed, the result of a few sadistic guards but the result of orders from top administration officials. Most of those detained in Guantánamo haven't been "ruthless enemies of this country" but innocent people or low-level combatants without any valuable intelligence.

If you don't believe journalists - because you think, as Cheney implies, they don't have the best interests of the country at heart - consider the perspective of the chief U.S. interrogator in Iraq, Matthew Alexander. "Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives," Alexander writes. "Our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse. My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques."

Of course, Dick Cheney has never been particularly interested in the truth. He wants to achieve his goals. And it appears that he's having some effect.

By rallying the conservative forces and putting pressure on invertebrate Democrats, Cheney has influenced national policy. The Senate refused to appropriate money for the closure of Guantánamo and the transfer of the prisoners held there. Obama has refused to support a truth commission. More ominously, the Obama administration is now working out its own policy of "preventive detention" - indefinitely holding people that can't be charged and tried in U.S. courts - that violates fundamental American legal principles. In his speech at the National Archives last week, Obama defended his important departures from Bush-era policy (end of torture, closure of Guantánamo) but also showed the influence of Cheney in his emphasis on war, "taking the fight to the extremists," and military commissions.

Liberal commentators have generally been enthusiastic about Obama's caution. Just check out The Washington Post's liberal stable: David Broder praised Obama and Cheney for both opposing a truth commission; "Obama has mostly called it right," observes Ruth Marcus; and E.J. Dionne, Jr. is delighted at the resurrection of Cold War liberalism. Cheney makes Obama look good. But he also pulls the president further to the right.

Cheney isn't just fighting for his principles. He's fighting for his career and those of the team that bent the Constitution to their will. No one expects that the villains in horror movies will observe Marquess of Queensberry rules. The same applies to the former vice president. Expect more down-and-dirty fighting from Dick Cheney. This is one nightmare from which we haven't quite woken up.

Nightmare on Kim Jong Il Street

North Korea can't let a U.S. holiday go by without offering its own form of celebration. In 2006, Pyongyang launched a rocket on July 4. This year, on Memorial Day, it decided to test a second nuclear weapon. Or, at least, that's what the seismic data suggests. The first test three years ago was widely held to be a dud. This one might not have been much better.

Dud or not, the United States has to come up with a response. Foreign Policy In Focus contributors Brent Choi and Joowoon Jung argue in A More Expensive Bill for North Korea that the Obama administration should wield a bigger stick and dangle a larger carrot. It should offer to send a high-level envoy to Pyongyang. And it should threaten to redeploy nuclear weapons in South Korea. In North Korea and Malign Neglect, I argue that ignoring North Korea hasn't worked in the past. The Obama administration should instead embark on an authentic policy of engagement as the only way to disempower North Korean hardliners and promote a more sensible agenda in Pyongyang.

Nukes or nice? Follow our debate in Strategic Dialogue: North Korea.

Nightmare on Recession Street

The horror movie that most people are facing these days is joblessness, foreclosure, and poverty. Will China save the global economy by using its own economic growth to pull the world out of recession?

FPIF columnist Walden Bello is skeptical. In Will China Save the World from Depression?, he points out that Beijing is sponsoring a stimulus package that, proportional to its economy, is larger than Washington's. Much of that money is going to the countryside. "A significant portion of Beijing's stimulus package is destined for infrastructure and social spending in the rural areas," Bello writes. "The government is allocating 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) in subsidies to help rural residents buy televisions, refrigerators, and other electrical appliances." But this isn't enough. "Even if Beijing throws in another hundred billion dollars, the stimulus package is not likely to counteract in any significant way the depressive impact of a 25-year policy of sacrificing the countryside for export-oriented urban-based industrial growth," Bello concludes.

Climate change isn't helping matters. The poorest countries in the world will face the near-term consequences of global warming. The UN has created a fund to help these countries make the necessary changes now to deal with this problem. The fund only has about 10% of the funds needed to pay for the first round of changes.

"The United States, as the world's richest country and its biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses, didn't pledge a single cent to this fund over the last eight years under President George W. Bush," writes FPIF contributor Saleemul Huq in Bridging the Climate Gap. "This has left a significant credibility deficit for the United States that Obama and Congress need to address if they wish the United States to claim a leadership role at the global level on climate change."

Where could the money come from? What about the Pentagon? The problem is, the Obama administration is proposing to increase military spending. "Wasting taxpayer money on dangerous, unnecessary, expensive military projects is more of an imposition on our grandchildren than spending money on health care or green energy - especially when the weapons programs don't work properly. The Government Accountability Office has documented massive Pentagon waste. Why is Congress unconcerned?" asks FPIF contributor Steve Cobble in Conservative Hypocrisy on Military Spending.

Speaking of waste, how about that World Bank? FPIF contributor Bea Edwards reports on the lack of safeguards against corruption at the Bank and what we can do about it in World Bank Corruption.

Final Nightmares

Israeli President Binyamin Netanyahu recently dropped in for a White House visit. The Obama administration has demanded that Israel stop building settlements, but Netanyahu is pressing forward on building homes in existing settlements.

The real nightmare scenario in U.S.-Israeli relations is Iran, though. "Netanyahu campaigned on and has continued to escalate his rhetoric threatening military force against Iran, sometimes framing it in the context of 'what Israel will have to do if the United States does not prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,'" writes FPIF contributor Phyllis Bennis in Netanyahu Visits the White House. "Netanyahu demands that the United States agree either to attack Iran if Obama's potential nuclear diplomacy doesn't work, or agree to support an Israeli attack on Iran"

Iran, meanwhile, is gearing up for an election next month. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is going for a second term, a nightmare possibility in itself. But he faces stiff competition from a couple of moderates. "A reformist comeback would certainly substitute confrontational tactics and volatile rhetoric with moderation and reason," writes FPIF contributor Bernd Kaussler in Iran's Next Leadership? "Although the nuclear position will not shift, the United States will likely be able to engage constructively with a reformist government in Iran. But such a government will also have to deal with a hostile conservative parliament, and may have trouble delivering on the key issues needed internally in order to secure and maintain dialogue with the United States."

FPIF contributor Andre Vltchek recently visited a nightmare: the Kibati refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He sends us a Postcard from...Goma that details the horrifying conditions.

And finally, FPIF contributor Tiffany Williams reviews a new book on yet another nightmarish condition: slavery in the United States. "Although the United States abolished slavery officially in 1865, it has never ended in practice," she writes. "In 2009, slaves work in the homes of diplomats in Maryland and in the tomato fields of Southwest Florida. 'There has never been a single day in our America, from its discovery and birth right up to the moment you are reading this sentence, without slavery,' write renowned human trafficking expert Kevin Bales and respected historian Ron Soodalter in their new book The Slave Next Door."

Links

Barton Gellman, Angler (Penguin, 2008); http://www.bartongellman.com/

ABC News, "Cheney Defends Hard Line Tactics," December 16, 2008; http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=6464697&page=1

Fox News, "Text of Dick Cheney's National Security Speech at AEI," May 21, 2009; http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/05/21/raw-data-text-dick-cheneys-national-security-speech-aei/

Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, "Cheney's Speech Ignored Some Inconvenient Truths," McClatchy, May 21, 2009; http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/68643.html

Matthew Alexander, "Former Senior Investigator in Iraq Dissects Cheney's Lies and Distortions," The Huffington Post, May 24, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-alexander/whats-not-said-is-more-im_b_207151.html

The Washington Post, "Obama on National Security and American Values," May 21, 2009; http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/05/21/obama_on_national_security_and.html?sid=ST2009052101969

David Broder, "A Worthy Debate," The Washington Post, May 24, 2009; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201634.html

Ruth Marcus, "Obama's 'None of the Above' Terror Policy," The Washington Post, May 24, 2009; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201894.html

E. J. Dionne, Jr., "Obama's Center-Left Two-Step," The Washington Post, May 25, 2009; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/24/AR2009052401980.html

The Marquess of Queensberry Rules; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess_of_Queensberry_rules

Thom Shanker and William Broad, "Seismic Readings Appear to Point to a Small Nuclear Test," The New York Times, May 26, 2009; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/world/asia/26threat.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Brent Choi and Joowoon Jung, "A More Expensive Bill for North Korea," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6136); Washington should consider a bigger stick and a bigger carrot.

John Feffer, "North Korea and Malign Neglect," Foreign Policy In Focus and Asia Chronicle (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6137); The Obama administration needs to abandon its default position and seriously engage North Korea.

Brent Choi, Joowoon Jung, and John Feffer, "Strategic Dialogue: North Korea," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6138); What's the proper response to North Korea's actions?

Walden Bello, "Can China Save the World from Depression?" Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6127); China's stimulus package is not likely to bail out either the Chinese peasants or the global economy.

Saleemul Huq, "Bridging the Climate Gap," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6124); The United States must help poor countries deal with the impact of climate change.

Steve Cobble, "Conservative Hypocrisy on Military Spending," Asheville Citizen-Times (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6133); It's time to apply "pay as you go" spending to the military budget.

Bea Edwards, "World Bank Corruption," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6134); The Bank's management tried to stifle an internal report that found that its funds are vulnerable to theft and diversion.

Phyllis Bennis, "Netanyahu Visits the White House," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6125); Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Obama has the chance to make good on real change in U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Bernd Kaussler, "Iran's Next Leadership?" Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6131); In their upcoming presidential elections, Iranians will make a choice that will have profound implications on their country's relationship with the United States and the world.

Andre Vltchek, "Postcard from...Goma," Foreign Policy in Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6128); The international community has promised assistance to refugees in Congo. But not much has reached them.

Tiffany Williams, "Review: The Slave Next Door," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6123); Slavery may have ended officially in the United States in 1865, but it has continued in practice to this very day.

© 2009 Foreign Policy In Focus

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.

The Awful Sound of Silence

 

by Steve Carlson

" And no one dared disturb the sound of silence. "
--Paul Simon
While I suppose one could argue that it's too early to start identifying the most under-reported story of the 21st century to date, I should think that the actual death and human suffering toll in Iraq might top the list of almost any discerning journalist, academic, policymaker, or for that matter, peacemaker. The fact that the scale and scope of the tragedy has been successfully obscured, so far, is in itself quite a story, though perhaps one with an ending that may leave our collective sense of fundamental goodness more than a bit shaken.
How is it that we in America haven't considered this question seriously? I understand we're in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. I understand we're shedding jobs at an alarming rate. I get it that hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, are at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure. No one disputes that these are tough times for a great many people in this country.
But what are the people of Iraq facing? What must it be like to be a survivor of the Iraqi War? Let's start with what's been reported so far.
The website Iraq Body Count has cross documented the violent deaths of between 90,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the 2003 American led invasion and occupation. Most experts agree that this number is, in all probability, significantly below the actual death toll.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins estimated that as of July, 2006, the death toll had exceeded 600,000 people.
A September 2007 study by the prestigious British polling firm Opinion Research Business, put the death toll at 1.2 million Iraqis.
Calculating a rate of increase derived from the numbers reported on Iraq Body Count, (and assuming that the survey methodologies of the Johns Hopkins and Opinion Business Research studies are sound), Just Foreign Policy estimates the current number of Iraqi dead at roughly 1.3 million people.
MIT researcher John Tirman has reported that there are perhaps 1 million Iraqi widows, up to 5 million orphans, and 4.5 million refugees as a result of the war.
What do these numbers mean? For the sake of trying to understand let's pick a number halfway between the Iraq Body Count and Just Foreign Policy estimates. Let's assume that 650,000 Iraqi's have suffered violent deaths since 2003. Let's further assume that the halfway mark also applies to the number of widows, orphans and refugees the war has produced. Then let's put these numbers into context by noting that the population of Iraq in 2003 was roughly one tenth the population of the United States, and then by taking an imaginative leap. Here goes.
A brutal tyrant ascends to power in America, crushing opposition political parties, murdering dissidents and destroying our civil liberties. The European Union and Canada decide to invade in order to "liberate" the American people. And in the ensuing war 6.5 million civilians die violently from military and sectarian conflicts. Civilians, mind you. And the war also produces 6.5 million widows, 25 million orphans, and another 20 milion people displaced from their homes, or become refugees. And the numbers might be double that. 12 Million dead. 40 million refugees. 50 million orphans. Think about it for a moment, if you can.
Tens and tens of millions of Americans would know someone who had been killed in the war. Tens and tens of millions more would know war widows and orphans, or of neighbors, friends or family who fled elsewhere to escape the violence, perhaps permanently displaced. And tens and tens of millions more would have seen violent death and injury first hand. And all of this death and suffering against the backdrop of a destroyed power grid, healthcare system and general infrastructure. A nation and it's people reduced to rubble and despair.
We'd be absolutely awash in grief and shock if such a thing happened in this country. A lot of us wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. A lot of us would feel as though we had no future and no hope. We'd never be the same again.
So how is it that any politician or pundit in America can talk about what did or did not "work" in the Iraqi War? How can a calamity of this magnitude be considered, in any sense whatsoever, a success? How could anyone in America have complained, as they have in the past, that the media doesn't report on the good things happening in Iraq. What good things?
Shouldn't somebody in Washington want to know the truth of what's happened in Iraq? Shouldn't the rest of us want to know, too? Shouldn't we be talking out loud about all of this? Maybe the crisis we're facing here at home is more than just an economic one. 

Steve Carlson is a former steering committee member of United for Peace and Justice, and a member of the Iraq Moratorium national committee. He can be reached through his website at www.bottomrungproductions.com

The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible

Published on Monday, May 18, 2009 by Salon.com

The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.

by Marcy Wheeler

On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program -- which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations -- trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

The Torture 13 also abused the legal review process in the Department of Justice in order to provide permission for torture. The DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) played a crucial role. OLC provides interpretations on how laws apply to the executive branch. On issues where the law is unclear, like national security, OLC opinions can set the boundary for "legal" activity for executive branch employees. As Jack Goldsmith, OLC head from 2003 to 2004, explains it, "One consequence of [OLC's] power to interpret the law is the power to bestow on government officials what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal statutes." OLC has the power, Goldsmith continues, to dispense "get-out-of-jail-free cards." The Torture 13 exploited this power by collaborating on a series of OLC opinions that repeatedly gave U.S. officials such a "get-out-of-jail-free card" for torturing.

Between 9/11 and the end of 2002, the Torture 13 decided to torture, then reverse-engineered the techniques, and then crafted the legal cover. Here's who they are and what they did:

1. Dick Cheney, vice president (2001-2009)

On the morning of 9/11, after the evacuation of the White House, Dick Cheney summoned his legal counsel, David Addington, to return to work. The two had worked together for years. In the 1980s, when Cheney was a congressman from Wyoming and Addington a staff attorney to another congressman, Cheney and Addington argued that in Iran-Contra, the president could ignore congressional guidance on foreign policy matters. Between 1989 and 1992, when Dick Cheney was the elder George Bush's secretary of defense, Addington served as his counsel. He and Cheney saved the only known copies of abusive interrogation technique manuals taught at the School of the Americas. Now, on the morning of 9/11, they worked together to plot an expansive grab of executive power that they claimed was the correct response to the terrorist threat. Within two weeks, they had gotten a memo asserting almost unlimited power for the president as "the sole organ of the Nation in its foreign relations," to respond to the terrorist attacks. As part of that expansive view of executive power, Cheney and Addington would argue that domestic and international laws prohibiting torture and abuse could not prevent the president from authorizing harsh treatment of detainees in the war against terror.

But Cheney and Addington also fought bureaucratically to construct this torture program. Cheney led the way by controlling who got access to President Bush -- and making sure his own views preempted others'. Each time the torture program got into trouble as it spread around the globe, Cheney intervened to ward off legal threats and limits, by badgering the CIA's inspector general when he reported many problems with the interrogation program, and by lobbying Congress to legally protect those who had tortured.

Most shockingly, Cheney is reported to have ordered torture himself, even after interrogators believed detainees were cooperative. Since the 2002 OLC memo known as "Bybee Two" that authorizes torture premises its authorization for torture on the assertion that "the interrogation team is certain that" the detainee "has additional information he refuses to divulge," Cheney appears to have ordered torture that was illegal even under the spurious guidelines of the memo.

2. David Addington, counsel to the vice president (2001-2005), chief of staff to the vice president (2005-2009)

David Addington championed the fight to argue that the president -- in his role as commander in chief -- could not be bound by any law, including those prohibiting torture. He did so in two ways. He advised the lawyers drawing up the legal opinions that justified torture. In particular, he ran a "War Council" with Jim Haynes, John Yoo, John Rizzo and Alberto Gonzales (see all four below) and other trusted lawyers, which crafted and executed many of the legal approaches to the war on terror together.

In addition, Addington and Cheney wielded bureaucratic carrots and sticks -- notably by giving or withholding promotions for lawyers who supported these illegal policies. When Jack Goldsmith withdrew a number of OLC memos because of the legal problems in them, Addington was the sole administration lawyer who defended them. Addington's close bureaucratic control over the legal analysis process shows he was unwilling to let the lawyers give the administration a "good faith" assessment of the laws prohibiting torture.

3. Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel (2001-2005), and attorney general (2005-2008)

As White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales was nominally in charge of representing the president's views on legal issues, including national security issues. In that role, Gonzales wrote and reviewed a number of the legal opinions that attempted to immunize torture. Most important, in a Jan. 25, 2002, opinion reportedly written with David Addington, Gonzales paved the way for exempting al-Qaida detainees from the Geneva Conventions. His memo claimed the "new kind of war" represented by the war against al-Qaida "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." In a signal that Gonzales and Addington adopted that position to immunize torture, Gonzales argued that one advantage of not applying the Geneva Convention to al-Qaida would "substantially reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." The memo even specifically foresaw the possibility of independent counsels' prosecuting acts against detainees.

4. James Mitchell, consultant

Even while Addington, Gonzales and the lawyers were beginning to build the legal framework for torture, a couple of military psychologists were laying out the techniques the military would use. James Mitchell, a retired military psychologist, had been a leading expert in the military's SERE program. In December 2001, with his partner, Bruce Jessen, Mitchell reverse-engineered SERE techniques to be used to interrogate detainees. Then, in the spring of 2002, before OLC gave official legal approval to torture, Mitchell oversaw Abu Zubaydah's interrogation. An FBI agent on the scene describes Mitchell overseeing the use of "borderline torture." And after OLC approved waterboarding, Mitchell oversaw its use in ways that exceeded the guidelines in the OLC memo. Under Mitchell's guidance, interrogators used the waterboard with "far greater frequency than initially indicated" -- a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah.

5. George Tenet, director of Central Intelligence (1997-2004)

As director of the CIA during the early years of the war against al-Qaida, Tenet had ultimate management responsibility for the CIA's program of capturing, detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qaida members and briefed top Cabinet members on those techniques. Published reports say Tenet approved every detail of the interrogation plans: "Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added -- was signed off on by the Director." It was under Tenet's leadership that Mitchell and Jessen's SERE techniques were applied to the administration's first allegedly high-value al-Qaida prisoner, Abu Zubaydah. After approval of the harsh techniques, CIA headquarters ordered Abu Zubaydah to be waterboarded even though onsite interrogators believed Zubaydah was "compliant." Since the Bybee Two memo authorizing torture required that interrogators believe the detainee had further information that could only be gained by using torture, this additional use of the waterboard was clearly illegal according to the memo.

6. Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor (2001-2005), secretary of state (2005-2008)

As national security advisor to President Bush, Rice coordinated much of the administration's internal debate over interrogation policies. She approved (she now says she "conveyed the authorization") for the first known officially sanctioned use of torture -- the CIA's interrogation of Abu Zubaydah -- on July 17, 2002. This approval was given after the torture of Zubaydah had begun, and before receiving a legal OK from the OLC. The approval from the OLC was given orally in late July and in written form on Aug. 1, 2002. Rice's approval or "convey[ance] of authorization" led directly to the intensified torture of Zubaydah.

7. John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel (2001-2003)

As deputy assistant attorney general of OLC focusing on national security for the first year and a half after 9/11, Yoo drafted many of the memos that would establish the torture regime, starting with the opinion claiming virtually unlimited power for the president in times of war. In the early months of 2002, he started working with Addington and others to draft two key memos authorizing torture: Bybee One (providing legal cover for torture) and Bybee Two (describing the techniques that could be used), both dated Aug. 1, 2002. He also helped draft a similar memo approving harsh techniques for the military completed on March 14, 2003, and even a memo eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections in the United States. The Bybee One and DOD memos argue that "necessity" or "self-defense" might be used as defenses against prosecution, even though the United Nations Convention Against Torture explicitly states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war ... may be invoked as a justification of torture." Bybee Two, listing the techniques the CIA could use in interrogation, was premised on hotly debated assumptions. For example, the memo presumed that Abu Zubaydah was uncooperative, and had actionable intelligence that could only be gotten through harsh techniques. Yet Zubaydah had already cooperated with the FBI. The memo claimed Zubaydah was mentally and physically fit to be waterboarded, even though Zubaydah had had head and recent gunshot injuries. As Jack Goldsmith described Yoo's opinions, they "could be interpreted as if they were designed to confer immunity for bad acts." In all of his torture memos, Yoo ignored key precedents relating both specifically to waterboarding and to separation of powers.

8. Jay Bybee, assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel (2001-2003)

As head of the OLC when the first torture memos were approved, Bybee signed the memos named after him that John Yoo drafted. At the time, the White House knew that Bybee wanted an appointment as a Circuit Court judge; after signing his name to memos supporting torture, he received such an appointment. Of particular concern is the timing of Bybee's approval of the torture techniques. He first approved some techniques on July 24, 2002. The next day, Jim Haynes, the Defense Department's general counsel, ordered the SERE unit of DOD to collect information including details on waterboarding. While the record is contradictory on whether Haynes or CIA General Counsel John Rizzo gave that information to OLC, on the day they did so, OLC approved waterboarding. One of the documents in that packet identified these actions as torture, and stated that torture often produced unreliable results.

9. William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department general counsel (2001-2008)

As general counsel of the Defense Department, Jim Haynes oversaw the legal analysis of interrogation techniques to be used with military detainees. Very early on, he worked as a broker between SERE professionals and the CIA. His office first asked for information on "exploiting" detainees in December 2001, which is when James Mitchell is first known to have worked on interrogation plans. And later, in July 2002, when CIA was already using torture with Abu Zubaydah but needed scientific cover before OLC would approve waterboarding, Haynes ordered the SERE team to produce such information immediately.

Later Haynes played a key role in making sure some of the techniques were adopted, with little review, by the military. He was thus crucial to the migration of torture to Guantánamo and then Iraq. In September 2002, Haynes participated in a key visit to Guantánamo (along with Addington and other lawyers) that coincided with requests from DOD interrogators there for some of the same techniques used by the CIA.

Haynes ignored repeated warnings from within the armed services about the techniques, including statements that the techniques "may violate torture statute" and "cross the line of 'humane' treatment." In October 2002, when the legal counsel for the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff attempted to conduct a thorough legal review of the techniques, Haynes ordered her to stop, because "people were going to see" the objections that some in the military had raised. On Nov. 27, 2002, Haynes recommended that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorize many of the requested techniques, including stress positions, hooding, the removal of clothing, and the use of dogs -- the same techniques that showed up later in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

10. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense (2001-2006)

As secretary of defense, Rumsfeld signed off on interrogation methods used in the military, notably for Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base and Guantánamo Bay. With this approval, the use of torture would move from the CIA to the military. A recent bipartisan Senate report concluded that "Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there." Rumsfeld personally approved techniques including the use of phobias (dogs), forced nudity and stress positions on Dec. 2, 2002, signing a one-page memo prepared for him by Haynes. These techniques were among those deemed torture in the Charles Graner case and the case of "20th hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani. Rumsfeld also personally authorized an interrogation plan for Moahmedou Ould Slahi on Aug. 13, 2003; the plan used many of the same techniques as had been used with al-Qahtani, including sensory deprivation and "sleep adjustment." And through it all, Rumsfeld maintained a disdainful view on these techniques, at one point quipping on a memo approving harsh techniques, "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

11. John Rizzo, CIA deputy general counsel (2002-2004), acting general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (2001-2002, 2004-present)

As deputy general counsel and then acting general counsel for the CIA, John Rizzo's name appears on all of the known OLC opinions on torture for the CIA. For the Bybee Two memo, Rizzo provided a number of factually contested pieces of information to OLC -- notably, that Abu Zubaydah was uncooperative and physically and mentally fit enough to withstand waterboarding and other enhanced techniques. In addition, Rizzo provided a description of waterboarding using one standard, while the OLC opinion described a more moderate standard. Significantly, the description of waterboarding submitted to OLC came from the Defense Department, even though NSC had excluded DOD from discussions on the memo. Along with the description of waterboarding and other techniques, Rizzo also provided a document that called enhanced methods "torture" and deemed them unreliable -- yet even with this warning, Rizzo still advocated for the CIA to get permission to use those techniques.

12. Steven Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general, OLC (2004), acting assistant attorney general, OLC (2005-2009)

In 2004, the CIA's inspector general wrote a report concluding that the CIA's interrogation program might violate the Convention Against Torture. It fell to Acting Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury to write three memos in May 2005 that would dismiss the concerns the IG Report raised -- in effect, to affirm the OLC's 2002 memos legitimizing torture. Bradbury's memos noted the ways in which prior torture had exceeded the Bybee Two memo: the 183 uses of the waterboard for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in one month, the gallon and a half used in waterboarding, the 20 to 30 times a detainee is thrown agains the wall, the 11 days a detainee had been made to stay awake, the extra sessions of waterboarding ordered from CIA headquarters even after local interrogators deemed Abu Zubaydah to be fully compliant. Yet Bradbury does not consider it torture. He notes the CIA's doctors' cautions about the combination of using the waterboard with a physically fatigued detainee, yet in a separate memo approves the use of sleep deprivation and waterboading in tandem. He repeatedly concedes that the CIA's interrogation techniques as actually implemented exceeded the SERE techniques, yet repeatedly points to the connection to SERE to argue the methods must be legal. And as with the Bybee One memo, Bradbury resorts to precisely the kind of appeal to exceptional circumstances -- "used only as necessary to protect against grave threats" -- to distinguish U.S. interrogation techniques from the torture it so closely resembles around the world.

13. George W. Bush, president (2001-2009)

While President Bush maintained some distance from the torture for years -- Cheney describes him "basically" authorizing it -- he served as the chief propagandist about its efficacy and necessity. Most notably, on Sept. 6, 2006, when Bush first confessed to the program, Bush repeated the claims made to support the Bybee Two memo: that Abu Zubaydah wouldn't talk except by using torture. And in 2006, after the CIA's own inspector general had raised problems with the program, after Steven Bradbury had admitted all the ways that the torture program exceeded guidelines, Bush still claimed it was legal.

"[They] were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful."

With this statement, the deceptions and bureaucratic games all came full circle. After all, it was Bush who, on Feb. 7, 2002, had declared the Geneva Conventions wouldn't apply (a view the Supreme Court ultimately rejected).

Bush's inaction in torture is as important as his actions. Bush failed to fulfill legal obligations to notify Congress of the torture program. A Senate Intelligence timeline on the torture program makes clear that Congress was not briefed on the techniques used in the torture program until after Abu Zubaydah had already been waterboarded. And in a 2003 letter, then House Intelligence ranking member Jane Harman shows that she had not yet seen evidence that Bush had signed off on this policy. This suggests President Bush did not provide the legally required notice to Congress, violating National Security Decisions Directive-286. What Bush did not say is as legally important as what he did say.

Yet, ultimately, Bush and whatever approval he gave the program is at the center of the administration's embrace of torture. Condoleezza Rice recently said, "By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture." While Rice has tried to reframe her statement, it uses the same logic used by John Yoo and David Addington to justify the program, the shocking claim that international and domestic laws cannot bind the president in times of war. Bush's close allies still insist if he authorized it, it couldn't be torture.

© 2009 Salon.com

Marcy Wheeler writes her blog, emptywheel, for FireDogLake.com

Colin Powell Got Snookered at CIA

Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Ray McGovern

Think back six years.  How often did we hear then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tout his intense four-day vigil at CIA headquarters preparing the speech he would give to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003?  Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was asked by Powell to herd cats in putting that speech together, recently threw light on why it turned out to be such an acute embarrassment. 

Surrogates of Vice President Dick Cheney were insisting on giving prominence to highly dubious reports of operational ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but on this particular issue (unlike the phantom WMD) CIA and State department intelligence analysts had stood firm in the face of heavy pressure.  Indeed, the CIA ombudsman saw fit to tell Congress that never in his 32 years as a CIA analyst had he witnessed a more aggressive "hammering" on analysts to change their minds and give credence to reporting that was trash. 

How was it, then, that Secretary Powell ended up citing a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network" to depict a relationship that did not exist?  Fair labeling: Reading what follows may not make you quite as ill as reading the Department of Justice torture memos, but it may well sicken-and anger-you just the same. 

According to Col. Wilkerson, just days before trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, his boss Colin Powell had decided not to regurgitate the dubious allegations about Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda.  Just in the nick of time, however, top CIA officials produced a "bombshell" report alleging such ties.  The information was more than a year old and apparently extricated via torture, but Powell took the bait. 

Wilkerson says the key moment occurred on Feb. 1, 2003, as the two men labored at the CIA over Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council four days later. 

"Powell and I had a one-on-one - no one else even in the room - about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa'ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech]," Wilkerson said. "I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.

"Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the director's conference room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons."

Although Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn't give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had been captured 15 months earlier; who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture; and who now seems to be quite dead. 

Presumably not realizing that the "new" intelligence was tainted, "Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with more general information from a previous draft about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies," Wilkerson said. 

Wilkerson's account provides insight into how the need to justify war gave impetus to the use of torture for extracting information, and how the Bush administration's reliance on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects helped grease the skids to war.  Both. 

Sealing the Deal

Powell, whose credibility essentially sealed the deal for war as far as millions of Americans were concerned, let himself be manipulated by senior CIA officials who kept him in the dark about crucial details, including the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency had thrown serious doubt on al-Libi's credibility.  Wilkerson told me: 

"As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet's breathtaking delivery).

"And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) ... All of this was hidden from us - the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service....

"As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi's recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair's probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication - to at least a certain extent - only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the ‘fabrication' theme from other examples."

Among those other examples, Wilkerson said, was the case of the Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, who supplied false intelligence about mobile labs for making biological and chemical weapons, and various Iraqi walk-ins who spun bogus stories about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. 

Though some of those sources appear to have concocted their tales after being recruited by the pro-invasion exiles of the Iraqi National Congress, al-Libi told his stories-he later claimed-to avoid or stop torture.  This is a central point in the current debate about why torture was used and whether it saved American lives. 

Torture Can Produce

For those of you distracted by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) spotlight on "what-did-Pelosi-know-about-torture-and-when-did-she- know-it," please turn off the TV long enough to ponder the case of the recently departed al-Libi.  According to a Libyan newspaper, al-Libi has died in a Libyan prison, a purported suicide. 

The al-Libi case might help you understand why, even though information from torture is notoriously unreliable, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the me-too officials running U.S. intelligence ordered it anyway. 

In short, if it is untruthful information you are after, torture can work just fine! As the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham put it during a Senate hearing on May 13-with a hat-tip to the Inquisition-"One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work." 

All you really need to know is what you want the victims to "confess" to and then torture them, or render them abroad to "friendly" intelligence services toward the same end. 

Poster Child for Torture

Al-Libi, born in 1963 in Libya, ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought that he might know of, or at least be induced to "confess" to, Iraqi training of al-Qaeda. 

The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI's Dan Coleman, who "lost" al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, "Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. 

Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, says, "A large part of that time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and we were not successful," according to Burney's recent testimony to the Senate.  Burney added: 

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

CIA interrogators elicited some "cooperation" from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business. 

By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi's claim was well received even though the DIA was highly suspicious. 

Serious Misgivings

"He lacks specific details" about the supposed training, DIA observed. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." 

Despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from 2004; the year al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda's connections with Iraq, a subject "about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."  (This, despite the limited "success" CIA interrogators claimed to have had on this issue.) 

According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and "placed him in a small box" for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to "tell the truth." 

When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he "was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back" and then was "punched for 15 minutes." 

And, sure enough, as Sen. Lindsay Graham has noted, this stuff really works! For it was then that al-Libi expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq "to learn about nuclear weapons."  Al-Libi added that the treatment he received improved after he told that to his interrogators. 

In any case, al-Libi's stories apparently were music to the ears of Colin Powell, who was under pressure to establish in his U.N. speech some evidence of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda-the "axis-of-evil" kind of epithet he ended up using to try to justify invading Iraq. 

Al-Libi recanted his claims in January 2004. This prompted the CIA, a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission.  But he was really a big help before he recanted! 

Just What the Doctor Ordered

George Bush relied on al-Libi's false confession for his crucial speech in Cincinnati on Oct.  7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." 

Colin Powell relied on it for his own speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003:  "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story." 

Bear in mind that before the attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, polls showed that some 70 percent Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had operational ties with al-Qaeda and thus was partly responsible for the attacks of 9/11.  Worse still, about half of the American people had been led to believe that Saddam was actually involved in 9/11. 

For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, at least until it was learned that he recanted, explaining that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture. 

In his disingenuous memoir, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet sought to defend the CIA's acceptance of the original claims made by al-Libi in the run-up to the Iraq war.  Tenet even suggested that al-Libi may have been right the first time-that it may have been his subsequent recantation that was not genuine. 

"He clearly lied," Tenet wrote. "We just don't know when. Did he lie when he first said that Al Qaeda members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true." 

I am not making this up.  That incisive analysis appears on page 353 of Tenet's book. 

Tenet, of course, is hardly a disinterested observer. If there was a CIA plan to extract a false confession, it's likely he was a key participant.  After all, he devoted 2002-03 to the mission of manufacturing a "slam-dunk" WMD-case for invading Iraq, in order to please his bosses. He had both the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime and, later, huge incentive to cover it up. 

Al-Libi "Commits Suicide"

If al-Libi is now dead - strangely our embassy in Tripoli has been unable to find out for sure - this means the world will never hear his own account of the torture he experienced and the story he made up and then recanted.  And we have already been asked to believe he "committed suicide" even though al-Libi apparently was a devout Muslim, and Islam prohibits suicide. 

Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya."  He added that, throughout Gaddafi's 40-year rule, there have been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that "then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death." 

Am I suggesting...? 

Anatomy of a Crime

Commenting on what he called the "Cheney interrogation techniques," Col. Wilkerson, writing for The Washington Note on May 13, made the following points: 

"...as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 - well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion - its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but on discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq to al-Qaeda. 

"So furious was this effort on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee ‘was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. 

"As far as al-Libi is concerned, his harsh interrogation ceased after, under waterboarding in Egypt, he ‘revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop." 

Cheney Family Honor

Stung by Wilkerson's criticism of her father, Liz Cheney, who worked in the State Department during the Bush/Cheney administration, lashed out publicly at Wilkerson on Sunday, charging he has made "a cottage industry out of fantasies" about the former Vice President.  All that Ms. Cheney could manage in support of her contention was to point out that al-Libi was not among the three al-Qaeda detainees the CIA has said it waterboarded. 

After his article in The Washington Note, I asked Col. Wilkerson for a retrospective look at how it could have been that the torture-derived information from al-Libi was not recognized for what it was and thus kept out of Secretary Powell's speech at the UN. 

Since al-Libi had been captured over a year before the speech and had been put at the tender mercies of the Egyptian intelligence service, should he and Powell not have suspected that al-Libi had been tortured? 

Wilkerson responded by e-mail with the comments cited above regarding Tenet and McLaughlin interrupting Powell's evaluation of the Iraqi WMD intelligence with their new -just trust us-"bombshell." 

I asked Col. Wilkerson:  "Were there no others from the State Department with you at CIA headquarters on Feb. 1, 2003. Was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), State's very professional, incorruptible intelligence unit, not represented? He answered: 

"When I gathered ‘my team' - some were selected for me, such as Will Toby from Bob Joseph's NSC staff and John Hanna from the VP's office - in my office at State to give them an initial briefing and marching orders, I asked Carl [Ford, then head of INR] to attend.  I wanted Carl - or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar - to be on ‘my team'.

"Carl stayed after the meeting and I asked him straightforwardly to come with me or to send someone from INR. Carl said that he did not need to come or to send anyone because he had the Secretary's ear (he was right on that) and could weigh in at any time he wanted to.

"Moreover, he told me, the Secretary knew very well where INR stood, as did I myself (he was right on that too).

"As I look back, I believe one of my gravest errors was in not insisting that INR send someone with me.

"Fascinating and completely puzzling at first was the total absence of a Department of Defense representative on my team; however, after 3-4 days and nights I figured out ... DoD was covering its own butt, to an extent, by having no direct fingerprints on the affair - and being directly wired into Cheney's office, Rumsfeld's folks knew they were protected by Toby and Hanna.

"When we all arrived at CIA, we were given the NIC [National Intelligence Council] spaces and staff. [But] I could not even get on a computer!! Protests to Tenet and McLaughlin got me perfunctory CIA-blah blah about security clearances, etc. - and me with 7 days and nights to prepare a monumentally important presentation! ...

"[It took] 24 hours before George or John acknowledged I could be on a computer.... From there on, it was a madhouse.

"But at the end of the day, had I had an INR rep, had I had better support, had I been more concerned with WHAT I was assembling rather than HOW on earth I would assemble it and present it on time, I'm not sure at all it would have made any difference in the march to war."

Not the Only Criminal Activity

So there you have it folks, the anatomy of a crime - one of several such already on the record, with some of the same dramatis personae. 

Mention of Carl Ford and Tenet and McLaughlin remind me of another episode that has gone down in the annals of intelligence as almost equally contemptible. This one had to do with their furious attempt to prove there were mobile biological weapons labs of the kind Curveball had described. 

Remember, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball's wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.  But the amateur attempts at deception did not stop there. After the war began, CIA intrepid analysts, still "leaning forward," misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. 

On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof they had been right about Iraq's "bio-weapons labs." 

They then performed what in Army parlance is called a "midnight requisition," finding the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position and getting him to provide DIA "coordination," (which was almost immediately withdrawn by DIA). 

On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." (For a contemporaneous debunking of the CIA-DIA report, see "America's Matrix," http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/060103a.html) 

When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they "went ballistic," according to Carl Ford, who immediately warned Powell there was a very large problem.  Tenet, in turn, must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, "That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I've ever read." 

What seems clear is that Tenet and McLaughlin learned nothing from their decision just four months earlier to play fast and loose with intelligence-regardless of the risk of heavy embarrassment to the Secretary of State or, in this case, the President. 

"They Should Have Been Shot"

This episode-and several like it-are described in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say that Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper.  Ford told the authors: 

"It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the [bio-weapons labs] report.  As it turned out, that analysis was unprofessional and even unethical. People did funny thing with the evidence...It wasn't just that it was wrong. They lied...they should have been shot." (Page 229) 

Small wonder Ford has remained angry-like Wilkerson.  It was all just too much.  Ford knew he had made a huge mistake in early Feb. 2003, by assuming that Colin Powell would face down the blandishments of Tenet, McLaughlin, and the White House members of Wilkerson's team. 

The way these things normally work, it was not unreasonable for Ford to assume further that he would have the opportunity, in extremis, to trade on his credibility with, and entrée to, Secretary Powell to thwart the CIA seniors, if they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters. 

In the end, Powell went along; Col. Wilkerson was left to twist slowly in the wind, so to speak.  Bush, Cheney, and their courtiers prevailed and our country embarked on what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal termed the "supreme international crime"-a war of aggression. 

Sad.  Very sad.  Criminal, I would say. 

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).