OBAMA’S SEARCH FOR A MORAL COMPASS
by Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
search-for-a-moral-compass.html
April 13 2009
Some countries never acknowledge their crimes. It has been 95
years since the Turkish genocide against its Armenian population,
but the Turkish government will not confess to any role in crimes
that were committed. The Japanese have never admitted the terrible
crimes committed throughout Northeast and Southeast Asia during
World War II. And Israel has refused to acknowledge its numerous
crimes against the Palestinians, most recently in Gaza, where
Israeli soldiers committed grave violations of international law by
deliberately attacking civilian targets and failing to protect the
civilian population.
We know that the United States has committed crimes that violated
the 8th Amendment of the Constitution against "cruel and unusual
punishments;" the War Crimes Act of 1996; the Convention Against
Torture of 1984 (the United States is a signatory); and of course
Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. President Obama’s
handling of the war crimes of the United States in facilities in
Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Iraq, and Afghanistan is particularly
troubling because his administration has admitted that crimes were
committed. He has condemned torture and abuse, closed CIA secret
prisons, and ordered the closing of Guantanamo within the year.
Attorney General Eric Holder stated bluntly in his confirmation
hearings that "waterboarding is torture." CIA director Leon Panetta
has done the same, and the CIA has conducted no extraordinary
renditions since Panetta replaced General Michael Hayden as CIA
director. Extraordinary renditions amount to enforced disappearance,
which is also a violation of international law. Panetta also has
announced that the CIA will no longer use contractors to conduct
interrogations and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining
black sites.
We have paid a terrible price for these crimes according to General
officers who have served in Iraq; they believe that U.S. use of
torture and abuse is the major incentive in the recruitment of
Arab fighters to Iraq in order to conduct their own acts of terror,
including suicide bombings.
But the president has stated that the United States "must look forward,
and not backward," and CIA director Panetta has proclaimed that
CIA officers who conducted torture and abuse in CIA secret prisons
"should not be investigated, let alone punished." The deputy director
of the National Security Agency and a former CIA senior officer,
John Brennan, has lobbied aggressively at the Justice Department
and the CIA against any release of documents that deal with CIA’s
interrogation program and its policy of extraordinary renditions.
Brennan was President Obama’s first choice to be CIA director,
until the appearance of numerous articles that traced Brennan’s
role as a cheerleader for "enhanced interrogation techniques" and
extraordinary renditions. Finally, CIA has taken no action against
CIA officers responsible for the willful destruction of nearly 100
tapes of torture and abuse against terrorist suspects, and Panetta
has retained as his deputy director, Stephen Kappes, who was the
ideological driver for the worst of CIA’s techniques and programs.
The CIA’s crimes are no secret, having been fully documented by Mark
Danner in the "New York Review of Books," Jane Mayer and Sy Hersh in
the "New Yorker," and Dana Priest and Barton Gellman in the Washington
Post. We learned about CIA’s "black sites" in 2002; the torture and
abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2004; and FBI protests against CIA torture and
abuse in 2006. We know that President Bush, Vice President Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet endorsed
and encouraged these measures.
Numerous reports, including the Taguba Report in 2004, the report
of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the forthcoming
report of the Senate Armed Forces Committee have fully documented the
crimes. The recent Spanish preparation of a case against six lawyers
with the Bush administration, including attorney general Alberto
Gonzales, will lead to more revelations as will the inquiries taking
place in Britain and Poland.
The stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates
it with impunity. The stature of a nation is diminished when it
commits crimes against humanity. And the national leadership
is diminished when it ignores the need for accountability and
explicit repudiation. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has called for a
"truth commission" to gather information on U.S. detention and
interrogation programs.
Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Christopher Bond (R-MI) have
endorsed a similar investigation of CIA programs as well as an
"evaluation of intelligence information gained through the use of
enhanced and standard interrogation techniques." This would represent
a good start, but only President Obama can restore our moral compass
on the crimes of the post-9/11 era. The judgment of history will be
harsh if he chooses not to do so.
Melvin A. Goodman,a regular contributor to The Public Record, is
senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent more
than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency,
and the Department of Defense. His most recent book is "Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
