Enhancing torture by the CIA

 

 

The US Senate Report on the use of torture by the CIA in interrogating alleged terrorist suspects underscores the problem of identifying the responsibility of both the Executive and Congress over the state’s apparatus for gathering intelligence necessary in its war against terrorism. It’s not only the brutal methods employed by the CIA that are highly disturbing but also the Report’s absence of finding or acknowledgment of culpability beyond the pay grade of the CIA operatives conducting those investigations.



Senate Intelligence Committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

talks to reporters after coming out of the Senate in Washington on

December 9, 2014. Reuters Photo

In addition to the finding that the CIA’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed, the Torture Report also brings out two other significant points: one, that the interrogation program was mismanaged and lacked adequate oversight, and two, that members of Congress and the White House were misled by the CIA about the effectiveness and extent of its brutal interrogation techniques.

 

The question to ask therefore is: Who are the authors or leading officials who presided over the CIA’s regime of torture? Whether it was its intention, the Senate Report did not address who ultimately must bear the political responsibility for torture.

 

Like the Nazi criminals during the Nuremberg Trials, US top leaders—Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Diane Feinstein— have pleaded “we didn’t know,” “we were misled,” and “the CIA didn’t tell us.”

 

If a similar Nuremberg Trial were convened today to prosecute those responsible for the CIA’s reign of torture, no judge would believe what these leaders say. There is no international court of law that would even be slightly persuaded by these pleas of ignorance of the CIA’s decade-long practice of torture. After all, former US Vice President Richard Cheney, one of President Bush’s unabashed architects of American aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, even lauded the CIA practice of torture on television and boasted he would implement the same policies again.

 

After 9/11, torture has been the method of choice as revealed by top military officials during the Abu Ghraib investigation. During the administration of President Bush, Jr., CIA leaders submitted detailed reports on intelligence, including the sources and the methods of obtaining the information routinely—with videos and ‘live feeds’ for the politicians to view. Nothing was “held back” then and now, as current CIA head John Brennan testifies. Everyone who attended high-level national security meetings knew how intelligence was obtained, and if they failed to ask it was because torture was accepted as the normal operating procedure.

 

Pleading ignorance is not a valid and winning argument. Former Vice President Cheney is more reckless in admitting his preference for the use of torture in ferreting out information from captured prisoners of war. During Cheney’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, he was asked if the Geneva Convention applies to this type of situation.

 

Cheney replied: “Sure there is. But remember, the terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Convention. They were unlawful combatants. And under those circumstances, they were not entitled to the normal kinds of courtesies and treatment you would accord to those.”

 

But the Geneva Conventions, a group of four international treaties covering different aspects of how civilians, prisoners of war and soldiers are to be treated once they are rendered incapable of fighting, guarantee a certain level of protection for former combatants, including prisoners of war and civilians. They set out in detail the requirements for food, clothing, shelter, safety from combat, access to medical care, and other matters.

US soldiers escort a detainee to his cell at Guantanamo Bay
Naval Base. Reuters Photo.

These fighters qualify for these protections if they adhered to some basic rules of law such as wearing uniforms, carrying arms openly, answering to a chain of command, and not committing war crimes. Many of those who were detained in Guantanamo Bay and other sites were from non-state terrorist groups and did not adhere to these rules. These are the unlawful combatants whom Cheney refers to and were not guaranteed the same protections afforded prisoners of war.

 

Is Cheney right?

 

There is in fact a distinction in the level of protection afforded under the Geneva Conventions, for those who receive extensive protections and those who do not. While detainees who do not have POW status don’t get the top level protection, they get more basic protections from the Geneva Conventions which would have shielded them against some of the brutal and harsh treatments mentioned in the Senate report.

 

Article 3, which is common and identical in all of the four Geneva Conventions, prohibits “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

 

Besides, the United States Supreme Court in its ruling in Hamsdan vs. Rumsfeld, a watershed case on detainee rights, has already ended the debate on Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court made it completely clear, that whatever their status is, detainees are entitled to some minimal protections under the Geneva Conventions. Such ruling is binding law in the United States, no matter what Cheney says.

 

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as one source of basic protection for detainees is also bolstered by other international agreements as well. Article 75 of the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions includes minimal protections for all people, whatever their status, who are caught in a conflict. Two other international agreements to which the United States is a party, the 1984 Torture Convention and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, also prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

 

In a more critical assessment of the Senate Torture Report, i.e., beyond the sheer brutality of the enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA, James Petras, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, wrote: “The Senate Report is an exercise in institutional power—a means for the Senate to regain political turf, to rein in CIA encroachment. The Report goes no further than to chastise “inappropriate” techniques: it does not proceed from crimes of state to prosecute officials responsible for crimes against international and domestic laws.”

 

“We know, and they know, and as every legal authority in the world would know, that without the punishment of political leaders, torture will continue to be an integral part of US imperial policy: Impunity leads to recidivism.”

 

The grim reality is that the Senate Torture Report will not result in a radical shift in CIA interrogations because to the United States, the war on terrorism can never be left to erring on the side of caution to maintain a level of respect for law and human rights. Torture will always be necessary, even though it is not the official policy, in gathering information that could prevent loss of or harm to human life. Those who rely on torture will always find a ticking time bomb to justify its use.

 

Such justification for the use of torture was in the heart of Israel’s Supreme Court ruling in 1999, holding that interrogators can employ torture to extract information if it prevents a bombing, and has now earned currency among the CIA and White House lawyers.

 

As the tempest in the teapot continues to boil over the Senate Torture Report, don’t expect resignations, let alone prosecutions and trials. Worldwide indignation may be heard but the US government will never be held to answer for its use of torture.

 

The CIA operates under the notion that international law and Geneva Conventions have to be modified, or at the very least, be interpreted generously to allow enhanced interrogation techniques even if by their nature they constitute acts of torture.

 

Torture should not be universally condemned and its practitioners be prosecuted: this is a core belief that the CIA relies upon for as long as it provides useful information in preventing terrorists accomplish their objectives. Such is what is expected of an imperial power like the United States, and nothing less.

 

To paraphrase James Petras, the only way for torture to disappear is when politicians are put on trial for their crimes against humanity. “Only when the empire is transformed back to a republic: where impunity ends, justice begins.”

Inventing the enemy

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Drone killings not justified

Last February 6, 2012, the Philippine military reported killing a senior Abu Sayyaf commander, a Singaporean guerilla and 12 terrorist followers after a surgical air attack on their suspected base in Parang, Sulu. The attack was so precise that it lasted only a few seconds. To date, however, the bodies of the slain terrorists have not been recovered.

Speculations were that U.S. Predator drones were used in the Sulu air strike, which was immediately denied by the Philippine Air Force. Four months earlier, PAF planes were also sent against terrorist fortifications in Zamboanga Sibugay after the Al-Barka massacre that killed 14 Marines. Nothing came out of that daytime raid, compared to the night-time Sulu strike which was carried out with uncanny accuracy.

Could it be that drones and Hellfire missiles are now being launched by U.S. visiting troops in the war against terror in Mindanao?

US Air Force predator unmanned aircraft in Afghanistan. Photo by DTN News.
Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh8Cjnzen8, to view "Predator Drones." 

There’s a raging debate going on regarding the moral and legal justification of the United States in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, in its war against terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and parts of Northern Africa where Al Qaeda operatives are known to operate. U.S. President Barack Obama was censured in an article in Esquire by Tom Junod for the administration’s policy of targeted killings of suspected militants.

So far, drones have become the weapon of choice of the United States military. Since being able to weaponize drones, the U.S. military now has the capability to hunt down terrorists without sending its navy and marines. All the military needs is a PlayStation warfare that can be operated thousands of miles away. The objective of the U.S. military is to convert 45 per cent of its “deep-strike” aircraft into drones.

According to Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, U.S. drone attacks may constitute war crimes since many of these attacks take place in areas not recognized as being in armed conflict, and some of them are strikes on rescuers who are helping those injured by the drone attack. Philip Alston, also a United Nations special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, considers drone killings as summary executions. 

Here are some disturbing facts about drone assassinations:

• The U.S. military has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. So effective are drones against the war against terrorists that U.S. President Obama has fallen in love with them. Drones have become central to the Obama administration’s way of waging war, with the huge potential to take out those guilty of conducting terrorism while limiting U.S. casualties.

• But for every “high-value” target killed by drones, there’s a civilian or other innocent victim who has paid the price. The government of Pakistan stopped allowing the U.S. military to use its borders for bringing supplies to Afghanistan after a deadly drone strike killed about 42 civilian Pakistanis in March 2011. Only recently after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered an apology to the Pakistani government was the U.S. military again allowed passage to Afghanistan through the Pakistan borders.

• The truth is, U.S. civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. As a consequence, thousands have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.

• According to The Wall Street Journal (November 2011), most of the time the United States did not even know the identities of people being killed by drones. Majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low-level fighters, together with a small number of civilians.

Drone killings are, in reality, summary executions and widely regarded as potential war crimes by international lawyers. A decade ago, the U.S. criticised Israel for such “extrajudicial killings” but now claims self-defense in the war against Al Qaeda.

The United States government justifies the use of drones as an act of self-defense against Al Qaeda, a necessary tool for its war on terror wherever terrorists are. This argument is a spill over from the 9/11 attacks and is being used by the U.S. government to justify killings in a global war on terror. But is this a valid legal justification?

If drones limit the cost of war, especially casualties on the part of the U.S. military, what could be wrong with the use of these unmanned aerial vehicles? The reality on the ground is that even with precision-guided munitions, drones could still cause a lot of collateral damage. And it’s the innocent civilian population that is taking the brunt of drone attacks rather than the few terrorist ringleaders. Just because individuals can be targeted without incurring troop casualties does not imply drones ought to be used.

Protesters demand grounding of drones by the U.S. military. Photo courtesy of
rjosef. Click  link to view "Predator Drones: Joking over innocent deaths?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTHrjfZ12Hw

At the centrepiece of the U.S. justification for the use of drones are the principles of distinction and proportionality, which under international humanitarian law (IHL) are aimed in seeking a balance between humanitarian concerns and military objectives. In other words, IHL expects states to differentiate between civilians and combatants, and to ensure that the incidental damage to civilians be proportional to the military advantage.

These IHL principles are being twisted by the U.S. military to support their argument that the non-belligerent population is not insulated from drone attacks as long as the military gain does not exceed the injury to civilians and their property. Thus, the incidental or unintentional killing of civilians is not proscribed under international law. But, harm to civilians that clearly exceeds the anticipated military advantage—that is, disproportionate harm—is proscribed.

But the problem lies in the determination of military advantage over civilian casualties, a very subjective calculus. Unless civilian fatalities are the result of intentional targeting —where advance information would show the likelihood of such an outcome—and those fatalities exceed military benefit, then the attacker is not in violation of international law. 

Retired high-ranking military and CIA veterans have challenged the legality and efficacy of drone killings. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright squarely denies the legality of drone warfare by saying that “drones are assassination machines, used for targeted assassination, extrajudicial ultimate death for people who have not been convicted of anything.”

Drone strikes are also counterproductive, according to Robert Grenier, former Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, who wrote, “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in the future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”

Emerging technologies such as drones and cyber-combat missions are reshaping the future of war. With a video joystick, bombs could now be launched thousands of miles away. The rapid proliferation of drones, beyond their own ethical and legal quandaries, makes violence and aggression so much easier and cheaper to perpetrate and therefore so much more likely.

For drone operators, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up with. It’s similar to operating PlayStation warfare. Unlike traditional pilots, who physically fly their payloads to a target, drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – amounting to what critics of drones call as  desensitizing the taking of human life. A target of a drone strike is called by the military a “bug splat,” since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed. “Bug splat” also happens to be the name of a children’s video game.

No wonder the bodies of the targeted terrorists by the Philippine military in Parang, Sulu have not been recovered. They must have been crushed into “bug splats.”