Last week, at least four Supreme Court justices referred to waterboarding as “torture.”
I would have missed this tidbit if I hadn’t been perusing a Spokane newspaper looking for something else. What does Spokane have to do with this? Oh, only the fact a key facet of the George W. Bush administration’s secret torture program were headquartered there.
“In the long, sordid evolution of the American post-9/11 torture program – whose contractors were headquartered in downtown Spokane and paid $81 million by the CIA – this is more than a simple semantic matter,” the story says.
Those contractors — yes, the dirty work was outsourced — were Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Yes, I’m naming names. This blog doesn’t give torturers the privilege of anonymity.
BRUCE JESSEN AND JAMES MITCHELL.
Oh, they didn’t torture anyone themselves. Adolf Eichmann didn’t push Jews into gas chambers, either. He only designed the logistics system.
Jessen and Mitchell are psychologists who designed the torture program. Read details here. Israel didn’t have a death penalty, but hanged Eichmann anyway, after a trial. I would give these guys due process, too, and I’m less certain what I would do with them. At least revoke their professional licenses. (The Texas licensing board refused; read about that here. A New York Times editorial argued they should be prosecuted; read about that here. They weren’t. Jessen and Mitchell have gotten off scot-free, other than being deservedly vilified.)
Shawn Vestal, a columnist for the Spokane Spokesman-Review, a normally rightwing newspaper, spelled out here better than I could what the semantics battle over using the word “torture” is all about:
“The torture program was built on an effort not just to adopt tactics that we always viewed – apart from the few years the Bush administration went rogue – as illegal under national and international law, but to also create a linguistic and legalistic foundation to pretend that we were not doing what we so clearly were doing: Torturing people. ‘When you call a moral obscenity what it is, … you summon a mental image of its true nature, and … a response that is proportionate,’ said Joe Margulies, one of Zubaydah’s attorneys and a Cornell Law School professor …. ‘That’s why we care about the words. That’s why the words matter.'”
(Emphasis mine.) Vestal also touches on the practical realities of, as opposed to semantical arguments over, what Jessen and Mitchell did:
“As the years have borne out, Mitchell and Jessen were sometimes torturing people who didn’t have any connection to 9/11, as in the case of Zubaydah, or without producing any real intelligence, as was the case with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”
And also the cover-up:
“The CIA destroyed tapes of the interrogations, and the government has acted to this day with a zeal to keep the information from the public.”
Plus what the ensuing Senate investigation found:
“An exhaustive Senate investigation, a redacted version of which was released in 2014, provided a damning account of the program and its lack of effectiveness ….”
(Emphasis mine.) Vestal points out that Jessen and Mitchell eventually told the CIA the torture program wasn’t working, which doesn’t make their hands less dirty, but were under “extreme pressure” to keep it going, which they did.
This story is in the news again because the Polish government is now holding a trial to determine how dirty its hands are. Poland hosted a CIA “black site” where detainees were tortured. The CIA did this dirty work outside U.S. territorial jurisdiction to avoid being under U.S. legal jurisdiction. Poland, the country where Auschwitz and other notorious Nazi death camps were located, albeit not with the cooperation of their government (which had been taken out and shot), cooperated.
Vestal notes both men are willing to testify “about their activities at the Polish site,” but a federal judge blocked their deposition at the behest of our government. The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse that order. It’s unclear why our government, under new management, is resisting disclosing details of a former management’s secret, illicit, illegal, and immoral torture program which they lied about and covered up. That impetus must be coming from the guilty agencies, not from the top.
In any case, it looks like the Supreme Court is leaning toward ripping the screen of secrecy away the Bush CIA’s dirty work. It should facilitate, not hinder, what the Polish government is now trying to do to make amends.
Photo: Mitchell (left) and Jessen (right)
