John Yoo, responsibility for torture, and the Bush legacy

Recently the media took notice again of the torture that most Americans first became aware of from the Abu Ghraib pictures. We then learned that the “interrogation” techniques that were used there had migrated from Guantanamo with the approval of the entire U.S. military command structure right up to at least Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld. Most recently we have actually seen the memo that rogue conservative attorney John Yoo wrote justifying the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” that the rest of the world consider to be violations of human rights.

There are several things to consider, of which I want to address two today. One is whether the attorney who wrote legal opinions justifying the use of torture, John Yoo, is as much of a war criminal as are Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and others. Another is why the Bush administration has been so insistent about using torture in the first place.

Philippe Sands, who wrote the excellent Vanity Fair article The Green Light which described how the Bush administration directly authorized the torture of one particular prisoner at Guantanamo, recently also wrote the following:

In our system of government, lawyers play a crucial role, as gatekeepers of legality and constitutionality. When the lawyers bend, when they fail to exercise independent and professional judgment, and when they become handmaidens to policymakers, they cross a line that raises the possibility of ethics violations and possibly even criminal violations. In “Torture Team,” I describe a conversation I had with a European judge and a European prosecutor. I was told that, under their rules of criminal law, “the lawyer has the same responsibility as the interrogator,” and that, when it comes to torture authorized by a lawyer, “the lawyer who gives such legal advice is not [treated] as an accomplice, it is as though he is the author the act.” Whatever the moralities of the situation, and however much one might agree that the principal responsibility lies with the politicians who ultimately made the decisions—the secretary of defense, the vice president, and the president—the responsibility of the senior lawyers is also there. Dean Edley’s point sits uncomfortably with the underlying rationale of the 1947 judgment in United States v Altstoetter and others.

A few days later, ABC ran a story confirming the direct involvement of the most senior members of the Bush Administration in approving certain decisions on individual interrogation techniques. This was an issue I discussed with Major General Mike Dunlavey. “The Green Light” contains the following exchange:

How high up did [the decision on new tactics] go?, I asked Dunlavey.
‘It must have been all the way to the White House,’ he replied.

On April 9, ABC News reported, in relation to C.I.A. interrogations, that “the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The dates are not specified.

Two days later, on April 11, President Bush confirmed the account. “Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people”, he told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

These important developments provide important confirmation of the thrust of my piece: that the law was circumvented, that key decisions were made at the top, that the bottom-up theory is false, and that individuals like Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantánamo, were scapegoated. The disappearance of a plausible bottom-up narrative also adds ballast to the evidence showing that the Guantánamo techniques migrated to Iraq and informed events at Abu Ghraib.

Back in early 2006 I wrote about how obvious it was that the responsibility for Abu Ghraib went very high in the military chain of command. The regular military officers carefully courts-martialed low-level individuals, preferably Reservists, as scapegoats to protect those who either directed or intentionally ignored the torture that was occurring in Abu Ghraib. Although the possibility that the White House (Bush and staff) was directly involved wasn’t as obvious then it is now clear that they were not only involved but were actively directing the very techniques used on specific prisoners in many instances.

It has also recently become clear is that just as Bush and Cheney were damned and determined to invade Iraq from day one of the Bush administration, similarly they intended to use torture to interrogate enemies from early on. Did they feel that information they needed was being hidden from them behind the (in their view unreasonable) international human rights laws? Did they feel that they had a unique and justifiable right to violate those international human rights laws? If so, then they were clearly not the first. Most iconically in the twentieth century the interrogators and their bosses in the German Gestapo felt that way, but so did others. As I wrote in May 2007 there is a long history of this kind of thinking. there is a long history of this kind of thinking by military occupiers in foreign lands.

There is an excellent history book called A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 - 1962 by Alistair Horne which presents the history of the war of national liberation by the Algerian FLN to defeat the French Imperial occupiers. He has several Prefaces, each written for a later edition as he got further information about the Algerian war of national liberation. Just reading them is a real education.

The FLN learned a lot from Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam, and applied it to their war against the French, since both nations had the same intent - remove the Imperialist occupier. The French kept fighting and kept wondering why the Algerians were fighting them because the French were just there to bring democracy and improve the education and economy of Algeria. The FLN realized early on that they could not defeat the French militarily in a head-to-head battle, so they developed terrorist techniques and went after the Algerian police who were attempting to stabilize Algeria.

The French recognized that they were fighting a war that required effective Intelligence to win, so they made special efforts to gather that Intelligence, using some of the nastiest torture techniques that they had developed. The Algerians responded by increased terrorism that went after civilians, men women and children with no regard for humanity.

Any of this sound familiar? Because after the French left Algeria the Palestinians used techniques developed by the Algerians to go after the Israeli occupiers during the Intifada, and the Israelis used increasingly tough interrogation techniques on the Palestinians to get effective Intelligence in a timely manner. All of this has blended into the current war in Iraq, with the two sides, American and insurgent, each patterning on the appropriate techniques for occupier and occupied developed earlier in Algeria.

Horne presents evidence that shows there is no difference between the rationale and rhetoric of the earlier Imperialist occupiers and the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the U.S. in Iraq. The reason our military is fighting terrorists in Iraq is exactly that same as why the French were fighting the Viet Cong in Viet Nam and then later were fighting the terrorists in Algeria. The French were occupiers who did not want to leave and the Occupied wanted them out at any cost. That is similar to Bush's recent statement about there being an American presence in Iraq for the next half century, on a time scale similar to that of our troops in South Korea. That will not happen. We will leave Iraq relatively soon. The cost of staying is way too high.

America is an unwanted occupier in Iraq, and now we even have polls showing that the majority of Iraqis want us out of there immediately if not sooner.

But there is one more really significant similarity. Torture. The U.S. under George W. Bush demands good and timely Intelligence, and they will go to whatever extremes they need to get it. That is the reason for the similarities in the language describing Intelligence gathering techniques that this article started with. [The Nazis also called torture ‘Enhanced Interrogation techniques’, just as the Bush administration does.] But here is Alastair Horne's warning on the use of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques:"

[ from page 18.]

The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led -- probably more than any other single factor -- to the ultimate defeat of France was the realization, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation sere being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. At the dawn of the new century, the ugly ghosts of torture returned to plague France. In 2001, and eighty-three-year-old former general, Paul Aussaresses, published a book in which he unashamedly, indeed proudly, admitted to having tortured -- in a good cause, he claimed. After a trial which gripped France, the aging General got away with a fine of one hundred thousand franc, on a uniquely worded charge "in the name of respect for the victims."

Because of the slowness of communications in the 1950's and 1960's it took a year or more for the message of abuses perpetuated in Algeria to sink in. Now, with the Internet and al-Jazeera, one set of photos from Abu Ghraib is enough to inflame hatred across the Islamic world against the West, providing an excuse for all the beheadings and atrocities carried out by al-Qaeda. From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the "Battle of Algiers," history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, ... torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society.

The testimony of Prefect Tietgen of Algiers - Tietgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to "the question"? Himself a deportee in World War II, Teitgen ... refused.

...I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because once you get into the torture business, your lost.... All our so-called civilization is covered with varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear....When you wee the throats of your coplains slit, the varnish disappears."

In America under the heel of Bush, Cheney and the Congressional Conservative Republicans, the varnish is similarly gone.

If Imperialism is defined as “The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations” it is hard to avoid recognizing that America is acting imperially as an occupying nation in Iraq. America is the occupier in Iraq just as France was also the occupier acting imperially in both Vietnam and in Algeria. The Palestinians clearly identified the Israelis as imperialist occupiers in the West Bank and adopted the same guerrilla techniques of resistance in the Intifada.

Whether the occupying nations in each case recognized their behavior as imperialism is unimportant. The occupied nations (and Palestine) recognized it, and all have used similar methods to force the occupiers out. As one reaction, the occupying nations each, in their fury at being resisted, have applied extreme “enhanced interrogation techniques” just as the Nazis did in WW II.

The public evidence from abu Ghraib is clear now. Abu Ghraib was not the actions of a few, low-level rogue individuals. Abu Ghraib was directed and controlled by the military chain of command all the way up to and including the White House and was approved by George Bush. The torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” were an application of force in common with other occupying armies in the twentieth, including the Germans in France, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, and the Israelis in the West Bank, and in each instance were a direct result of an attempt to use the military to quell resistance to the occupation of a foreign land. It should also be noted that in each case when the occupiers finally did leave the occupied territory, the battle ceased. The "terrorists" DID NOT follow the occupiers home. Which brings us to the question of personal responsibility for the criminal behavior in Iraq.

John Yoo’s memo approving the torture techniques went over the line of merely legally unethical to the point that Yoo himself has become criminally responsible for the violations of international human rights laws that he wrote to justify. Yoo is directly complicit in the crimes committed by the Bush administration, not as an attorney who merely provided legal advice but as a direct participant who did his best to bend the law to the point of breaking to justify that which is clearly criminal. Yoo’s legacy will be joined with that of George Bush, Dick Chaney, Don Rumsfeld and a cast of thousands of other willing criminals.

As for Bush’s legacy, George Bush has famously said that in spite of his deep unpopularity at present, history will revise the evaluation and he will be seen in a much better light by future historians. Perhaps his God has told him so. If so, Bush's God lied.

Since Bush is directly responsible for the invasion of a foreign nation even less justified than the Mexican-American War and for criminally unleashing and directing the same interrogation techniques universally condemned when practiced by the Gestapo and the French, it seems highly unlikely that Bush’s approval by future historians will even reach the extremely low levels of the American President previously considered to be the worst America has ever had, Andrew Johnson. There are similarities between the two presidencies.

Both Andrew Johnson and George Bush have attempted to rule in opposition to the Congress after Congress became cognizant of the disaster that the President was directing. I find it interesting that in Andrew Johnson’s battles with Congress he is described as “Obstinate rather than firm it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness.” Sounds a lot like Bush 43.

It is unfortunate that the Democratic leadership of Congress did not see fit to impeach Bush and Cheney. Perhaps the Democratic leadership of Congress felt that they themselves were too complicit in Bush's crimes to pass judgment on him?