{"id":75187,"date":"2016-06-20T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=75187"},"modified":"2016-06-17T14:48:23","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:48:23","slug":"counting-the-crimes-of-the-war-on-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/06\/counting-the-crimes-of-the-war-on-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Counting the Crimes of the War on Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Others Be Jailed? <\/em>Maybe we’ll never see America’s torturers behind bars. They should still have to tell the truth about what they did.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe cold was terrible but the screams were worse,\u201d Sara Mendez\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the BBC. \u201cThe screams of those who were being tortured were the first thing you heard and they made you shiver. That\u2019s why there was a radio blasting day and night.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, Mendez was a young Uruguayan teacher with leftist leanings. In 1973, when the military seized power in her country (a few months before General Augusto Pinochet\u2019s more famous coup in Chile), Mendez fled to Argentina. She lived there in safety until that country suffered its own coup in 1976.<\/p>\n

That July, a joint Uruguayan-Argentine military commando group kidnapped her in Buenos Aires and deposited her at Automotores Orletti, a former auto repair shop that would become infamous as a torture site and paramilitary command center. There she was indeed tortured \u2014 and there, too, her torturers stole her 20-day-old baby, Sim\u00f3n, giving him to a policeman\u2019s family to raise.<\/p>\n

Mendez was an early victim of\u00a0Operation Condor<\/a>, a torture and assassination program focused on the region\u2019s leftists that, from 1975 to 1986, would spread terror across Latin America\u2019s southern cone. On May 27th, an Argentine court\u00a0convicted<\/a>\u00a014 military officers of crimes connected with Operation Condor, issuing prison sentences ranging from 13 to 25 years. Among those sentenced was Reynaldo Bignone, Argentina\u2019s last military dictator, now 88. (He held power from 1982 to 1983.)<\/p>\n

Those convictions are deeply satisfying to the surviving victims and their families, to the legal teams that worked for more than a decade on the case, and to human rights organizations around the world. And yet, as just as this outcome is, it has left me with questions \u2014 questions about the length of time between crime and conviction, and about what kinds of justice can and cannot be achieved through prosecutions alone.<\/p>\n

Operation Condor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Operation Condor was launched by the security forces of five military dictatorships: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Brazil soon joined, as did Ecuador and Peru eventually. As a Cold War anti-communist collaboration among the police, military, and intelligence services of those eight governments, Condor offered an enticing set of possibilities. The various services could not only cooperate, but pursue their enemies in tandem across national borders.<\/p>\n

Indeed, its reach stretched as far as Washington, D.C., where in 1976 its operatives\u00a0assassinated<\/a>\u00a0former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier and his young assistant, Ronni Moffitt, both of whom then worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank.<\/p>\n

How many people suffered grievously or died due to Operation Condor? A definitive number is by now probably beyond recovery, but records from Chile\u2019s secret police suggest that by itself Argentina\u2019s \u201cdirty war<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the name given to the Argentine junta\u2019s reign of terror, \u201cdisappearances,\u201d and torture \u2014 took the lives of 22,000 people between 1975 and 1978. Thousands more are thought to have died before that country\u2019s dictatorship ended in 1983. It\u2019s generally\u00a0believed<\/a>\u00a0that at least another 3,000 people died under the grimmest of circumstances in Chile, while thousands more were tortured but lived. And although its story is less well known, the similar reign of terror of the Uruguayan dictatorship directly affected the lives of almost every family in the country. As Lawrence Wechsler\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in a 1989 article in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>:<\/p>\n

By 1980, one in every fifty Uruguayans had been detained at some point, and detention routinely involved torture; one in every five hundred had received a sentence of six years or longer under conditions of extreme difficulty; and somewhere between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand Uruguayans went into exile. Comparable percentages for the United States would involve the emigration of thirty million people, the detention of five million, and the extended incarceration of five hundred thousand.<\/em><\/p>\n

And what was the U.S. role in Operation Condor? Washington did not (for once) plan and organize this transnational program of assassination and torture, but its national security agencies were certainly involved, as declassified Defense Department communications\u00a0indicate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0The Condor Years<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Columbia University journalism professor\u00a0<\/em>John Dinges reported<\/a>\u00a0that the CIA provided training for Chile\u2019s secret police, computers for Condor\u2019s database, telex machines and encoders for its secret communications, and transmitters for its private, continent-wide radio communications network. Chilean Colonel Manuel Contreras, one of Condor\u2019s chief architects (who was then on the CIA payroll), met with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters four times. And what did the CIA get in return? Among other things, access to the \u201cresults\u201d of interrogation under torture, according to Dinges.<\/p>\n

\u201cLatin American intelligence services,\u201d he added,<\/p>\n

\u201cconsidered U.S. intelligence agencies their allies and provided timely and intimate details of their repressive activities. I have obtained three documents establishing that information obtained under torture, from prisoners who later were executed and disappeared, were provided to the CIA, the FBI, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). There is no question that the U.S. officials were aware of the torture.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Justice Delayed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why did it take 40 years to bring the architects of Operation Condor to justice? A key factor: for much of that time, it was illegal in Argentina to put them on trial.<\/p>\n

In the first years of the new civilian government, the Argentine congress passed two laws that granted these men immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the dirty war. Only in 2005 did that country\u2019s supreme court rule that those impunity laws were unconstitutional. Since then, many human rights crimes have been prosecuted. Indeed, Reynaldo Bignone, the former dictator, was already in jail when sentenced in May for his role in Operation Condor. He had been convicted in 2010 of kidnapping, torture, and murder in the years of the dirty war. As of March, Argentina\u2019s Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) had\u00a0recorded<\/a>\u00a0666 convictions for participation in the crimes of that era.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a question that can\u2019t help but arise: What\u2019s the point of bringing such old men to trial four decades later? How could justice delayed for that long be anything but justice denied?<\/p>\n

One answer is that, late as they are, such trials still establish something that all the books and articles in the world can\u2019t: an\u00a0official<\/em>\u00a0record of the terrible crimes of Operation Condor. This is a crucial step in the process of making its victims, and the nations involved, whole again. As a spokesperson for CELS told<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, \u201cForty years after Operation Condor was formally founded, and 16 years after the judicial investigation began, this trial produced valuable contributions to knowledge of the truth about the era of state terrorism and this regional criminal network.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took four decades to get those convictions. Theoretically at least, Americans wouldn\u2019t have to wait that long to bring our own war criminals to account. I\u2019ve spent the last few years of my life\u00a0arguing<\/a>\u00a0that this country must find a way to hold accountable officials responsible for crimes in the so-called war on terror. I don\u2019t want the victims of those crimes, some of whom are\u00a0still locked up<\/a>, to wait another 40 years for justice.<\/p>\n

Nor do I want the United States to continue its slide into a brave new world, in which any attack on a possible enemy anywhere or any curtailment of our own liberties is permitted as long as it makes us feel \u201csecure.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s little wonder that the presumptive Republican presidential candidate feels free to run around promising yet more\u00a0torture<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0murder<\/a>. After all, no one\u2019s been called to account for the last round. And when there is no official acknowledgement of, or accountability for, the waging<\/a>\u00a0of illegal war,\u00a0<\/strong>international kidnapping operations<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong>the\u00a0<\/strong>indefinite detention without prospect of trial<\/a>\u00a0of prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo, <\/em>and, of course,\u00a0<\/strong>torture<\/a>, there is no reason not to do it all over again. Indeed, according to Pew Research Center polls, Americans are now more willing<\/a>\u00a0to agree that torture is sometimes justified than they were in the years immediately following the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n

Torture and the U.S. Prison System<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a recent piece of mine, I\u00a0focused<\/a>\u00a0on Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner the CIA tortured horribly, falsely claiming he was a top al-Qaeda operative, knew about a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and might even have trained some of the 9\/11 pilots. \u201cIn another kind of world,\u201d I wrote, Abu Zubaydah \u201cwould be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America\u2019s top leaders and its major intelligence agency.\u201d Although none of the charges against him proved true, he is still held in isolation at Guant\u00e1namo.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then something surprising happened. I received an email message from someone I\u2019d heard of but never met. Joseph Margulies was the lead counsel in\u00a0Rasul v. Bush<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0the first (and unsuccessful) attempt to get the Supreme Court to allow prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo to challenge their detention in federal courts. He is also one of Abu Zubaydah\u2019s defense attorneys.<\/p>\n

He directed me to an article of his, \u201cWar Crimes in a Punitive Age<\/a>,\u201d that mentioned my Abu Zubaydah essay. I\u2019d gotten the facts of the case right, he assured me, but added, \u201cI suspect we are not in complete agreement\u201d on the issue of what justice for his client should look like. As he wrote in his piece,<\/p>\n

There is no question that Zubaydah was the victim of war crimes. The entire CIA black site program [the agency\u2019s Bush-era secret prisons around the world] was a global conspiracy to evade and violate international and domestic law. Yet I am firmly convinced there should be no war crimes prosecutions. The call to prosecute is the Siren Song of the carceral state \u2014 the very philosophy we need to dismantle.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, one of the leading legal opponents of everything the war on terror represents is firmly opposed to the idea of prosecuting officials of the Bush administration for war crimes \u2014\u2014 though he has not the slightest doubt that they committed them. Margulies agrees that the crimes against Abu Zubaydah were all too real and \u201cgrave\u201d indeed, and that \u201csociety must make its judgment known.\u201d He asks, however, \u201cWhy do we believe a criminal trial is the only way for society to register its moral voice?\u201d<\/p>\n

He doubts that such trials are the best way to do so, fearing that by placing all the blame for the events of those years on a small number of criminal officials, the citizens of an (at least nominally) democratic country could be let off the hook for a responsibility they, too, should share. After all, it\u2019s unlikely the war on terror could have continued year after year without the support \u2014 or at least the lack of interest or opposition \u2014 of the citizenry.<\/p>\n

Margulies, in other words, raises important questions. When people talk about bringing someone to justice they usually imagine a trial, a conviction, and perhaps most important, punishment. But he has reminded me of my own longstanding ambivalence about the equation between punishment and justice.<\/p>\n

Even as we call for accountability for war criminals, we shouldn\u2019t forget that we live in the country that jails\u00a0the largest proportion<\/a>\u00a0of its own population (except for the Seychelles islands), and that holds the largest number of prisoners in the world. Abuse and torture \u2014 including\u00a0rape, sexual humiliation<\/a>, beatings, and\u00a0prolonged exposure<\/a>\u00a0to extremes of heat and cold \u2014 are routine realities of the U.S. prison system. Solitary confinement \u2014 presently being\u00a0experienced<\/a>\u00a0by at least 80,000 people in our prisons and immigrant detention centers \u2014 should also be considered a potentially psychosis-inducing form of torture.<\/p>\n

Every nation that institutionalizes torture, as the United States has done, selects specific groups of people as legitimate targets for its application. In the days of Operation Condor, Chilean torturers called their victims \u201chumanoids\u201d to distinguish them from actual human beings. Surely, though, the United States hasn\u2019t done that? Surely, there\u2019s no history of the torture of particular groups?<\/p>\n

Sadly, of course, such a history does exist \u2014 and like so many things in this country, it\u2019s all about race.<\/p>\n

The practice of torture in the U.S. didn\u2019t start with those post-9\/11 \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques<\/a>,\u201d nor with the Vietnam War\u2019s\u00a0Phoenix Program<\/a>, nor even with the nineteenth century U.S. war in\u00a0the Philippines<\/a>. It began when European settlers first treated native peoples and enslaved Africans as subhuman savages. As southern farmers started importing captured Africans to augment their supply of indentured English labor, they quickly realized that there was little incentive for those slaves to work \u2014 none but the pain of whippings, mutilations, and brandings, and the threat of yet more pain.<\/p>\n

Torture and slavery, in other words, were fused at the root. From the first arrival of black people on this continent, it has been permissible, even legal, to torture them.<\/p>\n

And it didn\u2019t stop with emancipation. After the end of slavery, southern states began the practice of convict leasing \u2014 arresting former slaves and then their descendants, often on trumped-up charges, and renting them out as labor to farmers and later coal mine owners who had the power and legal right to whip and abuse them as they chose.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s\u00a0lynching<\/a>. Many people think of it as an extrajudicial death by hanging. As it was practiced in the Jim Crow South, however, it was a form of public, state-approved torture, often involving the castration or disembowelment of the living victim, sometimes followed by\u00a0death by fire<\/a>. Lynching thus\u00a0continued the practice of treating black minds and bodies as legitimate targets of torture. So maybe we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that, of the more than 2 million prisoners in the United States today, 40 percent are black, while the U.S. population is only 13 percent black.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the problem, then. When we say that putting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other top officials in their administration in prison for war crimes would be justice, we endorse a criminal justice system that is more criminal than just, and where torture is a daily occurrence.<\/p>\n

Do we want to do to Bush, Cheney, and their accomplices essentially what they did to their victims? There is, of course, a certain appeal to the idea of someday seeing such powerful white men among the suffering, tortured millions in our prison system, or even \u2014 like the supposed \u201cdirty bomber\u201d Jos\u00e9 Padilla<\/a>\u00a0and Abu Zubaydah \u2014 in perpetual solitary confinement.<\/p>\n

And yet, would this truly provide even a facsimile of justice, given that American prisons are hardly instruments of justice to begin with? Those opposed to the acts at the heart of America\u2019s never-ending war on terror were heartened when President Obama\u00a0ordered<\/a>\u00a0the CIA \u201cblack sites<\/a>\u201d dismantled globally. We continue to demand the closing of Guant\u00e1namo (something that looks increasingly unlikely to happen in his presidency).<\/p>\n

How, then, can we find justice through a prison system that uses similar methods on an everyday basis here in the U.S.?<\/p>\n

Forty Years to Go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

And then, of course, there is the question: Whom should justice truly serve?<\/p>\n

The first answer is: the victims of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d including those who were tortured, those detained without trial, the civilian \u201ccollateral damage\u201d of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the\u00a0\u201cunintended\u201d victims<\/a>\u00a0of drone assassinations. Then there are all those in the rest of the world who have to live with the threat of a nuclear-armed superpower that has in these years regularly refused to recognize the most basic aspects of the rule of law.<\/p>\n

Many who work with survivors of organized repression like Operation Condor say that their primary desire is not the punishment of their oppressors but official acknowledgement of what happened to them. In his\u00a0New Yorker <\/em>article, Wechsler, for instance, pointed out that, for the victims of torture, accountability may not be identical to punishment at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t necessarily insist that the former torturers go to jail \u2014 there has been enough of jail \u2014 but they do want to see the truth established. \u2026 It\u2019s a mysteriously powerful, almost magical notion, because often everybody already knows the truth \u2014 everyone knows who the torturers were and what they did, the torturers know that everyone knows, and everyone knows that they know.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Seeing \u201cthe truth established\u201d was the purpose behind South Africa\u2019s post-apartheid\u00a0Truth and Reconciliation Commission<\/a>. Torturers and murderers on both sides of the anti-apartheid struggle were offered amnesty for their crimes \u2014 but only after they openly acknowledged those crimes. In this way, a public record of the horrors of apartheid was built, and imperfect as the process may have been, the nation was able to confront its history.<\/p>\n

That is the kind of reckoning we need in this country. It started with the release of a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on the CIA\u2019s torture program, which brought many brutal details into the light. But that\u2019s just the beginning. We would need a full and public accounting not just of the CIA\u2019s activities, but of the doings of other military and civilian agencies and outfits, including the Joint Special Operations Command. We also would need a full-scale airing of the White House\u2019s drone assassination program, and perhaps most important of all, a full accounting of the illegal, devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq.<\/p>\n

Justice would also require \u2014 to the extent possible \u2014 making whole those who had been harmed. In the case of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d this might begin by allowing torture victims to sue their torturers in federal court (as the U.N. Convention against Torture requires). With one\u00a0exception<\/a>, the Obama administration has until now blocked all such efforts on national security grounds. In the case of the Iraq War, justice would undoubtedly also require financial reparations to repair the infrastructure of what was once a modern, developed nation.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re unlikely to see justice in the \u201cwar on terror\u201d until that cruel and self-defeating exercise is well and truly over and the country has officially acknowledged and accounted for its crimes. Let\u2019s hope it doesn\u2019t take another 40 years.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Rebecca Gordon teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of\u00a0<\/em>American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9\/11 War Crimes<\/a>\u00a0(Hot Books). Her previous books include\u00a0<\/em>Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9\/11 United States\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Letters from Nicaragua.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Others Be Jailed? Maybe we’ll never see America’s torturers behind bars. They should still have to tell the truth about what they did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}