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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 24th,
2008 - US Secretary of State Rice Defends Torture at Google Event |
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US Secretary
of State Rice Defends Torture at Google Event By Bill Van Auken World Socialist Web Site May 24, 2008 US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice found herself compelled on Thursday to defend the Bush
administration’s use of waterboarding - a potentially fatal method of induced
drowning used to break the resistance of detainees - claiming that America
was in a “different place” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, while insisting that the
government’s actions were consistent with US law and international treaties. The backhanded defense of
torture by Washington’s chief spokesperson on the world stage came in
response to a pointed question from the audience at a “town hall meeting”
organized at the headquarters of Google Inc., the Internet search giant, in
Mountain View, California. Rice’s statement, the most extensive
she has ever made on the issue of torture, followed the release earlier this
week of a Department of Justice Inspector General’s report that included
detailed accounts by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who
objected to sickening forms of torture that were inflicted on detainees at
the US prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The nature of these so-called
“enhanced interrogation techniques” was made clear by the agents, creating
what they called a “war crimes file” in which these reports were compiled. Also included in the report
was the revelation that senior Justice Department officials communicated the
concerns raised by the FBI agents directly to Rice, who was then Bush’s
national security adviser, along with the warning that the brutal practices
at Guantánamo were “gravely damaging...the rule of law.” As the report makes clear,
the warning had no impact whatsoever on the grisly activities being carried
out in US detention camps and secret prisons, and the FBI agents themselves
were quietly ordered to close their “war crimes file” and stop making
critical reports on the actions of CIA, military and private contractor
interrogators. Rice appeared before the
Google audience together with visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,
who traveled with her to California following meetings at the State
Department in Washington. Earlier, the two had joined to threaten new
economic sanctions against Iran over its alleged failure to offer full
disclosure to the International Atomic Energy Agency over its nuclear
program. Pointing to what she said
were economic dislocations resulting from existing US, European and UN
sanctions, Rice commented - apparently in reference to the military option
that the US administration continuously insists remains “on the table” -
“They are already paying consequences and, of course, there are other
possible courses available to us.” After a panel discussion in
which Rice and Miliband fielded queries from Google Senior Vice President
David Drummond, the audience of Google employees was invited to ask their own
questions from floor microphones. One of the first employees
asked Rice: “If an American held by another country were subjected to
simulated drowning by waterboarding, would that shock your conscience and
would you consider that torture?” He continued by asking Miliband to what
extent US use of the torture method against detainees had created a “strain
between the United States and your government.” Much of the audience
responded to the question with applause. Rice dodged the specific
question, but spoke at length in defense of the administration’s
interrogation methods, framing them as a necessary response to the 9/11
terrorist attacks. “The fact is that after September
11 [we did] whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks of
September 11, but the anthrax attacks that followed,” she said. “We were in
an environment in which saving America from the next attack was of paramount
concern; but even in that environment President Bush made it very clear that
we were going to live up to our legal responsibilities at home and to our
treaty obligations abroad.” Earlier in her remarks, Rice
had claimed that for her, during her tenure in Washington, every day had been
“September 12,” the universal rationale offered by the Bush administration
for wars of aggression, extraordinary rendition, torture, illegal domestic
spying and other attacks on democratic rights. Of course, “September 10” -
the period leading up to the terrorist attacks - does not feature in this
propaganda narrative. According to numerous accounts, then-National Security
Adviser Rice bore major responsibility for dismissing concrete and urgent
warnings from top US intelligence officials that a terrorist attack was
imminent. Seven months afterward, she
voiced the opinion in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of International
Studies that 9/11 presented an “enormous opportunity” for Washington “to
create a new balance of power.” By this time, she and the rest of the
administration were already well along in their preparation for a war of
aggression against Iraq, using fabricated charges concerning terrorist ties
and weapons of mass destruction as their pretext. Rice’s addition of the
anthrax attacks to 9/11 as justification for doing “whatever was legal,” in
her words, is peculiar to say the least. It was quickly established that
these attacks had no connection to Al Qaeda, and the perpetrators - who have
never been identified - were generally believed to be right-wing domestic
terrorists. The anthrax-laden mailings targeted Democratic leaders in the
Senate and sections of the media. The weapons-grade anthrax itself was
available only to a limited number of people involved in the US biological warfare
program. Yet, there were no reports
of members of America’s extreme right or employees of Defense Department
biological weapons facilities being abducted, imprisoned, waterboarded,
beaten, shackled in stress positions or subjected to sexual humiliation.
Instead, the entire matter was quietly dropped by the administration as it
waged a hysterical campaign to terrorize the American people with the
supposed threat from Middle East terrorism and Iraq in particular. While defending the Bush
administration’s treatment of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere, Rice
affirmed that the situation had undergone an “evolution,” with Congress
having put “in place a set of laws that were not there in 2002 and 2003.” She was referring to the
2005 Detainee Treatment Act. Drafted by Senator John McCain in collaboration
with the Bush White House, this legislation served largely to cover up and
immunize past acts of torture while placing no real impediment to the
continuation of these same methods and barring no specific torture technique,
including waterboarding. Moreover, the administration has insisted that CIA
interrogators are not bound by the terms of this law and must continue using
“enhanced interrogation techniques.” The act’s avowal that the US
would not subject those in its clutches to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment” was meant for public consumption, aimed at rescuing at least some
shred of America’s reputation in the aftermath of the photographic
revelations of sadism, abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “These issues have evolved
in the context of our democracy, they’ve evolved in the constant debate about
our values and what are values tell us to do,” Rice continued. “We are in a
different place now than we were, but I don’t want anyone to believe that
even when we were in that most difficult place that we failed to ask the
question, ‘Are we living up to our laws and to our treaty obligations?’ ” Whatever Rice wants or
doesn’t want anyone to believe, the record is by now quite clear. The Bush
administration asked the question about the law and obligations under the
Geneva Conventions, the Treaty on Torture and other international agreements
and concocted the answers it desired. Its legal advisers, including Alberto
Gonzales, David Addington and John Yoo, developed the doctrine that as
commander-in-chief in a supposed time of war - the undeclared global “war on
terror” - Bush was bound by no law and no treaty whatsoever. Other novel legal theories
followed, including the claim that, by designating detainees as “enemy
combatants” - an invented category with no legal standing whatsoever - one
could deny them rights and protections universally applicable under the
Geneva Conventions, and the assertion that physical and mental abuse only rose
to the level of torture if it produced effects comparable to death or major
organ failure. This is what the “values” of
Bush, Cheney, Rice and Co. told them to do. Contrary to Rice’s claims, this
process continued well past 2002-2003 and after the enactment of the Detainee
Treatment Act passed by Congress and remains ongoing. In any case, her
argument can be boiled down to: “We never tortured before, and we really
don’t torture now.” The Justice Department IG
report - relying on the sworn eyewitness testimony of hundreds of FBI agents
- establishes in stomach-turning detail that the US did indeed systematically
torture those it detained without charges or trials. Moreover, Rice was one of
those directly involved in crafting and directing the methods of physical
brutality, mental torture and sexual sadism that were employed over and over
again against detainees held by the US in prisons from Guantánamo to Abu
Ghraib. As ABC News reported last month,
she chaired a National Security Council Principals Committee - including all
the top figures in Bush’s cabinet - which reviewed and approved interrogation
techniques. “The high-level discussions
about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed,” ABC said,
citing senior administration officials, “some of these interrogation sessions
were almost choreographed - down to the number of times CIA agents could use
a specific tactic.” Bush subsequently confirmed the account, saying that he approved
of the committee’s work. In other words, Condoleezza
Rice sat around the table with Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, CIA Director Tenet, Attorney General
Ashcroft and others, discussing and approving methods that included
waterboarding, beatings, the prolonged shackling of prisoners in painful
positions, use of attack dogs in interrogation, draping detainees in women’s
underwear, forced nudity and other forms of sexual humiliation, sleep and
sensory deprivation and holding detainees in isolation for months on end. Not satisfied with Rice’s
answer, her questioner at Thursday’s meeting pressed further, demanding
whether she was saying that waterboarding does not constitute torture. “I
think I’ve answered your question,” the Secretary of State responded with a
tight smile. The Google executive cut the
employee off and started to move to the next questioner before realizing that
the British foreign minister was preparing to make his own reply. Standing firmly in defense
of the “special relationship” between London and Washington, Miliband
acknowledged that there existed “differences in national law and national
practice,” but insisted that these divergences did “not call into question
the fundamental nature of our alliance.” His statements
notwithstanding, torture of prisoners is not a matter of “national practice,”
but rather a war crime. If the British foreign minister offers such an alibi
for these crimes, it is because his own government is complicit, having
allowed its citizens to rot in Guantánamo for years, permitting “special
rendition” flights to transport US-held detainees from British airports to
torture chambers in the Middle East and having itself sought, unsuccessfully,
to allow the use of confessions extracted under torture as evidence in
criminal prosecutions. More fundamentally, the
British ruling elite has served as the accomplice of Washington’s key
criminal act - the waging of a war of aggression to secure the strategic
interests of American capitalism in the Middle East. This militarist
aggression - directed at offsetting the decline of US economic dominance
through the use of armed force - has given rise to a host of other crimes,
torture among the most repugnant. In her remarks in California,
Condoleezza Rice spoke wistfully of returning to Stanford University next
year as a professor and “reflecting” on her actions over the past eight
years. The only appropriate place
for a review of these actions is an international tribunal constituted to try
her, Bush, Cheney and other senior officials for the most serious war crimes
carried out by a major power since the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich. This task cannot be
entrusted to any section of the existing political establishment. The Democratic
Party, the US corporations and the media are all fully implicated in the
crimes of the Bush administration, including its use of torture. The defense
of democratic rights and the struggle against war, together with holding
accountable the war criminals in the White House, depend upon the development
of a new independent political movement of the working class. The unprecedented economic
crisis now unfolding in America and on a world scale, combined with the
ever-widening gulf between the financial elite and masses of working people,
is creating the conditions for a new eruption of class struggle out of which
such a mass socialist movement can emerge. External link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/may2008/rice-m24.shtml |