- PARIS - It is a strange
affair when the CIA's destruction of videos made of its torture of prisoners
has created a greater scandal in the U.S. Congress and the press than
the fact that the torture itself took place.
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- The actual scandal is that the United States has been
torturing prisoners on orders from the top of the Bush administration,
using methods of torture authorized from the top that the administration
still refuses to condemn or renounce. The White House says "the
United States does not torture," and therefore nothing that it does
is torture.
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- It is equally important that the U.S. Congress has been
unable, or unwilling, as a body, to condemn torture in unequivocal terms,
nor have Bush presidential nominees to high legal and judicial office
been willing in testifying to Congress to identify torture as anything
other than what America's enemies do, not us -- since as the president
says, we Americans do not torture.
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- Yet were the smallest child compelled to watch this procedure
known as water-boarding, he or she would know that it was torture. He
or she would scream in horror at the terrible thing being done to this
man (or woman; it seems that the U.S. does not discriminate sexually
in either victims nor professional torturers.)
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- Where does this leave us? Everyone knows that the policy
of the United States is to torture, while the policy of the president
and his men is cynically to deny it. The CIA dsstroys the evidence of
this torture -- which it has conscientiously filmed, just as Nazi torturers
and camp officials made careful records of their wartime actions and victims:
records which then were used against them in their postwar trials.
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- This may be significant. It is possible that America's
torturers and their superiors have recognized that whatever the administration's
efforts, a non-negligible risk exists that individuals responsible for
torture could eventually end before some new version of the Nuremberg
tribunals that caused Nazi war criminals to be hung, or the new International
Criminal Court, or some equivalent war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
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- Just this week [Dec. 12] the Bosnian Serb general who
commanded 44 months of the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo was convicted at
The Hague of murder, inhumane acts, and orchestrating terror, and was
sentenced to 33 years imprisonment, under the same international war
crimes accords that include the international ban on torture.
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- As the Bush administration approaches its end, such thoughts
may have arisen in some official minds. The CIA may have less than total
faith in the willingness of a new administration to protect it (especially
after what happened to the agency after Vietnam). All but the deluded
among its leaders know that they have been ordering, facilitating, or
committing crimes including torture, which is a felony in U.S. law, illegal
in international law, forbidden by U.S. military manuals, and by common
international opinion a loathsome practice. They probably have thought
of what a prosecutor could do with those videos.
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- They would be mad to think that George W. Bush or Richard
Cheney would ever declare to future international or American tribunals
that whatever the CIA did in the war on terror was done on their orders,
and that they assume full responsibility.
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- The presidential and vice-presidential position is that
the United States does not torture. If anyone at the CIA or elsewhere
committed torture, it must have been a rogue operation. (It was Donald
Rumsfeld whose sense of command responsibility led him to say of Abu Ghraib
that the problem lay with "a few hillbillies" who would be prosecuted
as indeed they were.)
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- The American nation has placed itself in an impossible
position. The president says we do not torture. Yet everyone knows the
president has with transparent euphemisms ordered the use of torture.
White House and Justice Department meetings have been reported by participants
in which officials lingered salaciously over the various near-death tortures
to authorize.
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- The discussion of recent days in the Congress has concerned
who ordered the destruction of the tapes. "Not I," says the
new head of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden; "I've just arrived."
"Not I, says George Tenet, former CIA director, although he is said
to have ordered the torture filmed. The tapes reportedly were destroyed
under Porter Goss, Tenet's successor. Congress asks: Why weren't we told?
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- It was not told because it already knew. That is the
big secret that is no longer a secret. As early as 2002 CIA officials
were briefing members of congressional intelligence committees on these
practices. Those briefed included the present Democratic Speaker of the
House, Nancy Pelosi. They had a "virtual tour" of all that was
going on, including the renditions, secret facilities abroad, and especially
the torture.
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- The congressional reaction? According to Congressman
Porter Goss, later head of the CIA, it was "not just approval, but
encouragement." Two of the legislators, according to The Washington
Post, asked if what the agency was doing "was tough enough."
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- No wonder everyone is happy today to call for special
investigations of who destroyed the tapes. That changes the subject.
The important information is the subject of the videos: state torture.
Who in the government was responsible; who knew about it; who went along.
And who objected? And to judge from the public reaction to date: who cares?
The national consensus seems to be that it is better to have destroyed
the evidence.
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