Assassination Got Legal Okay Long Ago; FBI Eyes Torture

The mathematics of imperial retribution for the crimes of Sept. 11 now include somewhere near 1000 dead civilians, according to the Taliban (Rumsfeld says he hasn't been able to count them personally), killed by the bombing of Afghanistan, and here at home more than 800 people of Mideast descent being held incommunicado without charges. Some of the FBI's captives have been shipped out to Southern jails where they are mercilessly beaten by inmates. The campaign against Al Qaeda has turned swiftly into war against the Taliban, and as swiftly again into the familiar air war, whose prime consequence is of course the killing and maiming of civilians, and the creation of vast numbers of starving refugees. If we had 20,000 indisputably dead Afghan civilians, would that establish moral parity with the 5000 dead in the World Trade Center buildings? Granted, a 4-1 ratio is probably insufficient.

The appropriate strategy to extract bin Laden from Afghanistan, and to isolate his relative Mullah Omar, was always a political one, of the sort in which the CIA is supposed to excel, with suitable backstairs intrigue and bribery, and promises to the chieftains and feudal lords that in the future their opium trade will not be inconvenienced by international reproof. In other words, once Mullah Omar's body can be exposed on the battlements of Kabul, hopefully alongside that of Osama bin Laden and his associates, life in Afghanistan can resume its normal course.

There have been the usual attempts at assassinating Taliban leaders, resulting in the apparent dispatch of Mullah Omar's 10-year-old son or perhaps grandson, reminiscent of the killing of Qaddafi's daughter in a similar bid to kill Libya's leader in the mid-1980s.

Some have been puzzled by the seeming contradiction between these assassination bids and the famous Executive Order 11905 (for whose repeal the CIA has been agitating for years) issued in February 1976 by President Gerald Ford, to the effect that "no employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." In 1989 a memo by the U.S. Army's chief legal officer, W. Hays Park, surfaced in The Army Lawyer, product of interdepartmental meetings between the State Dept., CIA and Justice Dept., and secretly approved by congressional intelligence oversight committees. It sought to clarify "the term [assassination] across the conflict spectrum," and duly did so.

According to Park, "the clandestine, low visibility or overt use of military force against legitimate targets...where such individuals or groups pose an immediate threat to United States citizens or the national security of the United States, as determined by competent authority, does not constitute assassination...and would not be prohibited by proscription in [Ford's Executive Order] or by international law." If striking at a "known terrorist" threat involves "too great a risk" for U.S. ground forces, it would even be "legally permissible to employ an air strike against that individual or group rather than attempt his, her or their capture."

So that's okay then. Mind you, since the BBC and an Indian newsletter have cited various Indian and Pakistani sources as saying that this summer, long before Sept. 11, the U.S. was preparing attacks on the Taliban, we can imagine Mullah Omar using exactly the same language as the U.S. Army lawyer to justify the crashing of the passenger jet into the Pentagon. When the interviewer from Al-Jazeera put this sort of argument to Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense cited the innocent civilians killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Back in 1993, when a missile attack on Baghdad ordered by Clinton killed a number of civilians including Iraq's best-known woman artist, a Defense Dept. source told journalist John Kelly (who unveiled the Park memo for CounterPunch in 1994) that "there's an assumed risk for people who work at military installations."

Justifying the mass murder of the occupants of the Trade Center towers might present greater legal obstacles, though there's no challenge too high but a properly trained lawyer can't surmount it.

FBI Eyes Torture

"FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans."

Thus began a piece by Walter Pincus on page 6 of The Washington Post on Sunday, and if you suspect that this is the overture to an argument for torture, you are right. The FBI interrogators have been getting nowhere with the four key suspects, held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center. None of these men have talked, and Pincus quotes an FBI man involved in the interrogation as saying that "it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure...where we won't have a choice, and we are probably getting there."

Pincus reports that "among the alternative strategies under discussion are using drugs or pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators, to extract information. Another idea is extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to torture."

Some FBI interrogators are thinking longingly of drugs like the so-called "truth serum," sodium pentothal; others the "pressure tactics," i.e., straightforward tortures, used by Shin Bet in Israel, banned after savage public debate a few years ago, which included sensory deprivation (an old favorite of British interrogators in Northern Ireland), plus many agonizing physical torments. Another idea is to send the suspects to other countries for torture by seasoned experts. Israel is not mentioned; nor are the British. Extradition of Moussaoui to France or Morocco is apparently a possibility.

CounterPunch was astounded to find David Cole, noted liberal professor at Georgetown University Law Center, being quoted by Pincus as saying that "the use of force to extract information could happen" in cases where investigators believe suspects have information on an upcoming attack. "If there is a ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue, it's tough," he said. Of course it's tough. As Cole surely knows, the "ticking bomb" rationale has been used by Israel's torture lobby for years, long after it had become clear that it had simply become a routine way of dealing with suspects. Right now the disposition of the FBI, intent on interrogating every Arab American male (some 200,000) in this country, is doubtless to assume that they might have knowledge of a ticking bomb.

The FBI claims it is hampered by its present codes of gentility. If so, there's no need to eye Morocco or France as subcontracting torturers. As a practical matter torture is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms of U.S. law enforcement, with Abner Louima the best-known recent example.

The most infamous disclosure of consistent torture by a police department in recent years concerned cops in Chicago in the mid-70s through early 80s who used electroshock, oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado and beatings of the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims black or brown. A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay State Prison was thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks from stun guns. Many states have so-called "secure housing units" where prisoners are kept in solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of them going mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced U.S. police forces for "a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to torture."

Last year the UN delivered a severe public rebuke to the United States for its record on preventing torture and degrading punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts highlighted what it said were Washington's breaches of the agreement ratified by the United States in 1994. The UN Committee Against Torture, which monitors international compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture, has called for the abolition of electric-shock stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint chairs on prisoners, as well as an end to holding children in adult jails. It also said female detainees are "very often held in humiliating and degrading circumstances" and expressed concern over alleged cases of sexual assault by police and prison officers. The panel criticized the excessively harsh regime in maximum security prisons, the use of chain gangs in which prisoners perform manual labor while shackled together, and the number of cases of police brutality against racial minorities.

So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the U.S. prison system, there are estimates that twice as many men as women are raped in the U.S. each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April of this year cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based on a survey of inmates in seven men's prison facilities in four states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.

Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The FBI could ship the four key suspects to plenty of countries taught torture by CIA technicians, including El Salvador. Robert Fisk reported in the London Independent in 1998 that after the 1979 revolution Iranians found a CIA film made for the SAVAK, the Shah's political police, on how to torture women. William Blum, whose Rogue State (Common Courage, 2000) gives a useful overview of the United States' relationship to torture, cites a 1970 story in Brazil's extremely respectable Jornal do Brasil, quoting the former Urugayan chief of police intelligence, Alejandro Otero, as saying that U.S. advisers, particularly Dan Mitrione, had instituted torture in Uruguay on a routine basis, with scientific refinement in technique (such as the precise upper limits of electric voltage before death intervened) and psychological pressure, such as a tape in the next room of women and children screaming, telling the prisoner that his family was being tortured.

The CIA's official line is that torture is wrong and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been appallingly effective.