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The Moral Black Hole of George W. Bush: How an Administration that Came to Power Promising to Restore Moral Clarity to the White House Set the Stage for Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
By William T. Street
For those who skimmed the story or turned their eyes from graphic detail, suffice to say the Abu Ghraib photographs showed lots of nude brown men (most with sandbags over their heads) forcibly posed in bizarre homosexual and/or heterosexually provocative positions. They were being gawked at and taunted by grinning, khaki-clad American corrections personnel, some of whom wore latex gloves. There were prisoners cowering before dogs. A man shackled spread eagle to a bunk bed with women's panties pulled over his head and face. A naked man lying on his side with a dog collar and leash around his throat being tugged by a female MP. Efforts by some to equate this sickening abuse with fraternity hazing, or to justify such brutality as an understandable response to the stress of a combat environment or atrocities committed by the other side, surely drags moral relativism to a new low The photograph that should shock American sensibilities most is one that is not overtly sexual: the guy in the black shroud and Klansman hood with no eye holes, perched barefoot on a cardboard box with this arms outstretched, palms forward, wired up to electric cords for shocks to his hands and genitals. A picture truly worth a million words. There is something medieval about this horrifying image. From a distance, the photo looks like an eerie Rorschach ink blot, a wrong color ace of diamonds, a lop sided kite with jagged wires tailing away as if trolling for lightning. The pointed black hood completely veils the subject's face, like the black coverings traditionally placed over the head of a condemned prisoner standing on the hangman's gallows, or seated in Old Sparky. The figure's body is covered from shoulder to below knee with dark patterned, drapery type material which has frayed tassels along the bottom, the garment cut to flow freely like a poncho or oversized hospital gown. Only the hands, feet, and throat are bare flesh. Prolonged hooding of a captive renders them even more helpless, heightens the anxiety level, makes breathing harder, induces disorientation, and brings on feelings of claustrophobia. Common sense tells us that covering the face also serves the practical effect of preventing eye contact with the captor, inhibiting positive identification of the perpetrator later on if abuse occurs. Psychological studies show that if physical pain is going to be inflicted upon a human subject by another human being, the task may be made emotionally easier with a faceless victim. There is ancient method to this madness. No less a mainstream media source than Time Magazine recently reported that standing prisoners on boxes for lengthy periods was an interrogation technique used by both the Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD. Rigging electrical wires and adding a threat that falling off the box would lead to electrocution, was a refinement attributed to the Brazilian secret police. Incredibly, according to the professor quoted in Time who has extensively studied the grisly world of modern interrogation, this whole package - balancing on a box with arms outstretched and electrodes attached - is a "basic torture method known as crucifixion." Crucifixion? How on earth did a political regime that came to power promising to restore moral clarity in the Oval Office drag the whole nation to such profound depths of depravity? Blame it on the devil if you wish, but the lawyers had to sign off first. According to Newsweek, in the frantic months immediately following 9/11 that gave us anthrax scares, immigration sweeps, military tribunals, and the USA Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft quietly issued a formal legal opinion that the 1949 Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Queda and Taliban suspects captured in Afghanistan. The Geneva Conventions prohibit as crimes "cruel treatment & torture, outrages against human dignity and humiliating treatment" directed at prisoners who have surrendered in time of war. Behind closed doors within the Executive Branch, attorneys at the State Department & the career military Judge Advocates General vigorously objected to Mr. Ashcroft's interpretation of the Geneva treaties' scope. In January 2002, White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales sent President Bush a four-page legal memorandum, urging him to continue siding with the Attorney General's narrow view. The Gonzales memo (leaked by a whistle blower, now posted on Newsweek's website, and the subject of Congressional inquiry) candidly advanced two chilling rationales. First, the President's lawyer argued that continuing to designate Al Queda & Taliban detainees as enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war would preserve the administration's "flexibility for future conflicts." Alberto Gonzales counseled George Bush "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of warŠ. This new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisonersŠ" Attorney Gonzales' memo was dated January 25, 2002. We know now what we didn't know then. Regime change in Iraq was already well advanced into the classified planning pipeline. So when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had General Boykin and General Miller go from Guantanamo to Baghdad in the fall of 2003 to tighten up the military intelligence gathering action at Abu Ghraib under the watchful eye of General Sanchez, they were all just exercising their flexibility to designate so-called resistance insurgents captured in Iraq as "enemy combatants" rather than POW's. Welcome to the black hole. Second, President Bush's lawyer argued that publicly declaring the Geneva Conventions inapplicable would greatly reduce the risk of criminal prosecutions under the War Crimes Act, 18 USC 2441, a federal statute which makes it a serious felony for anybody (soldier or civilian) to violate international war crime treaties. Attorney Gonzales opined that treaty terms like "inhuman treatment" and "outrages against human dignity" were vague. His memo to the President concluded, "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would provide a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." No kidding. Now that's what we in the criminal law trade call premeditation and deliberation. By selectively opting out of the Geneva Conventions constraints, such legalism creates a solid defense not only to unwarranted War Crimes Act prosecutions, but also to perfectly righteous War Crimes Act prosecutions. Squarely presented with both sides of the Geneva Conventions dispute among his advisors, President George W. Bush personally made the decision to side with the Ashcroft/Rumsfeld faction of the administration, setting the stage (in the name of international law-and-order) for the eventual outrages of Abu Ghraib. Torture is torture. And torture has been shamefully exposed as the official policy of the United States of America in the war on terrorism as it is presently being waged. Senator Carl Levin, Senator John McCain, Congressman John Conyers, and others in Washington deserve our full support in their current efforts to affix political accountability. People of good conscience (and particularly those who believe that torture is a sin) should work together to categorically reject this grotesque and fundamentally immoral national politics. The guy in the hood on the box was not dreamed up by just a handful of rambunctious bad apple reservists in need of better adult supervision. |
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