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The Torture Tape Fingering Bush As a War Criminal
Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.
There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon's riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.
And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy - someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.
President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, "used an alternative set of procedures", which were "safe and lawful and necessary".
Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word "torture" to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah's interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.
Ron Suskind's masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrinerecorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda's plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.
A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda's leaders all believed Zubaydah "was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they're going to tell him anything?" Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good - though not unique - information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.
The Washington Post reported that "current and former officials" said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these "alternative procedures", as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.
And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not "torture" but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah's incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorized war crimes.
And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.
See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah's interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney's right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration's detention and interrogation policies.
At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: "The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me." That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something - not that it didn't happen. That's the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.
This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration's interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.
The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West's intelligence on jihadist terrorism.
But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.
Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah's interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.
Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It's the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man's land. But Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.
What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?
What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorized waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?
What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.
Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.
Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: "I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up."
It's a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It's a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.
Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet unwritten.
© 2007 Times Online
152 Comments so far
Show AllFingering Bush as a war criminal?! As if commiting the "the supreme international crime" of initiating a war of aggression didn't already make him a war criminal in the same category as those condemned to death at Nuremberg.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at these incessant 'potential Watergate' revelations. If USans don't already see their entire criminal 'leadership' for what it is, they never will.
when will one of the well known writers start talking about the charges at the Nuremburg trial?
Of course Bush Cheney et al. are criminals. That they are war criminals as well is hardly surprising. We've known that since they lied us into an illegal invasion of Iraq. The Democrats chose then, as they are choosing now, to do nothing -- at least nothing effective. One can only conclude that they are as complicit as the Bush Republicans.
Not ALL of them are complicit, of course. Paul Wellstone -- now dead, conveniently -- was not one of the imperialists. Nor is Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, for that matter. Ms. Pelosi, unfortunately, seems to be firmly in favor of Bush's imperial project. That is what her actions tell me, including her apparent approval of torture for "terror suspects".
So we are presented with the question: Are we to be imperial subjects, with an unaccountable emperor, or citizens of a republic, with a legally-bound executive? I choose the latter, but I'm afraid that enough of My Fellow Americans would rather have the former. They have been deceived by years of corporate propaganda into believing that an empire is our birthright.
Attempting to elect one man (or woman) to the highest office is not going to change these realities. The world will only be saved by people with changed minds. We on the Left have to begin at the grass roots and build our revolution from below, as the radical Right has been doing since the 1970's.
The most important thing about 8 years of this George Bush is that even those in the international community who wanted to give the U.S. the benefit of the doubt, who in other eras might have said "it is not the people of the U.S., it is the U.S. government", now see almost to the nation and the person (with the exception of a few CIA-bought-and- paid-for lackeys like El Salvador which recently sent more members of the death squad battalion Cuscatlan to Iraq) that the U.S. people are not capable of and have very little real interest in bringing this beast — the military/industrial/congressional/media complex — under control. As a result, the nations of the world are increasing standing up to the U.S. in international forum after international forum and giving Uncle Sam a big middle finger and jettisoning U.S. run institutions. If there is to be a future prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and right down the line to the soldiers in the field who committed crimes, it will be by the international community, not by the people of the U.S., who are increasingly incapable of thinking our way out of a box.
What is disturbing about Andrew Sullivan is just what was disturbing about Scott Ritter. Both wanted to make out that the CIA is too incompetent to be up to truly evil things. Sullivan wants to suggest that the CIA couldn't be destroying the same sorts of information that they have previously been all about cooking up. When Ritter came to Spokane a few years ago he tried the same sort of rehabilitation of the CIA by suggesting that they needed to get back to doing the good work that they used to do and avoid being caught up in the deceptions and lies of a U.S. President. Until Sullivan and Ritter can come out and speak straight on the past and present of U.S. intelligence organizations, people are much better off seeking information from sources who come not from the heart of the Republican party (Sullivan) or the heart of U.S. intelligence (Ritter).
(If you doubt my thoughts on the U.S. people being unable to think our way out of a box, wait until November 2008 when you wake up to President Hillary or President Guiliani or another ruling class president. We lack the guts to grab the bull by the nuts and cut.)
David Brookbank
"Next question: With the walls closing in, how will they react?"
They will act like a caged animal. Attack, attack and attack.
IF they leave office, they know they can be charged with war crimes. I do not believe they are planning to leave. I believe they will create a reason to suspend the elections in '08 and remain in office.
It's their only recourse at this point.
"The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not "torture" but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah's incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.
"And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed."
Next question: With the walls closing in, how will they react?
I wonder if it is possible to change the name of Washington D.C. to Calamityville. It might fall under the Truth in Labeling law.
This bush is the same man who, as governor, never passed up an opportunity to execute a prisoner on death, now matter who or what the circumstances. I imagine he recollects those cases, as he doesn't feel legally threatened by them. This is the same man, who as a little shrub, considered it entertaining to blow up small defenseless animals in the most cruel ways. That revelation was treated by his nation as well as his family, as a peccadillos of the young. This, too, is the young man who joined one of the creepiest societies for up and coming plutocrats, and brought to it his own special brand of viciousness.
One danger in what our so much touted democracies have become in the age of modern communications and bought opinions, is that psychopaths will continue to have the advantage in leadership races. Certainly this will be so if we continue to ignore the danger signals of up and coming leaders, as well as the crimes of the present ones. It is time we started treating all such clues with the seriousness they deserve.
Impeach first, then send to the Hague. Reinstitution of legal government is both important and urgent.
Of course, this is a UK article. Was it published in print, with a big headline and the item above the fold? Or was it buried on the op-ed page?
There's a whole moving van of dirty laundry within the executive branch that MUST be cleaned by congress. But then there's another moving van with dirty laundry at congress too.
The respected top Democrat, Jane Harmon? Excuse me, but didn't this woman sponsor HR1955? I find very little to respect and much to abhor. This woman is a criminal in her own right.
I'm not a being that advocates capital punishment, but there must be incidents that may be considered "exceptions to my rule". Appropriate punishment for bush and his cohorts definitely meet this exception. Put this Illuminati/Skull and Bones/moronic pervert on the guillotine, along with his entire criminal abettors, including Blair. Allow the millions of true, compassionate humans whose lives his dastardly/inhuman/genocidal policies have affected to somehow be party to releasing the blade that severs their evil heads from the rest of their bodies. And when that's finished, REALLY HURT THEM! Is my bitterness showing? You are damn right it is!!
This, in a Murdoch paper...
Reading CD daily, I often wonder why those who post their comments are as hateful as those they complain about. Yes, the situation with our government is possibly the worst it has ever been,
but it would be refreshing to read about solutions that offer positive change.
The problem is that the people who can investigate this case are the spineless Democrats who will say things like "we can't go after the Republican president because it they ever take back Congress they'll go after our guy for lying about a sex scandal."
Janco54, I think you're right. And, time is running out.
It seems to me with all Bush & Chaney have to cover up they cannot risk turning over power to a Democrat no matter which one. They will likely stage another 911 event declare martial law and and try to stay in power. 1000 lawyers are now asking for investigation but all levels of government are involved in the cover up. Our system only works to deal with one or a few criminals at a time. We have no recourse when all levels/departments of government are involved in criminal activity.
Maybe the Americans, Afghans and Iraqi people who have lived in a state of incredible fear since 9/11, had their children, men, women and infants sacrificed and tortured for an illegal, immoral and unjustified war...maybe their idea of justice would be to put these sadistic, consciousless leaders in a minimum security prison with plasma TV and cappuccino, biscotti, I-Macs and cell phones. Maybe, but somehow, I doubt it.
As is made clear above, the Dems are just as much in this as Bushco. They can safely hand over power to the Clintonobamaedwardsdoddbiden without fear of ever being held accountable. Kissinger, Reagan and Bush-the-first were also war criminals. They were never held accountable during the eight years of Clinton. Bush and Cheney have nothing to worry about unless Kucinich stages an upset.
Wilybill wrote:
"I'm not a being that advocates capital punishment, but there must be incidents that may be considered "exceptions to my rule". Appropriate punishment for bush and his cohorts definitely meet this exception."
I disagree, because we have to show moral superiority, to avoid charges of "victors' justice" (we won, so you losers forfeit all rights). I have sympathy for the US troops who, on entering Dachau concentration camp in 1945, took all the guards they captured (many of whom tried to disguise themselves by putting on prisoners' uniforms, but were given away by the fact that they were not living skeletons) out and shot them. But that was in hot blood. To say that, if/when we get Bush where we want him, we are entitled to make an exception of him, is a decision made in cold blood. It should not be used as an excuse to dilute our principles.
I don't remember the last time justice has been served in this country anymore.
Let the true victims, the beings whose blood and friends and relatives and infants blood has been shed..let them make the decision...suits me fine.
So are you all going to keep whining and preaching to the choir or get out of the blogoshere and start organizing and supporting Kucinich? He can't win unless we all get out and tell everybody about him, run as delegates to the DNC in Denver, CO in August of 2008 and vote him in November. He is the only candidate who has voted against the war, the funding of the war, against the Patriot Act, against the Military Commissions Act,and is for a single payer, universal health care for all, Medicare for all. No one out there has consistently walked the talk. It is time to stand with him. Don't just blog, organize!
Of course they are war criminals. Their deceit has contributed directly to the deaths of as many as a million Iraqis, mostly women and children, along with 25,000 Americans dead or seriously wounded. Let us not forget, however, that these war criminals are the product of a corrupt government that has been committing war crimes as foreign policy for the past 100 years. America is not guided by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the rule of law; like all empires it is guided by the insatiable lust for wealth and power and the willingness to do or say anything to schieve them. America has had it's day in the sun and will be replaced in due course by another empire whose strategies and tactics will be all too familiar.
Bush and Cheney could kill puppies and kittens with a club (they'd probably love to) and rape someone's grandmother on videotape -- and no one would charge them with any crime.
Americans will just go along commenting on how "cute and folksy" war criminal Bush is by not being able to pronounce words, by being ignorant (how did he EVER graduate from college?), inarticulate, and ignoring his lies, etc.
Bush and Cheney are given a pass on everything they do in fascist, dumbed-down America. The citizens of this country keep track of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohen, Paris Hilton, sports events, American Idol, etc. more than they do their own government.
I too am waiting for the Nuremberg invocations.
America won the Cold War by claiming the moral high ground. Now that, thin as it may have been, is gone. We have, in too many ways to count, become the bad guys. Justifying techniques we condemned when perpetrated by the Germans and the Japanese, disappearing people, routine massacres of innocents, bombing civilians.
Where does it end?
Scarier still, where can it lead?
God forbid there is another terrorist attack, but we waged this war and if it comes home to roost -- think Berlin, 1945 -- can anyone really say we, as a people, as a nation, didn't have it coming?
Wexlerwantshearnings.com
Go there and sign on, you can make a diffference!
Trainer12, thank you, I needed that. You're 100% correct. I'm tired of blogging. It's time to get out and help Kucinich win. He deserves to win, and we deserve a decent president for once. In addition, his wife would make a wonderful first lady.
So, Neil Uecke, what solutions to American torture would not be hateful, would offer positive change?
Education on the subject could be a start. Americans need to become aware of our existing anti-torture roots, values and laws along with their humanistic base. We need to understand these things well enough to become passionate about defending and advancing them--no?
It's hard to believe Andrew Sullivan wrote this but I reckon things do change. I, along with 58 million plus citizens have been waiting for nigh on eight years now for some sanity and some justice. Time is running out on the Bush/Cheney regime. Tick … tock … tick… tock…
Yes, he is a war criminal. No, he will never be tried. Leaders of dominant countries aren't - it would reflect on the dominant country. The US (or its political establishment) will pretend Bush was a great leader till the day he dies. It's a matter of national honour. And just look at St Tony - no less guilty than Bush but flying off to the catholic church to a chorus of hosannas. The Church welcomes him with "joy and respect". Only the criminal leaders of conquered countries are made to pay, and usually as a demonstration of dominance on the part of the equally criminal victors.
If the writer is the big, bald, gay Republican commentator who now repents for helping put Bush in power, congratulations on seeing the light. I hope you will also include the rest of the Republican administration and the corporate conservatives in Congress who share the responsibility for a disaster of global proportion.
Fox news deserves kudos for running two stories about a North Carolina pig slaughterhouse where the workers spray painted "kill" on pigs, gouged the eyes out of pigs for fun--men and women laughing as they castrated pigs and cut the tails off piglets, and the supervisor bragging about the pigs he beats.
And pigs cant be accused of any crime--or suspected of any.
As Tolstoy said, we will always have war as long as we have slaughterhouses.
you're peeing in the wind, pal: no guts in congress, no prosecutions for the boyking.
That's the best picture of bush I've ever seen!
9/11 was an inside job in order to justify an invasion of Iraq and Afgahnistan but what wiil they organise to stay in power if the polls start showing a support for Kucinich.
I was listening to Greg Craig Obama's foreign policy spokesman on c-span this morning and he made it clear that Obama regarded Iran as a threat and an enemy. How are we to get any peace in the world with people like that likely to replace Bush. They're just corporate hacks from what i can see the likelyhood of a drastic change in policy both foreign and domestic is not good.
The young kids in America are being fed violence as a normal practice as the PIG story above shoes all too clearly. Just look at the games they play, nothing but violence and destruction.
Jane Harmon? Respected Democrat? What planet are you from?
So, what's new. Imprison this war criminal junta. And don't forget Nancy Pelosi AND ALL OTHER "DEMOCRAT" COMPLICIT.
Then recall the entire US Government.
First off HANG JANE! When the trials start, she should be included as an enabler or branded in the same category as that perino idiot, STUPID. Now as far as the tapes go, I do not remember any tapes being introduced as evidence in the Nuremburg Trials.
I believe that there is plenty of evidence to convict
the main 4......+JANE. Dont forget, they can still call the people that were waterboarded as "Hostile Witness's".
I'm about to stop reading anything about the law breaking prick in the White House.
I've been reading the same indicting arguments
about this prick for almost 7 years and nothing ever happens to the guy....and I predict nothing will.
He's like Fearless Fosdick from the Lil Abner cartoons. He seems to be bullet proof.
He's riddled with countless violations that would have sunk anyones ship and like Frankenstein he continues to resurface to violate again and again.
Merry Xmas
Impeach the fucking liar!
"Next question: With the walls closing in, how will they react?"
what walls closing in? how can the walls close in with schumer and feinstein letting mukasey get approved?
not to mention the lack of interest by pelosi and the rest of the useless democrats.
I don't know what a bunch of tapes have to do with labelling Baby Caligula a war criminal. He already invaded a country that had not attacked this country, killed tens of thousands of its citizens, and stole all their assets. If that's not enough evidence, I don't know what is.
Yes, (compared to Watergate) "...this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It's a war crime...".
But unfortunately this time both political parties are complicit.
That's my feeling: Anyone who has been party to the crimes committed by Bush, Cheney and the rest, deserve the same fete
as them in the courts of American Justice. Let's remove all of the rot before they destroy America. I don't know how they can sleep, let alone profess they believe in the leading socialist of biblical times . . . Jesus Christ.
I, and everybody I know want: Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd. The rest can go hem a hanky!
How can this writer make accusations against the tortured prisonsers when the accusations are based on information extracted by torture?
The only evidence the 9/11 Commission had to reach its conclusions about who planned 9/11 were second hand reports from the torturers of confessions that were the result of torture. They had the confessions on video tape, but destroyed the tapes.
The crimes of 9/11 remain unsolved.
"Bush seeks to restore U.S. image abroad with 2008 travel"
It will be called "The Torture Shmorture Tour."
oh for gawd's sake get off jane Harmon's back ... this article is about butthead bush and his war crimes ... stick to business ... Some of you sound like pubs trying to re-direct responsibility ....... par for the course!!
Ditto on Jane Harmon; she is as bad as the Republicans. And her buddy, Pelosi, has long ago committed herself to making sure the House doesn't try to impeach Bush and Cheney. Poor America!