The Need for Nuremberg-style Trials for the USA

We all knew that the US forces and officials under the George W. Bush regime were torturing people not only at Guantanamo Bay but at other secret camps across the World. We knew that torture was used at the US-run Abu Ghraib in Iraq. We know now that the British Security Service, MI5 and even the Greater Manchester Constabulary were involved in driving torture in Pakistan. In recent days confirmation of what we believed and has been corroborated by released prisoners, has come in the form of high-level memos about torture techniques used by the US security services, notably the CIA. I have discussed before how the 11th September 2001 attacks on the USA gave its government the feeling that it had a free hand to carry out any activity it deemed as necessary, going far beyond the acceptable bounds of behaviour for any government let alone that of a democracy and self-vaunted 'Land of the Free'. It led the US government to criticise those countries it felt was not going far enough in violating civil liberties and so has damaged them not just in the USA but more widely across the World. In looking at George W. Bush's regime we must see that his the policy which has had most impact in the World has been to make abduction and torture acceptable. Did Bush never realise that he had lost the War on Terror the moment he made the USA a terror state? What is the point of fighting to defend liberty if you have already killed it in your own country?

It is good that the new US President Barack Obama has had the courage to make public the memos which expose how far the previous regime, and no doubt so many of the agents and officials still in power, went in adopting totalitarian, terrorist techniques. One important thing is that it vindicates those people who have been released and have spoken of torture. Many people remained sceptical, feeling these former detainees (they were not convicts as they were never convicted of a crime) had reasons to condemn the US and perhaps exaggerate their treatment. We now know that they had no need to exaggerate anything; the USA was constantly torturing people. I was stunned by a radio report today that said it had been revealed one detainee had been 'water boarded' effectively brought to the edge of drowning (the detainee is tied down and has cloth placed over their mouth and nose which is then soaked making it almost impossible to breath), far more times than had so far been revealed and in fact it had happened 186 times in one month. On my calculations that is 6-7 times every day. Try and imagine almost being killed repeatedly, many times per day, every day. In addition, this was just one among a wide repertoire of psychological and physical torture inflicted on the detainees. This is factory torture, it is a process that goes beyond what we know of many totalitarian regimes and a world that has had the Soviet system, Idi Amin's regime, the Nazis, China today, Pol Pot's regime, that is a difficult league to get into let alone to reach the top.

It is clear the torture was not being done to gain information, it was simply for Americans to exercise their fury at those they saw as responsible for daring to violate US society by terrorist activity. The rest of the World was rather sickened by the Americans whining on about how the 11th September 2001 attacks were so horrific and so exceptional. Many people across the World, including here in the UK, have been living with terrorism for over 30 years, what made the Americans so special? The constant torturing of detainees stems from the delusion that the Bush administration suffered from that across the World was this vast organisation called Al-Qaeda, with Osama bin-Laden sitting at the centre like Ernst Stavro Blofeld of SPECTRE in the James Bond novels. We know George W. Bush is not intelligent and it is clear that he was easily led to believe that fiction had become reality. There are Al-Qaeda operatives out there, but more than that the word 'Al-Qaeda' is a banner which lots of local Islamist terror groups use to scare people. These are at best cells and more likely, just disparate groups adhering to a title which they know will make them appear bigger than they actually are. You can torture detainees as much as you like but they are going to be unable to tell you details of Al-Qaeda because it has never existed in the form the US administration persists in believing. Al-Qaeda followers (and I use that word to distinguish from 'members') did have connections with the Taliban but certainly none with Saddam Hussain's regime in Iraq.

Now, unsurprisingly, Barack Obama has done the right thing in bringing all of this to light. He knows that the USA can never be safe if it is not seen to be a state that does not engage in terrorist activity itself. It will take many years to restore people's faith in the USA, and Obama is right to start by coming clean as early as possible. Of course it puts him in a difficult position as it has generated hostility from his own intelligence/security bodies. I hope Obama checked who was loyal to him among these bodies as it would be to the entire World's detriment if he happens to be assassinated by a 'rogue' US agent, probably an Arabic one in order to scare the US public back into fearing the 'threat' to their country. The officials are unrepentant, Obama was advised not to reveal the memos and former head of the CIA General Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, Attorney General 2007-9 said it would undermine the moral of the intelligence services, invite scorn of the USA's enemies (whereas they have invited the scorn of the USA's friends) and certainly stimulate a 'faux outrage' about what had happened. This insults the World, there is nothing 'faux' i.e. forced or false about our outrage, believe me it is genuine, so much so it is painful. It is painful to see a country which lauds liberty and democracy not only pursuing terrorist tactics but also having shifted the sense of what is 'normal', let alone what is right, to the extent that they cannot understand why people are offended by such horrific behaviour.

Obama was told by Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA not to release the memos because they would give away techniques that the CIA might want to use again in the future. This echoes statements by Hayden and Mukasey. That in itself is scary, that the CIA is not only willing to draw a line at using torture but will not rule out using it again in the future. It also betrays an ignorance of the public. Anyone who wants to know torture techniques, as I have noted before, only has to watch popular television programmes. If you want to know more Amnesty International has been producing information on what governments have been doing for decades now. Panetta's concern is that the memos end the speculation, they show high-level approval for things we only suspected before were being used. Despite the popular perception that intelligence services have all the highest level high-tech equipment, they are very attached to old fashioned methods. I remember MI5 being unwilling in the late 1990s to allow documents produced in 1895 to come into the public domain because they said that the techniques mentioned were still relevant over 100 years later. How do they expect to apprehend anyone if they are using methods developed before aeroplanes and when the car and telephone were novelties and a mobile phone that that fitted your palm was a video camera and could send information to the whole world in seconds. The historian M.R.D. Foot pointed out that during the late 1980s he had been able to go to a small regional museum in the USSR and find many of the documents MI5 was unwilling to reveal to its own population.

The US administration under Bush under went that shift of perceptions that we see in all dictatorships. What is acceptable is altered. For example, in Nazi Germany, it became accepted that Jews were not people but vermin and so needed to be exterminated. In Stalin's USSR it became accepted that anyone could be suspect and deserved to be killed or sent to a gulag. In modern day China it became accepted that anyone who was deemed to be a landowner or an intellectual should be abused and nowadays that anyone from particular religious groups or asking for independence for Tibet or East Turkistan or for some freedom of speech should be suppressed and tortured. In these countries under those regimes, 'normal' shifted to what the bulk of the World sees as abnormal and horrific. The fact that the officials believe Obama only acted in order to garner media plaudits shows how far away they have got from normality. Obama did it because the memos revealed how evil agents of his own country had been and he felt that had to cease and not be done again.

With Abu Gharib, there was the excuse that low-level troops got out of hand and that though there was a permissive atmosphere from senior officers, there was no clear direction to use torture. With these memos we see that John Yoo and Jay Bybee were writing torture policy for Bush. Bybee, a Mormon, was Assistant Attorney General 2001-03; John Yoo was an assistant to the Attorney General and a law professor. Quotations from him about the legality of torture make you sick. On 1st December 2005 at a debate at Notre Dame University, Chicago, he even condoned the theoretical crushing of the testicles of the child of a detainee if that was felt necessary by the President to secure the information desired. Yoo wanted to have US forces exempt for war crimes prosecutions. Quite rightly given that he provided the so-called legal 'golden shield' for US officials carrying out torture the Spanish government is looking into trying him for war crimes. Yoo, of course, all along has believed that the USA is exempt from things like the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. He also believes that the US government is exempt from its own constitution for example in regard to the 4th Amendment preventing surveillance of US citizens in the USA. With such people at the top of the administration actively embracing torture it is unsurprising that it was used vigorously by lower level officers/officials. Yoo is one of the 'Bush Six' which includes Bybee, former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez; Douglas J. Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; William J. Haynes II, former General Counsel to the Department of Defense and David S. Addington, former chief of staff and legal counsel to former Vice-President Dick Cheney and the man seen as co-ordinating the clear policy of adopting torture. Cheney has asked the CIA to declassify material showing the 'success' of torturing as if this will justify and excuse it. As Obama has noted this shows how far the US administration had lost its 'moral bearings'.

Since the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the USA and China are among the signatories), it has been possible for any state to try someone for torture even if the activity has been carried out in another country. This is why Spain was looking to prosecute the Bush Six. These men have warned that if they travel outside the USA they are likely to be arrested on war crimes charges. Of course unlike the Guantanamo Bay detainees they will not find themselves abducted and turn up in a camp in Canada or Mexico or Spain to be tortured something of course their victims were not spared. I just hope they are extradited to the The Hague as happened to the war crimes perpetrators from the Yugoslav War. This will be an important step for the World to show the USA that it cannot simply behave how it wishes. Obama has said that the officers who actually carried out the torture will not be prosecuted, but Spain challenged this on the basis of the principle of 'just obeying orders' which was thrown out at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials 1945-6. Obama will find it very difficult to fight off criticism within the USA and so has sought to minimise the impact, tackling the men who drove the action rather than the men who carried it out.

The Nuremberg Trials were an international court which tried leading members of the Nazi regime who had not escaped or committed suicide before hand, including Albert Speer and Herman Göring who did kill himself subsequently. The trials gave body to the concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and so established the basis on which these things are still judged sixty years later. In addition, they removed the excuse 'just obeying orders' which many German officers had felt was a stronger imperative than being humane. These principles not just in the West but across the world have remained basically unchallenged, though some dictatorships such as Soviet USSR argued many of these issues are internal affairs and not an international concern and China has argued that the principles are embedded in a Western perception of ethics which is inappropriate to societies from outside that tradition. Interestingly, though it is argued that the Bush Six could find refuge in Israel (or Saudia Arabia), in the 1960s, the Israelis were most vigorous in applying the international nature of war crimes charges, most famously abducting Adolf Eichmann a leading SS officer and so called 'architect of the Holocaust' from Argentina in 1960 and putting him on trial for war crimes and executing him in 1962. On one hand this shows Israel's vigorous application of such indictments, but also that their methodology was similar to that used by the USA against suspects in Afghanistan. Of course Israel had the correct information about their suspect whereas in many (not all) cases the USA has abducted people with little or no connection to terrorism.

I am sceptical that we will ever see the trial of anyone over the US torture programme. However, in my idea world, we would see the Bush Six brought to a war crimes trial in The Hague. As the Nazi leaders, Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosevic all said, they will claim it has no jurisdiction over them and that somehow they are exempt from justice because of how important they once were. I think a minimum of 25 years imprisonment for creating a regime that promoted abduction and torture just in the way Nazi Germany did, is the starting point. It is ironic that anyone entering the USA has to declare that they were never a member of the Nazi regime or its agencies and yet you were entering a country where the attitudes of many of the government's leading lawyers were based on the same assumptions as those of Nazi Germany.

As for the frontline officers who carried out the torture, again we can draw on the pattern from the late 1940s. Between 1945-8 there was the process of Denazification. The Nuremberg Trials were part of this, but the process was also aimed at lower-ranking Nazis. They were graded after being investigated and received a range of penalties from terms of imprisonment to fines to being restricted to holding only manual labouring jobs and all were barred from holding any public office, most usually for 20 years. Certainly any officer who has been involved in torture needs to be expelled immediately from any of the intelligence or security services or the military and be barred from working in private security companies and from holding public office. There needs to be a root and branch exorcising of this evil which has penetrated right to the heart of the US government. If not it will infect US society for decades to come and give succour to those that the USA professes to be opposing.

The USA has severely lost credibility in the free world, because it has removed itself from that company by its actions and yet expects the world to back it actively or suffer its wrath. There needs to be a real understanding in the USA that 'freedom', 'liberty' and 'democracy' are not just terms that you define for yourself, they are objective standards that you must strive to attain. Civil liberties are not luxuries that only some nationalities are permitted to have.

I have been stunned by the number of online discussion groups in the USA dismissing the 'faux outrage' especially from abroad and also seeking to define what is torture. They have very strict discussions of what is torture and keep ruling certain practices as insufficiently horrific to be called torture. Even being locked in the boot (trunk for Americans) of a car is something most of us cannot bear and yet that is seen as one of the mildest forms of treatment being meted out to detainees. I suggest if they claim that then they should experience these practices for themselves, even for just an hour, let alone a month or months, then I know their definitions would change immediately. We have to admire the strength of spirit of those detainees to have withstood such horrific treatment. Henri Alleg was tortured by water boarding in 1957 by French forces and in his book 'The Question' (in English 2008) gives a graphic account of it. Malcolm Nance, advisor to the Department of Homeland Security has also been exposed to it and terms it torture. I do not advise anyone to try it, but simply believe from these men who know that it is torture and that the USA has been carrying out an extensive torture programme, only some of which has come to light so far.The USA has certainly lost its moral bearings and in so doing has made the World a far worse place. It cannot stand and criticise the other torturing regimes of this planet when it simply uses many of the same techniques, many of which originate from the Middle Ages not the 21st century. The hypocrisy is stunning. The inability of millions of US citizens to accept even that their government has behaved in an immoral, cruel manner is shocking. In these circumstances it does seem we are blighted with a new Dark Age. The only hope of washing away this evil is to have thorough trials. This has been done before and needs to be done again as quickly as possible.

Combating Terrorism - Responding to whose Agenda?

In the 1970s-90s, West Germany and then reunified Germany suffered a series of terrorist attacks from a group calling itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) a group set up in 1970 and commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its founder members. The group received funds from the East German secret police, the Stasi, and in the early 1970s had training from the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation). The group espoused radical left-wing policies though it can be argued that they were really simply spoilt rich people who got excitement from the bank robberies and assassinations, usually of businessmen, that they carried out. The group formally ended in 1998, partly as the world had moved on and they could no longer use the excuse of a need to promote a revolutionary and/or Communist society.

The Gang claimed that many of their actions in the 1970s were about challenging the authoritarian state that they saw West Germany to be. The result was that their actions actually pushed West Germany more towards authoritarianism: people with left-wing leanings, even if not supporters of the Gang, were removed from public sector positions such as the post office; the West German border police and police for the protection of the constitution (as these were federal as opposed to Land, i.e. regional, police forces) were strengthened and anti-terrorist units were created such as GSG9; the law was changed so that lawyers felt to be sympathetic to the gang could be excluded from any trials. When a number of the Gang were captured in 1977 three were murdered in prison and one severely injured. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment, West Germany not having the death penalty, but it was clear that the German state preferred to kill these convicts without any legal process, a so-called 'extra-judicial execution'. Thus, by the 1980s the Gang had effectively made West Germany more the kind of the regime it had argued it was from the start than if they had done nothing. All democratic states face the danger of losing what they seek to defend from terrorists.

One reason why there was bitterness in Europe over the American reaction to the September 11th attacks was that the Americans seemed to think that they were the only people who had ever suffered such things. Britain had been experiencing bombings throughout the 1960s-1980s and Northern Ireland after that too, killing and maiming numerous people. As a child in the 1970s I remember being separated from my mother so that she and I could both be searched, like all the other visitors, for weapons when we went to the Tower of London where there is still a plaque to mark where tourists had been killed by a bomb. I witnessed the Docklands bomb of 1996 from the window of my flat and I have known people caught up in the London bus bomb and Manchester bomb of the same year, this was all before anyone had even dreamed of the term 'al-Qaeda'. Countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have had such incidents repeatedly over the last few decades from various groups and yet we did not whine and expect the whole world to follow us in using the incidents to go off at a tangent and kill unrelated people. Given how the USA had behaved, particularly in carpet bombing Vietnamese people over so many years (and the mutations of Vietnamese children due to chemicals dropped by the American forces continues even now) it seemed very rich for them to then expect everyone to be so sympathetic to them about a single incident. Do not get me wrong, what happened was tragic, but that does not excuse the Bush regime's subsequent behaviour.

Adopting a sober reaction to terrorism is always hard for democracies. The UK fell into behaviour such as internment and the 'shoot-to-kill' policy of SAS (Special Air Service, the most famous UK special forces unit) against IRA (Irish Republican Army, since the late 1960s usually referring to the Provisional IRA or 'Provos' guerilla group as opposed to the broader organisation of the 1920s) suspects. However, what is apparent is under the cover of responding to terrorism, governments take the opportunity to extend their control over the population. As with the West German example at the start of this post, such a clampdown affects far more than any suspects. In the USA you had the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security, effective censorship of dissenting voices, the suspension of due process for suspects thrown without trial into the concentration camp at Gunatanamo Bay and so on. The UK has adopted similar policies allowing for longer detention without charge or trial, the greater monitoring of the population, the introduction of identity cards and so on.

You may argue that to defend democracy needs harsh measures. However, in turn you are doing more damage to democracy than the terrorists themselves. Even experts argue that things such as identity cards would not have stopped the 7th July bombers in London. Yet, the powers implemented to stop terrorism can easily be turned on others, for example, anyone protesting against the war in Iraq or even about a by-pass being built over a woodland. As has been proven in states like 1930s Germany, by the time people generally realise what freedoms they are losing they are in no position any longer to do anything about it. Defending democracy needs democracy to be strong, its institutions to stand for fairness and democracy, to unite, not divide a people.

So, we have the erosion of democracy in the name of defending it. No-one can deny that there is terrorist activity in the UK, but certainly not of the scale that we have been warned about repeatedly since 2001. A scared population is a compliant one and that is what governments like. To some degree most Britons have seen so much of terrorism in their lives that the 'warnings' just wash over them, in contrast, it seems to many Americans, who have experienced far fewer incidents of this kind. I do not believe al-Qaeda exists, certainly in the form it is portrayed with Osama bin Laden sitting like a villain from a James Bond movie hidded in an underground base, watching a map showing all his cells operating across the world. Al-Qaeda is like a brand that local terrorist groups can attach themselves to; it is a short hand for use by government and the media but one that fails to reflect the complexity and the diverse motivations of those who turn to terrorism. This is why, if we simply focus on rooting out al-Qaeda we will come nowhere near to ending Islamist-influenced terrorism. Watch 'The Power of Nightmares' series from the BBC, it is very good on these issues.

The current governments of the UK and USA, though, have not stopped at simply making their own countries more authoritarian, they have found an additional use for 'the war on terror' and that is, to advance economic and geo-political goals. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussain was no supporter of Islamist terrorism. He ran a secular state and was having to keep the different Muslim sects in his country in check. Support for that kind of terrorism was more likely to come from the British and American ally, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussain had been an ally of the West during the Cold War and after the Ayatollah's regime came to power in Iran in 1979, but by the 1990s his purpose was over. For the West he was becoming too nationalistic (this is the time when Western powers usually intervene, for example, with Nasser in Egypt in 1956) and of course, as I have discussed in the post 'Oil. What's it Good For? War!' the USA needed to secure a good source of oil for itself that the Chinese were not involved with yet. So, the war on terror was used as an excuse for a neo-colonial war to secure resources, so familiar in the 19th century, but seemingly less common now, or so we thought ...

Back to the UK perspective. I think Tony Blair, poor man, did genuinely believe that he was fighting a major threat in Iraq. He liked the fact that the terror 'threat' allowed him to be stricter in the UK, because, as I noted in '10 Years of the Blair Party', he has always had some authoritarian tendencies. However, he also allowed himself to be convinced, not by his own intelligence services, but by material from them distorted by political players, that Iraq was a threat. In addition, Saddam Hussain was a cruel dictator who needed to fall, but the West had already failed at that once in 1991 and while they actually removed the man this time, they unleashed all the forces that his strength had kept in check, all for the sake, not of countering terrorism because that has increased since the war, but for the oil reserves his regime sat on. In reviews of Blair's career today, Iraq overshadows everything else he did. This is fair, it was his greatest blunder, the blood of thousands of people is on his hands and it showed that despite his charisma and his belief that he controlled events, he was a weak leader, too easily influenced by one of the most brainless politicians a democracy has suffered. It showed, too, at the end of the day, he lacked the confidence in himself to divert Bush's plan. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (unintentionally turning into a bit of a hero on these pages) flew to the USA and successfully persuaded President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on North Korea. Though this is an overlooked historical incident, it no doubt saved the fates of millions and a lot of the Korean peninsula is not a wasteland. Blair would have gone down in history if he could have acted as such a brake on Bush, but instead decided to not only roll over for his objectives but actively support such a foolish, and probably illegal, step.