Abuses of power

If the era of unconscious American patriotism that began on September 11 ended in April 2004, when CBS News and the New Yorker magazine published the infamous torture photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, then perhaps the hangover of euphemism that clouded America’s understanding of its post-September 11 wars began to lift on June 18, 2008. On that day Physicians for Human Rights released a report documenting the experiences of 11 men who had been tortured in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The humiliation, degradation and violence had broken them, the report showed, and the men endured substance abuse, psychological afflictions and even suicidal tendencies long after their release.

As difficult to read as the report itself is – it speaks in matter-of-fact terms about the ruined lives of men who, among other things, confess to being raped by US troops – in a sense, it is less important than its short foreword. In it, a respected military leader issued a stark judgment on America’s turn to what Vice President Dick Cheney euphemistically called “the dark side” in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations,” wrote US Army Major General Antonio Taguba, “media accounts and reports from human-rights organisations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”

War crimes. This was not the verdict of a left-wing university professor. Nor was it the pronouncement of an overheated member of the political opposition. It was, instead, the considered judgment of a man who spent 35 years in the US Army, who had become only the second American of Filipino descent to achieve the rank of Major General, and who had his career ended for the sin of investigating the torture at Abu Ghraib. Taguba didn’t seek the assignment, but he did his job thoroughly, without fear, favour or euphemism. For that, in January 2006, he got a phone call from the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. Richard Cody, telling him, “I need you to retire by January of 2007.”

Taguba has not given interviews to any reporter except The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story. A spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights told me that I would not be an exception. Publicity cost Taguba his career, so garnering more of it appears not to be on his agenda.

But perhaps his indictment of the Bush administration and its conduct becomes all the starker by his refusal to explain or qualify his remarks. Unfortunately, the few mainstream US media outlets that did cover the release of the PHR report largely declined to mention Taguba’s “war crimes” remarks. But inside Washington’s national-security and intelligence community – the people whom the Bush administration ordered to, in some cases, violate both their consciences and the law – some viewed Taguba’s judgment as a clarion call for the country to come to terms with what has been done in its name, even if they express scepticism that such a reckoning will actually occur.

“Does it show America to be a maturing nation?” mused Martin Lederman, an attorney who worked for the Justice Department’s influential Office of Legal Counsel from 1999 to 2002. “Yes, slightly.” But will it make any difference? After all, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president – and America’s most prominent torture survivor – believes the CIA should retain the right to torture detainees even as he opposes the continued use of such tactics by the military. “Not unless the next Administration takes steps to repudiate the CIA’s torture techniques and the legal opinions underlying them,” Lederman notes.

Malcolm Nance agrees. “The implications of General Taguba’s remarks are profound, but will never be acted upon,” said Nance, who has spent 25 years as part of the intelligence and Special Forces communities pursuing al Qa’eda and other terrorist groups. “The procedures and techniques that the Bush administration has selected to ‘take the gloves off’ in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks were a headlong leap into choosing criminal acts over a forceful but dignified response.”

A few weeks ago, Milt Bearden, who ran the CIA’s operations backing the Afghan mujahideen in their fight with the Soviet Union, added his voice to this small but growing chorus, accusing the Bush administration of lying about the effectiveness of its war crimes.

“Throughout this ugly drama, US leaders have assured the public that the extreme interrogation measures used on detainees have thwarted acts of terrorist and saved thousands of American lives,” Bearden wrote in The Washington Independent. “The trouble with such claims is that professionals who know something of interrogation or intelligence don’t believe them. This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work – it doesn’t – but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralise.”

There has not, at least thus far, been any kind of national acknowledgement of the scope of these illegal acts, no coming-to-terms moment when the public forswears atrocities committed in its name. “The issue,” said Nance, “is will America accept or reject the corruption of our greatest core values – honour and justice. We have dishonoured all who have suffered torture at the hands of the unjust. It is here, at this point, that the balance of justice must be restored and American brought back into the pantheon of righteous nations.”

But if America hasn’t yet returned to that pantheon, it may be because the full scope of the illegal deeds has almost certainly not been revealed.

Much, of course, is known. The world is aware, firstly, of the horrific pictures of detainees cowering in fear, pain and humiliation at Abu Ghraib. Thanks to numerous investigations, it is aware that the interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib were the result of instructions given by Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez. Sanchez’s instructions, in turn, came from Maj. General Geoffrey Miller, then the commander of the detention complex at Guantanamo Bay – where, President George W Bush fatefully declared, the Geneva Conventions’ protections against abuse do not apply. Not only did Miller travel to Iraq to “Gitmo-ize” detention operations at the behest of senior Pentagon officials, but throughout 2002 and early 2003, Pentagon and White House officials leant heavily on Guantanamo Bay officers to make interrogations more brutal.

The last several weeks have seen more information about the origins of this torture come to light than any period since the initial disclosures that followed the revelations from Abu Ghraib in 2004. Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a watershed hearing that detailed how deeply senior Bush administration officials laid the legal and policy groundwork for an architecture of torture. Jim Haynes, general counsel to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, spent much of 2002 requesting information from the military’s Special Forces schools about how US troops were trained to survive torture in foreign countries. Haynes – along with other administration attorneys like David Addington, consigliere to Vice President Dick Cheney – then delivered information derived from the so called “SERE” program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to Guantanamo Bay for transformation into an interrogation regimen. At the hearing, it was revealed that a lawyer from the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, Jonathan Fredman, gave Guantanamo officials guidance about how to waterboard detainees – that is, strap them to boards and pour water into their mouths and nostrils to drown them. “If the detainee dies,” Fredman said in September 2002, “you’re doing it wrong.”

Yet much is still unknown – and will continue to be if McCain is elected president in November. While McCain fought bravely against President Bush in 2005 to bring US military interrogation methods back into compliance with the Geneva Conventions, his ambitions for the presidency led him to soften his position. Last year, he assented to an executive order that left the door open for the CIA – which subjected three detainees to forced drowning and held at least a dozen more incommunicado for four years – to continue its brutal activities. If McCain becomes president, he will need to placate a Republican Party that distrusts him, rendering it unlikely that he will declassify information implicating his erstwhile allies in what Taguba called war crimes.

In a profile of Taguba published in 2006, Hersh described what the world has yet to see from the prison. “I learnt from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees,” Hersh reported. “Taguba said that he saw ‘a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee.’”

But the administration has furiously resisted Congressional subpoenas for information about torture. Nor has it agreed to demands for independent investigations. Instead, it has insisted that any “abuses” were isolated cases as opposed to the demands of policy.

The stonewalling has been extensive. The week after the Senate Armed Services Committee held its watershed hearing, a subcommittee in the House of Representatives welcomed Addington and John Yoo, a controversial former Justice Department lawyer, for testimony about torture. Both men contend that the Constitution grants the President of the United States extraordinary powers during wartime. Both men played key roles in devising legal rationales for torture.

And both men refused to answer questions from elected members of Congress. Yoo claimed an inability to remember the intricacies of debates that occurred six years ago. Addington brushed aside questions with relish, happy to dodge what he considered impertinent questions of responsibility. When asked, for example, if he was involved in an infamous memo written by Yoo in August 2002 that allowed for any interrogation practised that stopped short of producing “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” Addington replied, “Didn’t have nothing to do with it, but you asked if I had a hand in drafting it,” explaining that he merely approved of the idea that a memo on torture and the law ought to be written.

Similar stonewalling has occurred at the CIA, the agency responsible for much of the worst torture. Ironically, many senior CIA officials fought hard – and early – to stop the CIA from getting back into the torture business, but the willingness of then-CIA Director George Tenet to please President Bush ultimately prevailed. The military has held over a dozen internal investigations into torture, but the CIA has held none. When the CIA’s inspector-general, John Helgerson, began investigating the practice of kidnapping terrorism suspects, sending them to countries that torture, holding them incommunicado, or torturing them itself, CIA Director Michael Hayden began his own investigation – of Helgerson.

Bringing an end to the cover-ups, the stonewalling and the secrecy will not come easy. If McCain is elected, he’ll be unlikely to open investigations that will implicate his political confederates in the Republican Party. And if Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, is elected, he’ll face pressure from inside the CIA and the military – which, through selective leaks to the press, can damage his presidency by attacking his national-security credentials – to let sleeping dogs lie. The bravery of a General Taguba is a rare thing.

So the effect of clear, non-euphemistic declarations like Taguba’s is unclear. “The American people, who are good and fair minded, have been so inured with the false ‘debate” of over whether torture is acceptable from the neoconservatives and echoed in the media that they are only beginning to awake to the damage. There is no debate. Torture is wrong and should be banned,” said Nance. “The main issue is not if the administration ordered war crimes; that will be found out in time.”

Unless it won’t. Seven years after September 11, the US is all but a rogue nation, guilty of much of the behaviour it professes to abhor in its enemies: torture, disappearances, sexual humiliation, endless wars of aggression. But the US – like all empires – has never been good about learning its uncomfortable lessons. Rather than look at how US policies in the Middle East gave bin Laden a pretext to inspire others to terrorism, Americans preferred to believe they were hated for being virtuous, for being just, for being free. As agonising as the US descent into national criminality has been, the awful truth may be that we can’t handle the truth. That usually comes – as the post-imperial experiences of Britain, France, Japan, Holland and Spain indicate – only after the empire falls.

Spencer Ackerman is a senior reporter at The Washington Independent, where he covers national security