I watched Rachel Maddow on MSNBC the night the report came out. She was so excited by the titillating details ("rectal rehydration!"), so manic in her delivery as she anticipated the next stunning disclosure, that it was very hard to follow. Suffice it to say that it all came down to a couple of Mormon psychologists who were contract hires of the Agency with no background in interrogation. A no-bid contract at that! Can you believe it? Instead of going out and hiring a couple of shrinks with an extensive background in tortured confessions, the CIA just pays these jackasses $81 million to enable the whole awful war crimes thing!
Wow. That ought to keep the rubes in the cheap seats muttering to themselves for a long time. Once in a while it's mentioned that the CIA told the Bush Administration in 2003, at the outset of the Torture Program, that intelligence gathered by abusing prisoners doesn't work. No matter. $81 million to a couple of psychologists with no background in torture! What were they thinking?
John Brennan, head of the CIA, held a press conference where he attempted to push back against the Report's conclusions, at least as those conclusions were interpreted by the Media Hologram. Liberals and conservatives threw rocks at Johnny for that one. Nice try, Bozo! We know whose fault it was! It's all in the Report!
If any of this sounds familiar, you might be thinking back, even unconsciously, to Abu Ghraib. Remember? All of that humiliation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Who did it? A few bad apples, as you'll recall. Definitely not the fault of the political class, or the military higher-ups, and it's inconceivable that you could blame anyone in the White House.
That's the way things are played in the American Hologram, in our Virtual Reality.
'Twas not always thus. Let us recall those heady, moralistic days following World War II. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, where the American prosecutorial team was led by Robert Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court. Now there's a Special Prosecutor. The law applicable to Nazi war crimes had to be made up on the fly, to a certain extent. What the Third Reich had done was in a way unprecedented in modern times. The fundamental question was this: can war be criminalized and punished by the victors?
The Third Reich defendants relied principally on two defenses. The first was the ex post facto nature of the criminal laws themselves. If there was no clear precedent, if these laws weren't written down anywhere, then how were the Nazis to have notice that they would be indicted for war crimes? The Allied response, in essence, was this: we don't give a shit whether it's technically ex post facto or not. If you couldn't figure out that what you were doing was criminal, then you're a monster who doesn't deserve to live anyway. This argument has a satisfying irresistibility to it.
The second defense was the famous "I was only following orders" objection. This argument was more of a problem, because in a dictatorial political system, such as the Third Reich, the argument might be available to everyone except Adolf Hitler himself, and Hitler and his girlfriend were already dead, killing themselves in the bunker in April 1945. Should responsibility be limited to the political higher-ups, like Goebbels, Bormann, and the rest of the creeps? Should it be extended to military officers such as Goering of the Air Force, Donitz of the Navy, Joachim von Ribbentrop of the foreign service, Jodl of the Army? How about handsome guys who seemed really cultured like Albert Speer?
The decisions on whom to indict seems to have been done mainly by a general feeling on degree of culpability. The Nuremberg Principles made the main war crime the "crime against peace," or aggressive war of invasion not premised on self-defense. In the end the principal Nuremberg Trial between November 1945 and October 1946 proceeded against 23 Third Reich defendants, including Martin Bormann in absentia. The "illegal war" was the principal crime, in the thinking of the Allied prosecutors, on the theory that such a war of aggression makes possible and enables all of the crimes against humanity which follow. The killing of civilians, atrocities such as "collective reprisals" carried out against whole occupied towns because of sabotage against the Axis military, the Holocaust itself.
The years after World War II were, relatively speaking, moral times, the high point for the truth and reconciliation process. Contrariwise, this is the modern era, where no standards exist anymore and no accountability is demanded. Torture, illegal invasions, mass killing of civilians - all of these things are okay so long as you remind yourself that none of these is really you, and that the important thing now is to look forward, not backward into this sordid past.
One can, as a work of imagination, picture what might happen if American political and military leaders were placed on trial by some foreign tribunal. The Iraq War Crimes Trials, harking back to Principle #1 of Nuremberg, the critical role played by the illegal invasion itself. It's a commonplace in America to admit that the war was premised on fraud, so most of the work for the tribunal would already have been done. We happily admit the invasion was illegal; it's part of our normal discourse. The harder question, as before, would be determining who the defendants ought to be. My guess is that this hypothetical Tribunal would not spend a lot of time on the CIA and its "waterboarding" of prisoners. That would seem pretty incidental in the overall appraisal of matters. No, I suspect that this Tribunal would mainly focus on the political leadership in the United States, on the executive officers who asked for authorization to invade Iraq and Afghanistan
Dianne is 81 years old now, the oldest Senator in a generally gerontological legislative body. She next stands for reelection in 2018, so it seems likely this will be her final term. She's married to the uber-wealthy Richard Blum, real estate tycoon, and no doubt she will want to spend her final years close to their palatial home on Presidio Terrace in San Francisco. Dianne has been the perfect DLC-style liberal Democrat, generally in favor of Good Things, including the care and feeding of the Military-Industrial Complex, California's defense contractors, and of "support for the troops" in foreign theaters of war, which she's always voted for.
Senator Feinstein will be remembered for her "courage" in blowing the whistle on the CIA. That will be enough Truth & Reconciliation concerning the whole unfortunate business of the War on Terror, and consistent with our general practice of blaming not higher-ups but lower-downs whenever it's time for somebody to take the fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment