[Shadow_Group] Fw: REMEMBER ABU GHRAIB?

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

"They're getting nervous in Washington about the prospect of a war crimes
charge, and with good reason."
 
REMEMBER ABU GHRAIB?
BUSH WOULD RATHER FORGET IT - SO WOULD KERRY
By: Justin Raimondo
Published in the October 25, 2004 issue of Ether Zone.
 
Like a giant octopus that occasionally surfaces when prodded - or hungry
- the seething mass of sheer malevolence at the core of U.S. foreign
policy sometimes breaks through to the front pages - most recently, in
Sunday's Washington Post, in the form of a story detailing a secret
Justice Department memo, written by Jack L. Goldsmith, former director of
the Office of Legal Counsel - and author of Pinochet, Head-of-State
Immunity, and International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts. The
document is a draft opinion rationalizes the "disappearing" of detainees
in Iraq, and their transport to nations where human rights protections
don't get in the way of interrogation techniques.
 
The Geneva Conventions - the 1949 treaty signed by the U.S. that
regulates the treatment of prisoners in wartime - clearly forbid
"individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of
protected persons from occupied territory . . . regardless of their
motive." Yet "as many as a dozen" detainees have been "disappeared" -
hidden from the Red Cross - and spirited out of the country, according to
the Post:
 
"The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and
foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the treaty. It
permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for
a 'brief but not indefinite period.' It also says the CIA can permanently
remove persons deemed to be 'illegal aliens' under 'local immigration
law.'"
 
The U.S., which cannot - and will not - enforce its own immigration laws,
is now intent on enforcing the immigration laws of other nations. Ah, the
ironies of empire!
 
The disappeared Iraqis pose a delicate legal problem of a different sort
for U.S. officials who authorize actions deemed a "grave breach" of the
Geneva Conventions, as explained in a footnote to the Goldsmith memo. The
Justice Department draft also notes that this would be a "war crime"
according to our own laws, and goes on to warn the administration:
 
"For these reasons, we recommend that any contemplated relocations of
'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully
evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis."
 
They're getting nervous in Washington about the prospect of a war crimes
charge, and with good reason.
 
This is only the most recent sighting of the dark secret at the core of
America's dirty war in Iraq. There was the story about systematic abuse
in Afghan prisons maintained by the U.S., and before that Abu Ghraib. It
was Seymour Hersh who blew the lid off the U.S. government's secret
network of torture chambers scattered at undisclosed locations all around
the world, revealed in a series of articles for the New Yorker. It's all
part of an operation code named "Copper Green," the details of which are
elaborated on in his excellent - and frightening - recent book, Chain of
Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.
 
Copper Green was a creation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
top lieutenant, Stephen Cambone: in the post-9/11 atmosphere of "moral
clarity," they set up a secret army of assassins, interrogators, and
specialists in torture techniques whose task it was to fight terror with
terror. At first directed at ferreting out Osama bin Laden and the top Al
Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, this "special access program" - a
program so top secret that only the President and a select group are in
on it - soon opened up a branch operation in Iraq.
 
The U.S. military, increasingly on the defensive, was desperate to
develop sources of intelligence inside the growing insurgency. The
"Gitmo-ization" of the prison system maintained by the U.S. in occupied
Iraq was ordered from the top, and we saw the results in those horrific
photographs - of which we have yet to see the worst. The idea was to so
humiliate and subjugate detainees that we could send some of them back
into the population as snitches - under threat of revealing graphic
evidence of their coerced activities to family, friends, and associates.
According to this rationale, supposedly suggested by the writings of
Raphael Patai, author of The Arab Mind, shame can be used to manipulate
and ultimately pacify Arabic males, since honor or the lack of it is the
moral mechanism that regulates their actions. Strip them of their honor,
and you have them by the cojones.
 
Such a theory, however, seems oddly counterintuitive: why assume
systematic abuse won't boomerang on the perpetrators, returning as
"blowback" in the form of terrorism? The result is more likely to be a
replication of the depressingly familiar "cycle of violence" that
inflames the West Bank, and keeps the violent passions of the Middle East
burning at white hot intensity. That this may very well be the idea is a
thought that strikes even the casual observer: Abu Ghraib was a gift to
bin Laden, and to the cause of radical Islamism worldwide, such as the
mujahideen could never have won on their own, pictorially confirming what
bin Laden and his cohorts have been saying all along - that the U.S. is
at the head of a Satanic conspiracy to destroy all that is holy. To any
Muslim, or, indeed, to anyone outside the West, the Abu Ghraib photos
didn't need captions.
 
In the U.S. and Great Britain, however, it was quite a different story:
the "abuses" (i.e. acts of torture) were depicted as random "isolated"
incidents carried out by a few individuals of lower rank. The scapegoats
were quickly rounded up, charged, and railroaded into prison, while all
testimony from high-ups was suppressed and the Senate investigation was
delayed if not derailed until after the election.
 
The temporal proximity of U.S. presidential elections and Halloween is no
accident, I would maintain: and, in any event, the results are always a
horror. This time is no different. However, what's truly frightening,
this scary season, is not the prospect of uncovering yet more gruesome
details about our secret torture chambers, our war crimes, our seemingly
deliberate campaign to empower bin Laden even as we pretend to fight him.
What's truly Halloweenish is the complete absence of the war crimes issue
from the presidential race. Have the words "Abu Ghraib" ever passed John
Kerry's lips? Oh, maybe once or twice - but he didn't say much. Only what
he felt - "revulsion" - not what he would do.
 
If Kerry had taken the risk of making this a big issue, he would have
started acting the statesman before taking office - that, combined with
his debate performance, would by now have put him over the top as far as
looking more presidential than the current occupant of the White House.
And that, I submit, is the main motivating factor behind the swing vote
that makes all the difference on Election Day: Bush has already lost the
election, but Kerry has yet to win it. By acting as if he's already won -
by getting up there on the bully pulpit and showing some real leadership
- Kerry could have already sewn it up by now.
 
Oh, but that would clash with the Democrats' idea of being "tough," of
emblazoning their bumperstickers with dumbass slogans like "For a
Stronger America." Stronger than what - Rome? Russia? The EU? All other
nations put together? The law of causality? God?
 
They need to get tough, all right: with George W. Bush. But it's almost
too late for that, now. If the Democrats lose this election, they will
have no one to blame but themselves: not Ralph Nader, not the Libertarian
Party (which is arguably drawing just as many disaffected Democrats as
libertarian Republicans, or at least enough to make a significant
difference), not voter fraud (there seems to be enough of that on both
sides to effectively cancel out the overall effect).
 
Kerry has called for Rumsfeld's resignation, but doesn't raise the larger
issue of how and why Abu Ghraib happened beyond calling for an official
commission to investigate. He hasn't made an issue of the growing war
crimes scandal and the shroud of official secrecy that veils the truth
about the war we are waging for a simple and all too obvious reason: if
Kerry wins, the apparatus of global "counter"-terrorism is his to command
- and he wouldn't hesitate to use it just as the current President and
his advisors have done. Kerry has told us this probably more than a
couple of hundred times by now: that he wouldn't hesitate to "hunt down
the terrorists and kill them." Which "terrorists," and where? Kerry's
various declarations are vague enough to cover all possible bases.
 
Kerry is promising to be a better interventionist, to fight and "win" a
morally and militarily problematic war. Instead of dismantling the
apparatus of torture and exposing the secret network of bloodstained
dungeons run by Bush's expert neocon torturers, Kerry will inherit it,
succeed in hiding it a little better, and use it for his own purposes.
 
It must be my Randian roots, but this issue illustrates why I cannot vote
for Kerry - without ever considering a vote for Bush. I can't help
believing that, by casting my vote, I am sanctioning whatever actions
that candidate will take once they're in office. I must, in an important
sense, take responsibility and be judged, just as President Kerry, or
President Whomever, will be judged in the court of history. By voting for
a candidate who, in his capacity as commander in chief, knowing permits -
and commits - war crimes, I am sanctioning those crimes. I become an
accomplice. And so do we all as long as we allow such a government to
remain in office.
 
http://etherzone.com/2004/raim102504.shtml<http://etherzone.com/2004/raim102504.shtml>
 


==============================================
     IF YOU'RE NOT PARANOID, THEN
     YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!
==============================================
To Post: ParanoidTimes at yahoogroups.com<mailto:ParanoidTimes at yahoogroups.com>
Home Page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanoidTimes<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanoidTimes>
Subscribe: ParanoidTimes-subscribe at yahoogroups.com<mailto:ParanoidTimes-subscribe at yahoogroups.com>
==================================================
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107,
this material is distributed without profit or payment to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
this information for non-profit research and educational
purposes only.  For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>
==================================================

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/shadowgroup-l/attachments/20041031/8a892251/attachment.html>