By Melvin GOODMAN
Nearly two decades ago, the Central Intelligence Agency started its vicious program of torture and abuse, and the Department of Defense produced a jail at Guantanamo to evade U.S. law. We are still learning about the horrors of the Global War on Horror. On July 16, military prosecutors finally asked to eliminate details gotten through abuse and abuse. Several days later on, the Biden administration moved its first detainee out of Gitmo, repatriating a Moroccan guy who had been cleared for release five years ago. These 2 products offer an opportunity to document the inadequacy and the mistakes of the mainstream media’s protection of CIA’s unconscionable criminal offenses.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken audaciously declared that it is challenging to transfer detainees till the United States gets assurances that the “rights of these individuals will be protected because nation.” To put it simply, the senior diplomat of the country that tortured and abused numerous hostages; broke different Geneva Conventions by kidnapping people and turning them over to countries such as Syria and Pakistan that conduct torture and abuse; created secret prisons throughout East Europe and Southeast Asia; and utilized Guantanamo to circumvent U.S. laws is now concerned about the health and wellness of these mistreated individuals.
For many years, incorrect declarations from federal government authorities have been dealt with as facts by the mainstream media. Maybe Blinken is uninformed that numerous U.S. hostages who were turned over to third countries were in fact released by those nations for lack of sufficient evidence of guilt. Blinken must acquaint himself with the Inspector General report on Khalid al-Masri, who was a victim of an erroneous performance. If it hadn’t been for al-Masri’s German citizenship and the intervention of National Security Adviser Condi Rice, then CIA director George Tenet might never have actually approved the release of al-Masri who was being held in Afghanistan.
In 2004, the CIA’s Inspector General completed a research study of the abuse and abuse that was used in CIA’s secret prisons, however numerous CIA directors have refuted the findings of the report. Former CIA director General Michael Hayden lied about every element of the torture program in his briefings to Congress, including the genesis of the program; the variety of detainees; the intelligence supposedly obtained from coercive methods; and the unlawful conduct of the interrogators. He asserted that “fewer than 100” detainees were moved through the CIA’s detention program, but that is an understatement.
Additionally, some people were moved or rendered from one nation to another or to the U.S. military and for that reason not counted as part of the CIA program. Hayden also mentioned publicly that “fewer than a third” of the detainees underwent “improved interrogation techniques,” the Orwellian term for torture and abuse. Much more detainees underwent elements of the program, consisting of insomnia, shackling, and consistent light and noise. There were various examples of detainees who were rendered by mistake who were tortured. Of course, he was most likely comfy lying to members of the intelligence committee who had been briefed on the program a number of years previously and not did anything to stop it.
The whole process was criminal, but the mainstream media stopped working to highlight what were essentially war crimes. The CIA had legal defense with memoranda from the White Home and the Department of Justice, but media failed to keep in mind that the torture and abuse started prior to the memoranda were prepared and that the abuse techniques exceeded what the DoJ considered genuine. CIA officers acted as accusers, private investigators, renderers, interrogators, judges, juries, and jailers. There was no appeals process, and no oversight by CIA lawyers and managers. Some people were rendered on the basis of details from a single source to a single, unvetted possession. A lot of innocent individuals were kept in custody long after there were reasons to do so. We will probably never ever understand how many of these individuals wound up in Guantanamo.
The decrease of congressional oversight of the intelligence neighborhood and the weakening of the role of the Inspectors General throughout the intelligence community have actually enabled the CIA to escape accountability for its role in conceiving and carrying out an unconscionable program of abuse and abuse. President Barack Obama had the best opportunity to address the concern of responsibility, however he said that he would “look forward, not back” at the criminal activities of the Bush administration and its global war on fear. Senior CIA authorities pushed the White Home to put limitations on the function of the CIA IGs, and Obama honored these demands.
CIA director Tenet who authorized the abuse program left federal government with the Governmental Medal of Liberty, the greatest honor that can be given to a civilian. Whenever Tenet was asked about CIA torture, his basic reply was “We don’t do it and I’m not going to talk about it.” Tenet’s instant followers, Representative Porter Goss and General Hayden had no interest in responsibility. Goss protected the “methods” as “unique and innovative methods, all of which are legal and none of which are abuse.” Hayden lobbied for a CIA exemption in any legislation to ban abuse and abuse. (Tenet got his Presidential medal along with Paul Bremer, who probably did more to create chaos and havoc In Iraq than any American besides the war’s sponsors: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.)
The CIA committed serious criminal offenses in the 1960s and 1970s throughout the Vietnam War, but at least the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House exposed the assassination plots and the secret invasions against U.S. people. Laws were composed to stop the type of assassinations that had been authorized by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were developed, three decades after the development of the CIA itself. It took an additional fifteen years and the crimes of Iran-Contra to develop a statutory Inspector General at the CIA. The torturers should have been prosecuted, and the criminal offense of torture and abuse need to have led to stronger oversight of the CIA.
At its peak, Gitmo held more than 675 men. According to the New York Times, there are currently 39 men in the jail; only 11 have been charged with criminal activities. There have never been charges against the other 28 people, and a federal parole-like panel has actually approved transfer for ten of them, including a 73-year-old Pakistani with cardiovascular disease. President Obama failed in his efforts to close Guantanamo and move the detainees to a U.S. jail; the 2022 budget proposition of the Biden administration has restored the proposal to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees. (The Times’Carol Rosenberg deserves congratulations for her impressive coverage of Guantanamo over a twenty-year duration, filling in the vacuum produced by the failure of congressional and governmental oversight to do so.)
The only achievement of the abuse program was the destruction of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency.