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The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released a few days ago describes in minute detail various “interrogation techniques” used by the CIA to extract relevant information in the fight against terrorism. The final published outcome was a summary of 500 pages of a study ... which at first glance induced an immediate reaction of horror, indignation, and repugnance that this writer has seldom experienced before.
There are not enough words to describe this litany of horror and atrocities outlined in the report, which can only be compared to the human rights violations committed in Argentina under the civil-military dictatorship there, or which, in the context of Plan Condor, were used against thousands of Latin Americans in the “dirty wars.”
After several readings, the report is liable to spark intense debate. To begin, the mere publication of such a document shreds any remaining notion of the United States as champion of human rights, since a government agency in direct communication with the president perpetrated these atrocities over the course of a number of years with the blessing of George W. Bush, and continued carrying out these crimes under the indifference of his successor to the White House. Obviously, if the U.S. previously lacked moral credibility to judge other countries for alleged human rights violations, after publishing this report, Barack Obama should publicly apologize to the international community (which he will not do, or allow to be done, as demonstrated in the NSA spying scandal), definitively suspend the annual reports about human rights and the war on terrorism, ranking countries by human rights records while the U.S. remains the infallible and untouchable judge and assure that practices considered torture by the Senate report not only will never be used again by the CIA and Pentagon, but also never again be used by the growing number of mercenaries hired to defend the interests of the empire, which is also unlikely to happen. The very idea of filling out the Pentagon’s military ranks with mercenaries recruited by U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, etc.) or by specialized companies like Academi (formerly known as the infamous Blackwater) frees the U.S. government from any liability for human rights violations committed by these euphemistically named “contractors.” This type of “outsourcing” of its military operations overseas has allowed the U.S. to apply torture against alleged or real terrorists, actions which have taken place outside of the scope of the Geneva Convention, which stipulates that prisoners of war should have the right to a legal defense and be treated in a humane manner. Mercenaries, or “contractors,” on the other hand, are gangs hired by Washington to carry out special operations, operating on the margin of legality. They don’t have prisoners, but “detainees” who can be held indefinitely, denying them the right to legal defense and leaving their charges at the mercy of maltreatment and torture that military contractors can apply at will and under complete impunity.
Secondly, the report ignores the fact that torture was legalized by President George W. Bush. As we outlined in a study we published in 2009, torture as a regular practice has been employed for quite some time by the CIA and other U.S. federal government agencies. In that publication, we made reference to torture and inhumane or degrading treatment becoming regular practice inflicted on persons during interrogations of prisoners captured by U.S. troops, whether these detainees were enemy combatants or simply suspects, “after the September 11 attacks and the new strategic doctrine adopted by President George W. Bush the following year (war against terrorism, perpetual war, etc.). For the purposes of avoiding the legal consequences that could result of this situation, Washington began transporting its prisoners to countries where torture is legal or where the authorities are indifferent to the practice, especially if this served U.S. interests. They also sent them to Afghanistan, Iraq, or its own North American base in Guantanamo, where brutal interrogation of prisoners without any legal oversight or outside observers (such as the International Red Cross) is the norm.”
At the astonishment of observers close and far, even after the Senate report was published, the White House spokesperson made use of ridiculous euphemisms when the president condemned the report’s revelations, rejecting “hard and atrocious interrogation methods” practiced by the CIA, all the while neglecting to use the correct term to define these techniques as they are described in the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Punishment, simple as: torture. Article 1 of the Convention on Torture stipulates: “For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”
According to this definition, it is impossible to deny that practices like “rectal rehydration,” “hypothermia,” and “rectal feeding,” hanging a victim on a bar, threatening to rape his or her spouse or children, sleep deprivation, or “waterboarding” applied cruelly for hours and days to interrogate terrorism suspects are acts of torture.
Despite this, in March 2008, President Bush struck down a congressional law that banned the application of “waterboarding” on suspected terrorists, following his official warning that he would veto any legislative action that would limit in any way the use of torture as a valid and legal interrogation method. In response to his critics in the White House, Bush said that it would be absurd to obligate the CIA to respect any precepts legitimized by international law because his agents were not confronting any legal combatants or regular military forces of a state operating according to traditional principles, but rather terrorists acting in total disregard of any ethical norms whatsoever. This was the pretext used by Bush and his cronies to attempt to justify permanently violating human rights under the auspices of “fighting terrorism.” Moreover, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, explicitly authorized in December 2002 the use of at least nine “interrogation techniques,” escaping definition as torture just by using this perverse euphemism. The interesting thing about the case is that the United States joined the aforementioned Convention (that has 145 signatories) in 1994, but made sure to ratify the Protocol so that authority was given to the United Nations Committee on Torture. In other words, just adhering to the Convention was a demagogic act, but lacked the implications of actually combating torture as a practice.
The especially horrific aspect of the report is that it should by no means lead us to believe that everything contained therein is true. It not only shatters the CIA’s central premise that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, the report underestimates the numbers of detainees and tortured compared to other reports on the subject. The U.S. Senate report, for instance, says that the “CIA had 119 people in its custody, 26 of whom were apprehended illegally.” Nevertheless, it is well known that in order to perpetrate these human rights violations, the United States operated numerous secret prisons in Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Afghanistan, and Thailand, as well as collaborated with countries like Egypt, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco, Gambia, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti in these interrogations. In addition, some other countries considered European “democracies,” such as Austria, Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden, along with a slew of other countries, assisted in the transfer and transport of prisoners, with full knowledge of what these individuals were about to face. So the number of victims exceeds the 119 indicated in the Senate report. Keep in mind that Human Rights First, a U.S. non-governmental organization, cited that 779 people passed through the Guantanamo prison since it was created. A special United Natinals report found that in Afghanistan alone, the CIA had detained 700 people and 18,000 in Iraq, all accused of being “terrorists.” Not to mention what happened at the detention camp in Abu Ghraib, a topic explored more extensively in our book.
Finally, we have arrived at three conclusions. First, the report emphasizes the ineffectiveness of torture but circumvents the ethical or political considerations of the issue. This last aspect was only touched on in the twentieth and last part of the report, which expressed marginal concern and regret that the torture used by the CIA “damaged the image of the United States in the world and caused significant monetary and non-monetary harms.” There isn’t any significant reflection about what this means for a country that proudly extolls democratic virtues - professing to be the most important democracy in the world, according to its most devoted publicists - in addition to the “leader of the free world,” having committed horrific practices comparable to the state terrorism carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean in the past. Torture is not only degrading and destroys the humanity of those suffering it. It also degrades and destroys the political regime that orders, justifies or consents to the practice. This is why this latest episode reveals the farcical character of “North American democracy” for the zillionth time. Now, the true nature of the regime could be better characterized as a “plutocratic regime.” Regime, because the powers-that-be are de-facto rulers, the military-financial-industrial complex that has not been voted into office and is therefore no way accountable; and plutocratic, because the regime’s material content consists of the collusion of giant corporate interests who, as noted by Jeffrey Sachs a few days ago, invest trillions of dollars in finance campaigns and political careers, as well as the lobbyists that conspire for their interests and receive remuneration for their efforts in economic benefits of all kinds, amounting to billions of dollars. This is all because the U.S. Supreme Court decided to legalize unlimited political donations that are largely exempted from accountability.
Secondly, the report abstains from recommending legal persecution of those responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by the CIA. Despite scenes described in the report that rival Dante’s Inferno, the authors of the report abstain from recommending a description that seems to be inspired by those scenes... But the pact of impunity has been consummated. In the face of inaction by the White House, the torturers and their numerous accomplices during and after the Bush Administration have now come out in open support of torture and are accusing the authors of the report of ideological bias, in the midst of unbridled exaltation of U.S. nationalism and a deliberate masking of the lies used by Bush and his cronies, including lies about what really happened on September 11, 2001 -- more uncertainties than knowns -- and accusing Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction. Given that Obama has announced that he does not plan to bring the intellectual authors and perpetrators of these crimes to justice, one can only conclude that torture has not only been legalized, it has been legitimized and sanctioned as justifiable “necessary evil.” Therefore, it would be beneficial if a foreign tribunal, acting on the principle of universal law in terms of crimes against humanity, would attempt to carry out justice, because the North American regime harbors impunity for these crimes as well as holds perversion and maliciousness as a virtue.
Third and last: the deplorable complicity of the press. All major media outlets knew that the CIA and other special Pentagon forces had integrated torture of prisoners in their standard operating procedures, as described above. But the mass media - not just the rabidly right-wing Rupert Murdoch chain and company - inside and outside of the United States - whether voluntarily and involuntarily - they conspired by not calling the horse by its name and trading truth for all sorts of euphemisms in an effort to soften the news and keep the North American population fooled. The Washington Post, New York Times and Reuters described these interrogation methods as “brutal,” “hard,” or “unbearable,” but never used the term torture. The television station CBS used the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” and Candy Crowley, the chief political correspondent for CNN in Washington, it was “what some may describe as torture.” For the MSNBC news channel (a fusion of Microsoft and NBC) according to Mika Brzezinski, daughter of the imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and apparently an astute disciple of her father, torture was “interrogation tactics used by the CIA.” These are the people right-wing politicians and intellectuals look to when giving us lessons on democracy and freedom of the press in Latin America and the Caribbean. It would behoove us to take note of their complicity with these crimes and of their absolute lack of moral ethics. They are not in a position to give lessons to anybody.
Translation by Rebecca Ellis for teleSUR.
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