It’s time to impeach our VP and Pres: http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com
By Andrew Sullivan
ICH 12/25/07
“The Times” 12/23/07
Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.
There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.
And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.
President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.
Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know – it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.
Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture – information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary – and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.
A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique – information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.
The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.
And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.
And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.
See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes – including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.
At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: “The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me.” That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something – not that it didn’t happen. That’s the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.
This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.
The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.
But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.
Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah’s interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall – and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.
Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory – and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It’s the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – a legal no man’s land. But Congress can get involved – especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.
What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?
What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?
What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.
Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have – without any bias – would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.
Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: “I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up.”
It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.
Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet unwritten.
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see
New York Times bows to White House pressure over CIA tapes story by Bill Van Auken
9/11 Panel Study Finds That CIA Withheld Tapes By Mark Mazzetti
Former CIA analyst says evidence abounds for impeachment
CIA chief to drag White House into torture cover-up storm h/t: ICH
Dandelion Salad 
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One of my comments on the forum discussion following this article on IFC:
Oracle, you seem to have a lot of patronizing opprobrium to direct at people’s justifiable outrage.
You here indict any resultant exasperated hyperbole regarding illegal militarism and the blind conspiracy of the public and their elected lawmakers in allowing war-crimes by the USA to be carried out.
You claim that the it is ‘preposterous’ to call the enlisted militarists “murderers” and that nobody should take any such claim seriously.
I direct you, professor, to the Nuremburg Principles and the Geneva Accords, to which the USA is a signatory.
Without detailing the myriad viable allegations of war-crimes and the legal basis for those accusations against the US armed forces in general and the individual personnel in particular, nobody here should be mistaken about the legal basis for the accusation of Murder:
THE LEGAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF INDIVIDUAL COMBATANTS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW:
1: The NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES, established at the Nazi trials after World War II, declare that it is the right and responsibility of individual soldiers to refuse to follow illegal orders or to participate in war crimes.
2: The GENEVA CONVENTIONS of War define a legal war as one that is undertaken as a last resort in the legitimate self-defense of a nation, and has the support of the international community of nations. It also defines what kind of weapons may be legitimately employed in war, and how civilian populations and captured soldiers should be treated during wartime.
3: The U.N. Handbook on Refugees calls on countries to provide refuge to soldiers “who refuse to participate in wars widely condemned by the international community as contrary to accepted standards of human behavior.”
Per these above references, indeed the individual enlisted combatants who willfully carry out orders to kill in this war, which is by every definition ILLEGAL under treaties that the USA remains a signatory to, are each guilty of war crimes and murder.
In light of this revelation, you can hardly blame the incredulous minority of moral people for being livid at the APOLOGISTS for these clearly criminal warmongers.
The citizens who support this criminal militaristic escapade are as much to blame for these illegal atrocities committed in our names as anyone, and they each deserve nothing less than wrath from those of us who always saw and still see full well that the supporters and prosecutors of this war are, were, and remain, WAR-CRIMINALS.
Individual soldiers who carry out orders to kill under illegal invasions are indeed MURDERERS. In fact they are serial killers of the very worst kind. What the individual enlisted soldiers of our armed services do each day over there, Jack The Ripper could only have lusted for in his wet dreams.
It was and remains the legal obligation of each and every individual soldier to abandon the battlefield at once the MOMENT it was shown beyond all doubt that this war was illegal, this war was not ‘just’ and that this invasion and occupation was pursued under false pretext in perfectly treasonous fashion.
The fact that you, as a professor, know all this full well and yet scoff at those who would technically correctly categorize service personnel as murderers by any definition, is indeed license for a lashing.
Shame on you, professor, for misleading your students about such a profoundly important matter as individual and national war-crimes and the responsibilities of individual combatants under international law to refuse to carry them out.
The complicity and resultant culpability of the public in these murderous crimes of historic proportions by your enlisted soldiers at your expense and apparently with your blessing, is perpetuated by the very conspiratorial behavior of individuals on the civilian side such as yourself, who try to ‘correct’ our morality with patronizing attacks on our terminology, when it is we who are in line with the rule of law, not you and your 75% who supported Bush and his militaristic illegal atrocity right up until recently.
The voters are themselves guilty by association, and by their near-unanimous refusal in five years to take action to correct their government’s wrongs.
The lawmakers in congress who refuse to pursue all possible avenues for eliminating funding and impeaching the commander-in-chief are as guilty as the soldiers themselves and the generals who command them.
Let the tribunals begin! (and isreal is next).
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