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Current Affairs News
Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international
war-crimes trial
A particularly telling report by the International Committee of
the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure
prominently in a potential Nuremberg trial.
by Nat Hentoff
(The Village Voice)
If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg
trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity
in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons,
there will be mounds of evidence available from documented
international reports by human-rights organizations, including
an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply
footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of
the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie
Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial
Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little,
Brown).
While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious
investigation into what many European legislators already know
about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the
International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that
would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg
trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence
concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons
around the world—or else governments wouldn't let them in.
But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen
accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held
in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New
Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what
they do—on the orders of the president—to "protect American
values."
She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line
of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can
do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that
dark a place without it changing you."
Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the
CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy
that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July
20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order
authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques—without
disclosing anything about them.
If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for
our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always
try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler
and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no
way of insisting on finding out what happened to their
disappeared neighbors.
We, however, have the right and the power to insist that
Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and
other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name
on terrorism suspects.
Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has
insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques—so much
so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee,
John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA
official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to
the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the
infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ
failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that
point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key
witness in any future Nuremberg trial.
As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she
found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own
extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by
the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic,
regimented program of abuse that was signed off on—at the White
House, really—and then implemented at the CIA from the top
levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for
up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of
light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it
was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they
were."
She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was
not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel
that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small
cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he
couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it
the dog box."
Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial—and Congress
continues to stay asleep—future historians of the Bush
administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks:
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality,
the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social
Responsibility.
The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order
on CIA interrogations—which, though it is classified, was widely
hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman
treatment"—"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the
'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002,
"with the president's approval (emphasis added).
In 2002, then–Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the
"torture" memos and other interrogation techniques in internal
reports that reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also
tell us. But Powell's objections should keep him out of the
defendants' dock in any future international trial.
From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American
statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice
Department have utterly violated:
In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into
U.S. law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention
Against Torture, which is defined as "an act 'committed by an
[officially authorized] person' . . . specifically intended to
inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon
another person within his custody or physical control."
The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act "criminalizes . . . specifically
enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as 'grave
breaches' of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions],
including the war crimes of torture and 'cruel or inhuman
treatment.'"
The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme
Court— before Chief Justice John Roberts took over—into the
war-crimes record of this administration. I strongly suggest
that Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility
send their report—with the following section underlined—to every
current member of the Supreme Court and Congress:
"The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to
violate substantive due process if the treatment 'shocks the
conscience,' is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or
offends 'a principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and
conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.'"
Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the
report continues, are "the rights to bodily integrity [and] the
right to have [one's] basic needs met; and the right to basic
human dignity" (emphasis added).
If the conscience of a majority on the Roberts Court isn't
shocked by what we've done to our prisoners, then it will be up
to the next president and the next Congress—and, therefore, up
to us—to alter, in some respects, how history will judge us. But
do you see any considerable signs, among average Americans, of
the conscience being shocked? How about the presidential
candidates of both parties?
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