Key torture players: Feith, Addington, Gonzalez, Bush, CheneyThis has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.
Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff of those officials -- all practicing attorneys -- in a pointed public statement:
"Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and -- at the apex -- Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.
It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi's embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?
How terribly sad.
A TAP ON THE SHOULDER
Even though there seems to be little appetite for doing so at home, trying those Bush administration officials as war criminals abroad is no mere leftist wet dream.The CIA agents involved in the rendition of Abu Omar are facing criminal charges in Italy, while British lawyer Philippe Sands wrote in "The Green Light," a Vanity Fair article that put the lie to the notion that the torture regime did not start at the highest reaches of the Bush administration, that he visited a judge and prosecutor in a major European city and reviewed with them materials pertaining to a Guantánamo torture case:
"[They] were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. 'That is very stupid,' said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country—one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.
" 'It's a matter of time," the judge observed. 'These things take time.' As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, 'And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.' "
LIVE AND IN COLOR
Speaking of Douglas Feith and Philippe Sands, they faced off yesterday at a House subcommittee hearing on torture.The first videotape of a Guantánamo Bay interrogation has been released by the lawyers of Omar Khadr, a Canadian teenager detained by U.S. forces.
The video shows Khadr, at the time aged 16, interviewed by intelligence agents in 2003. During the footage he sobs uncontrollably, removes his shirt to complain about his medical treatment and tells the agents: "You don't care about me."
Left alone in the interrogation room, Khadr cries, holds his head and rocks back and forth. The audio is not clear, but he reportedly repeats the phrase "help me."
Khadr, whom the U.S. accuses of killing a soldier in Afghanistan with a grenade, faces a military trial later this year for five war crimes. Amnesty International has described him as the first person to be put on trial anywhere in the world for war crimes allegedly committed when he was a juvenile.
TOMMY FRANKS WAS RIGHT
Feith was Donald Rumsfeld's undersecretary of defense for policy and advised him on how to play loose and fast with the Geneva Conventions when it came to torturing detainees, or as Feith terms it, using "counter-resisistance techniques." He said as much in an interview with Sands, author of "The Green Line" article, which was a preview of his subsequently published book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.
Widely disparaged as a twit (former General Tommy Franks famously remarked that Feith "is the fucking stupidest guy on earth," while to my eyes he is an amazing lookalike for a young James Widdoes, who played Hoover in Animal House), he ran true to form in protesting that Sands had misquoted him but . . . oops! forgot that the interview had been tape recorded.
Feith had turned down an appearance before the subcommittee last month because he refused to be in the same room with Lawrence Wilkerson. Small world, isn't it?
As it was, coverage of yesterday's face off was virtually non existent. Torture just isn't a particularly compelling subject when there are snarky magazine covers to write about and offshore oil to be drilled, but the right-wing Power Line did publish Feith's opening statement and a small handful of media outlets weighed in on the proceedings before the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
With Sands sitting to his right, Feith put on one of his typical logic-bending performances, arguing that others are to blame for his own actions; besides which, torture techniques can be applied "in a humane fashion."
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick described him as "one of those cans that erupt with an exploding snake. No matter who the questioner or what the question, Feith responds with a jolt of explosive, affronted outrage," but subcommittee Republicans did him one better and grumped that there have been far too many hearings on torture, besides which Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harmon were somehow instrumental in setting U.S. torture policy because they were briefed on it.
Ah yes, democracy in action.
IF ANYONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PREPARED
It is no coincidence that the titles of Sands' book and the just published The Dark Side: How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer are so similar.But while Sands concerns himself more with the Pentagon, Mayer shines a harsh light on Vice President Cheney, who along with his minions orchestrated a cover-up of administration's failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had he and the White House not been so caught up in an arrogant sense of infallibility.
I reviewed The Dark Side yesterday, but this excerpt from the first pages of the first chapter give the reader a taste of how important it is in setting the record straight:
"If anyone in America should have been prepared to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it ought to have been Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades before the planes hit the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Cheney had been secretly practicing for doomsday.
" . . . From the start of the administration, Cheney had confidently assumed the national security portfolio for a president with virtually no experience in the area. But Al Qaeda's attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President's thinking. The Soviet Union, whose threat had preoccupied Cheney and other doomsday planners in the 1980s, was gone. In its place another, more intangible danger had arisen. No one in the Bush Administration, including Cheney had had the foresight or imagination to see Bin Laden's plot unfolding."Photo illustration for Vanity Fair by Chris Mueller
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