Torture by American Soldiers

[rockysigman]

Let's have a silly debate in which some people try to defend this practice.

[Matheus]

I had no idea that American soldiers spanked the prisoners...!!!

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Dude, now that there's a thread, all quiet on the Western Front, eh?

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Imagine my disappointment. Two long-awaited Pentagon reports on detainee policy had finally reached public view: the Jacoby Report on Afghanistan and the Formica Report on Iraq, available as a result of Freedom of Information Act suits, like thousands of other pages of government reports on the war on terror. As the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, a collection of the memos, reports, and interview logs related to Bush administration detainee policy, I was naturally eager to see those parts of the story that were unfortunately still classified at the time of the book's publication in December 2004.



Both reports promised to contain new information about detainee policy. In June of 2004, Brigadier General Charles H. Jacoby, Jr. had submitted the results of his investigation into detainee operations and standards of detainee treatment in Afghanistan. In November of that year, Brigadier General Richard P. Formica had delivered his findings on command and control questions and allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq. Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez, Commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq and the military officer connected to the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib, had commissioned Formica to determine whether or not U.S. forces in Iraq were in compliance with Department of Defense guidelines on detainee treatment.



Now, a mere two years or so later, I began skimming through the introductory matter and the boldface headings of the Jacoby Report. I stopped first at "Detainee Operations Standard Operating Procedures." Here it would be in black and white -- or so I thought. But, as it happened, I was only half right. Startling amounts of the report were redacted or blacked out. Where there should have been text against white space, there was section after section filled with nothing but solid black blocs. Even some subsection titles were missing. Pure ink. Meant not to be read.



For example, when I reached the subsection entitled, "Interrogation Techniques," there was but a black blot of ink, two pages long. I couldn't help myself. I automatically lifted the paper to check if there weren't some way to see beneath the overlay of ink. But of course that was a hopeless thought. Whatever information had been there was gone, eradicated, tossed down the public memory hole that has eaten so much of the detail that I, along with many others, have been trying to discover for two years now.



Still, I plowed doggedly on. The deeper I went, the more redacted sections there were, leaving me with two "reports" that lacked, by my rough estimate, at least 50% of their contents.



Blackened page followed blackened page; introductory sentences led nowhere; subsection titles introduced nothing; elaborating details were rendered invisible along with most of each report's conclusions. If one were to treat the pages of each report like a flip-book, visually the story line would be a solid mass of black.



Not surprisingly, then, when it came to informational value, the offerings were slim indeed. And yet, the Pentagon has touted these very offerings as yet another sign "that the department is committed to transparency," echoing President Bush's recent remarks, delivered in Europe, that "We're a transparent democracy. People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open. We've got a legislative process that's active."



But there is nothing "transparent" about these reports. They are quite literally opaque documents; and, in this respect, they differ from earlier releases such as the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, the Fay-Jones Report, and the Mikolashek Report, all dealing with detention policy, all of which were made public in 2004.



The eleventh and twelfth Bush administration reports on detainee policy, the Jacoby and Formica Reports, held onto until now, are in a league with other recent administration releases which have been notable for the information they hide rather than reveal. Witness, for example, the Schmidt Report, the Inspector General's report on Guantanamo, which was released in April of this year. More than 50% of it, too, is redacted.



And only days ago, the long-awaited Church Report appeared. As with Jacoby and Formica, Naval Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert Tom Church III completed his report on Defense Department interrogation policies from Afghanistan and Gitmo to Iraq back in 2004. Though a brief summary was released, the report itself was held for two years and, like its most recent predecessors, its tale, though tantalizing, has largely been reduced to blackened page after blackened page.



The Pentagon claims that these massive redactions occur for technical and legal reasons, as cited in code numbers placed in the margins where text is missing, each representing a category of explanation for a deletion. Facts need to be deleted, for example, if they reveal installation locations or intelligence gathering unit names, or if they come from parts of inter- or intra-agency memos. Apparently justified by these code numbers, here is some of what you can't learn from the Jacoby and Formica reports.



On the Jacoby investigation into detention in Afghanistan, the birthplace of the War on Terror's interrogation policies, you cannot learn: the full definition of the category of "detainees," detention criteria, interrogation techniques used, approved interrogation strategies, guidelines on the protection of detainees from harm by a third party, full guidelines for the use of force, and so much more.



What you cannot learn from the Formica Report investigating prisoner treatment in Iraq is: Its assessments of policies regarding "command and control," or what processing guidelines for detainees are, or even what average length of detention is. Also hidden from sight are the discussion sections on the "adequacy of facilities and treatment of security detainees" and "Interrogation methods and procedures," among many other matters.



Withdrawal of information has been a deeply rooted tactic of the Bush administration. The urge not to tell, never to reveal, has been at the heart of its approach to government, whether what's at stake is court records, statistics on Iraq, or information about detainees. In 2001, 8 million government documents were classified per year. That number has now expanded to 16 million. Moreover, the rate of declassification has decreased significantly. On average, only one-sixth as many documents are declassified each year as during the Clinton administration.



As the administration endlessly reminds us, we are in a time of war and information that could actually harm national security does need to be classified. But the nature of what appears in the Formica Report, for example, might make us wonder about what it is that the Pentagon is redacting in the blacked out half of the document. For instance, you can still read -- between the non-lines, so to speak -- about allegations of abuse and torture that proved (according to the report) unfounded in American facilities in Iraq. These include sodomy, electric shock, dog bites, and more. If what we can read are the "unfounded" charges, you can only wonder whether those solid black areas of the report contain allegations of abuse and torture that simply turned out to be accurate.



Given a blank space, the mind naturally has the tendency to fill it in -- and these latest reports in their blankness are nothing but invitations to invent the details yourself based on what is already well known. There is little question that censorship produces rumors, while secrecy keeps the swirl of rumor alive and unchecked.



Although the Formica Report insists repeatedly that "detainees generally make false statements," the Jacoby Report does also point out, in a readable passage, that "training in detainee operations as opposed to EPW (Enemy Prisoners of War) is a relatively new concept for the Army" and that military personnel have apparently been regularly placed in circumstances that lead to abusive behavior. "If a TIC [Troops in Contact] results in detention, an opportunity for abuse arises as a result of the stress and emotion." From what can be discerned, it does look like training and expectations for the holding of detainees just didn't match the grim reality in the field.



The odd thing about the increasing rate of redactions is that they are coming at a time when there have been signs from elsewhere in the administration that a change of policy is needed and, at least when it comes to Guantanamo, might be limping its way toward us. President Bush has finally said that he'd like to find a way to close Guantanamo. The Supreme Court has called the classification of the detainees into question by stating that the Geneva Conventions apply even to al-Qaeda. Only days ago, the Department of Defense revised its Guantanamo detainee policy to adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Meanwhile, the detainees are being cleared of accusations and released at a more rapid rate than previously. Two weeks ago, for instance, fourteen Saudis were released from Guantanamo and sent back to Saudi Arabia, bringing the number of prisoners cleared and released from Guantanamo to nearly three hundred. Internal military concerns for making Gitmo a humane and legal prison have grown. In the past several months, the military has instituted a ban on the use of dogs and a new policy of religious sensitivity with regard to the detainees.



And yet on this, as on so much else with the Bush administration, if it weren't for angry, frustrated, or horrified leakers from within the military, the intelligence community, and the federal bureaucracy generally, we might truly be plunged into informational darkness. Part of the aura of secrecy the Bush administration has created around its own behavior involves the insistence that only agreed-upon administration officials can tell the story and only their way -- and often only as a last resort.



It's not surprising then that the more reports appear on the treatment (or mistreatment) of detainees around the world, the less they bother to offer us the light of day; and the more all-black pages that enter the world, the less the public knows -- except about the nature of the Bush administration itself. Shrouded in secrecy and adamant about the right not to reveal, the administration stands defiantly behind its darkened pages. And so here we stand, too, the text of our world becoming increasingly unreadable as words turn into massive inkblots, and black spaces overcome white ones. The dark, it seems, continues to swallow the light.





Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security, the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor of The Torture Debate in America.



[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing.]

[rockysigman]

skvorisdeadsorta said:

Dude, now that there's a thread, all quiet on the Western Front, eh?

Yeah, and here I was thinking the only reason that we couldn't go into it in depth was because it was off topic on the other board.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Yep. Hear that? What appears to be a windtunnel is actually someone in

THE DENIAL ZONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kmc]

Torture is ok. AngerDoc said so.

[shin]

Seriously, though, what's with this "summer camp" nonsense? Take torture out of the equation and we're still keeping these people locked in jail indefinitely without counsel in shit conditions. I don't know what kind of fucked up summer camp RocDoc's parents sent him to back in the day.

And torture is supposed to be what holds them "accountable" for their actions? Seriously? That's the moral foundation we're working on? They chop off someone's head, we slice their balls with a rusty butter knife? What kind of Old Testament bullshit is that! We didn't even do that stuff to Timothy McVeigh. This isn't even taking into account the innocent cab driver types we've been torturing, too, the sort of cases RocDoc is loathe to even acknowledge, let alone find it in his shriveled heart to condemn.

I'm starting to think that RocDoc honestly thinks the War on Terror resembles an episode of "24" with 99% accuracy. Just trust our lives to whatever the Jack Bauers of the world think is appropriate.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

No one wants to admit that Timothy McVeigh was former Army with ties to Al Quada, not to mention his protest over the massacre of Waco, because he was a law abiding veteran before that, which is a total conspiracy theory, but I honestly wonder.

Keeping the detainees without Legal counsel and indefinitely is a huge violation that is going to have huge repercussions for us in the future, I have no doubt of that.

[RocDoc]

AngerDoc?

Haha.

[kmc]

I am glad you liked it.

[kmc]

We were not able to have a silly argument after all, Rocky.

[rockysigman]

Disappointing. But perhaps this extremely relevent article will spark some silly argument...

Will Bush and Gonzales get away with it?

The pilot and Vietnam POW -- a staunch Republican -- who pushed through the War Crimes Act of 1996 is appalled that the Bush administration, facing possible prosecution for war crimes, is devising a legal escape hatch.

By Michael Scherer

Aug. 2, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Retired Navy pilot Mike Cronin knows enough about torture to know it doesn't work. After being shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, he spent six years enduring interrogations in the Hanoi Hilton, the notorious holding block for American prisoners of war. His neck and ankles were bound together with rope, causing him to lose consciousness. The nerves and bones in his wrists were crushed. His shoulder was ripped out of its socket. He was forced to talk, but he never gave the North Vietnamese the information they wanted.

"I told lies," explained Cronin, 65, in a telephone interview from Cape Cod, Mass., where he is spending the summer. "When you put people in that position, the information you get is not reliable."

After the war ended, Cronin returned home to become a commercial pilot for American Airlines -- and a deep believer in the laws of war. He came to see the Geneva Conventions, which bar torture and "humiliating and degrading treatment," as a bedrock of the international military code. He was amazed to discover that as late as the 1990s, there was no law enabling U.S. courts to try violators of the Geneva Conventions. "I was shocked," he said. "I just thought that was wrong."

So Cronin changed the legal landscape. Thanks to his persistent lobbying, Congress passed the War Crimes Act of 1996 with overwhelming bipartisan support. For the first time, U.S. courts were granted authority to convict any foreigner who commits a war crime against an American, or any American who commits a war crime at all. At the time, nobody could have predicted that a decade later a U.S. administration, with the explicit consent of the president and the attorney general, would be accused of systematic war crimes.

But that is precisely the accusation that President George Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now face. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Bush administration wrongly denied Geneva Convention protections to prisoners suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban, a policy that allowed for harsh and possibly illegal interrogation methods to be used against them. As a result, U.S. personnel, given their treatment of these prisoners, could become subject to prosecution under the law that Cronin, a former prisoner of war, lobbied to pass.

In fact, from the early days of the war on terror, the Bush administration was concerned about the War Crimes Act. Publicly released memos show that as far back as Jan. 25, 2002, Gonzales, then the White House counsel, worried that the president's policies could trigger prosecution under the act. That led the White House to declare, over the objection of the State Department, that al-Qaida was not protected by the conventions. In the memo, Gonzales argued that the president could create "a solid defense against any future prosecution" by declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

But with the Supreme Court ruling, that defense no longer stands, leaving the administration in a legally vulnerable position. At a recent congressional hearing, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, the Air Force judge advocate, testified that "some techniques that have been authorized" violated the Geneva Conventions. To preempt any prosecution, administration officials are now quietly circulating legislation to change the statutory interpretation of the War Crimes Act of 1996. In short, the legislation would make it difficult to prosecute U.S. personnel for the harsh interrogation methods authorized by President Bush and the Justice Department.

Cronin, an active Republican, sees the proposed changes, which have not yet been spelled out publicly, as an attempt by the civilian leadership to cover its tracks. "These guys are talking about trying to protect soldiers in the field. I think they are lying through their teeth," Cronin said. "They are talking about trying to protect themselves."

Cronin is not alone. Some Democrats have promised to push back against the proposed changes and have focused their initial ire on Gonzales. "The highest law enforcement officer in the country is leading an effort to undercut the rule of law," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, on the Senate floor last week. "We cannot credibly ask others to meet standards we are unwilling to meet ourselves." On Wednesday, the committee is scheduled to discuss the issue of war crimes prosecution.

Because the War Crimes Act is a criminal statute that requires a federal prosecutor, it is unlikely that any charges against the American civilian leadership will be filed in the next two years. But charges could be filed by the next administration or by appointment of a special prosecutor, say legal experts.

"What the administration is afraid of is that someday, presumably in a Hillary Clinton administration, Justice Department investigators will go back to 2002 and 2003, when the CIA was interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaida with guidelines from the Justice Department and the White House," said Tom Malinowski, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. He said the effort to change the interpretation of the War Crimes Act is focused on protecting those outside the military chain of command who may have committed war crimes or ordered war crimes to be committed. "If I were in the armed forces," Malinowski said, "I would be worried that the administration is selling out the armed forces for the CIA."

At first glance, Cronin appears to be an unlikely critic of the Bush administration. He identifies firmly with the military. He served nearly two years in Vietnam, flying A-4 Skyhawks off aircraft carriers over North Vietnam. He was shot down in January 1967, just before the end of his tour of duty. A registered Republican, Cronin voted for President Bush in each of the past two elections. In 2004, he even joined other prisoners of war in supporting Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the partisan nonprofit group that attacked the Vietnam service and antiwar activities of Democratic candidate John Kerry. One of his closest friends, a fellow American Airlines pilot, was in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

But today, Cronin says he is no longer certain he can support Bush. As he put it, "I have had some doubts about the wisdom of this administration."

The story of the War Crimes Act began by accident. In the 1990s, worried that his job as a commercial pilot might not be secure, Cronin enrolled at Georgetown Law School, studying nights while continuing his full-time job as a pilot. At Georgetown, he discovered that Congress had never enacted a law to enforce the Geneva Conventions, even though the conventions were ratified shortly after World War II. After graduating, he was asked by the Allied Pilots Association, his union, to help represent his colleagues on Capitol Hill. He made it a point to lobby members of Congress about the lack of war crimes enforcement as well. "I made it my hobby to discuss the issue with senators and congressmen," Cronin said. "I hit a brick wall. There was no interest until I met Congressman Jones."

In 1995, Rep. Walter Jones was a newly elected Republican from North Carolina who represented a military district that includes Camp Lejeune, a major Marine base. Jones took an immediate interest in Cronin and made the War Crimes Act his first legislative initiative. "This whole issue came to me by accident," Jones said. "It was my third month in Congress."

At the time, war crimes focused on acts by foreign adversaries, like the North Vietnamese, who had tortured Cronin. But when the bill passed into law, it applied equally to Americans. It passed the House by a voice vote, earned unanimous support in the Senate and was promptly signed by President Bill Clinton. Even right-wing conservatives supported it. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., said the bill would "close a major gap in our federal law." Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said the bill was "something that should have been done some 40 years ago."

In practice, the law made little difference for enlisted soldiers and officers, who were already subject to military law, which prohibits the abuse of prisoners. But for the first time, the War Crimes Act provided a way to prosecute U.S. civilians, including intelligence officers, contractors and government officials who order war crimes.

In the current proposals, which have been reported by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the administration is seeking to make Geneva Convention enforcement in the United States subject to domestic interpretation, not international standards. The slight technical change could have a huge practical impact. Legal experts say this would give some flexibility to the Justice Department to define certain interrogation techniques as legal in U.S. courts, even if the rest of the world considers them violations of the conventions.

"They want retroactive immunity," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame, who has been critical of the Bush administration's detention policies. "Have you known of any other time in our history when we have tried to immunize public officials against crimes after they have committed the crimes?"

The Bush administration, Cronin said, is simply unaware of the realities of war. "The vast majority of them never served a day in the military, even though almost all of them were of military age at the time of the Vietnam War," Cronin said. "The opposition to the administration's policy of detainment has come, to their great credit, entirely from the professional military."

Cronin, on the other hand, has been there. He is a victim of war crimes. And, as it stands, he no longer believes that the president and his aides have the nation's best interests at heart. "From day one," he said, "the total motivation of these people seems to have been, How can we protect ourselves?"

[kmc]

But who are you gonna believe, Rock? Some dude with tons of military experience who has been tortured, or the President?

[shin]

I wish Chrisfan was here so I could ask her how she felt about our president now having the power to order the torture of any and all American citizens, much like Saddam Hussein had in Iraq. But now we'll never know, will we?