I've been trying to write something comprehensive about the the state of the torture memos, US torture policy, and the coming confirmation hearings of the Enabler, one White House Counsel Gonzales. But it's too depressing.
So just read Hullabaloo. Digby says most of it. (And even has one small tiny ray of light — not quite everyone is going to take Gonzales lying down.)
The US holds maybe hundreds of non-citizens, all captured abroad (we are told), incarcerated in Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world. The Bush administration plans to hold them up to forever.
Of course, there is a difference between the Soviet Gulag, which was aimed at saboteurs, dissidents, or people who somehow got on the wrong end of officialdom, and the US Gulag, which is we are told aimed merely at the foreign version of the same.
Whether the creation of a secret archipelago of prisons and coercive questioning facilities will inevitably fail to be deployed against US citizens is a question that one is not permitted to ask in public, as it is too far outside the permitted consensus. So put that issue aside.
Ask instead whether from a moral, political, or even legal point of view, the fact that only foreigners are incarcerated for life without trial (or indeed any rights, it appears), at the complete and unconstrained pleasure of the super-imperial presidency, gives us much in the way of bragging rights over the former Soviet Union.
What's that? Our gulag is much smaller? And our policy this week is not to torture people, the last two years notwithstanding? And that nice Mr. Bush (with Justice Thomas's endorsement, to his and the Court's eternal shame) promises that all the people being held really deserve it, so who needs complications like a trial?
Well, that's alright then!
The people on the ground believed for some strange reason that their authorization to torture came straight from Rumsfeld and maybe even the White House. What on earth could have given them such a strange idea? See the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The new documents include several incidents of threatened executions of teenage and adult Iraqi detainees
Smart pundits are now predicting that Rumsfeld is being kept around to take the fall in six to twelve months for both the torture and the failure of the Iraq war. Meanwhile, even relatively mainstream inside-the-beltway types such as Matthew Yglesias now view the prospect of a war crimes prosecution with weary equanimity:
Laura Rozen looks at the latest developments on the torture front and remarks that it “is not1 at all inconceivable that some day not too many years off Rumsfeld and Bush will face arrest if they travel abroad for command responsibility for war crimes, like Pinochet.” Indeed, not only is it conceivable, I think in some ways it has to be regarded as expected at this point. I only hope the good judges of the rest of the democratic world recognize that it would be counterproductive to hand down indictments before this crew has left office, as such action would only inflame the embers of brain-dead nationalism that have done so much to get them re-elected.
The really interesting thing about the spate of stories we've seen over the past two weeks isn't so much that widespread torture was taking place (we knew that already) but that large swathes of the security and intelligence establishment issued various protests. It's testament both to the basic integrity of most of America's security professionals and to the utter moral depravity of the people in the Bush-Gonzalez-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith-Cambone chain that this happened. In a decent world, Al Gonzalez would face some rough questions about all this at his confirmation hearings, but I don't think we live in that world.
This tired acceptance, this learned helplessness, in the face of wrist slaps for the unlucky grunts (much more than a few bad apples—we're talking pattern and practice here) and non-investigations of the guilty is itself tragic.
“What the documents show so far was that the abuse was widespread and systemic, that it was the result of decisions taken by high-ranking officials, and that the abuse took place within a culture of secrecy and neglect,” [ACLU lawyer Amrit] Singh said.
Much as it pains me, the failure of all three branches of our government to deal with this in a timely way seems like the strongest argument yet for the International Criminal Court—clearly even our domestic checks and balances are not up to the task. The military's internal nonjudicial punishments meted out for, say, graphically threating to kill detainees, are vastly insufficient for what are clear war crimes.
At Guantanamo, a Prison Within a Prison:
Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.
But to the military's credit, they required the CIA to follow some of the most basic treaty obligations:
The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay thus provided the CIA with an isolated venue devoid of the sensitive international politics. But it came with strings attached.
The U.S. military, which controls the base, required the agency to register all detainees, abide by military detention standards and permit the ICRC some level of access.
“If you're going to be in my back yard, you're going to have to abide by my rules” is how one defense official explained it.
Normally, as I've noted before, the evidence is that the CIA doesn't bother with the Geneva conventions, and indulges in “ghost detainees” and who knows what sort of physical and psychological pressure:
CIA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far greater secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment.
You still have to wonder why exactly the CIA couldn't just lock these guys up at Langley? Is there any risk at all that they could get to a lawyer, or that if it did it would do them any good? Why does the CIA have to hold these guys abroad? Can there be any legitimate reason other than the desire to do things that our law would not allow? And if that is the reason, then I firmly believe it is an illegal motive. Our federal government is created by the Constitution. It has only those powers the constitution grants it. The power to act lawlessly abroad is not one of those powers. The Constitution constrains the CIA abroad just as it does domestically; if it's wrong for our agents to torture people here, it's equally wrong anywhere. And remember, they are formally our agents, We the People are formally their masters; what they do, my fellow citizens, they do in our names, more's the pity.
Fresh allegations about a regime of torture and humiliation inflicted on detainees by their American captors at Guantánamo Bay have been made by a Briton still held there, according to Foreign Office documents seen by the Guardian.
The claims by Martin Mubanga, from London, are the latest to surface from the prison where the US holds 550 Muslim men it claims are terrorists in conditions that have sparked worldwide condemnation.
Mr Mubanga, 31, alleges that only months ago he was kept shackled for so long that he wet himself, and then was forced to clean up his own urine. He claims to have been threatened, that an interrogator stood on his hair, and that he was subjected to extremes of temperature rising to 36C (97F). He was kept chained to the floor by his feet for an hour during a welfare visit from a British government official.
Where the hell is the outrage? The Senate hearings? The — excuse the term — Democrats?
Permanent jail set for Guantánamo:
… the Pentagon is quietly planning for permanency at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, The Herald has learned.
Pentagon planners are now seeking $25 million to build a state-of-the-art 200-cell concrete building meant to eventually replace the rows of rugged cells fashioned from shipping containers at Camp Delta.
At the same time, the Army is creating a full-time, professional guard force — a 324-member Military Police Internment and Resettlement Battalion that will replace a temporary, mostly reserve force at Guantánamo.
A Department of Army memorandum to Congress obtained by The Herald envisions the new military police force being included in the 2005 and 2006 budgets. ''This action is part of a systematic process to enhance Army's capabilities required to defend the Nation's interests at home and abroad,'' says the undated memo from the Army's legislative liaison office.
This is serious. Not only is the temporary Guantánamo facility an embarrassment that should be razed to the ground rather than upgraded, but a permanent facility is an actively dangerous temptation for rogue policy makers. A permanent facility can have any of three purposes and they are all bad:
Be worried, be afraid, be angry, be active.
Jotwell Blenderlaw