Thanks to rba for pointing me to Jane Mayer’s excellent and devastating article in the New Yorker.
Ms. Mayer does a profile in courage on Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy, who waged a sustained and ultimately failed campaign to stop the use of cruel and inhumane treatment and the torture of military detainees.
Mayer lays out in exquisite detail the chain of events that led the Pentagon to lose its way and establish itself as another culprit in the annals of crimes against humanity. And she also demonstrates with stunning clarity how the ultimate culpability for this everlasting stain on our nation’s posterity was implemented by a few men and women.
The chief culprits were Dick Cheney and his now chief-of-staff David Addington, their ally in the Pentagon, William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense; Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver; Mary Walker, the Air Force’s general counsel; administration lawyer, John Yoo; Stephan Cambone, the under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Donald Rumsfeld; and former Presidential legal counsel and now Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.
Collectively, they managed to not only legalize torture in opposition to a strong majority of Pentagon lawyers, but to keep their decision secret from them.
The article provides plenty of evidence that it is the consensus opinion of lawyers within the Pentagon that the legal arguments that were used to justify torture were not supportable. Specifically, they ignored Common Article Three of the Geneva conventions, which bars cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, as well as outrages against human dignity and U.S. Code 18.2441, the War Crimes Act, which forbids the violation of Common Article Three.
And then there is this:
Lawrence Wilkerson, whom Powell assigned to monitor this unorthodox policymaking process, told NPR last fall of “an audit trail that ran from the Vice-President’s office and the Secretary of Defense down through the commanders in the field.” When I spoke to him recently, he said, “I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation.” Cheney’s view, Wilkerson suggested, was fuelled by his desire to achieve a state of “perfect security.” He said, “I can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe, but he’ll corrupt the whole country to save it.”
These are clearly criminal offenses emanating from the Office of the Vice-President and passing through the office of the Secretary of Defense.
And here is what they’ve done.
Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.
This is not legal and it is not acceptable. As Alberto J. Mora says:
A few days after his going-away party, he reflected on his tenure at the Pentagon. He felt that he had witnessed both a moral and a legal tragedy.
In Mora’s view, the Administration’s legal response to September 11th was flawed from the start, triggering a series of subsequent errors that were all but impossible to correct. “The determination that Geneva didn’t apply was a legal and policy mistake,” he told me. “But very few lawyers could argue to the contrary once the decision had been made.”
Mora went on, “It seemed odd to me that the actors weren’t more troubled by what they were doing.” Many Administration lawyers, he said, appeared to be unaware of history. “I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials—or with the laws of war, or with the Geneva conventions. They cut many of the experts on those areas out. The State Department wasn’t just on the back of the bus—it was left off the bus.” Mora understood that “people were afraid that more 9/11s would happen, so getting the information became the overriding objective. But there was a failure to look more broadly at the ramifications.
“These were enormously hardworking, patriotic individuals,” he said. “When you put together the pieces, it’s all so sad. To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values.”
Indict, impeach, convict.
