Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release a report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years after 9-11, but the contents of the report are practically irrelevant since the decision not to punish those responsible makes it an exercise in historical archiving at best, nothing more.
After his inauguration in 2009, President Obama said:
“This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
You heard him. It’s not worth spending the effort to punish criminals. That might as well be the theme of the last 6 years of his administration. Since the financial crisis in 2008, a few loan officers and just a single investment banker went to jail. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has apparently made no criminal referrals to the Department of Justice in 6 years! — nor has the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or the Federal Reserve.
As for torture, well it continues overseas since the lawyers at the CIA have determined that using intelligence acquired via torture is legal under United Nations agreements, provided they do not conduct the actual torture. Instead, suspected terrorist are transported to CIA run facilities in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan where US allies under the direction of CIA handlers conduct torture without constraint. And when I say without constraint, I mean it.
Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murry described the situation in the “democratizing” country as especially horrific. Women were raped with broken bottles. Young men as young as 18 were literally boiled alive, allegedly in retaliation for speaking to the ambassador. Murray protested that even as the torture and rape rooms of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were being dismantled, the torture rooms of Uzbekistan were funded in part by US aid.
More traditional US torture chambers sometimes result in deaths, Abu Ghraib and a few scattered instances in Afghanistan being obvious examples. In Guantanamo, doctors manage caloric intake, blood pressure, heartbeat, breathing and other measures of health to determine if the torture can continue. Torture here can be painful, but it is mostly psychological. Sleep deprivation, subjecting “interviewees” to strobe lights, white noise, and force feeding are common tools. Within boundaries, agents can experiment to see what works. The less visible the harm done to detainees, the less likely the action will be deemed torture.
Lawyer and university professor Phillipe Sands notes that cruelty is infectious in a military structure, one might argue even in a society as a whole. He said:
“Once you open the door to a little bit of cruelty, people will believe that more cruelty is a good thing. And once the dogs are unleashed, it’s impossible to put them back on. And that’s the basis for the belief amongst a lot of people in the military that the interrogation techniques basically slipped from Guantanamo to Iraq, and to Abu Ghraib.”
Someone once said, military justice is to justice, as military music is to music. That would seem to be an understatement. Most detainees have never been charged with a crime and have been held for years in a state of limbo. In many cases there is no evidence against them, except for the word of Afghan police. In other instances, the evidence is classified. Even their lawyers are not allowed to see the evidence because they do not have a security clearance.
The Obama administration’s loud exclamations that it has brought change to America falls apart with even the slightest bit of examination. Glenn Greenwald puts it succinctly:
“They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers. With great fanfare, they announced the closing of CIA black sites — at a time when none was operating. They trumpeted the President’s order that no interrogation tactics outside of the Army Field Manual could be used — at a time when approval for such tactics had been withdrawn. They repudiated the most extreme elements of the Bush/Addington/Yoo “inherent power” theories — while maintaining alternative justifications to enable the same exact policies to proceed exactly as is. They flamboyantly touted the closing of Guantanamo — while aggressively defending the right to abduct people from around the world and then imprison them with no due process at Bagram. Their “changes” exist solely in theory… they change nothing in practice: i.e., in reality.”
Of course, Guantanamo still hasn’t closed, and even if it did, it’s closure would not mean release for most of those who have gone years without trial or charge, but instead would mean moving them to prisons on US soil or to other nations.
The broader problem here isn’t the failure of the American government to police itself; its commitment to justice has often been a sham. Rather it is that children, some of whom are not even out of grammar school, can be abducted and tortured on hearsay, or outright blown to pieces for their family members to collect after drone strikes. Actions like these are now accepted by all but a few cranks on the Internet still committed to something resembling human decency. The failure of the Obama administration to do anything of substance would be amusing if it did not simultaneously coincide with the nation’s steady descent into barbarism.
