Torturing Mr. Bush
Wednesday 16 June 2004
Should George W. Bush lose his bid for re-election this November, historians will find a major cause in the flood of
pornographic photographs that show American soldiers torturing and sexually humiliating naked Iraqis. How will
publishers of sanitized schoolbooks ever tell the story to future generations?
Nor will serious historians stop there. How will they deal with those of us who knew, or should have known, the way
American forces have used - and taught other nations to use - the same degrading torture techniques at least as far back
as President John F. Kennedy? Will our grandchildren and theirs see us as we see "the Good Germans" who callously turned
their eyes away from what Hitler did to the Jews?
As bad as the torture was and continues to be in America's global gulag, it is not the Holocaust. But it is bad enough,
and the moral dilemma it poses feels painfully similar.
Consider the role - no, the criminal complicity - of President Bush. For a Harvard MBA who usually delegates details, he
played a remarkably hands-on role pushing his torture package through Washington's bureaucratic maze. Not only did he
know what his underlings planned to do, he told them to do it. His fingerprints show up all over the smoking documents.
When after 9/11 the CIA and Special Forces began quietly "lifting" suspected al-Qaeda operatives and "disappearing" them
into secret torture centers around the world, the American spooks acted on direct orders from their commander-in-chief.
When Justice Department lawyers rationalized the president's right to order abuse of enemy non-combatants, they sent
their reading of the law to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the President's consigliore. Gonzales coordinated the
CYA, argued back and forth, especially with Secretary of State Colin Powell, and summed up the case for Mr. Bush, who
gave it his go-ahead. Everyone in the loop knew that POTUS, the President of the United States, wanted harsh
interrogations.
Publicly, Mr. Bush took the lead in arguing that he would not grant POW status to suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda
captives, either in Afghanistan or at Guantanamo Bay, leaving them subject to what insiders called "torture lite."
America would follow "the spirit" of the Geneva Conventions, the president promised, adding hypocrisy to the crimes that
followed.
Bush also took the lead in walking away from the International Criminal Court, which - he argued - would charge American
soldiers and political leaders with war crimes, not to do justice, but to satisfy political motivations. Now the world
knows what that was all about.
Given the mounting evidence, no one can escape the question: Did Mr. Bush commit war crimes, for which he should face
prosecution?
If, as Americans, we truly lived under the rule of law, we would have no need to ask. Nor would Mr. Bush stand in the
dock alone. Unlike the U.S. Army in its legal pursuit of Pvt. Lynndie England and her fellow prison guards, any serious
prosecutor, investigator, or historian would not ask how high up the crimes go, but how far down from the president it
seemed worthwhile to pursue them.
One obvious thread starts with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who joined Mr. Bush in demanding, justifying, and
publicly delighting in harsh interrogations. How he loved to tell reporters that America's latest captive would not have
a good time.
Next comes Dr. Stephen A. Cambone. Rumsfeld's protégé, Dr. Cambone now serves as Deputy Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence, and publicly takes credit for sending Major General Geoffrey Miller, the Guantanamo Bay camp commander, to
Iraq to "Gitmoize" interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons.
"At Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have," Miller told Brig.
General Janis Karpinski, as she recalled on BBC's Radio 4 this week.
"He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost
control of them."
A reserve officer, Karpinski ran Abu Ghraib until the Army relieved her of command following earlier investigations of
misconduct at the facility. Gen. Miller now runs Abu Ghraib, where the scandal has forced him to eliminate many of the
abuses he had earlier recommended.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, supported Miller's efforts to toughen the treatment of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib in hopes of producing better information during interrogations. According to secret documents
leaked to the Washinton Post, Gen. Sanchez specifically approved the use of dogs, extreme temperatures, sleep
interruption, sensory deprivation, enforced stress positions, and longterm solitary confinement.
Apparently, Miller's techniques also had the support of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the Army intelligence chief in Iraq.
From Dr. Cambone and Gen. Miller, the thread also extends to "civilian contractors," who likely worked as undercover
agents for Military Intelligence.
These are just a handful of the people who ran - and still run - Washington's worldwide network of mostly secret
detention facilities, which reportedly engage in even worse forms of torture. As the scandal snowballs in the coming
weeks, we will likely hear new names and learn more about human depravity than we ever wanted to know. But it will all
trace back through the CIA and Dr. Cambone's Pentagon office to George W. Bush.
For those who oppose his presidency, this might seem a great stick with which to beat him. I hope we take it more
seriously.
When the Abu Ghraib story first broke, I wrote that the abuse and humiliation looked exactly like the "stress and
duress" that the CIA pioneered in their KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation Manual, published in 1963, and their
updated Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, published in 1983.
Just this week, the Washington Post described the 1963 manual in great detail, confirming that the current torture
techniques date back to CIA efforts during the Vietnam War. Did President Kennedy know? I would bet he did, but
historians will now ask.
No one in my lifetime or his will bring George W. Bush to account in a war crimes trial, while John F. Kennedy has moved
beyond the province of human law. There's nothing we can do about either. But, if enough people got mad enough, we could
create a bi-partisan Truth Commission to open the books on American torture and close a dreadful chapter in our nation's
history.
If we want to remove the scourge from our midst, dismantle our global gulag, and regain our moral standing in the world,
we can do no less.
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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France,
where he writes for t r u t h o u t.