Torture and the Myth of Never Again

This fine piece on sentenced torture whistleblower John Kiriakou was written by friend and fellow blogger Peter Van Buren, and published on his site -- We Meant Well:

Torture and the Myth of Never Again: The Persecution of John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, pleaded guilty October 23, 2012 to leaking the identity of one of the agency’s covert operatives to a reporter and will be sentenced to more than two years in prison. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors dropped charges that had been filed under the World War I-era Espionage Act. They also dropped a count of making false statements. 

Under the plea, all sides agreed to a prison term of 2 1/2 years. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema noted the term was identical to that imposed on Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was convicted in a case where he was accused of leaking information that compromised the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, though Libby’s sentence was commuted by then-President George W. Bush.


Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.


In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

A long time ago, with mediocre grades and no athletic ability, I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. I guess the Rhodes committee at my school needed practice, and I found myself undergoing a rigorous oral examination. Here was the final question they fired at me, probing my ability to think morally and justly: You are a soldier. Your prisoner has information that might save your life. The only way to obtain it is through torture. What do you do?

At that time, a million years ago in an America that no longer exists, my obvious answer was never to torture, never to lower oneself, never to sacrifice one’s humanity and soul, even if it meant death. My visceral reaction: to become a torturer was its own form of living death. (An undergrad today, after the “enhanced interrogation” Bush years and in the wake of 24, would probably detail specific techniques that should be employed.) My advisor later told me my answer was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise spectacularly unsuccessful interview.

It is now common knowledge that between 2001 and about 2007 the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) sanctioned acts of torture committed by members of the Central Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took place in secret prisons (“black sites”) against persons detained indefinitely without trial. They were described in detail and explicitly authorized in a series of secret torture memos drafted by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, senior lawyers in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. (Office of Legal Counsel attorneys technically answer directly to the DOJ, which is supposed to be independent from the White House, but obviously was not in this case.) Not one of those men, or their Justice Department bosses, has been held accountable for their actions.

Some tortured prisoners were even killed by the CIA. Attorney General Eric Holder announced recently that no one would be held accountable for those murders either. “Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths,” he said, “the Department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Jose Rodriguez, a senior CIA official, admitted destroying videotapes of potentially admissible evidence, showing the torture of captives by operatives of the U.S. government at a secret prison thought to be located at a Vietnam-War-era airbase in Thailand. He was not held accountable for deep-sixing this evidence, nor for his role in the torture of human beings.


John Kiriakou Alone

The one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one may go to jail.

And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.

The charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.

The Obama Justice Department claims the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”

The charges result from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.

Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.

If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is 48. He is staring down a long tunnel at a potential sentence of up to 45 years in prison because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.


Welcome to the Jungle

John Kiriakou and I share common attorneys through the Government Accountability Project, and I’ve had the chance to talk with him on any number of occasions. He is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and quick to laugh at a bad joke. When the subject turns to his case, and the way the government has treated him, however, things darken. His sentences get shorter and the quick smile disappears.
He understands the role his government has chosen for him: the head on a stick, the example, the message to everyone else involved in the horrors of post-9/11 America. Do the country’s dirty work, kidnap, kill, imprison, torture, and we’ll cover for you. Destroy the evidence of all that and we’ll reward you. But speak out, and expect to be punished.

Like so many of us who have served the U.S. government honorably only to have its full force turned against us for an act or acts of conscience, the pain comes in trying to reconcile the two images of the U.S. government in your head. It’s like trying to process the actions of an abusive father you still want to love.

One of Kiriakou’s representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told me, “It is a miscarriage of justice that John Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation to the Bush-era torture program. The historic import cannot be understated. If a crime as egregious as state-sponsored torture can go unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn other governments’ human rights violations. By ‘looking forward, not backward’ we have taken a giant leap into the past.”

One former CIA covert officer, who uses the pen name “Ishmael Jones,” lays out a potential defense for Kiriakou: “Witness after witness could explain to the jury that Mr. Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted, that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by Obama administration officials and senior CIA bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the jury that for any secret material published by Mr. Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats contain many times as much. Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA censors, that contains dozens of pieces of classified information — names and enough information to find names.”
If only it was really that easy.


Never Again

For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.

Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.

America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.

What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?

The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.

Requiem for State

The statue got me high
The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye
The statue made me die
--The Statue Got Me High,
They Might Be Giants
____________________

Peter Van Buren has given a poignant and informed requiem for the State Department at his site today (State Department: America’s Increasingly Irrelevant Concierge). They could have been a contender.

Here is an excerpt, but please read the entire piece:

The Militarization of Foreign Policy

The most obvious sign of State’s irrelevance is the militarization of foreign policy. There really are more military band members than State Department Foreign Service Officers. The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier. Despite the role that foreign affairs has always played in America’s drunken intercourse abroad, the State Department remains a very small part of the pageant. The Transportation Security Administration has about 58,000 employees; the State Department has about 22,000. The Department of Defense (DOD) has nearly 450,000 employees stationed overseas, with 2.5 million more in the US.

At the same time, Congress continues to hack away at State’s budget. The most recent round of bloodletting saw State lose some $8 billion while DOD gained another $5 billion. The found fiver at DOD will hardly be noticed in their overall budget of $671 billion. The $8 billion loss from State’s total of $47 billion will further cripple the organization. The pattern is familiar and has dogged State-DOD throughout the war of terror years. No more taxi vouchers and office supplies for you! What you do get for your money is the militarization of foreign policy.

As Stephen Glain wrote in his book, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, the combatant commands are already the putative epicenters for security, diplomatic, humanitarian and commercial affairs in their regions. Local leaders receive them as powerful heads of state, with motorcades, honor guards and ceremonial feats. Their radiance obscures everything in its midst, including the authority of US ambassadors.

. . .

Tortured Logic

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts
when you have forgotten your aim
--George Santayana

Someone must have been
telling lies about Joseph K.,
for without having done anything wrong
he was arrested one fine morning
--The Trial, Josef Kafka

Every man always has handy
a dozen glib little reasons
why he is right not to sacrifice himself
--The Gulag Archipelago,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
_______________

Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (since renamed the National Clandestine Service), twisted logic in his defense of torture (="Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" or EIT), obstruction of justice and contempt of court in his appearance on 60 Minutes this weekend to hawk his new book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

In his book, Rodriguez defends his destruction of 92 videotapes recording the agency’s crimes like the 2002 waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA initially described as Al Qaeda’s chief of operations and responsible for planning the 9/11 attacks (they have since rescinded that allegation.) Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in the space of a month (Jose Rodriguez and the Ninety-Two Tapes .)

Rodriguez's stated reason for destruction of evidence is that it would put the perpetrators in danger, but the truth may be more self-serving. An internal CIA email obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2010 reads:

“Jose raised with [CIA Chief Porter Goss]…and explained that he (Jose) felt it was extremely important to destroy the tapes … As Jose said, the heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain—he said that out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us.”

So Jose is a dutiful fall guy who will make a few bucks off of his hoorah book. But anyone with a lick of sense would see through the holes in his obedient fear-mongering. For instance, he said that torture kept al Qaeda from blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge -- does he or anyone in the intelligence world think before they talk?

Think how many truckloads of military-grade explosives would have to be strategically placed on the bridge in order to bring it down -- or even just to severely damage it? Think about the Ludendorf bridge over the Rhine: It did not drop when a German Army engineer rigged it for demolition; also bear in mind that German bridges are designed for ease of demolition (unlike U.S. bridges.)

How would al Qaeda find the explosives and personnel to transport, place and detonate the charges? This event could only occur in a deluded mind . . . the sort of mind that seem to occupy supervisory positions in our intelligence agencies.

Recent reportage quotes a study that al Qaeda has been degraded to a point that they are no longer capable of a significant attack on the U.S., but Ranger maintains even this is fantasy, as al Qaeda was incapable of a follow-on attack immediately after the events of 9-11-01, nor did they have the intent. They had accomplished what they set out to do, as America spun out of control in overreaction born of fear and anger.

Rodriguez continued in his fantasy construction by referencing an al Qaeda anthrax program that torture also helped short-circuit, but what program is he talking about? There is no linkage of al Qaeda to any anthrax events.

Contrast the treatment of torture apologist Rodriguez to that of State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren. Both men have written books vetted by their respective agencies, but Van Buren exposed graft, corruption and incompetence in an Iraqi Provisional Reconstruction Team which he helped lead in his book, We Meant Well. For his courageous stand, Van Buren has been hounded and is now persona non grata in a Department which he served faithfully for 24 years.

OTOH, Rodriguez will be another hero of the Right for his defense of and participation in illegal behavior. When torturers become heroes and whistleblowers enemies, we as a people have transvalued our beliefs in the worst possible way. We are not Nietzsche's Ubermensch, and should not be thinking in that way.

Defending torture is defending totalitarianism. Torture is never legal in our democracy. The US military has held that waterboarding constitutes torture since the Spanish-American War.

There is no way to wend your way out of that fact.

--Jim and Lisa

Battle Buddy

The one fatal thing is to be a zombie,
and I think we're all in danger of
living that way
--Sister Wendy, Chiles High School

[H]e realized at once that he shouldn't
have spoken aloud, and that by doing so he had,
in a sense, acknowledged the stranger's right
to oversee his actions
--The Trial, Franz Kafka

This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century:
is it permissible merely to carry out orders
and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping
--The Gulag Archipelago,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
__________________

We have many friends and acquaintances here at RangerAgainstWar whom we have never met, save in the ether world. Among these is one each, Peter Van Buren, a true American patriot and razor sharp thinker.

We first heard Mr. Van Buren in an NPR interview regarding the topic of his book, We Meant Well -- How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011), and were impressed with his cogency and wit. It convinced us that at least one person in the State Department uses his head as something other than a hat rack. To the Department's shame, he seems to be in the minority.

Peter was fired by State this week in a confusing welter of accusations suggesting improper leaks, but it looks like a simple case of bullying an employee for exercising his right of free speech -- Oh, yeah, that thing that Peter was supposedly spreading at the behest of the U.S. with those Provisional Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). He has laid the situation and players out well over the past several weeks at his blog, WeMeantWell. com.

Bottom line: The State Department (DoS) cannot brook free speech, and in that way is not unlike the Department of Defense (DoD), or any federal agency. So the U.S. spends Trillions of dollars exporting fanciful democratic ideals, all the while stomping on those very same concepts here in The Homeland ™.

The treatment of the Branch Davidians during the Clinton White House might reveal Secretary of State Clinton's proclivities when dealing with a DoS whistleblower. She will attempt to roll over him like an Engineer Assault vehicle crushing the Branch Davidian compound. Peter needs our support if that still has relevance in our democratic scheme.

His case is similar to that of Bradley Manning's in many respects, except Manning (being DoD) has less rights. At least Van Buren has not been charged with espionage (at least, not yet!)

Ranger finds it curious that there at least three Constitutions: One for domestic consumption, one for export, and one for DoD and DoS. We just presume that the military does not have free speech because they cannot criticize the Commander in Chief and Chain of Command (even if what they say is correct and factual.) If Van Buren is fired (following appeal), then free speech will not be tolerated in any government office, obviating the need for federal whistleblower laws.

Men who march in lock step to their next promotion talk the talk but don't walk the walk, and sadly, they will be the ones judging men like Van Buren, who do. Screw the War on Terror -- it's time to defend freedom over here.

Our best wishes go out to Peter Van Buren who is stuck out on point without a battle buddy.

Did We Really?

--Pee, Luojie (China Daily)

And my eyes couldn't stand the strain
Of that promised love
All the way from America
--All the Way from America,
Joan Armatrading

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes
vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth.
Enormous effort and elaborate planning
are required to waste this much money
--Parliament of Whores, P. J. O'Rourke

The street game is the only game
the white man can’t control
--American Pimp (1999)
_________________

If U.S. policy makers would listen strategically to rock-n-roll lyrics, they would realize that promised love is not the same as received love. Further, winning hearts and minds is not the same as a Love Fest, as we have re-learned in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©); even if it were, the results are destined to end up as disastrously.

We have mentioned Peter Van Buren's trenchant comic-tragic book, We Meant Well, when discussing the tragedy of suicide amongst the ranks. Van Buren, a career Foreign Service officer sent to help administrate a Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT), offers a series of surreal vignettes displaying one man's view of the misled efforts of the State and Military Department in Iraq.

The very title is a challenge: Does invading and occupying a country, destroying its infrastructure and imposing the foreigner's concept of needful activities equate with well-meaning? The book dovetails well with Ranger's perspective of the PWOT ©, so he will offer some quotes from this fine primer on the failure of counterinsurgency to win hearts and minds.

The players and materiel are dissected rapier-style: KBR contractors are "fat as sheltered ponies"; "The DVDs all came from China. After oil, it seemed like illegal DVD sales made up the other half of the Iraqi economy." The milk episode embodies the entire debacle within a few pages, as a good parable might.

More observations, though each page is quotable,

"The Army and Embassy public relations people ordered the term [triangle of death] embargoed once they wanted us to seem like we were winning."

"The [U.S.] Army held elaborate ceremonies to "gift" the palaces back to the ungrateful Iraqis after they were done with them." "The programs they had initiated reflected months of constantly changing guidance from the Embassy ... To me, these were by and large people aggressively devoted to mediocrity, often achieving it."

"This is what the military would look like without NCOs -- a frat house with guns."

On Iraqis:

"There were Iraqis who worked for us ... our own imported Iraqi Americans. ... Many of them had not lived in Iraq for years yet we used them as cultural advisers. No one will ever know how much of our failure in reconstructing Iraq was caused simply by bad translation and subject matter ignorance, but it would be a decent percentage."

"Now there was literally more money than we could spend ... we wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn't be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad."

"A Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000 with almost no technical or policy oversight. ... a 2009 audit ... found the Army could not account for $8.7 Billion in finds."

"Military units were graded on how much cash they spent ... spent meant more kudos on evaluation reports."

This random selection brings to mind the Social Security Administration's mistake with Ranger's benefits causing him to now owe them $10,740. (Their mistake was discussed HERE.)

Situation recap: A 65 y.o. U.S. pensioner who devoted his entire adult working career to the U.S. government and who, from 11 May 11 - Nov 2012 will not be receiving his Social Security benefits. My income will be docked due to their error, but every page of We Meant Well documents examples of fraud, waste and myopic policies that squandered U.S. tax dollars to phenomenal -- criminal -- levels, if the concept of criminality retains any meaning today.

100's of Billions of dollars were thrown down a shit hole, yet my government chicken shits me and others like me with a petty (for them) debt caused by their ineptitude. If we had applied this conservative approach (demanding strict oversight and accountability) to Iraq, we might have achieved something of value, though what that would have been remains undefined. At least, we would not have lost some things of irretrievable cost.

Ranger is torqued that his country busts him for a paltry sum, while his Army and State Department wiped Iraqi asses with newly-minted benjamins. Why embark on a foreign policy dependent upon gaining the hearts and minds of Iraqis? Ranger doesn't care if they love or hate us -- no American soldier's life should be spent on such a meaningless goal.

Our government should focus on its own citizen's hearts, minds and bodily welfare. When one sells love, one is pimping or whoring. WOT also means "War on Truth", and a war on truth equates well with a reign of terror.

A Lost Heart and Mind

--Les Tournesols, van Gogh

War is done they've come back home
But they're the ones that lost
--Shiloh Town, Tim Hardin

I can see his face and I hear the words he said
And my memories ache and my senses burn
Did he dream too late will we ever learn
-- Testify,
Melissa Etheridge

Another soldier dies slippin’ into a ditch,
we call it a “combat death,”
just to give it a meaning…
My point is that sometimes the army
has to be concerned with something
bigger than the truth
--The Messenger (2009)

It's the same old seven and six
____________________

We Meant Well is a fine tragi-comedic telling of one man's experience with nation-building in Iraq.

Subtitled, "How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People," Peter van Buren, a career Foreign Service officer, offers a series of vignettes which puts the surrealism of the State and Military Department's efforts on display. One -- "Missing Him" -- deals with a troop's suicide, and the story is sadly timeless, dovetailing as it does with Ranger's experiences in his war many years before.

The "him" is Private First Class Brian Edward Hutson, who committed suicide in Iraq "after only a few months in the Army and even less time at the Forward Operating Base. ... Nobody really had befriended him" (243).

This is a direct indictment of the Army and their concept of leadership. What kind of Army would have a personnel policy that sends young, unformed personalities into combat environments after only a few months of Army exposure? This young private was shipped over with only Basic and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) under his belt.

What kind of Commander would be so oblivious that he would not assign a mentor to buddy up with newly assigned troopers to help ease them into their new reality? This applies to leaders from Second Lieutenant to General Officer. What kind of NCO or Squad Leader would not be cognizant enough to recognize the danger symptoms of pre-suicidal behavior?

Did anybody care? It is too late once the bullets are launched. At the Army level (TRADOC) and recruiting command there must surely be a personality inventory taken before induction that would indicate potential problems before they occur. That is the point of taking pre-induction personality inventories.

Has the Army's pre-induction processing also suffered from a jaded attitude and budget cuts? What should be a fairly simple leadership problem is failing as far too many soldiers have slipped through the cracks.

While at Ft. Benning following return from Vietnam, Ranger clearly remembers the high suicide rate on post. His impression was that it was officially swept under the rug despite its being common knowledge. This was over 15 years before PTSD would become an official diagnosis in the DSM manual, thereby receiving legitimacy from the medical community.

*It is hard to find any definitive suicide figures for either Vietnam or the current conflicts. Some have reported more deaths from Vietnam veteran suicides over the years than from actual combat deaths, but it is hard to ascertain for the usual reasons: The death might have been a single-vehicle accident; drugs or alcohol may have been the culprit; the reporting agencies do not list "suicide" as a kindness to the survivors, or to allow for insurance benefits. Ranger is certain some of his fellows from the Vietnam War were suicides, though without the usual note left behind.

PFC Hutson died as a result of the negligence of poor command policies, or because of a lack of command policy. This is strange as the Army also has suicide-prevention programs. Clearly this shows another policy disconnect as these programs are still in effect and PFC Hutson is still dead.

We should have a memorial to the suicides of all of our wars.

Ranger's condolences to PFC Hutson's family and friends.