The
Bush Administration And
The CIA Prisons:
A New Campaign Of Lies
By Joe Kay &
Barry Grey
19 September 2006
World
Socialist Web
In
a White House press conference Friday, and in statements of government
officials over the weekend, the Bush administration has mounted a new
campaign of lies and intimidation to justify the repudiation of international
law and a government policy of torture.
The administration claims
that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which sets standards
for the interrogation of wartime prisoners and proscribes “outrages
against human dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,”
is too “vague,” and that in order to continue a CIA detention
program that has “saved innocent lives,” it is necessary
to alter the US War Crimes Act and “clarify” the Geneva
Conventions.
This propaganda offensive
in defense of torture has arisen because of the defection of several
prominent Republican senators, who are blocking an administration-backed
bill that would grant congressional sanction to the military tribunals
Bush established by executive order after 9/11, and which were struck
down as unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court last June.
The high court rejected Bush’s
military commissions, which were set to begin trying detainees at Guantánamo,
because they violated basic due process principles laid down by the
US Constitution—allowing the use of secret evidence, coerced testimony
and hearsay evidence, and even permitting trials to be held in the absence
of the defendant. The court also declared that all those held by the
US had to be treated in accordance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions.
The administration’s
bill on the military commissions retains the trial procedures rejected
by the Supreme Court and seeks to evade the court’s injunction
regarding Common Article 3 by “clarifying” its meaning in
such a way as to emasculate it and allow cruel and abusive methods of
interrogation. In a September 14 editorial, the Washington Post summed
up the substance of the administration’s bill as “legislation
that would authorize the CIA to engage in interrogation tactics the
world understands as torture, rewrite America’s obligations under
the Geneva Conventions, and authorize trials whose fairness many people
at home and abroad will question.”
Last Thursday, four Republicans
on the Senate Armed Services Committee—Chairman John Warner of
Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and
Susan Collins of Maine—refused to back Bush’s bill and instead
backed an alternate, somewhat less brazenly repressive measure, which
was passed by the committee with the support of its Democratic members.
This is what prompted Bush’s
angry news conference Friday and subsequent statements of administration
officials, who declare that opponents of the administration’s
bill are undermining the CIA prisons and the agency’s interrogation
of purported Al Qaeda operatives and thereby aiding and abetting the
terrorists.
In addition to redefining
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, one of the aims of the administration’s
legislation is to amend the War Crimes Act, a US law that criminalizes
war crimes, including violations of the Geneva Conventions. In essence,
this law allows US courts to enforce international law and prosecute
war criminals.
The administration is arguing
that the aim of this change is to protect CIA interrogators. In fact,
the main aim would be to protect high-level officials in the Bush administration,
including the president himself, from future prosecution for war crimes.
The War Crimes Act includes
in its definition of a “war crime” any violation of Common
Article 3. The Supreme Court has ruled that Common Article 3 must be
applied to all detainees. The CIA program has been violating Common
Article 3 for a period of five years, since it was first implemented
under the order of the president.
Therefore, the president
and other administration officials have acted in violation of the War
Crimes Act. According to this law, anyone who commits a war crime shall
be fined, imprisoned, or, “if death results to the victim, shall
also be subject to the penalty of death.” Certain prisoners under
the control of the CIA have been killed while being tortured.
In order to protect administration
officials, the Bush bill would change the War Crimes Act to state that
only “serious violations of common Article 3” would constitute
war crimes. These “serious crimes” include torture and “cruel
or inhuman treatment.” The latter term is defined so narrowly
as to exclude virtually any method the administration has authorized
or would seek to authorize.
It does not require a great
deal of insight or sophistication to puncture Bush’s arguments
in favor of his bill and expose them for what they are: a foul defense
of torture.
First, the contention that
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is “vague” is
an obvious red herring. The article is no more vague than the alternate
standard proposed by the administration, which would prohibit measures
that “shock the conscience” and violate the US Constitution’s
ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
If “humiliating and
degrading treatment” is too vague a standard, then so too must
be “cruel and unusual punishment.” In other words, when
it comes to interrogating prisoners—whether foreigners or American
citizens—and meting out punishment, anything goes!
The language of Common Article
3, moreover, has been in place for nearly 60 years, since the Geneva
Conventions were ratified. Why is it that the language has suddenly
become so “vague” that it needs “clarification”?
It was not too vague during the Korean and Vietnam wars, so why is it
impossibly vague now?
It is clear that the administration
wants to “clarify” Common Article 3 in order to extricate
American officials and operatives from its authority. Why? So they can
continue torturing detainees without fear of being prosecuted for war
crimes.
This policy of torture is
part and parcel of the turn by US imperialism to a policy of unbridled
militarism, for which the events of 9/11 provided the pretext. In the
name of the “war on terror,” the US government repudiated
the Geneva Conventions in regard to its treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban
forces captured during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The US government then adopted
a policy of “preventive war,” which itself violates the
post-World War II body of international law, including the Nuremberg
principles, which reject war as a legitimate instrument of foreign policy
and declare it to be justified only under conditions of genuine self-defense.
It is well-established international
and domestic law that the types of interrogation methods approved by
the Bush administration and used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo
Bay and at the CIA’s secret prisons are illegal. In demanding
that the US government conform to the language of Common Article 3,
the US Supreme Court was merely upholding legal standards that have
been in place—though not infrequently violated in practice—at
least since 1949.
A Washington Post article
from September 16 gives some indication of the methods the administration
wants to continue: “One well-informed source said the techniques
include prolonged sleep deprivation and forced standing or other stress
positions.” Other techniques the CIA has used in the past include
“water-boarding,” which involves simulated drowning, naked
exposure to extreme temperatures, and subjection to loud music and other
sensory abuse. By any objective standard, all of these methods fall
under the category of torture, and violate Common Article 3’s
prohibition of “outrages against personal dignity” and “degrading
treatment.”
Another claim made by the
administration is that it must legalize the CIA program and modify Common
Article 3 because otherwise it would be impossible to obtain information
from alleged terrorists. Terrorist attacks have been halted because
of this program, we are told, and the program is necessary to prevent
future attacks.
First, it should be noted
that “intelligence” obtained through torture is notoriously
unreliable, since the victim is compelled to say whatever he or she
thinks will stop the hand of the torturer. Moreover, all torture regimes,
from the Nazis to some of Washington’s current allies such as
Jordan and Egypt, have used the need for information and the requirements
of national security as justification for employing such barbaric methods.
What is new is that the US government and a significant section of the
American media and “intelligentsia,” including erstwhile
liberals, now openly endorse these methods.
In justifying its use of
torture, the administration has made a series of unsubstantiated claims
of supposed plots that have been foiled. As always, no concrete information
is provided to substantiate the existence of these plots, and no evidence
is provided to support the claim that prisoner abuse was needed to halt
them. We are supposed to take the government at its word—a government
so steeped in lies that it feels compelled to repeat the canard that
Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda even after a bipartisan congressional
panel stated that there was no foundation for this claim, having previously
come to the same conclusion about the “weapons of mass destruction”
claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
All of this, we are told,
is a necessary component of the “war on terror,” which Bush
declares to be the great ideological struggle of the 21st century. If
this is the case, one is entitled to ask: What is the content of the
ideology promoted by the American government? How can the struggle for
“freedom,” “liberty,” and “democracy”
require the use of barbaric methods always associated with tyranny and
dictatorship?
Clearly, the content of this
ideology violently conflicts with the Enlightenment principles that
guided the founding fathers of the American republic and are codified
in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the US
Constitution.
Bush, of course, chooses
not to deal with this glaring contradiction of the “war on terror”—assuming
that he is capable of grasping it—and no one in the media or in
the Democratic Party raises it. Every faction of the political establishment
has endorsed this sham war, which forms the central ideological framework
for American imperialism’s drive for global domination.
The open attack on the Geneva
Conventions by the president of the United States and his defense of
torture express in a concentrated manner the decay and degradation of
American bourgeois democracy. This has the most profound and ominous
implications for the democratic rights of the American people. There
is no iron wall between foreign and domestic policy. A regime that employs
torture as part of its foreign policy will sooner or later employ the
same methods against its political opponents at home.