Cheney, McCain and the debate over torture

A dispute over outlawing government-endorsed torture has opened up as a new front in the developing struggle within the ruling class establishment against the Bush administration. It is a struggle to “soften up,” isolate and undermine the power of Vice President Dick Cheney, who is regarded by many as the secret and nefarious unofficial prime minister. This is part of a broader struggle to break up the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis as Washington and the Pentagon sink deeper into the Iraq quagmire.

The torturers are coming out against torture. No one should give one ounce of credit to the war criminals for this.

The battle is being waged in two areas: over the drafting of new Pentagon guidelines on torture, and over Senate legislation outlawing torture. In both spheres, Cheney is leading the opposition to legal and administrative restrictions on the “right” to torture.

Cheney is also—unofficially—a key target in the CIA-leak grand jury investigation. The grand jury, convened by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, has already issued a five-count felony indictment against Cheney’s chief of staff and key aide, I. Lewis Libby.

The struggle against new Pentagon guidelines that would mandate a reduction in the brutality against detainees has been smoldering behind the scenes for two months. But the debate has been going on for three years, since Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the so-called “fight against terrorism,” which includes just about anyone the Pentagon or the CIA can get their hands on in the Muslim world.

With world-wide condemnations of Pentagon and CIA torture, the military is moving to change its image. But Cheney signaled that he was not going to back up an inch on the torture question. The day after Libby resigned, Cheney appointed David Addington to replace him as chief of staff. Addington, among other things, co-authored the original torture memo that came out of the Justice Department authorizing torture as a prerogative of presidential war powers.

It was Addington who recently called Rumsfeld’s chief aide on detainee policy, Matthew Waxman, into his office and cross-examined him about the new Pen tagon guidelines. Waxman “left bruised and bloody,” said a Defense Department official. “He tried to champion Article 3 [of the Geneva Conven tions], and Addington just ate him for lunch.” (New York Times, Nov. 2)

The Times continued that “Addington objected to phrases taken from Article 3— which proscribes ‘cruel treatment and torture,’ and ‘outrages upon personal dignity, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, humiliating and degrading treatment’— as problematically vague.”

One of the Addington camp’s major defenses is that Bush “specifically rejected the Article 3 standard in 2002, setting out a different one” that said detainees should “be treated humanely and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.”

But the attempt to rewrite the rules “received strong support from lawyers for the armed services, the military vice chiefs and some civilian defense officials,” said the Times. “Their concern was that we were losing our standing with allies as well as the moral high ground with the rest of the world.”

Militarist introduces anti-torture amendment

The legislative struggle was precipitated when Bush rival and militarist Sen. John McCain introduced an amendment outlawing “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody. The amendment was attached to the $445 billion military spending bill. The language of the McCain amendment is taken directly from the UN Convention Against Torture.

Just as in the struggle over the Defense Department guidelines, Cheney is the chief opponent. Much of the decisive initiative for the McCain amendment comes from the military itself.

Secretary of State Condo leezza Rice wants to change the rules “to get us out of the detainee mess.” (Washington Post, Nov. 7) Rice’s aides and her counterparts in the Pentagon are trying to change the rules and the image. Cheney’s group is a “shrinking island,” according an anonymous State Depart ment official.

Cheney twice held meetings with legislators to try to have the McCain amendment defeated. When it was passed in the Senate, he got CIA head Peter Goss to meet with McCain and argue for exempting the CIA from the amendment. The CIA is reported to have illegal secret prisons around the world—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Guantanamo and Eastern Europe—where it tortures and “disappears” prisoners. Some are known to have died under torture.

Cheney lost that battle. His staff is now “trying to have meetings cancelled … to at least slow things down or gum up the works, or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members,” an intelligence official confided to the Washington Post. Rice has told Cheney she wants to be at all meetings.

Cheney recently went to a weekly luncheon of Republican senators and made “an impassioned plea” to reject the McCain amendment. McCain rebutted him, according to an aide, telling his colleagues that the image of the United States using torture “is killing us around the world.”

So there you have it. The militarists in the Pentagon, well represented by fellow militarist McCain, fear that torture is besmirching Washington’s image and ruining U.S. imperialism’s efforts to conquer Iraq and proceed with its plans in the rest of the world.

The strategists of U.S. imperialism are not opposed to torture because it is dehumanizing, degrading and cruel. No. But proclaiming it as official policy is “ruining their image” as they vainly attempt to colonize Iraq and pacify Afghanistan.

The CIA trained the torturers of the Savak under the Shah of Iran. The FBI and the Pentagon trained torturers for Latin America at the School of the Americas. Washington backed the death squads in El Salvador and now in Colombia. They supported the Argentinian, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Brazilian generals and dictator Pinochet of Chile, who “disappeared” tens of thousands.

The torturers are now coming out against torture. It is a victory to see them on the defensive, having to pull back and disavow their brutal tactics. But no one should give one ounce of credit to any of the war criminals for this. The Iraq resistance and its refusal to submit is what has brought it about.