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Getting Away with Torture: Secret Government, War Crimes, and the Rule of Law ReviewChristopher Pyle, who teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has written a strong indictment of the US state's use of and connivance in torture.
He points out that there were 70 renditions before 9/11. Vice-President Gore said, "Of course it's a violation of international law; that's why it's a covert operation." There is no right to kidnap fugitives: extradition treaties were developed to stop illegal abductions by covert foreign agents.
Bush secretly authorised the CIA to kidnap suspected terrorists from European countries and turn them over for interrogation under torture to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pyle comments, "That unprecedented development was strong evidence that the rule of law no longer mattered to American officials in power." Torture is a form of terrorism: it is illegal under US law and US military law. There were more than 150 renditions between 2001 and 2005.
He writes, "The old adage that `no man is above the law' is no longer valid. American courts, supported by three Republican attorneys general, have made it abundantly clear: high government officials who secretly authorize the kidnapping, torture, or murder of foreigners abroad cannot be prosecuted for the crimes the officials commit or sued for injuries they cause."
After 9/11, Congress authorised the President to use military force only against `those responsible for the recent attacks'. It did not license an endless `war against terrorism' or a limitless war against `States that harbour or support them' (as per John Yoo's Memo 25 September 2001). Under this absurd ruling, the USA could attack Britain.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that the US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was `an intentional system of cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment and a form of torture'. As Pyle notes, "more than 90% of the men and boys tormented at Guantanamo Bay had not been captured in combat but had been sold to the United States for large bounties."
The CIA has or had secret prisons in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia and Ukraine. Pyle comments, "the CIA made suspected terrorists `disappear', as if the United States were little more than a Latin American dictatorship. Many of these prisoners still have not been found."
He writes, "the torture, cruelty, and degradation revealed in those Abu Ghraib pictures were not merely the work of a few bad apples but were the result of a conscious policy of the Bush administration." The USA's highest officials `authorized, approved and encouraged the torture and degradation of suspected terrorists'.
Bush refused to grant POW status to captured Taliban fighters. Hitler's Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel refused to grant POW status to Soviet soldiers - he was hanged as a war criminal. Pyle proposes repealing the amnesty for Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Tenet.
He sums up, "The United States is no longer a constitutional government under law. Thanks to helpful legislators and judges, its president is now an elected monarch who can, if he chooses, commit criminal acts with impunity. He need not think of himself as a constitutional officer pledged to uphold the Constitution and laws against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He can operate like an Afghan warlord with legions of kidnappers, covert paramilitary units, and clandestine prisons at his disposal.
"At the moment, no one has any timely or effective legal protection against this warlord. Neither Congress nor the courts is disposed to confront this elected monarch until the terrorist threat, which the Republican Party has recklessly striven to make perpetual, has passed.
"As a result, the United States is in the worst constitutional crisis in its history. Many of the wrongs for which the American colonists went to war in 1776 now pale in comparison to the crimes the Bush administration committed. Even during the bitter Civil War, neither side instituted a policy of torture."
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