Who Rules the World? (6 page)

Their plea was answered. The United States sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba’s liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual U.S. colony, as it remained until 1959.

The “American idea” was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign, initiated by the Eisenhower administration almost at once, to restore Cuba to its proper place: economic warfare (with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would overthrow the disobedient Castro government), invasion, the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of his highest priorities), and other crimes in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.
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American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls “the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses salt water. Thus, if the Mississippi River had resembled the Irish Sea, westward expansion would have been imperialism. From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer grasp of the truth.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples” of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of Lodge’s Republican party)—at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that accompanied it.
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These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence.
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Similar models would be adopted in many other areas where the United States imposed brutal national guards and other client forces, with consequences that should be well-known.

THE TORTURE PARADIGM

Over the past sixty years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book
A Question of Torture
. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed in the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the U.S. torture record:
Truth, Torture, and the American Way
.
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It is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lament that “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”
15

None of this is to say that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has done some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”
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Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, “the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy—paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed.” Obama’s ban “doesn’t even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of ‘armed conflict,’ which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren’t in armed conflict … his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.”
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Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens … to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.”
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That trend included military aid, was independent of need, and ran through the Carter years. Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.
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These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic became not worth studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward—a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

ADOPTING BUSH’S POSITIONS

An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA’s “torture paradigm” never violated the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture, at least as Washington interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm, developed at enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s and based on “the KGB’s most devastating torture technique,” kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical torture, which was considered less effective in turning people into pliant vegetables.

McCoy writes that the Reagan administration carefully revised the international torture convention “with four detailed diplomatic ‘reservations’ focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages,” the word “mental.” He continues: “These intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost.”

When Clinton sent the UN convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exempted the core of the CIA torture paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the torture convention; and those reservations, McCoy observes, were “reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention.”
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That is the “political land mine” that “detonated with such phenomenal force” in the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in 2006.

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were struck down by the courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures.

In the important case of
Boumediene v. Bush
in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration’s claim that prisoners in Guantánamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.
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Glenn Greenwald reviewed the aftermath of the case in
Salon
. Seeking to “preserve the power to abduct people from around the world” and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, treating “the
Boumediene
ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game—fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process.” Obama adopted the Bush position, “filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue,” arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) “can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind—as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.”
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Shortly after, a Bush-appointed federal judge “rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of
Boumediene
applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo.” The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, “squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions,” in radical violation of the president’s campaign promises and earlier stands.
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The case of
Rasul v. Rumsfeld
appears to be following a similar trajectory. The plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for their torture in Guantánamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, the Central Asian states, and the United States as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush administration sought to have the case dismissed. Obama’s Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials should not be held liable for torture and other violations of due process at Guantánamo, on the grounds that the courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners there enjoy.
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It was also reported that the Obama administration considered reviving military commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the
New York Times
: “Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.”
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A serious flaw in the criminal justice system, it appears.

CREATING TERRORISTS

There is much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information—the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective then it may be justified. By this argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot Eugene Hasenfus in 1986, after shooting down his plane as it delivered aid to U.S.-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the United States, as they did. Instead, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington—no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global superpower.

By the same standard, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator—John Negroponte, then the U.S. ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first director of national intelligence, essentially a counterterrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur)—they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further “ticking time bomb” attacks.

Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion. Accordingly, we know at once how to evaluate the pleas about valuable information.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as it does from the idea of the City on the Hill. Perhaps the most eloquent exposition of this thesis was presented by
New Republic
editor Michael Kinsley, a respected spokesman of “the left.” Americas Watch (part of Human Rights Watch) had protested State Department confirmation of official orders to Washington’s terrorist forces to attack “soft targets”—undefended civilian targets—and to avoid the Nicaraguan army, as they could do thanks to CIA control of Nicaraguan airspace and the sophisticated communications systems provided to the Contras. In response, Kinsley explained that U.S. terrorist attacks on civilian targets are justified if they satisfy pragmatic criteria: a “sensible policy [should] meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end”
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—“democracy” as U.S. elites determine its shape.

Kinsley’s thoughts elicited no public comment; to my knowledge, they were apparently deemed acceptable. It would seem to follow, then, that U.S. leaders and their agents are not culpable for conducting such sensible policies in good faith, even if their judgment might sometimes be flawed.

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), one of the most seasoned U.S. interrogators in Iraq, who elicited “the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.