Introduction
The US Senate Report documenting CIA
torture of alleged terrorist suspects raises a number of fundamental questions
about the nature and operations of the State, the relationship and the responsibility
of the Executive Branch and Congress to the vast secret police networks which
span the globe – including the United States.
CIA: The Politics of a
Global Secret Police Force
The Senate Report’s revelations of CIA
torture of suspects following the 9/11 bombing is only the tip of the
iceberg. The Report omits the history and wider scope of violent activity
in which the CIA has been and continues to be involved. CIA organized large
scale death squad activities and extreme torture in Vietnam (Phoenix
Project); multiple assassinations of political leaders in the Congo,
Chile, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America and
elsewhere; the kidnapping and disappearance of suspected activists in Iraq and
Afghanistan; massive drug-running and narco-trafficking in the “Golden
Triangle” in Southeast Asia and Central America (the Iran-Contra war).
The Senate Report fails to locate the
current acts of CIA terror and torture in a broader historical context – one that
would reveal the systematic use of torture and violence as a ‘normal’
instrument of policy. Contrary to White House and Senate claims that
torture was a “policy error” committed by “incompetent” (or deranged)
operatives, the historical record demonstrates that the long term extensive and
intensive use by the CIA of torture, assassinations, kidnappings are planned
and deliberate policies made by highly qualified, and experienced policymakers
acting according to a global strategy approved by both Executive and
Congressional leaders.
The Report treats torture as a
“localized” set of events, divorced from the politics of empire building. In
point of fact, torture is and always has been an integral part of imperial
wars, colonial military occupations and counter-insurgency warfare.
Imperial wars and occupations provoke
widespread opposition and nearly unanimous hostility. ‘Policing’ the
occupied country cannot rely on community-wide support, least of all providing
voluntary ‘intelligence’ to the imperial officials. The imperial armed
forces operate out of fortresses surrounded by a sea of hostile
faces. Bribes and persuasion of local collaborators provides limited
information, especially regarding the operations of underground resistance
movements and clandestine activists. Family, neighborhood, religious,
ethnic and class ties provide protective support networks. To break this web of
voluntary support network, the colonial powers resort to torture of suspects,
family members and others. Torture becomes “routinized” as part and parcel of
policies sustaining the imperial occupation. Extended occupation and intensive
destruction of habitation and employment cannot be compensated by imperial
“aid” - much of which is stolen by the local collaborators. The latter, in
turn, are ostracized by the local population, and, therefore, useless as a
source of information. The “carrot” for a few collaborators is matched by
torture and the threat of torture for the many in opposition.
Torture is not publicized domestically
even as it is ‘understood’ by ‘knowing’ Congressional committees. But among the
colonized, occupied people, through word and experience, CIA and military
torture and violence against suspects, seized in neighborhood round-ups, is a
weapon to intimidate a hostile population. The torture of a family member
spreads fear (and loathing) among relatives, acquaintances, neighbors and
colleagues. Torture is an integral element in spreading mass intimidation – an
attempt to minimize co-operation between an active minority of resistance
fighters and a majority of passive sympathizers.
The Senate Report claims that torture
was “useless” in providing intelligence. It argues that victims were not privy
to information that was useful to imperial policymakers.
The current head of the CIA, John
Brennan rejects the Senate claim, while blithely admitting “some errors”
(underwater submergence lasted a minute too long, the electric currents to the
genitals were pitched to high?), argues that “torture worked”. Brennan argues
that his torturer colleagues did obtain “intelligence” that led to arrests of
militants, activists and “terrorists”.
If torture “works” as Brennan claims,
then presumably the Senate and the President would approve of its use. The
brutalization of human life, of family members and neighbors is not seen as, in
principle, evil and morally and politically repugnant.
According to the explicit rules of
conduct of Brennan and the implicit beliefs of the Senate, only “useless”
torture is subject to censure – if an address is obtained or a torture victim
names a colleague a ‘terrorist’ to avoid further pain, then by the criteria of
the Senate Report torture is justified.
According to the operational code of
the CIA, international law and the Geneva Conventions have to be modified:
torture should not be universally condemned and its practitioners prosecuted.
According to the Senate only torture that “doesn’t work” is reprehensible and
the best judge of that is the head of the torturers, the CIA director.
Echoing Brennan, President Obama,
leaped to the defense of the CIA, conceding that only some ‘errors’ were
committed. Even that mealy mouth admission was forcibly extracted after
the President spent several years blocking the investigation and months
obstructing its publication and then insisting on heavily editing out some of
the most egregious and perverse passages implicating NATO allies
The Senate Report fails to discuss the
complicity and common torture techniques shared between Israel’s Mossad and the
CIA and Pentagon. In defense of torture, the CIA and White House lawyers
frequently cited Israel’s Supreme Court ruling of 1999 which provided the
“justification “for torture. According to Israel’s Jewish judges, torturers
could operate with impunity against non-Jews (Arabs) if they claimed it was out
of “necessity to prevent loss of or harm to human life”. The CIA and
Harvard law professor and uber-Zionist zealot, Alan Dershowitz echoed the
Israeli Mossad “ticking time bomb” justification for torture, according to
which “interrogators can employ torture to extract information if it prevents a
bombing”. Dershowitz cited the efficiency of Israel’s torturing a
suspect’s children.
The CIA officials frequently cited the
Israeli ‘ticking bomb’ justification for torture in 2007, at Congressional
hearings in 2005, and earlier in 2001 and 2002. The CIA knows that the US
Congress, under the control of the Zionist power configuration, would be
favorably disposed to any official behavior, no matter how perverse and contrary
to international law, if it carried an Israeli mark of approval or ‘logo’.
The US CIA and Israeli’s Mossad share,
exchange and copy each others’ torture methods. The US torturers studied
and applied Israel’s routine use of sexual torture and humiliation of Muslim
prisoners. Racist colonial Israeli tracts about techniques on destroying the
‘Arab Mind’ were used by US intelligence. Israeli officials borrowed US
techniques of forced feeding hunger strikers. Mossad’s technique of
‘Palestinian hanging’ was adopted by the US. Above all, the US copied and
amplified Israel’s extra-judicial ‘targeted’ killings – the center piece of Obama’s
counter-terrorism policy. These killings included scores of innocent bystanders
for every ‘successful target’.
The Senate Report fails to identify the
intellectual authors, the leading officials who presided over and who
ultimately bear political responsibility for torture.
Top leaders, Presidents George W. Bush
and Barack Obama, and Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson, Diane
Feinstein, resort to the Nazi war criminals plea “we didn’t know”, “we were
misled” and “the CIA didn’t tell us”.
No judge at the Nuremberg Trials
believed them. Nor will any international court of law believe US
political leaders’ pleas of ignorance of the CIA’s decade-long practice of
torture – especially after former Vice President Cheney lauded the practice on
US television and boasted he would implement the same policies again. (One has
to wonder about the ‘source’ of Cheney’s transplanted heart…)
During the administration of President
Bush, Jr., CIA leaders submitted detailed reports on intelligence, including
the sources and the methods of obtaining the information, on a routine basis –
with videos and ‘live feeds’ for the politicians to view. Nothing was ‘held
back’ then and now, as current CIA head John Brennan testifies. From 2001
onward torture was the method of choice, as testimony from top military
officials revealed during the Abu Ghraib investigation.
National Security Agency (NSA)
meetings, attended by the President, received detailed reports extracted from
CIA “interrogations”. There is every reason to believe that every NSA
attendee ‘knew’ how the ‘intelligence’ was obtained. And if they failed to
ask it was because torture was a ‘normal, routine operating procedure’.
When the Senate decided to investigate
the “methods of the CIA”, half a decade ago, it was not because of the stench
of burning genitals. It was because the CIA exceeded the boundaries of Senate
prerogatives –it had engaged in pervasive and hostile spying against US
Senators, including the Uber-Senator Feinstein herself; CIA crimes were
compromising client regimes around the world; and most of all because their
orgy of torture and dehumanization had failed to defeat the armed resistance in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.
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.
Richard Cheney, Vice-President under
President George W. Bush, notorious war criminal on many counts, and prime
advocate of torture, publicly declared on December 10, 2014 that President
Bush specifically authorized torture. He bragged that they were informed in
detail and kept up to date.
In the political world of torture,
practiced by Islamic extremists and US imperialists, how does the decapitation
of non-combatant prisoners, match up with the CIA’s refrigeration of naked
political suspects? As for “transparency”, the virtue claimed by the
Senate Report publicists in publishing the CIA’s crimes, as “refurbishing the
US image”, the Islamists went one step further in “transparency”: they
produced a video that went global, revealing their torture by beheading
captives.
The Senate Report on CIA torture will
not result in any resignations, let alone prosecutions or trials, because over
the past two decades, war crimes, police crimes, spy crimes, and financial swindles
have not been prosecuted. Nor have any of the guilty officials spent a day in
court. They are protected by the majority of political leaders who are
unconditional defenders of the CIA, its power, techniques and especially its
torture of captives. The vast majority of Congress and the US President
repeatedly approve over $100 billion annual budgets for the CIA and its
domestic counterpart, Department Homeland Security. They approved the annual
budget voted on December 10, 2014, even as the “revelations” rolled in.
Moreover, as the tempest over CIA torture proceeds, Obama continues to order
the assassination by drone of US citizens “without ever crossing the door of a
judge”.
Despite over 6,000 pages of documents
and testimony, recording crimes against humanity, the Senate Report is unlikely
to trigger any reforms or resignations. This is not because of the actions
of some mysterious “deep state” or because a ballooning national security
apparatus has taken power. The real problem is that the elected officials,
Presidents and Congress people, Democrats and Republicans, neo-liberals and
neo-conservatives, are deeply embedded in the security apparatus and they share
the common quest for world supremacy. If Empire requires wars, drones,
invasions, occupations and torture, so be it!
Torture will truly disappear and the
politicians will be put on trial for these crimes, only when the empire is transformed
back to a republic: where impunity ends justice begins.
James
Petras latest book, The Politics of
Imperialism: The US, Israel and the Middle East (Atlanta: Clarity Press 2014)
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