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Let the Walls Speak: Collecting the Stories From the War on Terror
When I hear arguments against holding Bush administration officials accountable for authorizing the use of torture and "enhanced interrogation" techniques on men and women rounded up in the ill-defined "war on terror," I think about how I spent my Thanksgiving vacation: in Prague.
About an hour outside of Prague, one of Central Europe's oldest and most beautiful cities, is a place called Terezin. It was built in 1780 by Joseph II as a garrison town and it was named after his mother. Terezin served as protection against invaders from the North. During World War II, Terezin was turned into something very different: a place, according to Nazi propaganda, where older Jews could escape from the stresses of the war and live peaceably. Not quite.
Terezin had been home to some 5,000 Czechs before the War began, yet at its height as a detention and transport camp, Terezin held over 55,000 Jews. In 1944, the excess prisoners were shipped out, and Terezin was used as a showcase where the International Red Cross visited, proof that the Nazis were not mistreating Jews. A propaganda film was produced showing a soccer game, men and women tending vegetable and flower gardens, children laughing, and residents amiably gossiping. Everyone who appeared in the film was eventually killed. Almost 100,000 Jews, including 15,000 children, were transported through Terezin to their deaths either there or at other concentration camps.
There is another section of Terezin ironically called the "Little Fortress." This is where political prisoners and Jews who were considered a disciplinary threat were held, tortured for information and obedience, or for no reason at all, often killed. Nearby there is a crematorium and a vast cemetery with as many as sixty bodies in a single grave. The conditions in the Fortress were hellish. The isolation cells are dark and dank. Almost nothing grows in the courtyard of the "Little Fortress." Less important prisoners, as many as fifty at a time, lived in rooms no bigger than a modest living room. The only consolation was that in the winter, the press of bodies kept the men warm enough to survive another day.
When I entered the rooms where torture had been committed, the walls screamed silently. The shadows whispered. The air is stale and putrid although it's been nearly sixty years since these camps were liberated. It was cold when I was at Terezin, with snow on the ground and a gray sky. Inside the "Little Fortress," it was bone-chilling.
Starting back when George Washington commanded rebel troops against the British, an American tradition began: to engage in war according to rules. Those rules include fair treatment of prisoners of war. Yes, other American presidents have kidnapped and asked other countries to do what our laws have otherwise forbidden, but those instances were exceptional, and they remained hidden and secret, because of the shame. What makes the Bush administration unique to American history is its perverse use of legal analysis to try to justify torture, something domestic and international law as well as common decency forbids. Ratcheting up fear of among the population effectively suppressed much dissent.
During his campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised to end torture and to close down Guantanamo Bay prison. What we haven't heard is a promise to find out what happened inside the White House, Office of the Vice President, Justice Department, and Pentagon that permitted the flagrant and systematic use of torture and enhanced interrogation techniques on men and women, many of whom just so happened to be in the wrong place or to be enemies of the wrong people. That so many of the victims of these techniques are innocent of any crimes against the United States makes it more pressing that we find out who, how, and why.
Many trial balloons are being launched to see what level of inquiry might satisfy the American public. There is talk of presidential pardons, "truth and reconciliation" type hearings like there were in South Africa after apartheid, Congressional hearings with immunity, or just moving on. Few people are talking about criminal investigations and prosecutions under domestic law. That is what I propose.
There will be a time when visitors will walk through the abandoned pens at Guantanamo Bay and hear the silent screams. There will be a time when the men held there and in the secret prisons around the world will have an opportunity to speak. Their stories need to be heard. For us to make sense of those stories, we need a full accounting of who authorized such treatment, how the orders were carried out and by whom, and we need to hold not just individuals but the United States government accountable.
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6 Comments so far
Show AllYes.
The US will not regain its reputation unless and until the people responsible for ordering this are brought to justice. If the US won't do it, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Powell, Addington, and Bush better not travel internationally, because if they do they will get arrested at some point.
I thought Hazel was talking about Gaza.
There are also some American towns that they can't visit if they want to avoid arrest. These facts, in themselves, should light a fire under Congress to launch serious investigations and pursue criminal indictments, but those investigations - if conducted impartially - would lead to too many of their own members, so don't hold your breath hoping for this to happen. Sorry to be cynical, but that's what life on this planet does to those of us that are awake.
I agree with Hazel Weiser's approach. Use of the ordinary federal grand jury indictment process, plus grants of immunity from prosecution in exhange for truthful testimony as might be needed, is the preferable route to go.
Rather than a Truth Commission, or appointment of a special prosecutor, or more Congressional investigations, utilizing the ordinary powers of the Department of Justice to enforce existing anti-torture statutes would establish a healthy precedent that no one is beyond the reach of the law. It would also re-assure true career professionals within DOJ that their inability to enforce these laws was an aberration, courtesy of the politization of the Justice Department by the Bush regime at its very top.
There is one messy legal loose end to be tied up, however. Congress should repeal the grant of retroactive immunity that was given to the torturers and the torturers' policy making superiors by the Military Commissions Act. This shameful law (passed by both the House and Senate and signed by President George W. Bush) is still a part of the federal Criminal Code. In my opinion, you really cannot indict, try, convict, and sentence somebody to prison for doing things that federal law declares they were authorized to do, or that federal law at least declares they cannot be held legally accountable for doing.
Repeal the immunity grant first. Then let the system run its course. Give Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Addington, Bybee, Tenet, Miller, etc. their fair day in court. That's the American way.
Bill from Saginaw
I agree with the article's author, but ... as follows, too.
In the article, it is said, "What makes the Bush administration unique to American history is its perverse use of legal analysis to try to justify torture, something domestic and international law as well as common decency forbids. Ratcheting up fear of among the population effectively suppressed much dissent".
I'm not sure that the Bush-Cheney or Cheney-Bush administration is the first to be guilty among U.S. presidencies in terms of the first of the above two quoted sentences, but the second sentence applies to past U.S. presidencies. And it's interesting, in a way, that many U.S. citizens make a huge deal out of the torture applied at Guantanamo Bay prison, while seeming to always like to FORGET the [ongoing] genocide against the indigenous populations of the U.S.A. and its so-called formalized territories. This historically extreme genocide, which a number of experts say began with a time when there were around 100 million indigenous people in the Americas and ended with around 250,000 left, surviving, in actually concentration, prison camp form, and the genocides continuing onward as each day passes today, tomorrow, and so on; well, it's interesting in an unwelcome way that "Americans", the Euro-descendant ones, especially, or so I guess, pay no attention to this reality. I guess the injustices are just too close for comfort, so they're best forgotten, eh?!
We also seem to read almost solely of the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees being tortured, with by far most of them never having committed any acts that could justify arrests, much less renditioning and imprisonment or simply the latter; while reading very little from "Americans" about the extremely bad and apparently worsening situation in Iraq, where FAR MORE innocent people have been detained and imprisoned with brutal, ... treatment, and this hasn't stopped happening. People paying critical attention to this are seeing that the Iraqi govt continues to treat Iraqis this way and that this may become worse after the next so-called election, in 2009.
To try to be helpful, I'll link to some articles posted over the past two or three days.
"Obama Faced With Iraq Detainee Human Rights Debacle",
by Nick Mottern and Bill Rau, t r u t h o u t, Dec 4
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49341
"Prisoners occupy Iraqis’ minds as Eid approaches",
by Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman, Dec 4
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49330
"A Bad Hair Day...",
by Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues, Dec 4
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49324
Funny writer she is, and critical [analyst], as well.
"UN concerned over treatment of Iraqi detainees",
by KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer, Dec 2
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49263
"U.S. to hand over its Iraqi detainees to government",
by Latif Ali, Azzaman, Dec 1
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49251
Quoting from the latter, even if it's very short:
"There are fears that it might execute senior officials who served under former leader Saddam Hussein. Tareq Aziz, the most high-ranking Iraqi diplomat is one of them."
The U.S. WILL BE GUILTY for those executions, if they happen; and the U.S. will also be guilty for all mistreatment of all Iraqis detained in prisons in Iraq, if the govt the U.S. saw to installing commits the mistreatment!
"How many security agreements are there ?",
by Missing links, Dec 1
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49245
That's a short article, but what it says speaks of [important] matters to be watching for and to pay careful attention to as we move ahead in time. I haven't read most of the above articles, in which case I only read the excerpts provided with the links in the Uruknet homepage (the English one, in this case), and they illustrate that there are far more than the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison to be concerned about. We should be very concerned about them all; yet we should also care to place at least as much focus on the fact that the whole GWoT is entirely criminal aggression, as was and remains also the case in what was done in overthrowing the entirely legitimate govt of Haiti. Etcetera.
This is not really something new for the U.S.; most of U.S. history tells us of the govt being this criminal all along, just that much of the information is censored or twisted, wittingly so, and many "Americans" don't care about the ever ongoing genocide(s) in their own country.
If the U.S. hands over Iraqis detained by the U.S. in Iraq to the Iraqi govt, then it's a govt that the U.S. has not made sure, first, is co-signatory to the UN Charter, and so on. This would be yet an additional criminal act of the U.S.; it would be aiding and abetting a govt that refuses to [respect] human rights, etcetera!
Just a few incidental points.
"Humbaba December 5th, 2008 3:25 pm
I thought Hazel was talking about Gaza."
YES, that thought also crossed my mind, wherein the author of the above article wrote of the history of Terezin during the 20th century; and I was also reminded of what the author of the following article says. While it likely does not apply, per se anyway, to the above article's author and the article itself, I was nonetheless reminded of the following, in reading the above article.
Hopefully, people will understand what the following says and then apply it to each ourselves as how ever it can help to guide us in terms of deciding on actions to take and topics or issues to write about, f.e. As it is, we seem to get far more writing on the Guantanamo Bay prison situation for the detainees there and the criminals in Wa., DC, than we do about much else; like in my prior post just below, f.e.
"The Lady Between the Queen and the Tribe",
by Gilad Atzmon, PalestineThinkTank.com, Dec 3 2008
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m49308
I prefer to try to have an expanded, fuller view on all of the issues, and, again, there are far more wrongfully detained and mistreated Iraqis than there are for detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison. All of them are important; all of them deserve that The People of the USA contest the U.S. govt's criminal conduct; and none of these victims should be ignored.
Nor should the indigenous peoples of the USA, Canada, and so on, hence including Palestine, be ignored or treated as if unimportant, non-victims, i.e., criminals, etcetera. Even former officials of the former Saddam Hussein govt and who are imprisoned in Iraq should be released, for if they committed crimes, then they amount to very little compared to the present Iraqi govt, the U.S., U.K., and so on.
How many [good] realities are there? Not many, certainly not when compared to most of what is and has been happening, or, iow, most of reality.
Indict and convict the Bush-Cheney administration, and U.S. military generals, etcetera, the guilty ones; and the same could and would deserve to be done with the administrations of Clinton and Bush Sr, for second starters. And these indictments and convictions should be for [all] of the crimes of these people, i.e., fiends.