|
U.S. News, Whoa!
New York Times calls for
Cheney, Bush officials to be investigated and prosecuted for torture
Báo Mẽo kêu lôi Bush và bộ hạ ra tòa về vụ tra tấn
Trên tờ The New Yorker có 1
bài cũng thú lắm, quí vị độc giả có thể đọc free, trừ GCC.
Đành scan và dịch sau vậy.
Prosecute
Torturers and Their
Bosses
TORTURE AND
THE TRUTH
Tra Tấn và Sự Thực
It’s hard to
describe it as a positive development when a branch of the federal
government
releases a four-hundred- and-ninety-nine-page report that explains, in
meticulous detail, how unthinkable cruelty became official U.S. policy.
But last
Tuesday, in releasing the long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence
Committee
report on the C.I.A.'s interrogation-and-detention program, Senator
Dianne
Feinstein, the committee chairman, proved that Congress can still
perform its
most basic Madisonian function of providing a check on executive-branch
abuse,
and that is reason for gratitude.
It is clear
now that from the start many of those involved in the program, which
began in
2002, recognized its potential criminality. Before subjecting a
detainee to
interrogation, a 2002 cable notes, C.I.A. officers sought assurances
that he
would "remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his
life." Permanent, extrajudicial disappearance was apparently preferable
to
letting the prisoner ever tell what had been done to him. That logic
may explain
why no "high value detainee" subjected to the most extreme tactics
and still in U.S. custody in Guantanamo has yet been given an open
trial.
The report
also demonstrates that the agency misrepresented nearly every aspect of
its
program to the Bush Administration, which authorized it, to the members
of
Congress charged with overseeing it, and to the public, which was led
to believe
that whatever the C.I.A. was doing was vital for national security and
did not involve
torture. Instead, the report shows, in all twenty cases most widely
cited by
the C.LA. as evidence that abusive interrogation methods were
necessary, the
same information could have been obtained, and frequently was obtained,
through
non-coercive methods. Further, the interrogations often produced false
information,
ensnaring innocent people, sometimes with tragic results.
Other
documents illustrate how the agency misled. In June of 2003, the Vice-
President's counsel asked the C.LA'.s general counsel if the agency was
videotaping its waterboarding sessions. His answer was no. That was
technically
true, since it was not videotaping them at the time. But it had done so
previously, and it had the tapes. The C.LA. used the same evasion on
Senate overseers.
A day after a senator proposed a commission to look into detainee
matters, the
tapes were destroyed. Similar deceptions on many levels are so rife in
the
report that a reader can't help but wonder if agency officials didn't
simply
regard their cloak of state secrecy as a license to circumvent
accountability.
After
Feinstein introduced the report on the Senate floor, John McCain rose
to speak.
He praised the document as "a thorough and thoughtful study of
practices
that I believe not only failed their purpose-to secure actionable
intelligence
to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies-but actually
damaged our
security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in
the world."
His endorsement was important not only because, as a former prisoner of
war who
survived torture, he has particular authority on the issue but also
because he
is a Republican. He lent the report credibility against torture
apologists
hoping to discredit it as a political stunt. The tableau of the two
elder
senators putting aside their differences to stand together was a relic
of
bipartisan statesmanship.
It remains
to be seen, though, whether the report will spur lasting reform. Darius
Rejali,
a professor of political science at Reed College and an expert on
torture
regimes, doubts that it will. For one thing, despite McCain's
testimony, torture
is becoming just another partisan issue. This wasn't always the case-it
was Ronald
Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But
polls show
both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along
party
lines. "It's becoming a lot like the death penalty," Rejali said.
The 1975
Church Committee report, which was conducted following revelations of,
among
other things, covert operations to assassinate foreign leaders, was,
until now,
the best-known public airing of C.I.A. practices. According to Loch K.
Johnson,
a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who was
a
special assistant to Senator Frank Church, its findings were broadly
accepted
across the political spectrum. "No one challenged it," he said. By
contrast, the new report, even before it was released, came under
attack from
Republicans, including Dick Cheney, who, although he hadn't read it,
called it
"full of crap." Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader,
castigated it as "ideologically motivated and distorted." John
Cornyn, the second- highest-ranking Republican in the Senate, argued
that C.I.A.
officers should not be criticized but, rather, "thanked."
There was a
way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan
trivialization. In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig,
President
Obama's White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an
independent
commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea,
including such
national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
Secretary of
Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President's chief of staff,
Rahm Emanuel.
Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it.
Obama,
however, said that he didn't want to seem to be taking punitive
measures
against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach
bipartisan
agreement on issues such as closing Guantanamo.
Obama has
made plain in his public statements and in his executive orders that
torture, which
is how he forthrightly labelled the program, was unacceptable. But, in
leaving
matters to the Senate, he left the truth open to debate. He further
complicated
things by appointing John Brennan to run the C.I.A., even though
Brennan, as a
top officer in the agency, had worked closely with George Tenet, the
director
during the worst excesses of the program. Last Thursday, in a rare
press conference,
Brennan called the C.I.A.'s past practices "abhorrent" but declined
to say that they amounted to torture, undercutting Obama. Democrats
called for
Brennan and other C.I.A. personnel to be "purged." Senator Mark
Udall, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said, "If there is no
moral
leadership from the White House, what's to stop the next White House
and C.I.A.
director from supporting torture?"
Rejali, who
has studied the tension between torture and democracy around the world,
says
that "there's a five- or six- year window for any kind of
accountability.
We're now past that window. The two sides are entrenched. “Without a
mutual
acknowledgment of the mistakes made, and some form of accountability,
he
warned, another reversion to torture may be difficult to prevent:
"Nothing
predicts future behavior as much as past impunity."
-Jane Mayer
THE
NEW YORKER,
DECEMBER 22 & 29, 2014
Torture,
writes Améry, has "an indelible character".
Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.
Sebald: Chống Lại Sự Không Thể Đảo Ngược: Về Jean
Améry, trong Lịch sử tự nhiên về
huỷ diệt
[Against the
Irreversible. On Jean Améry.
On the
natural history of destruction, nhà xb Vintage Canada].
Améry viết, tra tấn có cái tính
quái dị, không thể tẩy
xoá đi được, là: Ai đã từng bị tra tấn, là suốt đời bị tra tấn.
Câu này,
theo Gấu tôi, đọc
[đảo] ngược lại, vẫn có nghĩa.
Rằng, kẻ tra tấn, là cứ thèm tra tấn suốt đời!
Cớm VC thú câu này lắm!
|