Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Six Americans Who Prove Bush and Cheney Didn't Have

to Do It
Posted by Rebecca Gordon
at 8:02am, February 10, 2015.
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The post-9/11 moment offered them their main chance to transform their dreams
into reality and they seized it by the throat. They wanted to take the gloves off.
They were convinced that the presidency had been shackled by Congress in the
Watergate era and that it was their destiny to remove the chains. They believed in a
unitary presidency: an unchained executive with unfettered power to do whatever
he wanted, preemptively and in any fashion he cared to. And in their own fashion,
they were visionaries in their urge to establish a Pax Americana first in the Greater
Middle East and then planet-wide.
Anything, they thought, was possible, given a nation shocked and terrified by the
apocalyptic vision of those towers coming down, even if the damage had been done by
just 19 hijackers armed with box cutters who belonged to a terror organization
capable, at best, of mounting major operations every year or two. "[B]arely five hours
after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon... [Secretary of Defense
Donald] Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," CBS
News reported, even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the
attack, not Saddam Hussein. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it
all up. Things related and not.'")
And, of course, from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, they did sweep it all up. As a
group, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many other top
figures in the administration were in love with the U.S. military. They were convinced
that a force with no peer on the planet could bring various rogue powers instantly to
heel and leave the U.S. dominant in a way that no power in all of history had ever
been. Throw in control over the flow of oil on a global scale and their dreams couldnt
have been more expansive. But when you write the history of this particular disaster,
dont forget the fear, either.
As was said over and over again at that moment, 9/11 changed everything. That
meant they felt themselves freed to do all the mad things we now know they did,
from preemptive wars and occupations to massive programs of torture and
kidnapping, as well as the setting up of a global penal system that was to be beyond
the reach of any law or the oversight of anyone but those under their command. They
green-lighted it all, but dont for a second think that they werent afraid themselves.
To touch that fear (bordering on paranoia), you only have to read Jane Mayers book
The Dark Side where she describes Vice President Dick Cheney in that post-9/11
period being chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil
possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), she added, "rested a

duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger
rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."
Yes, they were on top of the world and undoubtedly chilled to the bone with fear as
well. And fear and impunity turned out to be an ugly combination indeed. Both the
fear and the sense of license, of the freedom to act as they wished, drove them
fiercely. Take Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA, later of the CIA. Of that
moment, he recently said, "I actually started to do different things. And I didn't
need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It
was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what's reasonable
and what's not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a
direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one
in which I was located before the attacks took place. In other words, on September
10, 2011, he was simply the director of the NSA. On September 11th, without ever
leaving the NSA, he was the president, Congress, and the chief justice of the
Supreme Court all rolled into one.
Given what, as Hayden (and others) suggest, they couldnt help but do, its good to
know that there were some people who could. Its a point that TomDispatch regular
Rebecca Gordon, author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post9/11 United States, makes in a particularly moving way today. Tom
Saying No to Torture
A Gallery of American Heroes
By Rebecca Gordon
Why was it again that, as President Obama said, we tortured some folks after the
9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that
being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself
safe. Thats why we dont shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing
anything else. We honor and revere them.
Back in August 2014, Obama explained the urge of the top figures in the Bush
administration to torture some folks this way: I understand why it happened. I
think its important, when we look back, to recall how afraid people were when the
twin towers fell. So naturally, in those panicked days, the people in charge had little
choice but to order the waterboarding, wall-slamming, and rectal rehydration of
whatever possible terrorists (and innocents) the CIA got their hands on. Thats what
fear drives you to do and dont forget, at the time even some mainstream liberal
columnists were calling for torture. And whatever you do, dont forget as well that
they were so, so afraid. Thats why, says the president, Its important for us not to
feel too sanctimonious, too quick to judge the people in the Bush administration, the
CIA, and even the U.S. military who planned, implemented, and justified torture.

The president has vacillated about just how long this period of exculpatory fear was
supposed to last. Sometimes he seems to suggest that its just the responses in the
more or less immediate aftermath of those attacks we shouldnt feel too
sanctimonious about. Sometimes its all those years after 9/11 during which
Americas leaders had to face legitimate fears of further attacks and therefore
kept on torturing people.
However long the panic lasted, the important point is that, as Obama insisted in
2009, and again at the end of 2014, no one should be prosecuted for torture, because
everyone was scared.
Anyone in President George W. Bushs position would have declared that the Geneva
Conventions, which are supposed to protect prisoners of war from mistreatment,
dont cover prisoners taken in the war on terror. Anyone would have told the pundits
on Meet the Press, as Vice President Dick Cheney did less than a week after 9/11,
that the attacks meant we would now have to work the dark side. Anyone in CIA
Director George Tenets shoes would have agreed with Cheney when he said that a
lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion,
using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.
And any attorney in the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel would naturally
have written the torture memos that John Yoo and Jay Bybee created in 2002, in
which they sought to provide legal cover for the CIAs torture practices by
redefining torture itself more or less out of existence. For some act to count as
severe physical suffering and therefore as torture, they wrote, the pain inflicted
would have to be of a sort ordinarily associated with a serious physical condition,
such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions.
Wouldnt anyone do what these men did, if they, too, were frightened out of their
wits? Actually, no. In fact, the sad, ugly story of the U.S. response to the criminal
acts of 9/11 is brightened by a number of people who have displayed genuine courage
in saying no to and turning their backs on torture. Their choices prove that Bush,
Cheney, & Co. could have said no as well.
Though youd never know it here, no level of fear in public officials makes acts of
torture (or the support of such acts) any less criminal or more defensible before the
law. Its remarkably uncomplicated, actually. Torture violates U.S. and international
law, and those responsible deserve to be prosecuted both for what they did and to
prevent the same thing from happening the next time people in power are afraid.
Some of those who rejected torture, like CIA official John Kiriakou and an as-yetunnamed Navy nurse, directly refused to practice it. Some risked reputations and

careers to let the people of this country know what their government was doing.
Sometimes an entire agency, like the FBI, refused to be involved in torture.
Id like to introduce you to six of these heroes.
Sergeant Joseph M. Darby: If it hadnt been for a 24-year-old soldier named Joe
Darby, we might never have heard of the tortures and abuses committed at Abu
Ghraib, 20 miles outside Baghdad. It had once been Saddam Husseins most notorious
prison and when the U.S. military arrived in 2003, they put it to similar use.
Early on, however, the Defense Department was unhappy with the quality of
intelligence being produced there, so Major General Geoffrey Miller was dispatched
from his post as commandant of the jewel in the crown of the Bush administrations
offshore system of injustice, Guantnamo, to Iraq with orders to Gitmo-ize Abu
Ghraib.
Joe Darby was a member of the Military Police assigned to that prison. One day early
in 2004, Army Specialist Charles Graner handed him a couple of CDs full of
photographs, thinking perhaps that Darby would enjoy them as much as he did.
Graner was one of the people in charge of the Army Reservists responsible for
softening up prisoners before they were handed over for interrogation to Military
Intelligence and the Other Government Agency (a euphemism for the CIA and its
private contractors). Prisoners being softened up were stacked in pyramids like
cordwood, paraded like dogs on leashes, bitten by actual dogs, and in at least one
case, raped in the anus with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
When Joe Darby saw the photographs, unlike Graner, he was not amused. He was
horrified. He recognized them as evidence of crimes and, after three weeks of
internal debate, handed them to Special Agent Tyler Pieron of the U.S. Army Criminal
Investigation Command, who was working at Abu Ghraib. From there, the photos made
their way up the chain of command, via a leak into the hands of New Yorker reporter
Seymour Hersh, and eventually into U.S. living rooms on 60 Minutes II one Tuesday
evening at the end of April 2004.
Darby hoped to remain anonymous, but he soon gained international renown for what
he had done. With exposure came threats to him and to his family. In the immediate
aftermath of the disclosures, while still stationed at Abu Ghraib, he feared -- he told
the BBC -- that he might be murdered in his sleep. Still, he doesnt consider what he
did anything special. As he said, when accepting the Kennedy Librarys Profiles in
Courage award, It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Joe Darby may
have felt fear, but he didnt go along with a torture regime.

Major General Antonio M. Taguba: When the photos of Abu Ghraib came out, so did
the calls for investigation into what many people hoped was either 1) not as bad as it
looked (Rush Limbaugh famously compared it to fraternity hazing); or 2) a unique
aberration. The Army picked General Taguba to investigate and he complied. The
2004 Taguba Report -- officially, the Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th
Military Police Brigade -- is a model of restrained rhetoric in the service of
devastating revelation. Read it and weep.
Did Taguba know that this assignment likely meant the end of his military career?
The writing on the wall was pretty easy to read in the Bush-Cheney White House.
Only a fool would have seen this as a plum assignment. And in 2006, the Armys vicechief of staff telephoned him to say, I need you to retire by January 2007. Taguba
later told Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker that he was forced into retirement by
civilian Pentagon officials because he had been overzealous... and disloyal... I was
ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.
General Counsel to the Navy Alberto J. Mora: One of the first lawyers to attack the
tortured logic found in the key torture memo written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee,
Mora initially became concerned about U.S. torture practices in 2002, when he heard
from the head of the Naval Criminal Investigation Service about some of the abuses
at Guantnamo. Not grasping that the desire to torture came from the top, he
assumed that, if his superiors understood what was happening, they would promptly
end it. So he sought a meeting with William Haynes, then the Pentagons general
counsel and a protg of David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick
Cheney. When confronted on the issue on December 20, 2002, Haynes denied that
the Guantnamo techniques (including sleep and light deprivation, forced stress
positions, and so much else) were torture. Still, Mora left the meeting thinking hed
gotten through to the general counsel and that the practices, which he assumed were
an aberration, a blunder, would be halted.
Suffice it to say that Mora was wrong and that torture practices at Guantnamo went
right on. Mora nonetheless launched a full-scale memo-writing campaign against the
torture regime, but in the end failed to stop it. His intervention did nothing, of
course, to further his career. He left his post in January 2006 and eventually told his
story to New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer, who is herself another of the other
real heroes of the war on terror years.
John Kiriakou: Presently finishing a 30-month term -- nearly two years in federal
prison, a halfway house, and now home confinement -- for having inadvertently
disclosed the last name of a fellow CIA agent to a reporter. Threatened by the
Obama administrations Justice Department with a 38-year sentence for espionage,
Kiriakou pled guilty to a lesser charge of releasing classified information. His real
crime, however, was his refusal to participate in torture and his disclosure first to

ABC News in 2007 that the CIA had used waterboarding, a torture technique of
repeated near drowning, on suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
Kiriakou worked for the CIA for more than 14 years. After 9/11, he was made chief
of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan, but he left the agency when it became
clear to him that it was committed to torture. I was at the CIA when the torture
program was conceived, he told the Daily Beast in 2014. I refused to be trained in
the techniques and when I left government I confirmed that torture was official U.S.
policy.
Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch: He is the latest addition to the list of torture
rejecters. Couch is mentioned in the introduction to Mohamedou Ould Slahis newly
published Guantnamo Diary, which chronicles the arrest, rendition, and torture of an
innocent Mauritanian citizen who remains in segregation at the Guantnamo prison to
this day. Couch was the military prosecutor assigned to Slahis case. Hed returned to
active duty after the death of a friend, like himself a former Marine, who was the
co-pilot of the plane that hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11.
He was eager to bring the people responsible for his friends death, as well as others,
to justice.
As he prepared the case against Slahi in 2003, however, he began to worry about the
interrogation techniques used on his future defendant and at Guantnamo more
generally. As Larry Siems, the books editor, writes in the introduction,[Couch] had
caught a glimpse, on his first visit to the base, of another prisoner shackled to the
floor in an empty interrogation booth, rocking back and forth as a strobe light
flashed and heavy metal blared. He recognized the technique; hed experienced it
himself when as a Marine pilot, he had endured a week of such techniques in a
program that prepares U.S. airmen for the experience of capture and torture.
(Couchs training was most likely part of the U.S. militarys Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, program, which some have called a torture school.)
The more Couch learned about Slahis case, the more he became convinced that
torture had been involved (as it in fact was on a startling scale). He withdrew from
the case at the end of 2003. In an interview with the anti-torture organization
Torturing Democracy, Couch described the moment he knew he had to end his
involvement with the military commissions at Guantnamo.
I was in church this Sunday, and we had a baptism. We got to the part of the liturgy
where the congregation repeats -- Im paraphrasing here, but the essence is that we
respect the dignity of every human being and seek peace and justice on earth. And
when we spoke those words that morning, [although] there were a lot of people in
that church I could have been the only one there. I just felt this incredible, all
right, there it is. You cant come in here on Sunday, and as a Christian, subscribe to

this belief [in the] dignity of every human being and say I will seek justice and peace
on the earth, and continue to go with the prosecution using that kind of evidence. And
at that point I knew what I had to do. I had to get off the fence.
An unnamed Navy nurse: We know of at least one other person who directly refused
to participate in acts of torture. He was an unnamed Navy nurse whose identity is
being withheld on the advice of his lawyers, because he still faces legal sanctions for
his actions.
In July 2014, after initially agreeing to participate in the force-feeding of
Guantnamo prisoners on a hunger strike, this nurse realized that what he was being
asked to do violated the fundamental values of his profession, that it was a form of
torture. Since 2005, prisoners at Guantnamo had used periodic hunger strikes as a
nonviolent method of protesting their harsh treatment, solitary confinement, and
indefinite incarceration. Officials at the prison camp responded with violent and
painful force-feeding, which they used not to save lives, but as a strikebreaking
technique.
One victim put it this way in the New York Times: I cant describe how painful it is
to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I
wanted to vomit, but I couldnt. There was agony in my chest, throat, and stomach. I
had never experienced such pain before.
The nurses attorney told NPRs All Things Considered:
He volunteered to go out to Guantnamo initially and then after he observed the way
the practices were performed and he saw the ways in which the detainees were
forcibly extracted from their cells and placed in five-point restraint chairs, and how
they were fed with a tube through the nose into their stomach, and that the kinds of
things that nurses would do -- according to their professional responsibilities -- those
things were not done, he felt he could no longer participate in it.
As a result of his refusal, the Navy sent him back to the States and threatened him
with court martial and prison. That threat has been taken off the table, but the 18year Navy veteran still faces possible involuntary discharge, and with it the loss of
his pension, health care, and education benefits under the post-9/11 G.I. Bill. In spite
of the risks, he stepped away.
In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a famous series of
experiments, in which subjects were convinced by white-coated authority figures to
deliver what they believed to be painful and life-threatening electric shocks to people
they believed were also experimental subjects. In the years since Milgram published
his research into ordinary peoples willingness to torture strangers theyd just met,

many people have come to believe that almost everyone will go along with torture -even if theyre not particularly scared. In fact, thats not what Milgram found. A
substantial minority of his subjects -- around 35% -- refused, and similar minorities
have refused in subsequent studies.
So, yes, it is possible to say no to torture. These six figures did, each in his own way,
and undoubtedly if we knew the full inside story of the American post-9/11 torture
nightmare, the list would be significantly longer.
The authors of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (which our country signed in
1988 and ratified in 1994) knew that torturers would be tempted to use fear as an
excuse for breaking the law. Thats why they included these words in Article 2:
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of
war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a
justification of torture.
The Convention goes on to say this about torture and the law:
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its
criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by
any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties,
which take into account their grave nature.
Those who planned, executed, and justified American torture practices after 9/11
should not get away with it just because they were scared.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Mainstreaming Torture:
Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy
department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War
Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming
Torture website.
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Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon