FBI files indict Bush, Cheney as war criminals
FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals
By Bill Van Auken
23 May 2008
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/may2008/fbi-m23.shtml
The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department
Inspector General's report released this week was that agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a "War Crimes"
file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US
prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop
writing their reports.
The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and
other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted
that the actions of the Bush administration—the launching of wars of
aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians
without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture—constitute war
crimes under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding
international statutes and treaties.
To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice
Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to
the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its
sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the
rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have
engendered within the US government and America's ruling elite as a whole.
The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and
planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including
the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the
Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds
by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed,
and evidence of this criminal activity covered up.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new
revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the
crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of
impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG's report continues to
this day.
"There's nothing new here," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A
State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained
in the report as "pretty vague."
Pretty vague? One can't help but wonder what the spokesman would
consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by
FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at
Guantánamo.
In one section, the report states: "[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at
some point during the interrogation, the military officer `put water
down' a seated detainee's throat. He said he guessed that the purpose
of the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was
drowning, so that he would provide the information that the
interrogator wanted. [The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging
and spitting out water. He said that the detainee appeared to be
uncomfortable, and assumed that he had trouble breathing."
Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a
Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned
over to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002:
"He was left alone in a cold room known as `the freezer,' where guards
would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him...
"He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by
means of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music,
forced intake of water, and forced standing.
"He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator;
"Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual
statements to him;
"Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten."
In addition, the document says, he was "led to believe he was going to
be executed, and urinated on himself," and was told that his mother
and family would be detained and harmed.
Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture
Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by
literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and
private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and
abuse against detainees.
In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances
of beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of
detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being
subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the
use of extreme temperatures in order to "break the detainees' resolve
to resist cooperating" and 50 agents reporting the use of extended
isolation to "wear down a detainee's resistance."
In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of
two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged
shackling in a standing position.
The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the
iceberg.
They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen
born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the
fall of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty.
First taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then
transferred to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded
that Kurnaz had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until
the middle of 2006 and released only because of pressure from the
German government.
Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely
attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.
"I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster," he said. He
told how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his
wrists for hours and subjected to the `water treatment,' in which his
head was stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the
stomach, forcing him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department
Inspector General's report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last
form of torture did not constitute "waterboarding," but did represent
"an effort to intimidate the detainees and increase their feelings of
helplessness.")
"I know others have died from this kind of treatment," said Kurnaz. "I
suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and
sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times."
"There was no law in Guantánamo," Kurnaz concluded. "I didn't think
this could happen in the 21st century.... I could never have imagined
that this place was created by the United States."
The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those
detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and
the CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An
estimated 27,000 people are being held without charges, much less
trials, many of them simply having disappeared into Washington's
global gulag. Some are held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons
run jointly by the CIA and regimes to which it "outsources" detainees,
like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, where other, cruder forms of
torture—being buried alive, given electric shocks or slashed with
scalpels—are employed.
The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the
photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light
four years ago—naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and
sexual humiliation by US guards—were no aberration. The methods
described in the report—forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in
interrogations, chaining detainees in "stress" positions, leading them
around on dog leashes, draping them in women's underwear—were
identical to those officially blamed on a "few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib.
Sadistic torture "orchestrated" from the White House
The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is
evidence that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon
those detained by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top.
Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials
on the so-called Principals' Committee—Vice President Dick Cheney,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National
Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice—conducted detailed
discussions on "enhanced interrogation techniques," which, according
to ABC, "were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA
agents could use a specific tactic."
Bush subsequently told ABC that he was "aware our national security
team met on this issue. And I approved."
The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials
advised the White House National Security Council of their concern
that the practices witnessed by the agents were "gravely damaging ...
the rule of law" at Guantánamo.
In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied,
thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up.
The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant
protests or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for
that matter from the party's presidential contenders, Senators Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue
in their campaigns.
The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, "What the
FBI agents saw," which laid out the details of the report and stated
that it "shows what happens when an American president, his secretary
of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt
American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and
torture of prisoners."
The paper's conclusion: "The Democrats must press for full disclosure"
through hearings to uncover "the extent of President Bush's disregard
for the law and the Geneva Conventions." This, they tell their
readers, "is the only way to get this country back to being a
defender, not a violator, of human rights."
Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism.
The extent of the Bush administration's outright criminality has been
thoroughly exposed over the course of several years.
The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and
the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war
crimes—just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not
another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution
of a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable.
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be
placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington and
Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted
the pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted
as well, together with those military and intelligence officials who
directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and
other CIA and military camps and prisons.
The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such
a reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have
repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice
president is "off the table." They have no interest in pursuing the
administration on the issue of torture because they themselves are
complicit, with Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having
been briefed extensively on the criminal methods employed at
Guantánamo, which they approved and concealed from the American people.
On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a
policy of global militarism and aggression—carried out under the
mantle of a "global war on terrorism"—which is directed at using armed
force to further the interests of America's ruling oligarchy. It is
this criminal strategy—resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi
lives—that has given rise to the crime of torture itself.
Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating
the conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social
relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the
dock as war criminals.
Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these
ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against
political opposition within the US itself and politically educating
the American people.
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