Jan Egeland, Mariano Aguirre| openDemocracy, June 17, 2009
The degrading treatment meted out to prisoners of the United States-led “war on terror” over seven years has yet to be subject to proper legal scrutiny and accountability. But the responsibility is Europe’s too, say Jan Egeland & Mariano Aguirre.
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In the very heart of the western world, Europe’s major ally has tortured prisoners to death – in an operation that we Europeans too were involved in. The fourteen “techniques” authorised by the George W Bush administration include semi-drowning (“waterboarding’), confinement in cramped and dark boxes, psychological torture and deprivation of sleep for up to eleven days and nights (see Mark Danner, US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites” [New York Review of Books, 9 April & 30 April 2009]).
An undefined number of prisoners have died or committed suicide as a result of mistreatment in interrogation chambers run by the United States and its allies (the last one was a Yemeni in Guantánamo). It may be recalled that Japanese military jailors who employed these techniques during the second world war were adjudged war criminals by the US’s own military-legal experts.
This, to emphasise the point, is not about the despicable actions of some far-away dictator, nor the atrocities committed by Nazis and communists in Europe in the years of totalitarianism and genocide. No, these acts were part of a larger operation involving our own western, liberal democracies. Europeans were there – with troops, intelligence, logistics and funding – taking part in the “war on terror” that formed the backdrop to these war crimes. After the US secret services had been authorised to mistreat prisoners held in American custody, the CIA was allowed to undertake its “extraordinary renditions”: more than 1,000 flights, often with unnamed prisoners (“unlawful combatants”) in a wide arc across European airspace – from Norway to Romania. Several countries (including Jordan and, again, Romania) granted permission for these prisoners to be interrogated and mistreated in local, US-administered prison camps.
In 2007, a majority of elected representative in the European parliament accused the governments of Europe of having concealed the details of what had happened in these cases. In fact, several countries did more than clandestinely transport and keep prisoners; they also delivered some of their own prisoners into the hands of the CIA. The transfer by the Swedish police in December 2001 of two Egyptian nationals, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed El Zary – who later vanished into Egypt’s prison-camp system where torture flourishes – is but one example. Reports from both the European parliament and the Council of Europe have found that Europeans have accepted the perpetration of severe abuses in our own backyards that we were and are quick to condemn anywhere else.
When defenceless prisoners – some of them hardcore terrorists, others quite innocent men – were being beaten and humiliated by United States soldiers at Bagram air- base in Kabul, Europeans were close by: every day, our military and civilian forces in Afghanistan would drive past.
When the inner circles around President Bush were planning the torture – how to legitimise, explain and implement it in a network of prisons (some secret, others not) in Europe, the middle east and elsewhere – Europeans remained silent and loyal contributors to the “war against terror” in Afghanistan.
When clever American legal experts were arguing that the principles of international humanitarian law – the Geneva conventions, United Nations conventions, and of habeas corpus –were not applicable in this case of “our battle” against “our enemies”, Europe’s own parliamentarians and NGOS were urging international legal action against some leaders in the global south on the grounds that they had broken the very same principles.
The dark side
How could it be that these years of torture could unfold under Europeans’ very noses, in flagrant contradiction of our national constitutions, our penal codes, our international legal commitments – all without hearings being organised and investigative commissions appointed? Where were our legal experts, our auditors and our journalists? And where were we, the researchers and commentators who have written this? With the exception of rare voices in a few media and human-rights organisations, and a couple of politicians that denounced what had happened, Europe kept silent.
There are no excuses. What was being conceived, planned and perpetrated was hardly a secret, even before the New Yorker and other media published detailed descriptions of these war crimes and the deceit involved (see, for example, Jane Mayer, Outsourcing torture“, New Yorker, 14 February 2005), .After all, only days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Dick Cheney admitted that the US chief executive was willing to make the “war against terror” an ugly, dirty affair: in a primetime national broadcast, the US vice-president announced that the secret services would be authorised to go over to the “dark side” (see Jane Mayer, The Dark Side [Vintage/Anchor, 2009]).
Such attitudes began around the same time to infect popular and even intellectual culture. The US television industry broadcast (from November 2001) the well-engineered TV drama series 24, about a federal agent who could not always afford to play by the rules. In episode after episode, the popular series indulged the lie that the torture of suspects was necessary in order to save the lives of innocents. The academic and pundit Michael Ignatieff– then director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, now the head of Canada’s main opposition party and the country’s likely next prime minister – was only the most high-profile of several intellectual who began to argue that torture is terrible but could in some circumstances be morally and politically justified (see Mariano Aguirre, “Exporting democracy, revising torture: the complex missions of Michael Ignatieff“, 15 July 2005).
So it was that the Bush-Cheney cabal could demolish the legacy of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The United States’s first president banned all maltreatment of English prisoners during the during the war of independence (1775-83), forbidding his troops to “imitate the brutality of the British”. Its sixteenth president followed the same principle during the American civil war (1861-65). Both respected here the US’s declaration of independence (1776), based as it was and is on the prohibition of abuse of power, arbitrary arrest and torture.
The next step
Many political, military and administrative leaders were involved in the planning and execution of the “war on terror”; none has had to face legal prosecution for what went on in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other sites of documented torture. Almost without exception, it is low-level operatives who have faced prosecution, even though their crimes were committed under a system that was organised in and controlled from the topmost echelons of power in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon (see Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib [Penguin, 2008]).
President Barack Obama – whose election by US citizens in 2008 is a turning-pointin this story – declared his intention to close for ever this dark chapter in the history of the United States. For that to happen, he must ensure that the legal process focuses on those who bear political and administrative responsibility. Chile and Argentina are among the countries which investigated and prosecuted those who had ordered torture – so why not the United States? In addition, it is clear that the Guantánamo prison-camp must be shut down; but military tribunals that fail to comply with international standards of jurisprudence should also be closed.
The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the abuse and neglect of the highest principles of leadership nurtured by western civilisation over centuries. In this light, it is wrong to see the actions of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their coterie in isolation (see Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules [ Penguin, 2006]). For this is also a tale of colossal hypocrisy and worse on the part of Europe, in accepting and being complicit in depredations that violate its own deepest values.
The experience was allowed to unfold year by grim year. During this long period, the European allies of the US – aware of the absence of legal protection for those nameless prisoners being transported for interrogation and torture at destinations known and unknown – appear to have done very little. Why?
What will be the next steps in bringing to justice those responsible? Thomas Hammarberg, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, has called on the council’s forty-seven member-states to provide the complete facts on what actually took place from 2001 to 2008, so that the guilty may be held to account. It cannot happen soon enough. For until it does, the enormous damage Europe has inflicted in these terrible years – not least on itself – can never be repaired.
This article was translated from Norwegian by Susan Høivik
The initial strike on the compound only killed one person, according to residents. The bulk of the toll came when locals rushed to the scene to help rescue the wounded trapped under the rubble, and the drone fired more missiles on them. It is unclear how many of the slain were civilians, but given the nature of the secondary strike it seems likely to be significant.
Peace and Justice Post 
Obama whitewashes foreign policy
June 19, 2009By Teo Ballve | The Advoacte, June 19, 2009
President Obama is trying to whitewash the history of U.S. foreign policy.
In two major speeches in the last month, he has spun a fairy tale.
At the National Archives on May 21, Obama claimed, “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” And in Cairo, Egypt, just two weeks later, Obama said, “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. … America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.”
These assertions ring entirely hollow in Latin America, where the reverse is true: Washington propped up tyrannical leaders and bankrolled murderous armies. Under the iron fist of these U.S.-backed regimes, the region’s torture chambers rang with the cries of innocent victims.
As Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza ruthlessly ruled his country like a colonial coffee plantation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said of his ally: “Somoza may be a son of a b—-, but he’s our son of a b—-.”
Intervention sometimes came at the behest of influential U.S. companies, as in Guatemala. In 1950, President Jacobo Arbenz won a landslide election and moved ahead with a land reform program aimed at breaking up large landholdings.
The reforms sat uneasily with executives from the United Fruit Co. (today, Chiquita), which owned vast, feudal-like fruit plantations throughout the country. The company collaborated with the CIA and the State Department to orchestrate Arbenz’s overthrow in 1954. What followed were a succession of military governments and a crescendo of violent conflict that ultimately claimed more than 200,000 Guatemalan lives.
After the socialist Salvador Allende won the presidency of Chile in 1970, national security adviser Henry Kissinger declared, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Three years later, Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende with the support of the U.S. government. Pinochet then helped band together his fellow South American dictators. They formed a coordinated campaign of state terrorism, called “Operation Condor,” against leftist sympathizers. The U.S. ambassador to Paraguay at the time suggested the campaign was receiving key intelligence support from the Pentagon.
A common tactic practiced by the military in these dirty wars was to throw drugged, yet alive and conscious, prisoners out of aircraft over the ocean. Not even pregnant women were spared from electric shocks to genitalia and waterboarding.
As Congress became concerned over the intensifying repression carried out by U.S. allies, Kissinger assured his nervous Argentine counterparts: “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported.” Those “friends” killed 30,000 innocent people in Argentina alone.
In Central America, where civil wars broke out, the destruction was even greater. The CIA and the Pentagon worked with death squads in the name of U.S. national security. In El Salvador, where Washington spent $6 billion trying to defeat rebels, 75,000 lost their lives.
Today, Washington still disregards human rights abuses in its military alliances. Colombia’s army is drenched in scandal over its execution of 1,600 innocent civilians, who were later claimed as rebels killed in combat. The United Nations has called political murder at the hands of the army “widespread and systematic.” Nevertheless, Obama’s first foreign appropriations budget has slated $270 million in military aid to Colombia.
At the National Archives, Obama made a veiled criticism of the Bush administration’s policies.
“We went off course,” Obama said.
As U.S. involvement in Latin America shows, the truth is that the ship went off course a long time ago. Acknowledging this would be the first step toward steering it straight again.
Teo Ballve is a writer for Progressive Media Project, affiliated with The Progressive magazine.
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Tags:Colombia, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Latin America, President Obama, Salvador Allende, U.S. foreign policy, United States
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