CIA ATROCITIES REVEALED TO A NATIONAL SHRUG
Written by Ted Rall
Columbia City Paper
Sept 3 2009
WE HAVE MET THE NAZIS, AND THEY ARE US.
NEW YORK–Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis.
Godwin’s Law be damned–it’s impossible to read the newly-released
CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of
the Third Reich.
Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western
adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in
Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out
criminals’ eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities
were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the
Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war
crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of
"rational" technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality
and the perversion of medical science.
Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted
to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told
the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.
"The CIA’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules,
and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking,
eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy," observed The New York
Times. We have much in common with the Germans.
"In July 2002," the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer
"reportedly used a ‘pressure point’ technique: with both of his hands
on the detainee’s neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the
detainee’s carotid artery." Another agent "watched his eyes to the
point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then…shook
the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of
three applications on the detainee."
The CIA’s rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of
Dr. Sigmund Rascher’s experiments at Dachau and a parallel project
conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army’s infamous Unit 731 in occupied
Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after
World War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived
them over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed
protocols governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could
be subjected–protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned
over to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.
So it was in the CIA’s prisons at Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia,
eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere.
(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. Bush publicly banned torture in
2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007. Obama supposedly
banned it again earlier this year, but then his CIA director Leon
Panetta told Congress the agency reserves the right to keep doing
it. Until the entire secret prison network is dismantled and every
single prisoner released, it would be absurd to assume that torture is
not continuing.) Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the
"Water Dousing" section of the "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological
Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," which
"allow for water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap
water, or a bottle or similar container as the water source." Ah, the
glorious war on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as
41 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes–no longer, no colder.
For the record, the CIA’s medical expertise is about as reliable
as its legal and moral sense. Forty-one degrees is bracingly cold;
41 was the temperature of the Hudson River was when US Airways
Flight 1549 crashed into it earlier this year. (Remember the ice
floes?) "Generally, a person can survive in 41-degree water for 10,
15 or 20 minutes," Dr. Christopher McStay, an emergency room physician
at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital told Scientific American magazine.
Like its Gestapo and SS antecedents, the CIA is highly
bureaucratic. CIA employees were informed that "Advance Headquarters
approval is required to use any physical pressures [against
prisoners]." And those permissions came from the very top of the
chain of command: the White House, which ordered the Office of
Legal Counsel and other legal branches of the federal government
to draft "CYA" memoranda. The memos, wrote Joshua L. Dratel in his
introduction to "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib," a
compilation of memos authorizing torture of Muslim detainees reflect
"a wholly result-oriented system in which policy makers start with
an objective and work backward."
Also reminiscent of Nazism is the utter absence of firewalls
that has come to characterize the behavior of top government
officials. Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany corrupt the judiciary
by using the courts to carry out political policy. Beginning under
Bush and now under Obama, judicial independence has been eradicated.
On August 28th The New York Times reported: "In July, Leon E. Panetta,
the CIA director, tried to head off the investigation [of the CIA’s
torture program], administration officials said. He sent the CIA’s top
lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to [the Department of] Justice to persuade
aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for
an inquiry." There’s a term for this: Obstruction of Justice. You’re
not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an investigation. It
was count six of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
To Holder’s credit, he has appointed a special prosecutor. To his
discredit, the focus of the investigation is narrow: he will only go
after officials who went beyond the Bush Administration’s over-the-top
torture directives (which allow, as seen above, freezing people to
death). He does not plan to go after the worst criminals, who are the
Bush Administration lawyers and officials, including Bush and Cheney
themselves, who ordered the war crimes–much less those like Obama
who are currently covering them up.
He should change his mind. While he’s at it, he should throw Leon
Panetta in jail.
Holder’s brief currently involves just 20 cases, which include
detainees who were murdered by the CIA. But even those will be tough
to prosecute, reports The New York Times: "Evidence, witnesses and
even the bodies of the victims of alleged abuses have not been found
in all cases."
Because, you see, the bodies were burned and dumped.
They–the CIA–are Nazis for committing the crimes.
And we are Nazis for not giving a damn. Only a third of Americans told
the April 27th CBS News/New York Times poll that there ought to be
an investigation of Bush-era war crimes–and they don’t care enough
to march in the streets, much less break a few windows. So few of
my columns on torture have been reprinted by American newspapers or
websites that I seriously contemplated not bothering to write this one.
We have met the Nazis, and they are us.
(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial
Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and
"Silk Road to Ruin.")