10. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Private contractors and PhD psychologists who call themselves Dr., Mitchell and Jessen were paid $81 million (on a $180 million contract) to torture people. Both are retired Air Force officers on government pension. Reportedly the CIA has indemnified them against liability for any crimes they've committed. They were hands-on torturers and know, literally, where at least some of the bodies are buried. CIA general counsel John Rizzo (who also knew, approved, and participated in torture) called Mitchell and Jessen's techniques "sadistic and terrifying." No one knows how many private contractors, like Blackwater and others, tortured, disappeared, or murdered people, but they should be brought to account.
11. George Tenet. The Clinton-appointed head of the CIA is awash in torture-guilt, but that pales compared to his role in lying the U.S. into an aggressive war in Iraq, one of the highest war crimes. In 2004, Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he should give back. In 2007 he was still saying, "We don't torture people." His successors, especially Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, may have tidied up the CIA a bit, but they held no one accountable for the crimes they continued to deny. The new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, forced Goss out at the CIA in favor of Negroponte's deputy Hayden, then still a four-star Air Force general. As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte was immersed in the dirty wars of Central America and all the unaddressed crimes the U.S. sponsored there. In 2004, when the CIA inspector general reported that the CIA was violating the Convention Against Torture, assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury in the Office of Legal Counsel wrote three more "torture memos" to quash the inspector general's concern. The new CIA head, John Brennan, remains in denial and cover-up mode.
How does any nation recover from being a rogue state?
Even though this top 10 list includes way more than 10 people guilty of participating in torture, it's by no means an exhaustive list of all the government workers with greater or lesser culpability for crimes against humanity over the past three presidencies. Kidnapping, euphemistically called extraordinary rendition, grew popular in the Clinton administration and there's no reason to believe our government has abandoned the practice, any more than the government has given up torture, illegal detention, or assassination. The U.S. may be less of a rogue state now than it was a decade ago, but it's still far from an honorable member of the international community that accepts accountability under international law.
To be clear, torture has long been a chronic, low level vein of criminality by U.S. government operatives, with bipartisan collusion at least since the beginning of the Cold War. Torture (and murder) was endemic to the American Indian Wars of the 19th century and to U.S. military predation in the Philippines (1899-1913), where Mark Twain described the troops as "our uniformed assassins."
The U.S. Defense Department, formerly the War Department, has considered torture one of its options during its entire existence, used sparingly perhaps by the U.S. government but encouraged among our proxies around the world. Starting in 1946, the School of the Americas (now known euphemistically as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) has periodically trained the military officers of Latin American dictatorships in the uses of torture in peacetime.
The CIA and its proxies have used torture on an as-needed basis since the CIA was created in 1947. The CIA's Phoenix Program in Viet-Nam combined torture and assassination in a years-long terror campaign against the Viet Cong (also terrorists). What the CIA did in Laos, Cambodia, and elsewhere is less well known (if known at all) but not less ugly and criminal. Some sense of official atrocity can be inferred from the CIA torture manuals supplied to Central American dictatorships during the Reagan administration.
Even in the context of longstanding, institutionalized official torture -- Torturers 'R' US, in effect -- the Bush administration took American government crime to a new level not seen in official circles since a similar panic produced the Salem witch killings. What George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their accomplices did out of blind fear was to embrace torture as right and just. Previously, even the structure of torture programs reflected guilty knowledge that the practice is abhorrent, hence better done by others on our behalf whether in Iran or Argentina, Iraq or Guatemala, wherever perceived witches threatened supposed American interests.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights is a British lawyer named Ben Emmerson. Regarding the CIA torture report, he issued a statement saying, in part:
"The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today's report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.
The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.
"International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but also to those senior officials within the US Government who devised, planned and authorised these crimes.
"As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice... States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.
"It is no defence for a public official to claim that they were acting on superior orders...
"However, the heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated in the planning and purported authorisation of these crimes... There is therefore no excuse for shielding the perpetrators from justice any longer. The US Attorney General is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible."Torture is a crime of universal jurisdiction. The perpetrators may be prosecuted by any other country they may travel to. However, the primary responsibility for bringing them to justice rests with the US Department of Justice and the Attorney General." [emphasis added]
The Obama administration has a moral and legal duty to bring American war criminals of three administrations to justice. Not to do so is to continue to use American exceptionalism as a justification for the worst crimes against humanity. The national precedent is to honor those most responsible for government crimes, but what honor is there in that?
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