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Bush's Pentagon Papers: The Urge to Confess
by Tom Engelhardt
 They can't help themselves. They want to confess.
How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times.
Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years.
Tomgram: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?
As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February
of that year, was "an expansive endorsement of the harshest
interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency."
The second "secret opinion" was issued as Congress moved to outlaw
"cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (not that such acts weren't
already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly "declared that
none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard"; and,
the Times assured us, "the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in
effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more
recent memorandums."
All of these memorandums, in turn, were
written years after John Yoo's infamous "torture memo" of August 2002
and a host of other grim documents on detention, torture, and
interrogation had already been leaked to the public, along with graphic
FBI emailed observations of torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those
"screen savers" from Abu Ghraib, and so much other incriminating
evidence. In other words, in early 2005 when that endorsement of "the
harshest interrogation techniques" was being written, its authors could
hardly have avoided knowing that it, too, would someday become part of
the public record.
But, it seems, they couldn't help
themselves. Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled "legal"
justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials
-- from the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense on down
-- just couldn't resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we're
dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly
irrational in its intensity, that's gripped this administration. None
of the predictable we're shocked! we're shocked! editorial responses to
the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.
Torture as the Royal Road to Commander-in-Chief Power
So
let's back up a moment and consider the nature of the torture
controversy in these last years. In a sense, the Bush administration
has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to
possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a
tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can
only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it
feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public
record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive
administration in our history.
Let's recall that, in the wake
of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration's top
officials had an overpowering urge to "take the gloves off"
(instructions sent from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's office directly
to the Afghan battlefield), to "unshackle" the CIA. They were in a rush
to release a commander-in-chief "unitary executive," untrammeled by the
restrictions they associated with the fall of President Richard Nixon
and with the Watergate era. They wanted to abrogate the Geneva
Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council
and companion-in-arms to the President, declared "quaint" and
"obsolete" in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of
imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as
their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be
total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement,
their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last
thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with
full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.
That prison complex was to
be the public face of their right to do anything. Perched on an
American base in Cuba just beyond the reach of The Law --
American-leased but not court-overseen soil -- the new prison was to be
the proud symbol of their expansive power. It was also to be the public
face of a new, secret regime of punishment that would quickly spread
around the world -- into the torture chambers of despotic regimes in
places like Egypt and Syria, onto American bases like the island
fastness of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, onto U.S. Navy and other
ships floating in who knew which waters, into the former prisons of the
old Soviet Empire, and into a growing network of American detention
centers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, when those first shots of
prisoners, in orange jumpsuits, manacled and blindfolded, entering
Guantanamo were released, no one officially howled (though the grim,
leaked shots of those prisoners being transported to Guantanamo were
another matter). After all, they wanted the world to know just how
powerful this administration was -- powerful enough to redefine the
terms of detention, imprisonment, and interrogation to the point of
committing acts that traditionally were abhorred and ruled illegal by
humanity and by U.S. law (even if sometimes committed anyway).
Though
certain administration officials undoubtedly believed that "harsh
interrogation techniques" would produce reliable information, this
can't account for the absolute fascination with torture that gripped
them, as well as assorted pundits and talking heads (and then, through
"24" and other TV shows and movies, Americans in general). In search of
a world where they could do anything, they reached instinctively for
torture as a symbol. After all, was there any more striking way to
remove those "gloves" or "unshackle" a presidency? If you could stake a
claim the right to torture, then you could stake a claim to do just
about anything.
Think of it this way: If Freud believed that
dreams were the royal road to the individual unconscious, then the top
officials of the Bush administration believed torture to be the royal
road to their ultimate dream of unconstrained power, what John Yoo in
his "torture memo" referred to as "the Commander-in-Chief Power."
It
was via Guantanamo that they meant to announce the arrival of this
power on planet Earth. They were proud of it. And that prison complex
was to function as their bragging rights. Their message was clear
enough: In this world of ours, democracy would indeed run rampant and a
vote of one would, in every case, be considered a majority.
The Crimes Are in the Definitions
This,
then, was one form of confession -- a much desired one. George W. Bush,
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates (with few
exceptions) wished to affirm their position as directors of the
planet's "sole superpower," intent as they were on creating a
Pentagon-led Pax Americana abroad and a Rovian Pax Republicana at home.
But there was another, seldom noted form of confession at work.
As
if to fit their expansive sense of their own potential powers, it seems
that these officials, and the corps of lawyers that accompanied them,
had expansive, gnawing fears. Given this cast of characters, you can't
talk about a collective "guilty conscience," but there was certainly an
ongoing awareness that what they were doing contravened normal American
and global standards of legality; that their acts, when it came to
detention and torture, might be judged illegal; and that those who
committed -- or ordered -- such acts might someday, somehow, actually
be brought before a court of law to account for them. These fears, by
the way, were usually pinned on low-level operatives and interrogators,
who were indeed fearful of the obvious: that they had no legal leg to
stand on when it came to kidnapping terror suspects, disappearing them,
and subjecting them to a remarkably wide range of acts of torture and
abuse, often in deadly combination over long periods of time.
Perhaps
Bush's men (and women) feared that even a triumphantly successful
commander-in-chief presidency might -- à la the Pinochet regime in
Chile -- have its limits in time. Perhaps they simply sensed an
essential contradiction that lay at the very heart of their position:
The urge to take pride in their "accomplishments," to assert their
powers, and to claim bragging rights for redefining what was legal
could also be seen as the urge to confess (if matters took a wrong turn
as, in the case of the Bush administration, they always have). And so,
along with the pride, along with the kidnappings, the new-style
imprisonment, the acts of torture (and, in some cases, murder), the
pretzled documents began to pour out of the administration -- each a
tortured extremity of bizarre legalisms (as with Yoo's August 2002
document, which essentially managed to reposition torture as something
that existed mainly in the mind of, and could only be defined by, the
torturer himself); each was but another example of legalisms following
upon and directed by desire. (Yoo himself was reportedly known by
Attorney General John Ashcroft as Dr. Yes, "for his seeming eagerness
to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired.")
Each, in the end, might also be read as a confession of wrongdoing.
What
made all this so strange was not just the "tortured" nature of the
"torture memo" (just rejected by the new attorney general nominee as
"worse than a sin, it was a mistake"), but the repetitious nature of
these dismantling documents which, with the help of an army of leakers
inside the government, have been making their way into public view for
years. Or how about the strange situation of an American president, who
has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in
the issues of detainment and torture -- as, for instance, in a February
7, 2002 memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his
power to "suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United
States and Afghanistan" (which he then declined to do "at this time")
and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners
of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began
with the following: "Our recent extensive discussions regarding the
status of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm…"
"Our recent
extensive discussions…" You won't find that often in previous
presidential documents about the abrogation of international and
domestic law. It wasn't, of course, that the U.S. had never imprisoned
anyone abroad and certainly not that the U.S. had never used torture
abroad. Water-boarding, for instance, was first employed by U.S.
soldiers in the Philippine Insurrection at the dawn of the previous
century; torture was widely used and taught by CIA and other American
operatives in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in Latin
America in the 1970s and 1980s, and elsewhere. But American presidents
didn't then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a
previous American president would have sent his vice president to
Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past
presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and
perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves).
They didn't regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their "extensive
discussions" on distasteful and illegal subjects.
Nor did they
get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the
fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential
desire to use "harsh interrogation techniques") to deny repeatedly that
their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject
from Bush's most recent press conference:
"Q What's your definition of the word ‘torture'?
"THE PRESIDENT: Of what?
"Q The word ‘torture.' What's your definition?
"THE PRESIDENT: That's defined in U.S. law, and we don't torture.
"Q Can you give me your version of it, sir?
"THE PRESIDENT: Whatever the law says."
After
a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession -– that, among other
things, the President has never rejected John Yoo's definition of
torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of
"extensive discussions" on detention matters and, minimally, you have a
President, who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A
President who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim
to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you're already moving
from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions ("It depends on what the
meaning of the word 'is'") into unfathomable realms of presidential
definitional darkness.
On the Record
Of course,
plumbing the psychology of a single individual while in office -- of a
President or a Vice President -- is a nearly impossible task. Plumbing
the psychology of an administration? Who can do it? And yet, sometimes
officials may essentially do it for you. They may leave bureaucratic
clues everywhere and then, as if seized by an impulsion, return again
and again to what can only be termed the scene of the crime. Documents
they just couldn't not write. Acts they just couldn't not take. Think
of these as the Freudian slips of officials under pressure. Think of
them as small, repeated confessions granted under the interrogation of
reality and history, under the fearful pressure of the future, and
granted in the best way possible: willingly, without opposition, and
not under torture.
Sometimes, it's just a matter of refocusing
to see the documents, the statements, the acts for what they are. Such
is the case with the torture memos that continue to emerge. Never has
an administration -- and hardly has a torturing regime anywhere -- had
so many of its secret documents aired while it was still in the act.
Seldom has a ruling group made such an open case for its own crimes.
We're
talking, of course, about the most secretive administration in American
history -- so secretive, in fact, that Congressional representatives
considering classified portions of an intelligence bill, have to go to
"a secret, secure room in the Capitol, turn in their Blackberrys and
cellphones, and read the document without help from any staff members."
Such briefings are given to Congressional representatives, but under
ground rules in which "participants are prohibited from future
discussions of the information -- even if it is subsequently revealed
in the media…" So representatives who are briefed are also effectively
prohibited from discussing what they have learned in Congress.
And
yet, none of this mattered when it came to the administration
establishing its own record of illegality -- and exhibiting its own
outsized fears of future prosecution. Let's just take one labor
intensive -- and exceedingly strange, if now largely forgotten --
example of these fears in action. In 2002, a new tribunal, the
International Criminal Court (ICC), was established in the Hague to
prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war
crimes.
"[T]hen-Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton nullified the
U.S. signature on the International Criminal Court treaty one month
into President Bush's first term" and Congress subsequently passed the
American Servicemembers' Protection Act which prohibited "certain types
of military aid to countries that have signed on to the International
Criminal Court but have not signed a separate accord with the United
States, called an Article 98 agreement." The Bush administration,
opposed to international "fora" of all sorts, then proceeded to go
individually, repeatedly, and over years, to more than 100 countries,
demanding that the representatives of each sign such an agreement "not
to surrender American citizens to the international court without the
consent of officials in Washington."
In other words, they put
the sort of effort that might normally have gone into establishing an
international agreement into threatening weak countries with the loss
of U.S. aid in order to give themselves -- and of course those
lower-level soldiers and operatives on whom so much is blamed -- a free
pass for crimes yet to be committed (but which they obviously felt they
would commit). We're talking here about small, impoverished lands like
Cambodia, still attempting to bring its own war criminals of the Pol
Pot era to justice.
In the process of twisting arms, the
administration suspended over $47 million in military aid "to 35
countries that ha[d] not signed deals to grant American soldiers
immunity from prosecution for war crimes." In this attempt to get every
country on the planet aboard the American no-war-crimes-prosecution
train before it left the station, you can sense once again the
administration's obsessional intensity on this subject (especially
since experts agreed that the realistic possibility of the ICC bringing
Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).
The Bush
administration regularly reached for its dictionaries to redefine
reality, even before it reached for its guns. It not only wrote its own
rules and its own "law," but when problems nonetheless emerged from its
secret world of detention and pain and wouldn't go away -- at Abu
Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere -- it proceeded to investigate itself
with the expectable results. For Bush's officials, this should have
seemed like a perfect way to maintain a no-fault system that would
never reach up any chain of command. Indeed, as Mark Danner has
commented, such practices plunged us into an age of "frozen scandals"
in which, as with the latest torture memos, the shocked-shocked effect
repeats itself but nothing follows. As he has written: "One of the most
painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be
revealed -- and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised,
unpunished, unfinished."
How true. And yet, looked at another
way, the administration -- with outsized help from outraged government
officials who knew crimes when they saw them and were willing to take
chances to reveal them -- has already created a remarkable record of
its own criminal activity, which can now be purchased in any bookstore
in the land.
Back in the early fall of 2004, when the first
collection of such documents arrived in the bookstores, Mark Danner's
Torture and Truth, America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, it was
already more than 600 pages long. In early 2005, when Karen J.
Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the
NYU School of Law, and Josh Dratel, the civilian defense attorney for
Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, released their monumental The Torture
Papers, The Road to Abu Ghraib, another collection of secret memoranda,
official investigations of Abu Ghraib, and the like, it was already an
oversized book of more than 1,200 pages -- a doorstopper large enough
to keep a massive prison gate open. And, of course, even it couldn't
hold all the documents. A later Greenberg book, The Torture Debate in
America, for instance, has military documents not included in the first
volume.
Then, there were the two-years worth of FBI memos and
emails about Guantanamo that the ACLU pried loose from the government
and released on line, also in 2005. This material was damning indeed,
including direct reports from FBI agents witnessing -- and protesting
as well as pointing fingers at -- military interrogators at the prison,
as in an August 2, 2004 report that said: "On a couple of occasions, I
entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a
fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water…Most times
they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there
for 18, 24 hours or more." Or a Jan. 21, 2004 email in which an FBI
agent complained that the technique of a military interrogator
impersonating an FBI agent "and all of those used in these scenarios,
was approved by the DepSecDef," a reference to Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.
Other paperback volumes have also
been published that include selections from these and other documents
like Crimes of War: Iraq by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert
Jay Lifton and In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq
and Beyond by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. If all of
these documents, including the latest ones evidently in the hands of
the New York Times, were collected, you would have a little library of
volumes -- all functionally confessional -- for a future prosecutor.
(And there are undoubtedly scads more documents where these came from,
including perhaps a John Yoo "torture memo," rumored to exist, that
preceded the August 2002 one.)
What an archive, then, is
already available in our world. It's as if, to offer a Vietnam
comparison, the contents of The Pentagon Papers had simply slipped out
into the light of day, one by one, without a Daniel Ellsberg in sight,
without anyone quite realizing it had happened.
The urge of
any criminal regime -- to ditch, burn, or destroy incriminating
documents, or erase emails -- has, in a sense, already been obviated.
So much of the Bush/Cheney "record" is on the record. As Karen J.
Greenberg wrote, back in December 2006, "What more could a prosecutor
want than a trail of implicit confessions, consistent with one another,
increasingly brazen over time, and leading right into the Oval Office?"
Looking back on these last years, it turns out that the
President, Vice President, their aides, and the other top officials of
this administration were always in the confessional booth. There's no
exit now.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His
book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press),
has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals
with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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