The Road to Gitmo Begins in Washington

By Quill and Farol

By now the latest revelations of U.S. policy on torture have hit the blogospheric fan, and while the continued authorization of torture by the government is old news, the Yoo Memos validated what were previously just speculations held by opponents of the pro-torture policies. The most important by far is the now indisputable fact that these orders came from the top and trickled down to the bottom, not the other way around, as the administration has consistently claimed.

The fact is, senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, the general counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and former undersecretary of defense for policy (the no. 3 position at the Pentagon) Douglas Feith, have their dirty little fingerprints all over the atrocities being committed at Guantánamo and around the world in the name of the United States of America.

For an incredibly in-depth and damning explanation of the story behind how the higher-ups in Washington directed underlings in the military to use more "aggressive techniques" that constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, see Philippe Sands' jaw-dropping article "The Green Light" in Vanity Fair (of all places...keep up the good work, guys). It demands to be read in full.

Besides the previously mentioned proof of top-down influence, some of the article's revelations that stuck out to us most were:

1. Douglas Feith is a comically diabolical man. This evil little shit actually glowed with delight has he told Sands how clever his circumvention of Geneva was:

Douglas Feith had a long-standing intellectual interest in Geneva, and for many years had opposed legal protections for terrorists under international law. He referred me to an article he had written in 1985, in The National Interest, setting out his basic view. Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; those who chose not to follow the rules, he argued, shouldn’t be allowed to rely on them, or else the whole Geneva structure would collapse. The only way to protect Geneva, in other words, was sometimes to limit its scope. To uphold Geneva’s protections, you might have to cast them aside.

But that way of thinking didn’t square with the Geneva system itself, which was based on two principles: combatants who behaved according to its standards received P.O.W. status and special protections, and everyone else received the more limited but still significant protections of Common Article 3. Feith described how, as he and Myers spoke with Rumsfeld, he jumped protectively in front of the general. He reprised his “little speech” for me. “There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States,” he told Rumsfeld, according to his own account, “and there is no institution in the U.S. government that has a stronger interest than the Pentagon.” So Geneva had to be followed? “Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional,” Feith replied. “The Geneva Convention is a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute.” Myers jumped in. “I agree completely with what Doug said and furthermore it is our military culture It’s not even a matter of whether it is reciprocated—it’s a matter of who we are.”

Feith was animated as he relived this moment. I remained puzzled. How had the administration gone from a commitment to Geneva, as suggested by the meeting with Rumsfeld, to the president’s declaration that none of the detainees had any rights under Geneva? It all turns on what you mean by “promoting respect” for Geneva, Feith explained. Geneva didn’t apply at all to al-Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state and therefore couldn’t claim rights under a treaty that was binding only on states. Geneva did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva’s own terms Taliban fighters weren’t entitled to P.O.W. status, because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia. That would still leave the safety net provided by the rules reflected in Common Article 3— but detainees could not rely on this either, on the theory that its provisions applied only to “armed conflict not of an international character,” which the administration interpreted to mean civil war. This was new. In reaching this conclusion, the Bush administration simply abandoned all legal and customary precedent that regards Common Article 3 as a minimal bill of rights for everyone.

(Feith then lit a pipe, twirled his moustache, and went, "BWAHAHAHAHA!")

This type of circular logic is emblematic of the current administration's agenda to legislate immunity for those complicit in its reckless law-breaking, such as the telecom companies involved in warrantless wiretapping.

2. Feith, along with John Yoo, are now ensconced in cushy teaching positions in two of America's most respected educational institutions - Georgetown University and Berkeley College, respectively. It is utterly horrifying that these war criminals are actually getting paid to teach the future lawyers of America the ways of justifying torture and the circumvention of the U.S. Constitution and international law to achieve the ends of a corrupt and morally bankrupt administration. Which is a great segue into our third point...

3. These kind of people still enjoy protection from prosecution for their crimes by an apathetic Congress and press corps. It is absolutely reprehensible that an article of this magnitude goes largely unnoticed by the very people whose duty it is to inform the public of this blatant disregard of the law, not to mention those who should be punishing lawbreakers. If Congress doesn't investigate the claims made by Sands in his article, it will be complicit in the deeds committed by these war criminals.

4. Sands reveals that some of these prisoners in Gitmo are actually being tortured our of their minds after 54 consecutive days of "enhanced interrogation techniques":

The abusive interrogation of al-Qahtani lasted a total of 54 days. It ended not on January 12, as the press was told in June 2004, but three days later, on January 15. In those final three days, knowing that the anything-goes legal regime might disappear at any moment, the interrogators made one last desperate push to get something useful out of al-Qahtani. They never did. By the end of the interrogation al-Qahtani, according to an army investigator, had “black coals for eyes.”

5. What happened in Gitmo lead directly to what happened in Abu Ghraib. The Haynes memo made it all the way to Iraq via a general and legal consultant at Guantánamo months before the scandal was uncovered, surely contributing to the appalling abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

While it is highly unlikely that the "torture team" will ever be tried for their crimes in our own country, Sands holds out hope that if they ever step foot on foreign soil again, what happened to another infamous war criminal - Pinochet - might just happen to them.