The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 10, 2009
by Jacob G. Hornberger
U.S. officials are now concerned not only with a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan but also a Taliban takeover in Pakistan. These problems, however, were caused by the U.S. Empire itself.
While most Americans now view President Bush’s Iraq War as a “bad war,” the common perception is that Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was a “good war” (despite the fact that he went to war without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war). The notion is that the U.S. government was justified in invading Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban regime from power because the Taliban and al-Qaeda conspired to commit the 9/11 attacks.
There’s just one big problem with that belief: it’s unfounded.
The reason that Bush ousted the Taliban from office was that the Taliban regime refused to comply with his unconditional demand to deliver Osama bin Laden to U.S. officials after the 9/11 attacks.
The Taliban responded to Bush’s demand by asking him to furnish evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Upon receipt of such evidence, they offered to turn him over to an independent tribunal instead of the United States.
Bush never explained why the Taliban’s conditions were unreasonable. After all, as federal judges in the Jose Padilla case, the Zacarias Moussaoui case, and many others have confirmed, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. Thus, while it’s not unusual for one nation to seek the extradition of a foreigner to stand trial for a criminal offense, it’s just as reasonable for the nation receiving the request to be provided evidence that the person has, in fact, committed the crime.
Venezuela is currently seeking the extradition from the United States of a man named Luis Posada Carriles, who is accused of bombing a Cuban airliner over Venezuelan skies, a terrorist act that succeeded in killing everyone on board.
Venezuela and the United States have an extradition agreement. Nonetheless, the U.S. government is refusing to extradite Posada to Venezuela. The reason? It says that it fears that Venezuelan authorities will torture Posada. (Another reason might be that Posada was a CIA operative.)
But if fear of torture is a valid reason for refusing an extradition request from Venezuela, then why wouldn’t the same reason apply with respect to the Taliban’s refusal to extradite bin Laden to the United States? I think everyone would agree that if bin Laden had been turned over to the CIA or the Pentagon, he would have been brutally tortured, perhaps even executed, without ever being brought to trial before a fair and independent judicial tribunal.
What about the Taliban’s request that Bush provide evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks? That request is precisely what is done in extradition proceedings. When one nation seeks the extradition of a foreigner, the rules of extradition require it to provide evidence to support the request.
What was remarkable about the Taliban offer was that there wasn’t even an extradition agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. The Taliban was offering to deliver bin Laden to an independent tribunal even though international law did not require it, so long as U.S. officials provided the same type of evidence that is ordinarily required in an extradition proceeding.
Yet Bush refused to consider either the Taliban’s offer or its request for evidence. His position was effectively this: “We are the world’s sole remaining empire. We have the most powerful military on the planet. We have the capability of smashing you and removing your regime from power. You will comply with our demand, unconditionally and immediately.”
But the Taliban refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional demand. Consequently, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, it not only went after bin Laden, it also took sides in Afghanistan’s civil war, taking the side of the Northern Alliance. Ousting the Taliban from power in a classic regime-change operation, U.S. officials installed Hamid Karzai into office, who has been a loyal, friendly, and compliant member of the empire ever since, but one whose regime is now under constant attack by those who were ousted from power by the U.S. Empire.
While Bush and other U.S. officials promised to disclose evidence that the Taliban regime had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks, that promise was never fulfilled and it was ultimately forgotten. The likely reason for that is that they never had such evidence. After all, if they had evidence of such complicity, they would never have wasted time demanding that the Taliban turn bin Laden over. They would have simply declared war against Afghanistan for having attacked the United States.
What would have been the ideal way of handling bin Laden? The same way that the United States handled Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who committed the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Treating that attack as a criminal offense, U.S. officials simply waited Yousef out, relied on good police work, and finally were able to effect his arrest in Pakistan. He is now residing in a U.S. federal penitentiary. No bombs, no missiles, no destruction, no killing of Pakistani wedding parties, and no needless production of new enemies for the United States.
Instead, treating the capture of bin Laden as a military problem, U.S. officials invaded the country, killed and maimed countless innocent people, wreaked untold destruction on Afghanistan, effected regime change, created new enemies for the United States … and failed to capture bin Laden.
But even given the military invasion of Afghanistan, the aim of that invasion could have been limited to going after bin Laden rather than being used as an opportunity to effect regime change at the same time.
Indeed, that’s precisely what happened after Pancho Villa killed several Americans in a raid on Columbus, New Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. After the raid, U.S. officials sent an expeditionary force into Mexico to capture him and bring him back to justice. While the expedition was unsuccessful, what was noteworthy about it was that the expedition force limited itself to trying to capture Villa, not taking sides in Mexico’s civil war.
We would be remiss if we failed to keep in mind the role that U.S. foreign policy played in bringing into existence and supporting the Taliban. In a November 5, 2001, article, Congressman Ron Paul pointed out:
We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.
Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA….
Incredibly, in May the U.S. announced that we would reward the Taliban with an additional $43 million in aid for its actions in banning the cultivation of poppy used to produce heroin and opium. Taliban rulers had agreed to assist us in our senseless drug war by declaring opium growing “against the will of God.”…
Once the Taliban regime refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional order to turn over bin Laden, the U.S. Empire did what it had done and tried to do in so many other countries — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, and others — bring about regime change by ousting a recalcitrant regime that refused to comply with the unconditional orders of the U.S. Empire — a regime that the U.S. Empire itself had helped to create — and replacing it with a submissive pro-empire regime. In the process, the empire succeeded in embroiling the United State into one more foreign conflict, one that has now spread to nuclear-armed Pakistan.
It’s just another “success story” in the life of the U.S. Empire and its interventionist foreign policy.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
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Peace and Justice Post 
Obama bows to Republican right and military on torture photos
May 14, 2009By Bill Van Auken | WSWS, 14 May 2009
The Obama administration’s decision Wednesday to renege on its promise to comply with a court order and release photographs of US personnel torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan represents another capitulation by his administration to mounting pressure from the right and the military-intelligence apparatus.
Speaking briefly to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Obama said that the photographs would “further inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger.”
He claimed that the images are “not particularly sensational” and “would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” Obama failed to explain what makes the US president the arbiter of what is of “benefit to our understanding.”
The Pentagon, with Obama’s declared support, announced last month that it would release a “substantial number” of photos of US personnel abusing detainees at several prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision was taken in compliance with a decision last September by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals upholding a lower court victory for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had sought the photographs in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The full appeals court refused to rehear the case.
The photographs, reportedly 44 in all, were set to have been released May 28.
The Bush administration had argued that the release of the photos would generate international outrage and violate the rights of the detainees under the Geneva Conventions, rights that the administration had explicitly claimed had no application to detainees, who were classified as “enemy combatants.”
Apparently, the Obama administration is preparing to repackage the arguments made under George W. Bush, claiming that the release of the photos would threaten national security and, as the president asserted unconvincingly Wednesday, would have a “chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”
In making its “national security” case for suppressing the photographs, the Obama administration would likely be compelled to go to the US Supreme Court.
Amplifying on Obama’s statements, an administration spokesman told the media, “The president would be the last to excuse the actions depicted in these photos. That is why the Department of Defense investigated these cases and why individuals have been punished through prison sentences, discharges, and a range of other punitive measures.”
Nothing could more clearly sum up the criminal character of the Obama administration’s decision to prevent the release of these photos. Those subjected to “punitive measures” have consisted of a handful of junior enlisted men, such as those individuals punished in connection with the photographs uncovered in 2004 depicting the horrific treatment of detainees held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The entire point of exposing the photographs of similar abuse from a half dozen other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan was that they prove that the torture of detainees was not the work of a few “bad apples” or psychopaths in uniform, but was systemic. The photographs showing prisoners at Abu Ghraib being beaten, threatened with attack dogs, piled naked in pyramids, smeared with feces, hanging from shackles and dragged on leashes did not represent an aberration. Rather these odious practices and worse were carried out on orders that came from the White House to the Pentagon and down the military chain of command.
The ACLU’s Executive Director Anthony D. Romero denounced the about-face by the White House. “The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.
Romero continued, “It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known—whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration’s complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.”
Jameel Jaffar, who argued the case for the ACLU called the decision “inconsistent with the promise of transparency that President Obama has repeated so many times.”
What is to account for the Obama administration’s sudden reversal?
The New York Times cited administration officials arguing that the photographs should be suppressed because “the missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan were entering risky, new phases. In Iraq, American combat forces are withdrawing from urban areas and are reducing their numbers nationwide. In Afghanistan, more than 20,000 new troops are flowing in to combat an insurgency that has grown in potency.”
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Wednesday that Generals Raymond Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, David McKiernan, the recently sacked commander in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus, the chief of US Central Command, which oversees both wars, “have all voiced real concern about this.” He added, “Particularly in Afghanistan, this is the last thing they need.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, appearing before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, said that the generals had “expressed very serious reservations about this and their very, very great worry that release of the photographs will cost American lives. That was all it took for me.”
Obama informed Odierno of his decision at a White House meeting Tuesday, before announcing it to the public.
Thus, Obama bowed to the demands of Gates, Petraeus, Odierno and McKiernan, all of whom were placed in their present positions by the same Bush administration that instituted torture as a standard operation procedure for the military and the CIA.
Even more importantly, Obama’s U-turn on the question of the torture photos has been carried out in the face of a concerted campaign led by former Vice President Dick Cheney to defend torture and portray the new administration’s decision to repudiate “enhanced interrogation techniques” and to release Justice Department memos justifying torture methods as paving the way for new terrorist attacks.
This has been accompanied by an attempt to justify the crimes of the Bush administration in relation to torture by emphasizing the complicity of key Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who were briefed on the use of waterboarding and other acts of torture being carried out against detainees and voiced no objection.
This effort has apparently been spearheaded by the CIA itself, which leaked documents detailing the number of briefings provided to members of Congress on the ongoing torture of detainees beginning in 2002.
There is no doubt that Obama is retreating in the face of this offensive by the Republican right and the national security complex. More fundamentally, however, the administration has made it clear from the outset that it has no interest in seeing any serious investigation of the torture carried out under the Bush administration, much less in the prosecution of those who ordered these practices, from Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and other cabinet members on down.
Its aim is to preserve intact the police-state infrastructure erected by the Bush administration in its “global war on terror,” while continuing to wage the wars of aggression that the previous government began in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This policy of political cowardice and complicity has inevitably turned Obama himself into a defender of torture, using the same “national security” arguments as the Bush administration to cover up its crimes.
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Tags:Abu Ghraib prison, American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero, Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, defending torture, Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Obama administration, photographs, President Obama, prisoners abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, torturing the detainees, violation of Geneva Conventions
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