Revolution #128, May 1, 2008
New Revelations
Torture “Almost Choreographed”
by the White House
Last December a scandal surfaced momentarily when the New York Times revealed that the CIA destroyed thousands of hours of videotapes of waterboarding and other torture used during interrogation of detainees in 2001. Now we learn that these torture sessions were deliberately and meticulously planned by top White House officials in dozens of meetings. A source told ABC News, which broke the story on April 9, that the tortures “were almost choreographed.”
The torture planning cabal included Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA head George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Asked about this, George Bush said that he knew about these torture meetings of his top national security team—“And I approved.”
Here it is in plain daylight. In meeting after meeting, those at the top of the American power structure discussed in gruesome detail how to nearly drown and inflict other extreme physical and mental pain on human beings. The President himself—after claiming for years that “we don’t torture”—now openly says he approved. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity. Anyone who argues otherwise is refusing to look at reality and to take a basic stand on what is right versus what is wrong and immoral.
But did the revelation of these White House torture planning meetings become banner-headline news on the front page of every newspaper and dominate the TV news shows? No—it was pretty much treated as minor news if at all, with even ABC News, which broke the scoop, putting it fourth in its list of stories. Were there outraged calls in Congress for Bush and Cheney to be impeached for these war crimes and driven out of office? No such thing happened.
The fact that there has been no society-wide uproar about the Bush team’s torture sessions speaks to how much the open use of torture by the U.S. has become legitimized in official American politics, policy, and discourse—and how far things have gone in the direction of ripping up the old legitimating norms and setting up new, fascistic norms. The ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was among the “core” rights of the U.S. from its beginnings. These rights have always been applied narrowly by this country’s rulers (and, of course, they did not apply at all to slaves and Native people)—and they have often been violated outright. But it is a new and very dangerous thing when things like torture that were formal violations of law are now openly approved by those at the heights of the government who have declared that the law is whatever they say it is.
During those White House meetings, the only participant to raise any qualms was John Ashcroft—not because he opposed torture, but because (according to ABC News) “he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations.” Ashcroft’s worry was that he and others would get directly associated with the torture and other crimes they were mapping out. And it is known that others in the Bush regime, the military, and the CIA were concerned that the open use of torture—in direct violation of domestic and international laws—would harm the overall interests of the U.S. empire.
John Yoo’s Torture Memos
This is where the lawyers for the Bush regime came in. The White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told Bush that the Geneva conventions against torture were “quaint” and did not apply to the U.S.’s so-called “war on terror.” And a team of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a series of infamous secret memos designed to give legal cover for the torturing of detainees under American control.
One memo, written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, declared that what CIA interrogators did to prisoners did not meet the legal definition of torture unless it was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death.” In any case, Yoo claimed, laws against torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners did not matter because the American president has unlimited war-time powers as commander-in-chief.
Another secret memo by Yoo in March 2003 applied these arguments to the interrogation of prisoners by the U.S. military. In the 81-page memo, Yoo coldbloodedly discussed whether the president could allow American interrogators to poke out a prisoner’s eye or throw “scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance” on a detainee, which are among the brutal assaults specifically banned in a U.S. statute (law) against “maiming.” Yoo’s answer was that it depends on the circumstances or which “body part the statute specifies.” But again, in Yoo’s perverse argument, none of that matters in any case because the president’s ultimate authority as commander-in-chief trumps any existing laws.
After this second memo finally became public a few weeks ago, the National Lawyers Guild and others began a campaign to get John Yoo dismissed from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, the prestigious law school where Yoo has been a professor since he left the Bush administration in 2003. The dean of Boalt Hall and some others are opposing the demand for Yoo’s firing, saying that dismissing him from his tenured position would harm academic freedom.
There is a heavy assault on academic freedom in America today. Professors are being hounded, suppressed, and fired for their critical or unorthodox thinking. But this is a systematic right-wing offensive spearheaded by forces like David Horowitz with connections high in the ruling circles of this country, including the Bush regime that Yoo served. Yoo is not just an academic who has published controversial scholarly works or espouses unpopular views. He was one of the key legal architects for the use and legitimization of torture by the Bush regime. His role can be likened to that of the Nazi lawyers who advised Hitler on how to legally carry out atrocities, like disappearing people in occupied territories into secret detention camps—and who were convicted for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials after World War 2.
Not only should Yoo be dismissed from his position as a “respectable” legal scholar—he, along with the whole Bush regime from Bush on down, are war criminals!
Yoo and others deliberately crafted their legal memos to justify and give cover to the torture that was already going on, under the direction of the top levels of the Bush regime. And these memos cleared the way for even more war crimes and crimes against humanity. Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vincent Warren has written that the Yoo memos “were the keystone of the torture program, and were the necessary precondition for the torture program’s creation and implementation.”
We know about some of the horrors of this torture program: The deaths of at least 108 people under U.S. detention since 9/11, many from torture. The use of attack dogs, sexual assaults, and other terror against prisoners at Abu Ghraib in occupied Iraq. The hundreds of prisoners isolated for years at the Guantánamo torture camp, more than a few driven insane or to suicide. The horror of waterboarding—where the torturer straps down a prisoner, covers the victim’s face with cloth or plastic, and pours water down the nose and throat to “simulate” drowning. Many more bloody horrors still remain hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
The Military Commissions Act: Institutionalizing Torture
Some of the torture memos by Yoo and others were later “rescinded.” But the Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in 2006 and signed by Bush, institutionalizes the use of torture by the U.S.—and gives retroactive immunity to government and military officials for torture already carried out. In March of this year, Bush vetoed a Congressional bill that would have outlawed the CIA’s use of waterboarding and certain other forms of torture.
This legitimization and rampant use of torture is part of the whole agenda of those in power in the U.S. to go for a qualitative leap in consolidating and expanding their global dominance and to achieve an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire. This agenda means reactionary violence and suffering on a massive scale for people around the world—the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions from their homes, and Iran is now in the U.S. target sights. And it means a radically repressive shift in society—fascistic laws like the Patriot Act, government wiretapping and spying on an unprecedented scale, the rise of a theocratic Christian fundamentalist movement reaching high into the government, as well as Gestapo raids to round up and deport thousands of immigrants.
This is the reality that millions throughout society here in the U.S. must fully confront—and mobilize to politically resist in their millions, with moral conviction and fearless determination. “Our” rulers are openly torturing and carrying out other war crimes. Silence in the face of this is unacceptable complicity with these horrendous crimes.
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