Are Claims of American Exceptionalism a Sick Joke?

Among the racists, homophobes, and anti-women elements of the Republican Party and certainly among the Tea Party loons, the myth of "American exceptionalism" is almost as sacred as the Bible which they use to justify their hatred toward everyone else.   The myth is a continuation of the Old Testament myth that sought to give the Israelites a sense of being special and gave Israel claims to a great history that, as modern archaeology is confirming, in fact did not exist.  A piece in Salon looks at this myth of the far right and the ways in which America is exceptional, but not in a good way.  Here are some excerpts:

Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state.

All of the exceptions that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II. Until the creation of the CIA in 1947, the United States had been an innocent abroad in the world of intelligence.

Yet by fits and starts, the covert domain inside the U.S. government has grown stealthily from the early twentieth century to this moment. It began with the formation of the FBI in 1908 and Military Intelligence in 1917. The Central Intelligence Agency followed after World War II along with most of the alphabet agencies that make up the present U.S. Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and last but hardly least, in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Make no mistake: there is a clear correlation between state secrecy and the rule of law — as one grows, the other surely shrinks.

The White House’s “exceptions” also produced a deeply contradictory U.S. attitude toward torture from the early years of the Cold War onward. Publicly, Washington’s opposition to torture was manifest in its advocacy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the CIA began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of those same international conventions. 

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA worked through the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development that sent American police advisers to developing nations.

Concealed within this larger OPS effort, CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay. Amnesty International documented widespread torture, usually by local police, in 24 of the 49 nations that had hosted OPS police-training teams. 

[T]he terror attacks of September 2001 sparked an unprecedented expansion in the scale of the intelligence community and a corresponding resurgence in executive exceptions.  The War on Terror’s voracious appetite for information produced, in its first decade, what the Washington Post branded a veritable “fourth branch” of the U.S. federal government with 854,000 vetted security officials, 263 security organizations, over 3,000 private and public intelligence agencies, and 33 new security complexes . . .

As this secret state swelled, the world’s sovereign decided that some extraordinary exceptions to civil liberties at home and sovereignty abroad were in order. The most glaring came with the CIA’s now-notorious renewed use of torture on suspected terrorists and its setting up of its own global network of private prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the reach of any court or legal authority. Along with piracy and slavery, the abolition of torture had long been a signature issue when it came to the international rule of law.

Even after the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report documented the Agency’s abusive tortures in painstaking detail, there was no move for either criminal or civil sanctions against those who had ordered torture or those who had carried it out. In a strong editorial on December 21, 2014, the New York Times asked “whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity.” The answer, of course, was yes. Immunity for hirelings is one of the sovereign’s most important exceptions.

Can there be any question that, in the decades to come, Washington will continue to violate national sovereignty through old-style covert as well as open interventions, even as it insists on rejecting any international conventions that restrain its use of aerospace or cyberspace for unchecked force projection, anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or conventions that in any way check this power will be violated when the sovereign so decides. These are now the unwritten rules of the road for our planet.  They represent the real American exceptionalism.

Read the entire piece.  It will NOT leave you feeling warm and fuzzy - or safe from your own government.

The Case for Trying Bush, Cheney and More for War Crimes

America has a very nasty history of what has been done to those deemed enemies - it started with the genocide against the Native Americans - but on occasion it has stood up for punishing those who committed atrocities.  The war crimes trials after World War II are a case in point.  Now, America seems to be shifted back to its old ways of talking about lofty ideals while allowing horrific deeds to go unpunished.  A piece in Salon makes the case of why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney among others need to be prosecuted for war crimes.  Here are select excerpts:

We’ve seen it in Ferguson, Missouri, with Darren Wilson getting off scot-free for killing Michael Brown. And we’ve seen it again in Staten Island, with Daniel Pantaleo getting off scot-free for killing Eric Garner. So why shouldn’t scores of CIA agents, contractors, higher-ups and other government officials—including former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—get off scot-free for torturing hundreds of detainees, including some complete innocents?  That, apparently, is the reigning logic following the release of the Senate torture report.

But just as genuine legal experts have been appalled by the perversion of normal and normative legal process in the grand jury proceedings in St. Louis County and Staten Island, there’s been a sharp line drawn by human rights lawyers and advocates in response to the Senate torture report, calling for prosecutions to match the crimes. 

“The report talks a lot about how the CIA lied and covered up, but it doesn’t change the fact that the basic practices were authorized, you know, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, things like that.” But also, “George Bush approved waterboarding by his own admission, he approved the CIA renditions program,”  while Cheney  “was the driving force behind many of the illegal detention and interrogation policies to begin with.”

As for the legal obligations involved, “The torture convention requires that acts of torture be referred to the competent authority for the purpose of prosecution,” Roth said. “The United States has an obligation to prosecute torture.” Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, agreed. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” he said.

The need for such action is only made more urgent by the fact a new Pew poll shows 56 percent of Americans believe the lie that torture provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, and relatedly that 51 percent think that “the CIA’s interrogation methods … were justified.”

As the Intercept’s Dan Froomkin tweeted, “If 56 percent of Americans think ‘CIA interrogation’ was effective, all that tells us is that they’ve been misled,” adding, “Just like 70 percent of Americans once though Saddam was behind 9/11, now 56 percent think torture worked. This is a massive indictment of the U.S. media.” But it’s not just the media. America’s entire elite infrastructure is indicted in this state of affairs, which is why America so desperately needs to have broad-based, high-profile torture trials on the model of the Nuremberg Trials following World War II . . . 

Al-Qaida’s whole aim with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the U.S. into a self-destructive conflict in the Middle East, and to expose and exploit our contradictions. And thanks primarily to the Bush/Cheney delusional response (and Obama’s limited willingness to alter direction), that’s exactly what has happened.

[E]verything the U.S. has done since 9/11 has been seriously misguided at best, and Obama’s policy changes have merely trimmed around the edges of what Bush and Cheney started, because he has been obsessed with trying to quickly unify the country, papering over  profound differences, rather than facing up to the genuine deep difficulties of overcoming them.

Obama invoked the shameful, discredited Nazi Nuremberg Defense (“I was only following orders”), when he said:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

Not only is this an insult to the real heroes, who spoke out against the barbarism they were tasked with, the Nuremberg Principles, which came out of the Nuremberg Trials, explicitly rejected this defense:

Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

They also rejected the notion that those who give the orders are exempt:

Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

These two principles aren’t that hard to grasp, for anyone familiar with TV crime dramas. Both the hit man and the man who orders the hit are guilty of murder.  Street crimes, suite crimes, international war crimes—the same logic applies equally to all of them.

Bush and Cheney’s unhinged panic drove the entire process off the rails. Yet, even today they and their defenders continue to pretend that they were the tough guys, the realists, the ones who protected us. They need to stand trial in part simply so that this lie can be publicly put to rest. 

Did Bush/Cheney Authorize Nazi-Like Experimentation on Humans?

Various aspects of what the Senate torture report revealed in therms of the torture and war crimes authorized the the evil duo of Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Less discussed is a related aspect of what the CIA did under the authorization from the White House: experimentation on humans to find ways to break them.  It's something right out of the annals of what the Nazi regime and Gestapo did in Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's.  Any decent American ought to be horrified by this revelation.  Frighteningly, many are not and it speaks volumes about America's further moral descent under those who claim to be the champions of "Christian values."  The Nation looks at some of these less reported horrors:

Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.

The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”

In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in 1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun. That would have seemed like a “never again” moment.

But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.

[U]ntil the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.

My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA’s program as one of human experimentation. If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse perpetrators as “patriots” who “acted in good faith.” Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of advocates and apologists.

Not all at the CIA and within the military bought into torture and experiments on human beings.  A piece here looks at these unsung heroes who supported decency. 

George W. Bush Cancels Appearance at Swiss Charity Gala Over F of Arrested

While Barack Obama and the U.S. Justice Department appear prepared to ignore their obligations under international law to prosecute George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, et al, for war crimes and torture crimes, even dimwitted Chimperator Bush realizes that by leaving American territory, he risks arrest by nations who do not ignore their obligations international law.   Hence Bush's cancellation of his scheduled appearance at a Swiss charity event in Geneva in February.  The Daily Mail has details.  Here are highlights:

Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland over fears he could have been arrested on torture charges.

Mr Bush was due to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala in Geneva on February 12.
But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the country.

Criminal complaints against Mr Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials said.  Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against him in the Swiss city tomorrow for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay.

Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, said: 'He's [Bush] avoiding the handcuffs.'

The action in Switzerland showed Mr Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he travelled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, he said.

Mr Brody is a U.S.-trained lawyer who specialises in pursuing war crimes, including Chile's late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad's ousted president Hissene Habre.

He said: 'President Bush has admitted ordering waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law.  'Under the Convention on Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush.'

Switzerland and the U.S. are among 147 countries that have ratified the 1987 treaty.

Of course, the one I truly want to see in handcuffs and standing trial is the entreatingly foul Dick Cheney.  Better yet, I would love the opportunity to see Cheney convicted as a war criminal and punished accordingly.  I will leave it to readers to surmise the punishment that would please me the most.

Cheney - Bush Knew About CIA Torture

Apparently wanting to make sure that, like himself, Chimperator George Bush can never again leave American territory, Emperor Palpatine Cheney is working hard to dispel the storyline of those who are trying to depict Bush as too clueless to have known about the CIA torture program and other war crime abuses being committed in the name of the American people.  MSN News reports on Cheney's effort to fully implicate George W. Bush.  Here are excerpts:

President George W Bush was fully aware and an "integral part" of the CIA's torture of terror suspects, his vice-president Dick Cheney said Wednesday. 

The long-awaited US Senate report released Tuesday on the program of harsh treatment and torture of detainees said Bush only learned details of it in 2006, four years after it started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Speaking to Fox News, Cheney denied Bush was kept out of the loop. He said the then-president "was in fact an integral part of the program and he had to approve it."


Asked if Bush knew specific details of how specific interrogations were being conducted, Cheney was more vague, saying: "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that."

Bush has yet to speak out publicly on the Senate report, which has drawn scathing criticism worldwide of what the CIA has called "enhanced interrogation techniques", amid calls for those involved to face trial.


"Such a gross violation of our liberal, democratic values must not happen again," German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, reflecting the embarrassment of Washington's European allies.
America's great power rival China -- often on the end of US censure for its rights record -- was equally unimpressed.

"We believe the US side should reflect upon itself, correct its ways and earnestly respect and abide by the rules of international conventions," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

The United Nations said the program violated international law and basic human rights, and British-based advocacy group CAGE demanded criminal proceedings.

Around the world, human rights bodies demanded that current US President Barack Obama -- who halted the torture but has not gone after the perpetrators -- take legal action.

Bush and Cheney et al have done immense damage to America's ability to chide others on human rights abuses.  True, America has a very ugly history, if one knows accurate history, but the use of torture and war crimes makes it clear that nothing has really changed and America is plagued with hypocrisy.  People around the world are tired of being told by America to "do as we say and not as we do."

Are International Legal Cases Against Torture Participants Coming?

As noted in one of the last posts uploaded yesterday, under the UN Convention on Torture, if the United States fails to prosecute American torture participants, then other countries can launch prosecutions and the United States will have to either allow the defendants to be extradited or find itself further outside the bounds of international law.  Think Progress has a piece that looks at the question of whether international prosecutions are in the offing.  It's probably safe to say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won't be traveling outside the USA any time soon.  Here are article highlights:

New evidence might bring new legal cases against American officials involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program after the release of previously classified information on Tuesday. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 525-page report report which details the “brutal” interrogations of 39 detainees has spurred calls for prosecution from the U.N., as well as human rights’ and civil liberties organizations. 

“We made mistakes,” C.I.A. director John Brennan said in a statement, but he maintained that his agency’s policies were legal. 

But Ben Emmerson, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights doesn’t think official authorization from agencies within the U.S. frees those who carried out torture from facing justice. 

“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever,” Emmerson said in a statement. “Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.” 

He added that as a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is legally obligated to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance if there is sufficient evidence to to bring about a case.

International law does not permit individuals who carried out torture to dismiss liability because they were acting on orders. And, Emmerson said, “States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.”

“Other countries have all the information they need should they wish to exercise universal jurisdiction and prosecute these officials should they appear in their borders,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch said.

Universal jurisdiction is a legal doctrine that allows the courts of any country to try certain crimes against humanity including torture regardless of where those crimes took place or who is alleged to have committed them. It stems from a 1998 case brought by a Spanish court against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the murder and torture of opposition figures. 

Some organizations that have already invoked this principle and are planning to use this new release of information to build their case against American officials.

In a fact sheet, the ACLU notes that there are a number of U.S. laws that could be invoked to hold those accused of torture responsible including the federal torture statute that criminalizes the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering with intent outside of the U.S. 

The group points out that while some of the alleged crimes occurred more than a decade ago, “There is no statute of limitations under the torture statute when the abuse risked or resulted in serious physical injury or death.”

Here Come the War Crime Apologists

It's no surprise that many on the far right are falling all over themselves to defend the criminal use of torture revealed by the Senate torture report released yesterday.  I'm sure many of them, had they been in Nazi Germany in the period 1938 - 1945 would have found justification for the countless horrors the Nazi regime inflicted on millions.  The numbers of victims involved in the Bush/Cheney torture program may be smaller by far than what Hitler oversaw, but torturing smaller numbers doesn't somehow make it acceptable or any less criminal under international law.  As noted previously, it is no wonder Republicans did not want this report to see the light of day because through Bush and Cheney they own it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the efforts of the war crimes apologists.  Here are excerpts:

The publication today [yesterday] of a censored summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture at C.I.A. prisons has brought war-crime apologists out from under their rocks.

Chief among them is former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the all-time great prisoner abuse enthusiasts. Even before the report was issued, Mr. Cheney was telling The New York Times on Monday that torturing prisoners was absolutely the right thing to do and that everything the C.I.A. did was authorized.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said releasing the report was a “terrible idea,” because it would put Americans in danger. “Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths,” he said, conveniently ignoring that it’s in the intelligence community’s interest to make such a prediction.

Mr. Rogers is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which has done absolutely nothing to shed light on this dismal chapter in American history. It’s specious to argue that transparency about torture, rather than torture itself, is to blame for any future retaliation.

Let’s be clear, the acts committed against the C.I.A.’s prisoners — no matter how murderous and awful some of those prisoners were — were disgusting and inexcusable. They violated all kinds of American and international laws against torture.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow,” he [John McCain] said. “The American people are entitled to it nonetheless. They must be able to make judgments about whether these policies and personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values.”

Quote of the Day: Will America Comply With the UN Convention on Torture?

Cheney - the real architect of the torture regime?

Perhaps I have beat to death the issue of American sponsored torture, but to me it gets to the heart of the problem with today's far right American conservatives and the Christofascists: they have no compassion for those who are different, especially in matters of race and religion, and they believe that they are wholly above the law.  Today's release of the Senate torture report now places America at the cross roads of either complying with the law - actually a treaty that it signed - or becoming in essence a rogue nation.  Andrew Sullivan quoting Ronald Reagan sums it up well:

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of [this] Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution,” – Ronald Reagan’s signing statement on the ratification of the UN Convention on Torture.

Allow me to repeat:

“Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

I guess all of a sudden the Christofascists and GOP crowd will claim amnesia on this part of Reagan legacy.