Obama ’s Abu Ghraib solution

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Obama’s Abu Ghraib solution
13 August 2009

In the spring of 2004, the entire world recoiled in horror and disgust
at the photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib, the US prison in Iraq.

There was the ghostly image of a terrified Iraqi detainee draped in a
hood and standing on a box with electrodes attached to his fingers.
Photos showed men being beaten, attacked by dogs, dragged by leashes,
shackled in “stress” positions, piled naked upon each other and
subjected to perverse sexual humiliation.

Grinning US soldiers were pictured giving the thumbs-up sign over the
corpse of a murdered detainee. All of these images served to expose
the colonial-style war waged by US imperialism in Iraq.

Ample evidence emerged that not only had these heinous acts been
promoted and applauded by senior commanders in Iraq, but that the
methods employed had been crafted by the Pentagon and US intelligence
agencies, and the use of torture had been sanctioned by the White
House itself.

To protect the Bush administration and its leading figures from the
consequences of their crimes, the Bush White House and the
Pentagon—with the collaboration of the Democratic Party and the
media—fashioned an alibi. They presented the horrors exposed at Abu
Ghraib as the work of “rogue” elements, a few “bad apples,” whose
actions in no way reflected on the occupation of Iraq or what was
supposedly an otherwise lawful system of detention and interrogation.

In the end, a handful of junior enlisted personnel and reservists, who
no doubt deserved punishment for their acts of brutality, were
prosecuted. The sole reason they were “brought to justice,” however,
was to cover up the far greater crimes at the highest levels of the
Bush administration and the military, where the use of torture was
initiated and authorized.

Five years later, the Bush administration is history, and a Democratic
president has taken office, verbally repudiating torture and promising
“transparency.”

Nonetheless, according to published reports, President Barack Obama
and his attorney general, Eric Holder, are dusting off the Abu Ghraib
tactic of prosecuting a few supposed “bad apples” at the bottom of the
chain of command in order to whitewash the far more serious crimes
committed by those at the top.

According to Justice Department officials quoted in the Los Angeles
Times last weekend, Attorney General Holder has determined that his
agency cannot avoid carrying out some form of probe into the CIA’s use
of torture. The pressure for such an investigation is expected to grow
later this month with the court-ordered release of a CIA inspector
general’s report

The Los Angeles Times quotes one unnamed senior Justice Department
official who revealed that the investigation planned by Holder would
be “narrow” in scope, limited to “whether people went beyond the
techniques” spelled out in memos issued by the Bush administration
authorizing torture.

According to the report in the Times, one focus of the probe will
likely be CIA interrogators who were guilty of “waterboarding of
prisoners far in excess of Justice Department guidelines.”

Holder is, according to this report, basing himself on one of the
so-called torture memos drafted by his predecessors at the Justice
Department, which cautioned in relation to waterboarding that
“repetition will not be substantial because the techniques generally
lose their effectiveness after several repetitions.”

The Times suggests that among the cases to be investigated on this
basis are those involving Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded at least
83 times in August of 2002, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was
subjected to this form of torture 183 times in March of that year.

The torture of both Zubaydah and Sheikh Mohammed was hardly the work
of “rogue” interrogators. It was directed and followed in minute
detail by the leading figures in the Bush administration, including
Vice President Dick Cheney, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet,
Attorney General John Ashcroft, and others. Bush acknowledged that he
was well aware of their work and fully approved of it.

One of the reasons for the “excessive” use of this torture was the
intense desire of the Bush administration to extract from the
detainees confessions to non-existent ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein, so that they could be exploited as propaganda for the planned
aggression against Iraq.

The likelihood of a successful prosecution on this basis is
exceedingly slim. The Justice Department memo limiting waterboarding
is vague in the extreme and suggests avoiding over-repetition more as
a matter of efficacy than policy. It is also unclear whether CIA
interrogators were ever informed of the memo, which was in any case
drafted after the fact to provide a pseudo-legal cover for torture
methods already in use.

Moreover, there were other findings that gave a green light to
torture. The administration’s definition of thousands of detainees as
“enemy combatants,” with no rights under the Geneva Conventions, was
drafted to facilitate torture. Other rulings claimed unfettered power
for the president as the commander in chief in the “war on terrorism,”
allowing him to override any legal restrictions, including
proscriptions against torture.

As the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under
the Bush administration, Jack Goldsmith wrote, “If you do torture, you
probably have a defense; and even if you don't have a defense, the
torture law doesn't apply if you act under the color of presidential
authority.”

The underlying conception of Holder’s proposed probe— “torture is
permitted, but only within the law” —is worthy only of contempt. Its
ultimate effect would be to exonerate those who approved torture in
the first place. In effect, it would provide tacit support to their
contention that the methods they sanctioned—from waterboarding, to
hanging people in shackles, to sealing them in boxes with
insects—didn’t really constitute torture at all.

Whether any such probe will get off the ground, much less result in
criminal indictments remains to be seen. There are intense divisions
over the matter within the state apparatus, with the military and
intelligence agencies deeply hostile to any more revelations or
investigations, and increasingly making their objections known. They
have already floated the argument that investigating CIA personnel for
“excessive” torture will inhibit the agency, thereby jeopardizing
national security and strengthening terrorism.

This latest stratagem for dealing with the systematic torture carried
out under the Bush White House confirms the essential role of the
Obama administration in covering up these crimes while continuing the
basic policies that gave rise to them.

This is in line with the behavior of the Democratic Party over the
previous eight years, in which it provided support for the continuing
wars of aggression and police state measures begun under the Bush
administration, out of which the use of torture emerged. Leading
congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were
informed of the use of torture and lent their support, while
concealing these crimes from the American people.

Those responsible for the policies of torture and illegal war must be
investigated and brought to trial. This includes Bush, Cheney, Rice,
Rumsfeld, Tenet, Ashcroft and others. Likewise, those who crafted the
pseudo-legal justifications for torture—including former Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington,
and ex-Justice Department Deputy Assistant Secretary John Yoo—must be
prosecuted.

Such trials are vitally necessary to prevent the repeat of these
crimes internationally and, under conditions of growing social crisis
and increasing class struggle, the use of these same methods against
working people in the United States itself.

Holding accountable those responsible for these crimes is a political
task posed to the American working class. It can be achieved only on
the basis of the independent political mobilization of working people
in opposition to the Obama administration and both parties of the
ruling establishment and the capitalist system which is the root cause
of war and repression.

Bill Van Auken

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