Some countries never acknowledge their crimes.
It has been 95 years since the Turkish genocide
against its Armenian population, but the Turkish
government will not confess to any role in crimes
that were committed. The Japanese have never
admitted the terrible crimes committed throughout
Northeast and Southeast Asia during World War
II. And Israel has refused to acknowledge its
numerous crimes against the Palestinians, most
recently in Gaza, where Israeli soldiers committed
grave violations of international law by deliberately
attacking civilian targets and failing to protect
the civilian population.
We know that the United States has committed
crimes that violated the 8th Amendment of the
Constitution against “cruel and unusual
punishments;” the War Crimes Act of 1996;
the Convention Against Torture of 1984 (the
United States is a signatory); and of course
Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.
President Obama’s handling of the war
crimes of the United States in facilities in
Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Iraq, and Afghanistan
is particularly troubling because his administration
has admitted that crimes were committed. He
has condemned torture and abuse, closed CIA
secret prisons, and ordered the closing of Guantanamo
within the year.
Attorney General Eric Holder stated bluntly
in his confirmation hearings that “waterboarding
is torture.” CIA director Leon Panetta
has done the same, and the CIA has conducted
no extraordinary renditions since Panetta replaced
General Michael Hayden as CIA director. Extraordinary
renditions amount to enforced disappearance,
which is also a violation of international law.
Panetta also has announced that the CIA will
no longer use contractors to conduct interrogations
and has proposed a plan to decommission the
remaining black sites.
We have paid a terrible price for these crimes
according to General officers who have served
in Iraq; they believe that U.S. use of torture
and abuse is the major incentive in the recruitment
of Arab fighters to Iraq in order to conduct
their own acts of terror, including suicide
bombings.
But the president has stated that the United
States “must look forward, and not backward,”
and CIA director Panetta has proclaimed that
CIA officers who conducted torture and abuse
in CIA secret prisons “should not be investigated,
let alone punished.” The deputy director
of the National Security Agency and a former
CIA senior officer, John Brennan, has lobbied
aggressively at the Justice Department and the
CIA against any release of documents that deal
with CIA’s interrogation program and its
policy of extraordinary renditions.
Brennan was President Obama’s first choice
to be CIA director, until the appearance of
numerous articles that traced Brennan’s
role as a cheerleader for “enhanced interrogation
techniques” and extraordinary renditions.
Finally, CIA has taken no action against CIA
officers responsible for the willful destruction
of nearly 100 tapes of torture and abuse against
terrorist suspects, and Panetta has retained
as his deputy director, Stephen Kappes, who
was the ideological driver for the worst of
CIA’s techniques and programs.
The CIA’s crimes are no secret, having
been fully documented by Mark Danner in the
“New York Review of Books,” Jane
Mayer and Sy Hersh in the “New Yorker,”
and Dana Priest and Barton Gellman in the Washington
Post. We learned about CIA’s “black
sites” in 2002; the torture and abuse
at Abu Ghraib in 2004; and FBI protests against
CIA torture and abuse in 2006. We know that
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld, and CIA director George
Tenet endorsed and encouraged these measures.
Numerous reports, including the Taguba Report
in 2004, the report of the International Committee
of the Red Cross, and the forthcoming report
of the Senate Armed Forces Committee have fully
documented the crimes. The recent Spanish preparation
of a case against six lawyers with the Bush
administration, including attorney general Alberto
Gonzales, will lead to more revelations as will
the inquiries taking place in Britain and Poland.
The stature of international law is diminished
when a nation violates it with impunity. The
stature of a nation is diminished when it commits
crimes against humanity. And the national leadership
is diminished when it ignores the need for accountability
and explicit repudiation. Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) has called for a “truth commission”
to gather information on U.S. detention and
interrogation programs.
Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Christopher
Bond (R-MI) have endorsed a similar investigation
of CIA programs as well as an “evaluation
of intelligence information gained through the
use of enhanced and standard interrogation techniques.”
This would represent a good start, but only
President Obama can restore our moral compass
on the crimes of the post-9/11 era. The judgment
of history will be harsh if he chooses not to
do so.
Melvin A. Goodman,a regular contributor
to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.
He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army,
the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department
of Defense. His most recent book is “Failure
of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the
CIA.”
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
