FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals

By Bill Van Auken
23 May 2008

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The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.

The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted that the actions of the Bush administration—the launching of wars of aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture—constitute war crimes under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding international statutes and treaties.

To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have engendered within the US government and America’s ruling elite as a whole.

The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG’s report continues to this day.

“There’s nothing new here,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained in the report as “pretty vague.”

Pretty vague? One can’t help but wonder what the spokesman would consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at Guantánamo.

In one section, the report states: “[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at some point during the interrogation, the military officer ‘put water down’ a seated detainee’s throat. He said he guessed that the purpose of the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was drowning, so that he would provide the information that the interrogator wanted. [The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging and spitting out water. He said that the detainee appeared to be uncomfortable, and assumed that he had trouble breathing.”

Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned over to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002:

“He was left alone in a cold room known as ‘the freezer,’ where guards would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him...

“He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by means of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music, forced intake of water, and forced standing.

“He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator;

“Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual statements to him;

“Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten.”

In addition, the document says, he was “led to believe he was going to be executed, and urinated on himself,” and was told that his mother and family would be detained and harmed.

Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture

Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and abuse against detainees.

In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances of beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the use of extreme temperatures in order to “break the detainees’ resolve to resist cooperating” and 50 agents reporting the use of extended isolation to “wear down a detainee’s resistance.”

In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged shackling in a standing position.

The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the iceberg.

They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the fall of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty. First taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then transferred to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded that Kurnaz had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until the middle of 2006 and released only because of pressure from the German government.

Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.

“I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster,” he said. He told how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his wrists for hours and subjected to the ‘water treatment,’ in which his head was stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the stomach, forcing him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department Inspector General’s report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last form of torture did not constitute “waterboarding,” but did represent “an effort to intimidate the detainees and increase their feelings of helplessness.”)

“I know others have died from this kind of treatment,” said Kurnaz. “I suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times.”

“There was no law in Guantánamo,” Kurnaz concluded. “I didn’t think this could happen in the 21st century.... I could never have imagined that this place was created by the United States.”

The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and the CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An estimated 27,000 people are being held without charges, much less trials, many of them simply having disappeared into Washington’s global gulag. Some are held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons run jointly by the CIA and regimes to which it “outsources” detainees, like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, where other, cruder forms of torture—being buried alive, given electric shocks or slashed with scalpels—are employed.

The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light four years ago—naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and sexual humiliation by US guards—were no aberration. The methods described in the report—forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in interrogations, chaining detainees in “stress” positions, leading them around on dog leashes, draping them in women’s underwear—were identical to those officially blamed on a “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib.

Sadistic torture “orchestrated” from the White House

The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is evidence that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon those detained by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top.

Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials on the so-called Principals’ Committee—Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice—conducted detailed discussions on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, according to ABC, “were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”

Bush subsequently told ABC that he was “aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials advised the White House National Security Council of their concern that the practices witnessed by the agents were “gravely damaging ... the rule of law” at Guantánamo.

In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied, thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up.

The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant protests or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for that matter from the party’s presidential contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue in their campaigns.

The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, “What the FBI agents saw,” which laid out the details of the report and stated that it “shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”

The paper’s conclusion: “The Democrats must press for full disclosure” through hearings to uncover “the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions.” This, they tell their readers, “is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.”

Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism. The extent of the Bush administration’s outright criminality has been thoroughly exposed over the course of several years.

The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war crimes—just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution of a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington and Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted the pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted as well, together with those military and intelligence officials who directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other CIA and military camps and prisons.

The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such a reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice president is “off the table.” They have no interest in pursuing the administration on the issue of torture because they themselves are complicit, with Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having been briefed extensively on the criminal methods employed at Guantánamo, which they approved and concealed from the American people.

On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a policy of global militarism and aggression—carried out under the mantle of a “global war on terrorism”—which is directed at using armed force to further the interests of America’s ruling oligarchy. It is this criminal strategy—resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi lives—that has given rise to the crime of torture itself.

Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating the conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the dock as war criminals.

Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against political opposition within the US itself and politically educating the American people.

See Also:
FBI agents created “war crimes file” documenting US torture
[22 May 2008]
2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship
[4 April 2008]
Bush defends torture
[16 February 2008]

The Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Sexual Terrorism

By DAVID ROSEN

The “New York Times’” recently revealed the existence of a little-known executive order issued by President Bush in the summer of ’07 that permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to circumvent restrictions on the use of humiliating and degrading interrogation techniques.

Bush’s order permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to effectively side-step the legal and moral restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court and Congress (and formally approved by Bush) as well as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Brian Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, laid-out the rationale for the continued subversion of these restrictions:

The fact that an [humiliating interrogation] act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliating or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.

The Bush administration’s argument is that an interrogator can utilize what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” if he/she believes such techniques will thwart a possible threat or terrorist act. For the administration, illegal (if not immoral) interrogation techniques are a corollary to preemptive military strikes that was its rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

Much attention has been paid to water-boarding as an immoral if not illegal technique utilized in the so-called War of Terror. Little attention has been paid to the equally physically harmful and likely more long-term consequential technique of sexual humiliation and terror.

Buried deep in Mark Mazzetti’s Times article is an intriguing paragraph:

That order specifies some conduct that it says would be prohibited in any interrogation, including forcing an individual to perform sexual acts, or threatening an individual with sexual humiliation. But it does not say which techniques could still be permitted. [New York Times, April 27, 2008]

Yes, what “techniques” of sexual humiliation can still be used?

It seems almost impossible to precisely determine these techniques. Reviews of the CIA, Justice and Defense department’s websites reveal little useful information. Email queries to the Justice Department, including Benczkowski and the media-relations office, have not been answered.

An exhaustive search of the internet has provided no further information about sexual humiliation then the oblique Times reference. (An effort for further clarification from Mazzetti has not succeeded.) This is very much in keeping with Bush administration policies to deny, falsify, obfuscate or simply lie about techniques sanctioned and employed in its fictitious War on Terror.

In the absence of the formal specification of CIA’s approved or utilized (and they are not necessarily the same) techniques of sexual humiliation, one must draw upon previously documented U.S. military and intelligence-agency practices and the techniques used by other militaries. These examples illustrate what the CIA and other U.S. agencies are capable of employing to break those they identify as “terrorists”.

Rape is one of the most barbaric forms of sexual humiliation and terror. Since the Civil War, rape has been increasingly integrated into what is known as total warfare. Women, girls and some boys have been increasingly singled out for systematic sexual abuse during civil conflicts and military campaigns. However, rape has only been limitedly employed against adult male captives detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo or CIA black sites around the world. [see “’The Hard Hand of War’: Rape as an Instrument of Total War,” CounterPunch, Apri1 4, 2008]

The U.S. has employed (and, most likely, continues to employ) a host of other techniques of sexual terrorization to break male inmates. An act of sexual humiliation serves two purposes: to physically harm and to emotionally scar those subjected to such abuse. Sexual terrorization seeks to inflict both pain and shame, to make the recipient suffer and loath himself. Sexual humiliation is intended to break the victim both physically and spiritually, to leave scars on (and inside) the body and in the psyche.

If (or when) top officials of the Bush administration face either an American or international war crimes tribunal over their conduct related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, sexual humiliation and terror should not be absent from the indictment.

* * *

According to an ABC News report, in response to September 11th the CIA adopted six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" in mid-March 2002. These techniques were to be used on a dozen or more alleged al Qaeda leaders detained in CIA black sites. These “approved” techniques consisted of:

• The Attention Grab: the interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

• The Attention Slap: an open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

• The Belly Slap: a hard open-handed slap to the stomach; the aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury.

• Long Time Standing: prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.

• The Cold Cell: the prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and is periodically doused with cold water.

• Water-Boarding: also known as “the water cure” or “simulated drowning,” the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet; cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him.

Obviously missing from the CIA’s list of interrogation techniques is sexual humiliation, degradation and terrorization. [ABC News, November 18, 2005]

Reconstructing U.S. military and intelligence officials use of sexual interrogation techniques begins in 2004 with Abu Ghraib and Seymour Hersh’s invaluable “New Yorker” article and the CBS “60 Minutes II” broadcast of soldiers’ photos. Their combined impact not only exposed the horrendous treatment of Iraqi prisoners, but made “celebrities” out of three of the perpetrators, Army reservists Charles Graner, Sabrina Harmon and Lynndie England. [see New Yorker, April 30, 2004 and March 24, 2008]

The best single source for details on abuses at Abu Ghraib is the study conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba. In the report’s executive summary, the following "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” are identified as having been used at the prison:

• videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;

• forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;

• forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;

• forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;

• forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

• arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;

• positioning a naked detainee on a MRE [meals ready to eat] Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

• placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture;

• sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

In a description of a meeting about the report with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other high-ranking Defense Department officials, Taguba told Hersh: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.” Images of these practices, like similar images of cruelty from the Vietnam and other wars, have become enshrined in the nation’s memory.

Making matters even more sadistic, the festive, if not chaotic, conditions at the prison led male soldiers to engage in “consensual” sexual liaisons with female prisoners and even record their trysts for posterity. According to the Taguba report, “a male MP guard [was] having sex with a female detainee.” [Taguba report, “Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade”; New Yorker, June 25, 2007]

Subsequent to the Hersh and CBS exposés, additional photos, videotapes and personal accounts by military personnel and former detainees have come out. More than one hundred photographs and four videos taken at Abu Ghraib were initially suppressed by the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. In September 2005, and only after ACLU litigation and a ruling by District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, was all the “evidence” finally released to the public. (Dozens of photos can be accessed through google and other sources.) They provide further examples of the sexual abuse systematically employed by U.S. personnel on alleged or suspected terrorists.

Drawing from a host of media reports, a jig-saw-puzzle picture of sexual torture employed in the War on Terror begins to emerge. Two examples are illustrative:

1. Scotland’s “Sunday Herald” reports that a former Iraqi prisoner claimed that there is a photo of a civilian translator raping a male juvenile prisoner; he stated, “They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming, … and the female soldier was taking pictures.”

2. The Associated Press reports that a former inmate, Dhia al-Shweiri, was ordered by American soldiers to strip naked, bend over and place his hands on a wall; while not sodomized, he says he was humiliated: “We are men. It’s OK if they beat me,” al Shweiri said. “Beatings don’t hurt us; it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.”

Accepting the patriarchal sexism, the humiliation was deeply upsetting.

The experience of another former inmate, Hayder Sabbar Abd, is similarly revealing. Abd is memorialized as the man in the hood in Lynndie England’s infamous photo. In that photograph, the smiling England gives a thumbs-up gesture and points at Abd's exposed genitals.

As reported by the “Independent”:

Mr. Abd said he recalled having his hood removed and being told by the soldiers' Arabic translator to masturbate as he looked at Ms England. "She was laughing and she put her hands on her breasts," he told the newspaper. "Of course I couldn't do it, so they beat me in the stomach and I fell to the ground. The translator said, 'Do it, do it. It's better than being beaten.' I said 'How can I do it?' So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending."

At this point, one of the other prisoners, ­a friend of Mr Abd's identified as Hussein, ­was pushed towards his genitals while the hood was put back over his own head.

"They made him sit next to me. My penis was very close to his mouth. I did not know it was my friend because of the hood. It was humiliating. We didn't think that we would survive. All of us believed we would be killed and we would not get out alive," said Mr Abd.

One can only wonder what England now thinks about Abu Ghraib as she sits in her jail cell at San Diego’s Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar. And how she appreciates the “bad apples” theory in the face of the recent revelation of Bush administration “Principals” approving “harsh” interrogation techniques.

Surprising to many, nearly a year before Abu Ghraib was exposed, in May 2003, British private Gary Bartlam, previously stationed in Basra and the port of Umm Qasr, was arrested in his hometown of Tamworth, Staffordshire. He had brought in a roll of pictures he shot in Iraq to his local photo-developer for processing. A shocked clerk, after reviewing the shots, called the police. Among his photos were:

* a picture showing an Iraqi man being forced to perform oral sex on a (white) man;

* a picture showing two Iraqis apparently being forced to perform anal sex;

* a picture showing two naked Iraqis cowering on the ground.

A flabbergasted Bartlam told the police that he took the shots to show his mom what was going on in Iraq.

Such interrogation practices were not limited to Iraq. According to a report in the “Sydney Morning Hearld”: “Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.”

This allegation was confirmed by former Army Sergeant Erik Saar in his book, “Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo.” Saar worked as an Arabic translator at Gitmo from December 2002 to June 2003; Major General Geoffrey Miller, the architect of Abu Ghraib intelligence techniques, was his commander.

According to Saar, a female interrogator employed an innovative technique to "break" a Saudi detainee. He says she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection. In a draft of his book, Saar’s describes her most ingenious proceedure:

She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee. As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' [the detainee had taken a pilot course] He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.

She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying: "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

“The concept,” observes Saar, “was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength.” Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact between a man and a woman not his wife or family member or with a menstruating woman, who is considered unclean. [The Sun, June 4, 2003;Independent, May 6, 2004; Washington Blade, May 7, 2004; Sydney Morning Hearld, January 28, 2005]

* * *

The American people, through human rights groups, the ACLU, Congress and the Courts, have fought a protracted battle with the Bush administration over the precise meaning of “enhanced interrogation techniques” used in Iraq, Guantánamo and CIA black sites. Recent revelations show just how far the Bush administration will go to cover its tracks with regard to questionable (if not illegal) interrogation techniques.

In December ’07, it was revealed that the CIA destroyed videotapes it made in 2002 (two years before Abu Ghriab) of the interrogation of those it designated “top terrorist” suspects; these tapes were destroyed, as CIA director Michael Hayden explained, because CIA officials at the time were afraid that keeping them "posed a security risk”.

In March ‘08, Bush vetoed an intelligence bill that would have limited the CIA to interrogation techniques approved by the Army Field Manual. It would have banned water-boarding as well as stripping prisoners naked, forcing them to perform sexual acts or to mimic sexual acts, mock executions and beating or burning of prisoners.

In April, ABC News revealed that the highest officials of the Bush administration, what is know as the "Principals," met dozens of times after September 11th to review and approve interrogation techniques. Those who participated in the White House Situation Room meetings included Dick Cheney, Colin Powel, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet and John Ashcroft; the president was intentionally excluded from the meeting in apparent fear of a possible war crimes indictment.

According to ABC, “the high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” The Times mentions that CIA operatives actually demonstrated some of these techniques, including water-boarding, for the principal war criminals. One can only wonder if any of the techniques of sexual humiliation were demonstrated or if the gathered officials had to rely on their vivid (if perverse) imaginations to conjure up the actual practices and their likely consequences for the hapless victims.

Ashcroft is reported to have been the only one troubled by the use of the techniques. Nevertheless, when queried about the meetings, Bush stated that he knew of and "approved" the techniques.

And later in April, the Times ran Mazzetti’s article further detailing CIA interrogation tactics and revealing Bush’s ’07 executive order permitting U.S. intelligence operatives to circumvent restrictions on the use of humiliating and degrading interrogation techniques.

The clock is ticking down on the Bush administration. For all their respective protestations, one can only wonder whether the next president will (secretly) approve the use of cruel, humilating and degrading interrogation techniques, especially sexual terror. Hidding behind plausible deniability is one of the oldest practices of those in power. Morality and the law nearly always take second place to expedience and necessity, whether real or invented.

The Bush administration and the Congress are unlikely to make public the full scope of sexual terrorism used to break the detainee in both body and mind during the War on Terror. Yet, detailing the actual techniques both approved and used by the interrogators (whether CIA, military or civilian contractors) is critical to establishing the true history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While wishfull thinking, this accounting might support subsequent war crimes prosecutions.

David Rosen can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.