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Is Texas Harboring Torture Decider?
By Ray McGovern (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Ray McGovern - Writer
This should come as no surprise. You see, the Feb. 7, 2002,
memorandum has been posted on the Web since June 22, 2004, when
then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales mistakenly released it, along
with other White House memoranda.
The title seemed innocent enough "Humane Treatment of al Qaeda
and Taliban Detainees" but in the body of the memo President George
W. Bush authorized his senior aides to withhold Geneva Convention
protections from suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.
Like Shakespeare, the media seem harshest on the lawyers, including
Texans Gonzales and William J. Haynes II (Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's lawyer), who later outdid themselves trying to make torture
legal.
What gets lost in the woodwork is this: Banal as their ex-post-facto
"justification" for torture was, the lawyers were not the deciders.
After
the decider-in-chief, the key decision makers were the eight addressees
of the Feb. 7 memorandum: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of
State Colin Powell, Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White
House chief of staff Andrew Card, CIA Director George Tenet, National
Security aide Condoleezza Rice, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers.
During the Q & A after a recent Myers talk in Washington, I
asked him what he did after he had read the President's memo on
ignoring Geneva. The tone of his non-answer was this: If the President
wanted to dismiss Geneva, what was a mere Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
to do?
In his memoir, Eyes on the Horizon, he tries to blame the lawyers:
"By relying so heavily on just the lawyers, the President did not get
the broader advice on these matters that he needed."
Myers and
the other seven addressees might these days be called derivative
deciders - or, more simply, accomplices. There is not a shred of
evidence that any of the Gang of Eight gave the slightest consideration
to resigning, rather than carry out the President's decision.
They elected to "just follow orders," a defense dismissed out of
hand at the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal on war crimes. Together with
the lawyer-advisers, the derivative deciders provide abundant proof
that the "banality of evil" did not die with Adolf Eichmann and other
functionaries of the Third Reich.
But the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with
President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and
John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a
report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that
Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering
aggressive techniques."
Here is Conclusion Number One of the Senate committee report:
"Following the President's determination, techniques such as
waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions...were authorized for use in
interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody."
It is essential that those responsible for torture be held to
account. This is not about "policy differences." It is about crimes.
More important still, it's about holding fast to our Constitution and
enforcing accountability in the executive branch.
There was a time when we regularly looked to folks from Texas to
defend the law. What would we have done, for example, without the late
Barbara Jordan, African American jurist and member of the House
Judiciary Committee, who spoke out with memorable eloquence in arguing
that President Richard Nixon had to be held to account. He could not
get away with placing himself over the law.
Jordan and most of her committee colleagues voted out articles of
impeachment against Nixon, leaving him little choice but to resign or
be impeached. Speaking to the House, Jordan described Nixon as a
President "swollen with power and grown tyrannical." She added:
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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