[Sosfbay-discuss] FW: "Torturing Democracy" Film at Stanford Tues. 7 pm

[Brian Good]

   At one point I had to walk out for some air.  It troubled me to see college students munching 
pizza and sipping coke like "It's only a movie."  
   I don't know how I feel about the fact that I'm less angered by the human suffering inflictedby the Bush Administration than I am by what they did to the moral standing of our country.I'm disturbed that so few care about either of them.   Fred and Lois were there, Carol was there to promote her Oakland film fest.
Much of the information in the movie was well known to me because I digested the article 
"The Green Light" by Philippe Sands.   I can produce the below as an 8-page 8-1/2 X 11 booklet but I'd like to cut it more before distributing it.  I'd appreciate any comments.I need to send it in two parts because it's 120 kb.





The
Green Light 

A 6,600-word digested of
Philippe Sands's 11,000 word May 2008 Vanity Fair article 




As the first
anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee
wouldn’t talk, the Bush administration’s highest-ranking lawyers
argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing
international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army’s own Field
Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the
pressure—then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows
the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes
charges.



  Abuse of prisoners, rising to the level of torture,
defines W's presidency.  It began in the treatment of the first
inmates at Guantánamo in late 2002 when "Detainee 063" was
tortured for seven weeks. The Bush administration falsely claims that
the decision to use coercive techniques “trickled up” from
military commanders and interrogators on the ground. In fact it
started with several senior advisers to the president, the vice
president, and the secretary of defense--politically-appointed
lawyers who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes and engaged
in international criminality. Formal investigation is a very real
option. This is the story of how the torture began at Guantánamo,
and how it spread. 

 

“Crying. Angry. Yelled for Allah.”

  
Cruelty, humiliation, and torture of detainees have
long been prohibited by international law, including the Geneva
Conventions and their Common Article 3. The 1984 U.N. Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment criminalizes torture and complicity in it. Torture
includes “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”

  
On December 2, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed off on
an "action memo" from his general counsel Jim Haynes
authorizing 15 techniques of aggressive interrogation, included
physical contact, humiliation, and sensory deprivation,  stress
positions, isolation, hooding, 20-hour interrogations, and nudity.
Haynes and Rumsfeld explicitly did not rule out the future use of
three other techniques, including waterboarding.  Rumsfeld added a
comment: "Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

  
Detainee 063 was subjected to systematic sleep
deprivation. He was shackled and cuffed and forced to listen to
threats to his family.   To leverage his Muslim sensitivities he was
shown pictures of scantily clad models, was touched by a female
interrogator, was made to stand naked, and was forcibly shaved. He
was denied the right to pray. He was intimidated by aggressive,
barking dogs.  He was subjected to extreme cold. Intravenous tubes
were forced into his body to provide nourishment when he would not
eat or drink. 


  
Was Detainee 063 subjected to severe mental pain or
suffering?  I'll string together a few descriptions of 063’s
reactions taken from an interrogation log leaked to the press 

   
Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed.
Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two.
Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard
spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated
and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence.
Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah. 


Urinated on
himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried.
Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and
openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled
uncontrollably. 



The Authorized Version
  In the spring of 2004, photos of the Abu Ghraib
abuse were broadcast.  Alberto Gonzales, who was Bush’s White House
counsel, and Jim Haynes called a press conference to  paint the issue
as the actions of a few bad eggs with no connection to the broader
policies of the administration.  Showing the gravity of the political
crisis was the thick folder of documents made public for the first
time,  among them the Haynes Memo showing Rumsfeld's approval. 
techniques that I later reviewed with Seltzer.  (The log detailing
the interrogation of Detainee 063 would be leaked to the press two
years later.)

   
For two hours Gonzales and Haynes laid out the
administration’s narrative: al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy,
deadly and shadowy, that targeted civilians and ignored the Geneva
Conventions and other international rules. Nevertheless, the
officials said, the administration had acted judiciously, even as it
moved away from a purely law-enforcement strategy to one that
marshaled “all elements of national power.” The authorized
version had four basic parts. 


   
First, the administration had moved
reasonably—with care and deliberation--and legally. In February
2002 the president had determined, in accordance with established
legal principles, that none of the detainees at Guantánamo could
rely on any of the protections granted by Geneva, even Common Article
3. This presidential order was the lead document. This was claimed to
be a clear-eyed reading of the law. The administration was simply
going by the book.

  
A second document, a legal opinion dated 8/1/02,
had been the subject of media speculation for some weeks. The memo's
authors,  two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel (OLC), were Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, and John Yoo, a
Berkeley law professor.  They had been assisted by David Addington,
Cheney's lawyer.  The Yoo-Bybee Memo declared that physical torture
occurred only when the pain was “equivalent in intensity to the
pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily function, or even death,” and that mental
torture required “suffering not just at the moment of infliction
but … lasting psychological harm.” Interrogations that did not
reach these thresholds—far more permissive than those set by
international law—were allowed.   Though OLC findings typically
carry great weight, Gonzales characterized the Yoo-Bybee Memo as mere
stargazing unrelated to what happened at Gitmo.  It never made it
into the hands of the president or of soldiers in the field, Gonzales
said, and did not “reflect the policies that the administration
ultimately adopted.”

   
The second point
of the official narrative said the source
of the new interrogation techniques was the military commander at
Guantánamo, Major General Michael E. Dunlavey. Washington had merely
reacted to a request from below after Detainee 063's ability to
resist the traditional non-coercive interrogation techniques spelled
out in the Army Field Manual had made necessary "more
flexibility" in light of intelligence suggesting new attacks. A
request coming up the chain from Guantánamo on October 11, 2002
ultimately resulted in Rumsfeld's approval for “all but three of
the requested techniques.” 


   
Point three was the claim that the legal
justification for the new interrogation techniques originated in
Guantánamo, not with politically-appointed lawyers high in the
administration, and certainly not the Justice Department. The memo
that sought to provide legal authority, also dated October 11, came
from Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at
Guantánamo. No other legal memo was cited as bearing on aggressive
interrogations. 


   
Point four was the claim that decisions relating
to Guantánamo had no bearing on events at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Gonzales wanted to “set the record straight”:  The
administration’s actions were inconsistent with torture. The abuses
at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized and unconnected to the
administration’s policies. 


  
Gonzales's and Haynes's case was carefully
scripted.  Every element contained untruths. 


  The real story, pieced together from interviews
with most of those involved, goes something like this: The Geneva
decision did not follow the logic of the law but rather was designed
to give effect to a prior decision to allow coercive interrogation;
it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees
were meant to fall. New interrogation techniques did not arise
spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of
intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-Bybee
Memo was not simply academic hypothesizing: it was crucial in
enabling the top guys to pressure the bottom guys.  And the practices
employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.  Addington,
Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of
lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all
international rules prohibiting abuse. 





Killing Geneva

   
As undersecretary of defense for policy in early
2002 directly below Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith
provided advice on the conduct of military interrogations.  Feith
proudly acknowledges his contribution as one of the principal
architects of the president's decision on Geneva. Addington, Haynes,
and Gonzales had all objected to Geneva's constraints, and on January
9, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty at the Justice Department offered
the opinion that the president wasn’t bound by traditional
international-law prohibitions. 


  
Strong opposition came from Colin Powell and his
counsel William H. Taft IV at the State Department, as well as from
the Tjags—military lawyers in the office of the judge advocate
general—who wanted to maintain a strong U.S. commitment to Geneva
and the customary laws. On January 25, Alberto Gonzales signed a memo
to the president supporting Haynes and Rumsfeld over Powell and Taft.
This memo, probably written by Addington, presented a “new
paradigm”and described Geneva’s “strict limitations on
questioning of enemy prisoners” as “obsolete.” 


  
Feith said he and Myers discussed the issue with
Rumsfeld.  Myers told Feith, “We have to support the Geneva
Conventions If Rumsfeld doesn’t go along with this, I’m going to
contradict them in front of the president.”

  
Douglas Feith for many years had opposed legal
protections for terrorists under international law. His 1985 article
in The National Interest
said Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; if those who
violated them were allowed to rely on them, the whole Geneva
structure would collapse. To protect Geneva, in other words, you
might have to cast its protections aside.

   
Under the Geneva system, combatants who behaved
according to its standards received P.O.W. status and special
protections, and everyone else received the more limited protections
of Common Article 3. Feith said he told Rumsfeld: “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 added: “It is our
military culture.... a matter of who we are.” 


   
So how had the administration gone from a
commitment to Geneva to the president’s declaration that detainees
had no rights? It all turns on what you mean by “promoting respect”
for Geneva, Feith explained. Since al-Qaeda fighters weren’t part
of a state, they couldn’t claim rights under the Geneva  treaty
that was binding only on states. Under Geneva’s own terms Taliban
fighters weren’t entitled to P.O.W. status if they hadn’t worn
uniforms or insignia. The safety net of Common Article 3 did not
apply to detainees 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. 


    
The principled legal arguments were a fig leaf.
The real reason for the Geneva decision was to remove the constraints
to interrogation.  On the one hand Feith upheld Geneva as a matter of
law—and on the other he pulled the rug out from under it as a
matter of reality. Feith’s argument was so clever that Myers
continued to believe Geneva’s protections remained in force—he
was “well and truly hoodwinked,” one seasoned observer of
military affairs later told me. 


   
Feith’s argument prevailed. On February 7, 2002,
Bush signed a memo making Guantánamo a Geneva-free zone. As a matter
of policy, the detainees would be handled humanely, but only to the
extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. “The
president said ‘humane treatment,’ ” Feith told me,
inflecting the term sourly.  “It’s a fine phrase—‘humane
treatment.’ ” The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or
“outrages upon personal dignity” were gone. Did the decision
diminish America’s moral authority?  “The problem with moral
authority,” Feith said, was “people who should know better, like
yourself, siding with the assholes."

“I Was on a Timeline”
   Rumsfeld put Michael Dunlavey in charge of Joint
Task Force 170, which oversaw military interrogations at Guantánamo.
A judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Erie, Pennsylvania, Dunlavey
was a Vietnam veteran and a major general in the reserves with a
strong intelligence background. Rumsfeld "wanted me to ‘maximize
the intelligence production,’" Dunlavey said.  No one ever
told him "The gloves are off" but clearly the Geneva
Conventions didn’t apply. Planeloads of detainees arrived every
day; half of them, Dunlavey informed Rumsfeld, had no intelligence
value.  


  
In June, the focus settled on Detainee 063,
Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national who had been refused entry to
the United States just before 9/11 and was captured a few months
later in Afghanistan.  Initial interrogation of al-Qahtani based on
long-established F.B.I. and military techniques of building rapport
yielded nothing. Dunlavey was under enormous pressure—from
Washington, from the top "all the way to the White House”—to
do "everything humanly possible" to find out what
al-Qahtani knew.  “This guy may have been the key to the survival
of the U.S.” Dunlavey said. On August 8, al-Qahtani was placed in
an isolation facility. 


   
Unbeknownst to Dunlavey, the C.I.A. was having its
own interrogation issues.  C.I.A. director George Tenet wanted
aggressive interrogation of a captured al Qaeda official, Abu
Zubaydah, but, worried about the risk of criminal prosecution, waited
for legal opinions from the Justice Department.  “Clear guidance”
came on August 1, 2002 in memos written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo
with input from Addington.  Addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the first
memo redefined torture, abandoning the definition set by the 1984
torture convention. This was the Yoo-Bybee Memo released by Gonzales
after Abu Ghraib. It referred broadly to “the conduct of
interrogations outside of the United States” and nothing in it
limited its use to the C.I.A. Though Gonzales would later contend
that this policy memo did “not reflect the policies the
administration ultimately adopted,” in fact it gave carte blanche
to all the interrogation techniques later recommended by Haynes and
approved by Rumsfeld. 


   
The second memo, requested by John Rizzo, a senior
lawyer at the C.I.A., spells out the specific techniques in detail.
[note: This is probably the 8/1/02 memo from Jay Bybee that was
released 4/16/09] Dunlavey and his subordinates at Guantánamo never
saw these memos and were not aware of their contents. 


   
The lawyers in Washington wanted high-pressure
interrogations, but with distance and deniability--and legal
cover--for themselves. If Haynes and Rumsfeld knew of the content of
these memos before they approved the new interrogation techniques for
al-Qahtani, then the administration’s official narrative—that the
pressure for new techniques, and the legal support for them,
originated on the ground at Guantánamo, from Dunlavey and his staff
lawyer—becomes difficult to sustain. Also, that knowledge links
causally the keyboards of Feith and Yoo to the interrogations of
Guantánamo.

   
All indications are that well before Haynes wrote
his memo he knew what the Justice Department had advised the C.I.A.
on interrogations, and believed he had legal cover to do what he
wanted. All of the upper deciders I spoke with, including Feith,
General Myers, and General Tom Hill (the commander of SouthCom),
confirmed to me that they believed at the time that Haynes had
consulted Justice Department lawyers. Moreover, Haynes was a close
friend of Bybee’s.  Later, Haynes would testify to the Senate that
he had not sought the memo, had not shaped its content, and did not
possess a copy of it—but he carefully refrained from saying that he
was unaware of its contents. Haynes, with whom I met twice, will not
speak on the record about this subject. 


to be cont'd

> Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:56:19 -0700
> From: fredd at freeshell.org
> To: sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org
> Subject: [Sosfbay-discuss] "Torturing Democracy" Film at Stanford Tues. 7 pm
> 
> It was a gripping documentary. The Bush Administration's support of the 
> grossly illegal torturing was disgusting. There seems to be ample 
> evidence to indict Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Yo, Hughes and others in that 
> gang. Will there be the ethical will to do so?
> 
> Fred
> 
> Free Food!
> 
>   Havana Room of the Graduate Community Center, 750 Escondido Road. 
> Parking
> should not be a problem after 4 pm.
> 
> >From Embarcadero and El Camino, take Embarcadero toward the mountains.
> At the first stop sign turn left.  Go past the gas station.  At the next 
> intersection,
> turn left.  #750 will be on your right.
> 
> "Torturing
> Democracy" tells about the policies that led the US to
> become (with no small
> help from Stanford's own Condi Rice) a
> practitioner of torture. It was supposed to be
> shown on PBS last year,
> but then some mysterious "scheduling conflicts" came up
> and they
> canceled it. But we've got it now, so come check it out!
> 
> 
> When: Tuesday, August 25th, 7:00 pm
> 
> Where: Havana Room, Graduate Community Center, 750 Escondido Rd.
>     "Torturing Democracy" tells the inside story of how the US 
> government adopted
> torture as official policy in the aftermath of 9/11.  With exclusive 
> interviews, explosive
> documents and rare archival footage, award winning filmmaker Sherry 
> Jones has
> crafted the definitive account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent 
> American history.
>   "Torturing Democracy" carefully presents the evidence that leads 
> straight to the top
> of the chain of command -- and so lays to rest the "rotten apple" 
> defense for abusive
> 
> 
> 
> interrogations at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
> 
> Sponsored by the Graduate Student Programming Board
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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