Twilight of the torturers (or, the rehabilitation of John Ashcroft, part II)
I think I've said before that when John Ashcroft is the voice of reason, you know that you've gone over the cliff. But Ashcroft, the one-term Bush attorney general, is slowly emerging as one of the few occasional voices of reason inside an administration bent on lawbreaking.
First, there was his really rather heroic refusal to supercede the authority of his equally heroic deputy, James Comey, who was acting attorney general at the time the administration sent errand boy Al Gonzales to Ashcroft's hospital bed to get him to sign off on domestic eavesdropping. Now, comes a report from ABC News that Ashcroft sounded the alarm as the highest possible level members of the Bush administration torture of detainees, one at a time. They did so at the insistence of the CIA, which wasn't going to allow its agents to become the fall guys for the Bush team's illegal torture policies. So, Tenet and Co. sought legal and political cover from the White House and its "legal team." And yes, I use the term lightly. From ABC today:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
So much for vice president Rice. So what did Ashcroft ultimately do this time? Well, I wish I could say he repeated the heroism he displayed in the later spying situation by declaring the torture of detainees in U.S. custory unlawful, unconostitutional and un-American. He did not. However, Ashcroft did make a prophetic statement, according to ABC's sources, that rings truer than true. A bit more from the exhaustive ABC report:
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
And indeed it won't. War crimes have been committed by agents acting under the color of authority of the president of the United States. His own cabinet signed off, not just on the notion of torture, but on the specific techniques and use of torture on individual detainees. Each "enhanced interrogation" constitutes an explicit war crime. And the people in those meetings -- all of them, Ashcroft included -- should be held liable for those crimes, up to and including the man they worked for, the president of the United States.
If we had a real Congress, rather than a cowering hall of shameful derelicts on Capitol Hill, someone might even do something about it.
P.S.: Right wingers will likely cheer the ABC report, along with the Vanity Fair story by Philppe Sands that says interrogators, strapped for torture ideas, began getting their techniques from the show "24," the Bible for right wing warmongers and torture afficionados. They represent an ideology that is infected, in a very real sense, with Saddamism. They wish to see the president of the United States become more like Saddam Hussein, in order to defeat those about whom they are paranoid: Muslims. They, too, are acting in a manner that absolutely flies in the face of everything America is supposed to stand for. At the end of the day, we are being governed by a bunch of criminals in the White House, who will likely go unprosecuted for the rest of their miserable lives, at least in this country.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
