Torturer-in-chief: Bush brags about waterboarding

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Torturer-in-chief: Bush brags about waterboarding
By Bill Van Auken
6 November 2010

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts
of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of
waterboarding.

The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by
the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the
September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former
president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.”

The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip
statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”

The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely
self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding
and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with
evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the
war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic
interests.

In a country governed by laws, international treaties and democratic principles,
such admissions would provoke a public outcry, an intense political debate and
the arrest and prosecution of George W. Bush.

In the United States of America of 2010, however, the former president’s
bragging that he ordered his subordinates to carry out torture has been greeted
within the political establishment and the corporate media with an audible yawn
of indifference.

The news of Bush’s bragging about having ordered torture was broken by the New
York Times Tuesday in one sentence in an online political blog. The so-called
paper of record print edition relegated the matter to the ninth paragraph of a
book review published in its Arts pages.

The review merely quotes Bush as writing, “had I not authorized waterboarding on
senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the
country would be attacked.” In keeping with the Times policy, the word “torture”
does not appear.

The Washington Post carried an article on Bush’s statement on waterboarding on
Thursday. In the book, the paper reports, “Bush makes clear that he personally
approved the use of that coercive technique,” which the Post acknowledges
constitutes “a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit
torture.” The Post article states that the book “reiterates” Bush’s claim that
waterboarding does not constitute torture.

For the rest of the media, the confirmation that the former US president
personally ordered the use of torture has received far less attention than
Bush’s complaint in the memoir about how “deeply insulted” he was when rapper
Kanye West stated on national television that “George Bush doesn’t care about
black people” because of his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

There has been no response from the Obama administration or the Democratic
congressional leadership to Bush’s confession.

On Friday, a senior US State Department adviser attending a UN Human Rights
Council meeting in Geneva was asked by journalists about the reports on the Bush
memoir.

“I think that the Obama administration defines waterboarding as torture as a
matter of law under the convention against torture and as part of our legal
obligation...it’s not a policy choice,” the official, Harold Koh, responded.

He went on to claim that “investigations are ongoing” to determine whether
anyone could be prosecuted for the practice.

“There has been a turning of the page” under the administration of President
Barack Obama, Koh insisted.

This is a barefaced lie aimed at mollifying international outrage over the US
embrace of torture. There has been no “turning of the page.” Rather, the Obama
administration has systematically covered up for the crimes of the Bush White
House, while continuing the criminal policies and methods introduced by its
predecessor.

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that any investigation of Bush-era
torture will be limited to whether anyone in the CIA went beyond the torture
methods laid down in the Justice Department’s so-called torture memos drafted to
legitimize the practice. Even this limited probe has gone nowhere as the
powerful US intelligence apparatus has opposed it with undisguised hostility.

As a result of Bush’s order, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.
Another alleged Al Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded at least 83
times. The CIA acknowledged using the method against a third detainee, Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In 2005, it revealed that videotapes depicting the
interrogations of these last two prisoners had been destroyed in an apparent
attempt to eliminate evidence of torture.

This technique and others even more hideous were used in countless other
interrogations by both CIA and military interrogators from Bagram airbase in
Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and numerous so-called black sites maintained
by the US intelligence agency around the world.

Bush’s memoir serves to confirm once again that these crimes were not merely the
responsibility of a few overzealous CIA interrogators or “rogue” enlisted
personnel, but rather were carried out at the direct bidding of the president of
the United States.

Waterboarding amounts to induced drowning, with the prisoner strapped to a
gurney and water poured through a cloth over his mouth and nose. It can and has
resulted in death. From the Spanish-American War onward, the US military treated
waterboarding as a war crime, prosecuting both its enemies and, on several
occasions, members of its own ranks, for utilizing this form of torture. The US
State Department has regularly condemned foreign governments for torture on the
basis of evidence that they utilize this barbaric method.

Yet, under the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” waterboarding and a
litany of other methods ranging from sensory deprivation to sealing prisoners
into boxes containing insects, to hanging them from the ceiling in shackles,
were declared not to be torture but rather “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
This phrase represented virtually a literal translation of the term used by the
German Gestapo 60 years earlier, Verschärfte Vernehmung, also as a bureaucratic
euphemism for torture.

The US media fell dutifully into line with this attempt to deny torture with a
terminological sleight of hand.

A study released by Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy last summer found that after 70 years of describing
waterboarding as torture, the leading US newspapers carried out an abrupt turn
after the revelation that US interrogators were utilizing the method against
alleged terror suspects.

The study found a “sudden significant shift in how newspapers characterized
waterboarding.” Only 2 of 143 post-2003 articles dealing with waterboarding in
the New York Times, for example, used the word “torture,” while only 1 out of 63
articles in the Wall Street Journal did so.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller dismissed the study as
“tendentious,” asserting that to describe waterboarding as “torture” would
constitute “taking sides in a political dispute.”

The Democratic leadership, as was revealed last year, was repeatedly briefed on
the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but did
nothing to oppose these methods or to expose them to the American people. Among
the first Democratic leaders to be informed about this use of torture was House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California), then the leading Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee.

If Bush feels no compunction over bragging about torture, it is in large measure
because he knows that not it is not just he and his inner circle of accomplices
who are implicated—Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet,
Attorney General John Ashcroft and others. Rather, the entire political
establishment is complicit, including the Congress, the Democratic Party, the
courts and the media.

The former president is also confident that he enjoys impunity on the issue of
torture because the policies of the current administration are largely in
continuity with his own.

Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser at the White House in John Brennan, a
former top CIA official who publicly defended the agency’s “enhanced
interrogation techniques” as well as the practice of “extraordinary rendition,”
in which the agency abducted people and flew them to third countries to be
interrogated and tortured.

The Obama administration has repeatedly sent the Justice Department to court to
quash challenges to extraordinary rendition, torture and domestic spying,
invoking a sweeping claim to the “state secrets privilege” that essentially
places the executive branch above the law on all matters that it claims touch on
“national security”.

It has likewise kept open the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and
continued use of military kangaroo tribunals for the purpose of trying suspects
whose cases would be compromised in regular courts because of their
interrogation under torture.

And the Obama White House has gone even further than its predecessor, claiming
the right to place American citizens on CIA “kill lists” to be assassinated by
death squads or drone missile attacks without being charged, much less tried,
for any offense.

The United Nations Convention against Torture, signed by President Ronald Reagan
26 years ago, making all acts of torture criminal offenses under US law, applied
to all those who either participate or are complicit in torture.

The treaty implicitly rejects all the US rationales for its “interrogation
techniques,” stating that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a
state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other
public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Governments are required by the treaty to either prosecute those accused of
torture or extradite them to another country that will do so.

Bush’s memoir constitutes prima facie evidence that he is guilty of torture—as
if any additional evidence were needed. The failure of the Obama administration
to arrest him and others implicated in waterboarding and other torture methods
makes it complicit in torture as well.

This complicity in and indifference towards the crime of torture pervades all
sections of the US ruling elite, its government, its political parties and its
media. It is symptomatic of the profound erosion of democratic processes and
democratic rights within the United States, which has been driven by a decade of
uninterrupted imperialist wars of aggression abroad and unprecedented social
inequality at home.

Holding those responsible for these crimes accountable is a vital political
task. It is required both to cleanse the political atmosphere of the stench of
torture and unprovoked wars and to prevent, under conditions of an unprecedented
crisis of American capitalism, these same methods being turned against working
people in the US itself.

Bringing those guilty of torture to justice can be carried out only by the
working class mobilizing its political strength independently against both the
Obama administration and the Republicans as well as the profit system that they
defend, which is the source of militarism and the war crimes it engenders.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/bush-n06.shtml

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