Crimes of George W Bush revealed.

Jun
1
Worse Than Waterboarding: Looking Forward Requires Looking Backward
Michael Haas on June 1st, 2009

The campaign for accountability regarding the use of torture has bogged down and become a diversion of attention from the fact that more than two hundred war fifty crimes were committed during the administration of George W. Bush, many of which continue in the present. Because Americans remain unaware of some of the most heinous crimes that imperil the survival of international legal restraints on uncivilized governmental behavior, something more than a focus on torture and waterboarding is needed to galvanize public opinion to demand accountability.

The fact that war crimes were committed is indisputable. Bush ordered commanders in Afghanistan and Guantánamo to stop applying the Geneva Conventions, so they were subsequently violated, as General David Petraeus has recently affirmed. Since a violation of the Geneva Conventions is a war crime, there must be war criminals, whose obvious misdeeds provoke the desire to put them on trial.

Torture, of course, is a violation of American domestic law and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions as well as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But the very wording of the latter treaty indicates that the sole focus on torture ignores the illegality of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The myopic focus on three prisoners who have been waterboarded ignores hundreds of thousands who have been subjected to other illegal methods.

Furthermore, the treatment of prisoners is only one topic in the law of warfare. Three others are the legality of war itself, the military conduct of war, and the civil-military occupation of countries conquered by war. The campaign against torture and its detractors fail to recognize the fact that the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements consist of hundreds of articles, many of which were violated with impunity during the Bush administration and are now being ignored in the administration of Barack Obama.

THE FOCUS ON TORTURE

The campaign against torture demands nothing less than accountability for the actions of torturers, those who wrote legal opinions authorizing torture, and those who authorized torture with or without legal cover. One form of accountability is to collect facts through Congressional hearings. Yet one recent voluminous Senate report concluded that there is a need for another (!) set of hearings. Meanwhile, neither the testimony nor the ink satisfy the desire for justice.

A second form of accountability is to hold a truth commission. Yet collectively the various Congressional hearings could be called one grand truth commission. But only on one topic–torture. Hearings and reports have not brought about admissions of guilt or epiphanies from those responsible. National reconciliation is unlikely to follow more investigations and more posturing by those for and against accountability.

A third form of accountability is litigation. Trials, however, can sometimes take years. Each step of the way will be contested with legal motions that might end up in narrow Supreme Court decisions, which in turn will bounce back and forth to trial courts. The most likely prospect is that whoever is convicted will receive a light sentence because motivated by good intentions (defense of the country) and, during the Obama era, will be pardoned to promote national healing. The demand for lawsuits, however, fails to recognize that war crimes continue and should be stopped immediately.

Although Republicans broke ranks during Watergate to remove Richard Nixon from office, only a few Republicans oppose torture today; of those, accountability is not on their agenda. Republican Senator John McCain is strongly opposed to torture but does not support accountability and now even opposes closing Guantánamo.

In a forum at UCLA on May 6, John W. Dean, Bruce Fine, and Philippe Sands agreed that something is needed to mobilize public opinion to demand accountability. For Dean, the answer is continual revelations about misdeeds. For Fein, greater realization that former Vice President Dick Cheney openly advocates lawbreaking (torture). For Sands, release of more torture photographs. However, release of the photos was subsequently blocked by President Obama and Congress. Retired General Antonio Taguba, who also supports the nonrelease of the photos, claims that they feature rape of Iraqis by American soldiers. Such pictures would clearly inflame world opinion in the Islamic world. Besides, displaying prisoners has been banned by the Geneva Conventions since 1929.

In short, the subject of torture has been debated for five years, positions have hardened, and the likelihood of any new groundswell of opinion for accountability is correspondingly low. Public opinion is divided on the advisability of torture. The subject of torture has mobilized some of the public, the pundits, and members of Congress to demand accountability. Additional mobilization requires new revelations beyond torture as well as a realization that continuing war crimes serve to gain recruits for Al-Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist organizations.

WORSE THAN TORTURE

One crime is worse than torture—murder. The main war crime, of course, is Bush’s decision to go to war without authorization by the UN Security Council. In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (2008), attorney Vincent Bugliosi argues that all the Americans who have died in Iraq have been murdered in an illegal war. Although no court has yet accepted his argument that Bush is criminally liable, the conspiracy among members of the Bush administration to plan the Iraq War is equivalent to charges against high-ranking officials of Nazi Germany who were on trial in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as noted by Chief Prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz in his Foreword to my George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes (2009). Families of the innocent who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq have every reason to believe that the murders are also violations of the law of warfare, but they lack access to American courts.

In addition, at least 160 prisoners in American-run detention facilities abroad have died, either due to torture or to medical neglect. Some 45 cases are confirmed homicides. The academy awardwinning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) is primarily about the murder of an Afghan taxi driver, partly through medical neglect and partly due to cruel behavior tantamount to torture. In addition, at least 38 prisoners died at American detention facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, because they were located in combat zones and hit by the shelling, some by American cluster bombs.

In Oath Betrayed (2006), Dr. Steven Miles documents several other prisoners who have been murdered due to medical malpractice. Similar cases are revealed in a 2004 report of the Red Cross. In 2007, to take a more recent example, Abdul Razzaq Hekmati died of colorectal cancer after being denied a colonoscopy at Guantánamo.

MEDICAL ABUSE

Medical misconduct short of homicide has been attested in biographies by former Guantánamo Chaplain James Yee and Guantánamo interrogator Eric Saar, as well as in photographs at Abu Ghraib of one prisoner bleeding unattended on the floor at Abu Ghraib, another with his face lacerated. Even CIA Director George Tenet admitted dispatching a physician to revive a prisoner who appeared to be dying due to waterboarding so that he could be waterboarded again.

In 2003, the prison physician at Abu Ghraib refused to be concerned when Ameen Sa’eed al-Sheik’s wounded leg was repeatedly beaten with a baton. Yee observed a guard daring a prisoner to come out “if you’re a man,” followed by a beating so severe that his head was split open. At Kandahar journalist Sami al-Hajj was not allowed to wash for about 100 days, resulting in a body infested with lice, a common cause of typhus.

Cells at some American-run prisons abroad have lacked running water, and prisoners have been denied requests for water, resulting in severe dehydration. In 2005, Shaker Aamer told his attorney that he had kidney problems from filthy yellow water, lung and skin problems from chemicals used in the cells, arthritis from freezing air during interrogation, tinnitus from perpetual noise, eye problems from constant fluorescent lights, and ulcers and constipation from the disgusting food.

When Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi entered Guantánamo, the chief medical doctor pronounced him to be in excellent health. Today, he has tuberculosis. His attorney, believing that he also has HIV from a blood transfusion in 2004, petitioned on his behalf for medical records to verify the diagnosis. In 2008, a federal judge refused to allow him to see his own medical records, which would show whether his treatment is appropriate to his medical condition. Prison authorities informally tell him he has AIDS, but without access to his medical records such information can only be viewed as an attempt at psychological mortification.

More information about medical neglect should focus on psychological torture, as many inmates could be described as zombies. Suicide attempts have been common. A hunger strike is taking place now. And the psychological damage to Americans handling the prisoners under orders is yet another untold story

The use of techniques from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training as an interrogation program can best be described as a psychological experiment, as the previously untested hypothesis was that prisoners subjected to several simultaneous or sequential forms of accepted abuse might divulge information. In light of the practices of Dr. Josef Mengele, medical experiments are banned by the Geneva Convention. Besides, the Nazi use of interrogation camps was the premise for extensive provisions in the Third Geneva Convention that ban practices which are now routine at Guantánamo.

In all, there have been at least two dozen war crimes regarding medical misconduct in American-run prisons abroad. Instead of more Congressional investigations or a truth commission on torture, testimony on medical war crimes might galvanize new currents of public opinion for accountability. Although Physicians for Human Rights has published such reports, the issue has not yet gained traction. Meanwhile, medical issues continue in American-run prisons abroad.

CHILD ABUSE & RAPE

More horrific perhaps are the way thousands of children have been processed as prisoners at American-run facilities abroad. The capture, handcuffing, forcible removal from home and even country, “enhanced” interrogation, indefinite detention, and miserable conditions of incarceration for those under the age of 18 and as young as 7 can only be characterized as psychological torture. At least twenty-five types of war crimes involve children.

The first example of war crimes against children occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some three hundred children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In detention, several children have been brutalized, raped, and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took no action to stop the offenses. Americans raping Iraqi children of both sexes are among the photographs that President Obama refuses to release. Retired General Taguba is aware of what the photos contain, as he conducted a thorough investigation of misconduct at Abu Ghraib.

Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

While General Hamid Zabar was being questioned in Iraq, his interrogators decided to arrest his frail 16-year-old son in order to produce a confession. After soldiers found the boy, he was stripped, drenched with mud and water, and exposed to the cold January night while bound and driven about in the open back of a truck. When presented naked to his father, he was shivering due to hypothermia, clearly needing medical attention.

In 2003, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao gave a speech on behalf of the need to rehabilitate child soldiers from Burundi, Colombia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. While she spoke, sixty-four children were being abused at Guantánamo. The most famous are Mohammed Jawad and Omar Khadr.

Canadian Omar Khadr’s videotaped plea for his mommy and claims of torture have been viewed on television worldwide. While still wounded from battle in Afghanistan, 15-year-old Omar was captured and interrogated many times, sometimes while hooded with dogs barking near him, so he confessed to stop pain from wounds inflicted earlier by American gunfire. During interrogation at Guantánamo, Omar was shackled to the floor in stress positions until he soiled himself. His bound body was twice used as a mop to wipe his own urine mixed with pine oil after which he was refused a shower and a change of clothing for several days. He has also been administered a brutal beating while on a hunger strike, threatened with rape, and denied pain medication.

There is some puzzlement over the reason for imprisoning 12-year-old Afghan boy Mohammad Jawad. Is it because, while at an American-run prison in Afghanistan in 2002, he claimed that he saw Americans murdering inmates? At Guantánamo, to deprive him of sleep in order to force some sort of confession, he was shifted from one cell to another more than 100 times during two weeks in May 2004, and he remains in solitary confinement today. When he showed up in court in 2008, he was the first to wear leg shackles. During his arraignment, the judge asked him whether he accepted the assigned military defense attorney as his lawyer. After replying in the negative, the judge asked whether he knew another lawyer. His reply to the Kafkaesque inquiry was “Since I don’t know any lawyer, how can I have them represent me? . . . I should be given freedom so that I can find a lawyer.” His request to hunt for a lawyer was then denied.

Both Omar Khadr and Mohammad Jawad remain at Guantánamo today. According to the UN-backed Committee on the Rights of the Child, they are victims of war and should be returned home immediately. Any truth commission of war crimes against children might evoke new demands for accountability from Republicans (especially women who have children), but the issue failed to resonate with Fine and Sands during the UCLA forum.

OTHER WAR CRIMES

On the battlefield, the lack of sufficient ground troops has resulted in the overuse of aerial warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. As a result, war crimes involve prohibited targets (civilians, hospitals, mosques, museums, schools), prohibited weapons (cluster bombs, depleted uranium weapons, napalm, white phosphorous), indiscriminate attacks, extrajudicial executions, and the use of mercenaries (professional soldiers from other countries paid more than American soldiers). Since taking office, President Obama has issued no executive order to enforce compliance with the First Geneva Convention, which deals with such matters. Meanwhile, the deaths of innocent civilians continue to undermine the legitimacy of the American presence in all three countries, where protests now come from civilians and government officials alike.

On January 22, 2009, President Obama ordered immediate observance of the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo and a report within thirty days on compliance. When that report was submitted by Admiral Patrick Walsh, the focus was only on provisions in Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions. His sole recommendation–to have those in solitary confinement socialize more often–reveals the depth of the Pentagon’s defiance of the executive order, as indefinite solitary confinement is contrary to the Articles 20, 90, and 90 of the Third Geneva Convention. Indeed, attorneys visiting Guantánamo since January 20 attest that many other violations continue, notably regular beatings after prisoners are strapped to chairs while force-fed, windowless cells with extremely cold temperatures, and interruption of prayers by guards. Meanwhile, there has been no similar executive order to require Geneva Conventions compliance at the prison at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, where violations continue.

The civil-military occupation of Iraq, mostly due to well-recognized mistakes by J. Paul Bremer III, was tarnished by thirty more war crimes. The unpopularity of the United States in that country can be attributed largely to the such Geneva Convention violations as failure to establish public order, disrespect for the legal framework and cultural traditions, and economic and financial decisions that left thousands out of work. A serious public health crisis remains today, in part because the United States has failed to respond to the World Health Organization’s request for a map of locations of depleted uranium ordnance, where children have been playing and thereby are coming down with leukemia.

Currently, the United States gave supported several unsavory warlords in Afghanistan, including Hazrat Ali. His troops have reportedly been accused of seizing teenage boys to serve as sex slaves. President Obama has not ordered observance of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs occupations, to be applied in Afghanistan, where some of the same problems fester as those in Iraq.

CONCLUSION: A REAL TRUTH COMMISSION

In the clamor for accountability for a single war crime, torture, the public conversation on the Afghan and Iraq Wars has overlooked the immensity of war crimes, past and present. Yet the United States pioneered and fostered the laws of warfare, particularly when President Abraham Lincoln issued Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (1863), President Theodore Roosevelt insisted on convening the Second Hague Conference in 1907, President Harry Truman authorized the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials after World War II, and President Dwight Eisenhower persuaded the Senate to ratify the Geneva Conventions in 1955.

The public remains unaware of the meaning of the term “war crimes,” a concept so taboo that two talk-show hosts (Jack Cafferty and Jon Stewart) have been forced to apologize for its use. The ignorance extends to the failure of the United States to live up to several Geneva Convention standards evident in the television series Hogan’s Heroes that have never been applied at Guantánamo. Accountability for war crimes is premature until there is more awareness of the law. The constant drumbeat about torture by waterboarding (only one war crime) is not enough.

If a truth commission is ever held, the exercise should be to educate the public about the full scope of the law of warfare, including when war is legal, what battlefield conduct is prohibited, how to treat prisoners properly, and the norms applicable to civil-military occupation of other countries. That is the kind of truth commission which is proposed in the recent George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, not a rehashing or embellishing of evidence regarding torture that has by now bored a divided public which is being encouraged by the president to move on.

Those in the campaign against torture may take comfort whenever the principal panicstricken advocate of torture retreats to his latest marmotlike bunker, unrepentant, but at least he does not promote amnesia. Today, myriad war crimes continue unabated, even if we are led to believe that torture has ceased, because President Obama has failed to require full observance of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Iraq, and Pakistan. To stop war crimes requires a reckoning with the past as well as the present, for in the words of Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson “The real complaining party is Civilization.”

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