CIA claims no guilt, ordered to do it

ralphrepo · Apr 10, 2009

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Nazis at Nuremberg more or less claim the same thing; that they were only following orders? So we should just call this an 'oops' and forget about it? Each and every man (or woman) walks in his own moral or ethical shoes, and we need to look at each person's involvement and take an accounting of who did what to see where such guilt may lay. But if we accede to the Peneta argument that CIA members be immune from prosecution, that is, if we forgive the lesser operatives as unwitting dupes of those in charge of the larger decision making process; then should they not give us those that made that huge error in judgment? Or does everyone go unpunished here?

In a rush? For a quick synopsis, just read the red highlighted lines.

C.I.A. to Close Secret Prisons, Scenes of Harsh Interrogations
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: April 9, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday that it would decommission the secret overseas prisons where it subjected Al Qaeda prisoners to brutal interrogation methods, bringing to a symbolic close the most controversial counterterrorism program of the Bush administration. But in a statement to employees, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, said agency officers who worked in the program “should not be investigated, let alone punished” because the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had declared their actions legal. Mr. Panetta and other top Obama administration officials have said they believe that waterboarding, the near drowning method used in 2002 and 2003 on three prisoners, is torture, which is illegal under American and international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which interviewed 14 prisoners, said in a report made public this week that prisoners were also repeatedly slammed into walls, forced to stand for days with their arms handcuffed to the ceiling, confined in small boxes and held in frigid cells.

Mr. Panetta said the secret detention facilities were no longer in operation, but he suggested that security and maintenance had been continuing at the sites at the taxpayers’ expense since they were emptied under Mr. Bush in 2006. Terminating security contracts at the sites would save “at least $4 million,” Mr. Panetta said.

The C.I.A. has never revealed the location of its so-called black sites overseas, but intelligence officials, aviation records and news reports have placed them in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Jordan,

...among other countries. Agency officials have said that fewer than 100 prisoners have been held since the program was created in 2002, and about 30 were subjected to what the C.I.A. called “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Mr. Bush transferred the remaining 14 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba in 2006 but ordered some sites maintained for future use; only two Qaeda prisoners are known to have been held for several months since then.

In his first week in office, President Obama banned coercive interrogations and ordered the C.I.A. program closed.

Mr. Panetta said that the C.I.A. had not detained any terrorism suspects since he took office in February and added that any suspects captured in the future would be quickly turned over to the American military or to a suspect’s home country.
Joanne Mariner, the director of the terrorism and counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch, said the closing of the C.I.A. prisons was “incredibly heartening and important.” But she said that a criminal investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program was nonetheless necessary, and she expressed concern that Mr. Panetta had not made clear what evidence the C.I.A. would need to detain a suspect. Mr. Panetta’s statement, along with a classified letter about interrogation policy that he sent Thursday to the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees, underscored the new administration’s sharp break with policies that Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney often credited with preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

By contrast, President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. insist that the use of techniques they describe as torture betrayed American values, alienated allies and became a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. A task force is now studying what interrogation methods should be permitted and how to ensure that prisoners turned over to other countries will not be mistreated. In his statement, Mr. Panetta vowed to continue the “global pursuit” of Al Qaeda and its allies but said interrogators would use traditional methods and not physical force. “C.I.A. officers, whose knowledge of terrorist organizations is second to none, will continue to conduct debriefings using a dialogue style of questioning,” Mr. Panetta wrote. He said C.I.A. officers were required to report abuse, even if it were carried out by a cooperating foreign intelligence service. Mr. Panetta also said the agency would no longer use contractors to conduct interrogations. Former military psychologists working under contract for the C.I.A. helped devise and conduct the previous harsh interrogations, according to former agency officials. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had proposed legislation barring contractors from conducting interrogations, saying the job was too important to outsource. The Senate committee recently began an investigation of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program, and senior Senate and House members have called for a broader and more public “truth commission” to investigate past counterterrorism programs.

Mr. Panetta said that the agency would cooperate with Congressional reviews but said that “fairness and wisdom” should dictate against a criminal investigation or other sanctions. The C.I.A. statement comes at a time of continuing debate inside the Obama administration over which classified documents related to the agency’s interrogation program should be made public. After several delays, the Justice Department now has until April 16 to decide whether to make public legal opinions justifying the C.I.A.’s harsh methods. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has argued for the release of the opinions and related documents, but some current and former C.I.A. officials say they believe that wholesale disclosures could harm counterterrorism efforts and hurt morale at the agency.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 10, 2009, on page A9 of the New York edition.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world/10detain.html?ref=todayspaper
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Since it was Bush - Cheney who argued for this and insisted it was legal, IMHO it should ultimately and rightly be the most burdensome on them. I'm not saying this to be partisan, but if we can impeach an American president for lying under oath, what should be done to a president that issued illegal and criminal orders? When I was a young soldier a long time ago, the military made it quite clear that US personnel must obey all 'Lawful' orders, but not only that; we were also required to bluntly refuse to follow those orders that we clearly knew to be illegal. As time winds on, it is becoming increasingly clearer just how profoundly the US had lost its moral compass under the previous administration. My take? If they can prosecute ex-leaders from around the world (Fujimora, Allende, et al), why should any former US president be immune?

Further, in another article, it seems that the CIA had medical personnel supervise the torture to ensure that they can inflict pain without worrying about accidentally killing the prisoner:

Report Outlines Medical Workers’ Role in Torture
By SCOTT SHANE
April 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded. Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006,

Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown.

Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said. Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”At times, according to the detainees’ accounts, medical workers “gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.” The Red Cross report was completed in 2007. It was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about torture, and posted Monday night with an article by Mr. Danner on the Web site of The New York Review of Books. Much of its contents were revealed in a March article by Mr. Danner and in a 2008 book, “The Dark Side,” by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, but the reporting of the Red Cross investigators’ conclusions on medical ethics and other issues are new.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, told investigators that when he was waterboarded, his pulse and oxygen level were monitored, and that a medical attendant stopped the procedure on several occasions. Another prisoner, Walid bin Attash, who had previously had a leg amputated, said that when he was forced for days to stand with his arms shackled above his head, a health worker periodically measured the swelling in his intact leg and eventually ordered that he be allowed to sit. The report does not indicate whether the medical workers at the C.I.A. sites were physicians, other professionals or both. Other sources have said that psychologists helped design and run the C.I.A. interrogation program, that physicians’ assistants and former military paramedics worked regularly in it, and that physicians were involved at times. By policy, the Red Cross, the chief independent monitor of detention conditions around the world, keeps its reports to governments confidential to encourage officials to grant access to prisoners. Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization in Washington, declined on Monday to comment on the report, adding, “We deplore that confidential material attributed to the I.C.R.C. was made public.”

Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that because of the Red Cross’s confidentiality policy, he would not comment on the report. He said that President Obama had prohibited all government interrogators from using techniques apart from the noncoercive methods in the Army Field Manual, and that the new C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, “has taken decisive steps to ensure that the C.I.A. abides by the president’s executive orders.” Mr. Mansfield added, however, that Mr. Panetta “has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.”

The C.I.A.’s interrogation methods were declared legal by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

In its 40-page report, the Red Cross roundly condemned the C.I.A. detention program not only for using torture and other cruel treatment, but also for holding prisoners without notice to governments or families. “The totality of the circumstances in which the 14 were held effectively amounted to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty and enforced disappearance, in contravention of international law,” said the report, which was provided to the C.I.A. acting general counsel, John Rizzo, in February 2007. Shortly after taking office in January, Mr. Obama ordered the C.I.A. secret detention program closed and directed that the Red Cross be promptly informed of every person detained by the C.I.A. or any other agency. The report also provided new details of the Bush administration’s failure to cooperate for several years with the Red Cross’s inquiries and investigations of American detention programs. Repeated inquiries and reports from the organization beginning in 2002 received no response from American officials, the report said, though the United States sent a diplomatic message addressing some inquiries in 2005. M. Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown University law professor, who also trained as a psychiatrist and is now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago law school, called the report's findings...

“a disturbing confirmation of our worst fears about medical professionals’ involvement in directing and modulating cruel treatment and torture.”

Another critic of medical involvement in harsh interrogation, Dr. Steven H. Miles, a physician at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota, said he had counted about 70 cases worldwide after World War II in which physicians were punished for participating in torture or related crimes. Most were in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, he said. None have been in the United States.
Dr. Miles said that in recent decades, torture had almost always involved medical professionals, and that to deter future misconduct, the medical role in the C.I.A. program should be fully disclosed.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/world/07detain.html
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This is really dishearteningly scary. When medical professionals choose to use their education and skill sets in this manner, what then separates us from the guy standing there with a whip? Oh, and if you have the time, read this other post I made about a Japanese doctor participating in wartime prisoner vivisections.

CIA claims no guilt, ordered to do it

ralphrepo Well-Known Member