Investigating the torture team

May 2, 2009
Issue 

Torture Team — Deception, Cruelty & the Compromise of Law.
Philippe Sands. Allen Lane, Penguin. New York. 2008.

"Only a few pieces of paper can change the course of history. On Tuesday, 2 December 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed one that did."

From such a singular beginning, Philippe Sands writes the history of US attempts to abolish international laws and conventions on the use of torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.

This is the memo Rumsfeld approved with the sarcastic comment about standing: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" Perhaps Rumsfeld should have been subjected to the other 17 "techniques" that accompanied the memo to see if his tolerance for them was as good.

Torture Team begins carefully, reviewing and structuring the trail of evidence and the chain of command. Most of the participants in the chain of command were interviewed, some more willingly than others, and good portraits of their characters come through.

They varied from casually ignorant and carefree to defensively firm in their self-perspectives on the various papers, actions, and events that occurred. Through it all, the only groups or people who appear to be relatively "clean" in these events are the military themselves and the FBI.

All others, that is, politicians (starting at the top with George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, defence under secretary Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz et al), government lawyers and advisors, medical personnel, psychologists, anthropologists — pretty much anyone who had a hand in the interrogation — become complicit in war crimes under international law.

As with the one action paper signed by Rumsfeld, much of the evidence comes from a singular detainee, Detainee 063 (Mohammed al-Qahtani), whose record of torture is described in an "interrogation log" over several months.

Around the one piece of paper and the one detainee is a history of the attempted subversion of international law, and the evasions and rationales used by the chain of command to avoid culpability.

Much of the argument is based on Common Article 3 — labelled so because it appears in each of the four Geneva Conventions — prohibiting "cruel treatment and torture, as well as 'outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment'".

A violation of this article "would be a war crime, leading to possible investigation in many countries". Indeed it is required for signatory countries to prosecute war crimes. Further, "There are no exceptions to Common Article 3 — not even necessity or national security", making anyone who contravenes it "an international outlaw".

Sands discusses the situation in comparison with Nuremberg and a particular Nazi government official, a lawyer, whose argument acted within the same parameters as those presented to Feith. While Sands agrees that the actual actions are not comparable in size, the arguments presented as lawyers trying to avoid culpability are similar.

Feith was one of the main characters in the history. He was one of the "chicken hawk" neo-cons advocating for a new world order, arguing that the war on terror is a "new kind of war".

The Bush administration and its many neo-con supporters said the world changed on 9/11, that the US was fighting a new type of war, against non-state actors.

An external view of the situation more correctly identifies that the world remained essentially the same. Non-state insurgents and jihadists had been active for some time, propelled to their modern image by the US itself, in liaison with Pakistan, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Yes, something in the US changed: not its record of foreign military interventions, but its outward attitude. Now it felt it could do what it wanted openly against the terrorists.

Feith claims the US is "one of the few governments that actually is entitled to moral authority". As this is a self-professed, self-claimed authority, it has no claim to reality, to any moral superiority over any other country or culture.

It is another of the many claims to US exceptionalism, most of which are self-proclaimed and contrary to evidence — the actions taken do not support the grand rhetoric and jingoism that go with them.

Sands concludes that the "most senior lawyers bear direct responsibility for decisions that led to violations of the Geneva Conventions". He notes that they have "immunity from criminal process [as] built into US law, and to which several of these lawyers contributed".

Complicity in the war crimes reaches much deeper than that. In consultation with European sources, Sands reveals the extent of the complicity.

War crimes conventions developed after World War II said "there would be no refuge for the torturer or the international criminal". Duties were imposed "on every person who was involved in the decision-making process".

As for the legal advice, any writing that "had opened the door to abuse or even torture … on specific individuals, then in theory the responsibility would go back to the author of the legal advice".

Avoiding the issue does not help either, as "contributing to the avoidance of an investigation of a crime could itself give rise to complicity".

The societal impact of 9/11 on US culture in its broadest sense was enormous. Having long before "won" the Cold War with the Soviet Union, "a pervasive sense of threat … hung in the air a year after the September 11 attacks".

Much of that fear was created deliberately by the neo-cons, who could now focus the US citizens' worries on the new "global war on terror". September 11 "gave rise to a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining interrogation".

Along with that, "A new culture of cruelty had been unleashed", one that captured Europe as well ... the "CIA's program of 'extraordinary rendition' was the product of the same mindset, and it seems to have ensnared various European and other countries in a culture of complicity".

The actions taken were not "mere accident or oversight", but were "motivated by a combination of factors, including fear and ideology and an almost visceral disdain for international obligations".

Sands draws broad sweeping conclusions on the complicity of many levels of the US government and its advocates and advisors. It reaches overseas into NATO's (and other nations') participation in the rendition program.

It is also the cause of the actions taken at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Many in the Bush administration, and those that served them, fall into Sands's description of complicity in war crimes.

It leaves a lingering question — if "contributing to the avoidance of an investigation" results in complicity, where do the actions of Barack Obama fall?

He has given a deadline for the closure of the Guantanamo detention centre, he has sworn that torture will not be used in the US, but nothing has apparently changed with overseas renditions, and he has indicated that he would not "look back" and prosecute anyone for war crimes.

The final chapter of Torture Team has yet to be lived and written, but it is still a valuable and strongly researched work.

[Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles's work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.]

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