Trump says "I always felt that I was in the military," but real officers are drilled in the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. (photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Redux)
Trump's
Tough-Guy Talk on Torture Risks Real Lives
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
January 25, 2017
In
an interview with his biographer Michael D’Antonio, Donald Trump explained that
although he received a medical deferment rather than serving in the war in
Vietnam, “I always felt that I was in the military.” This was, as D’Antonio
reported in “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” because he
spent his high-school years at a military-themed boarding school, not far from
West Point.
Last
Saturday, President Trump trumpeted his military expertise during a visit to the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, where he praised
his nominee to direct the C.I.A., Michael Pompeo, for being first in his class
at West Point. Then he digressed, noting, “I know a lot about West Point. . . .
Trust me, I’m, like, a smart person.”
One
difference between serving in the military and being a pretend soldier at the
New York Military Academy, where Trump proudly led mock drills in snappy faux
military uniforms, is that, in the real thing, officers are drilled not just in
marching formations but also in the laws of war. These include the Geneva
Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, which impose absolute,
unconditional bans on torture and other forms of cruel and inhumane treatment
of enemy combatants, categorizing such conduct, under any and all
circumstances, as a war crime.
In
an interview with ABC’s David Muir, made available on Wednesday, Trump
gave a cursory nod to those laws. Asked if he wanted U.S. forces to use
waterboarding, the President said that he would listen to his advisers, but
that he wanted to do everything “within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do
legally” to “fight fire with fire.” He told Muir, “I have spoken, as recently
as twenty-four hours ago, with people at the highest level of intelligence, and
I asked them the question: Does it work? Does torture work? And the answer was
yes, absolutely.” He added, with emphasis, “Do I feel it works? Absolutely I
feel it works.”
The
interview came on the same day that several news organizations published a
draft executive order that, if signed, would command the Trump Administration
to review the possibility of reintroducing C.I.A.-run “black site” detention camps for terror suspects and the use of
brutal interrogation techniques. These practices were used during the early
years of the War on Terror, but were shut down after the Supreme Court declared
them subject to prosecution. At the daily White House press briefing on
Wednesday, Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, described the draft as “not a
White House document.” Still, it was circulating through high levels of the
government, and President Trump’s sentiments were clear.
As
any military expert could tell Trump, torture only increases the danger that
soldiers face. It produces false intelligence, increases the risk that captured
soldiers will themselves be tortured, and undermines discipline and moral
authority. This is a lesson that George Washington knew well. As a general in
the Revolutionary War, he vowed that, unlike the British, who tortured their
captives, this new country would distinguish itself by its humanity toward
enemy combatants. Washington’s order proved not just moral but also practical.
As David Hackett Fischer wrote in “Washington’s Crossing,” his Pulitzer
Prize-winning history, Washington’s superior treatment of enemy captives
fomented desertion among British and Hessian soldiers, and bolstered the
American soldiers’ morale.
Washington’s
enlightened orders formed the backbone of U.S. military policy until the War on
Terror. America didn’t always live up to these ideals, but it nonetheless
valued them, and enshrined them in law. The original copies of the Geneva
Conventions are kept in a safe at the State Department, signed by, among
others, Winston Churchill, whose bust Trump reportedly has chosen to give a
place of honor in his Oval Office.
The
horrifying consequences of abandoning the high road are catalogued in the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 report on the C.I.A.’s use of torture
during the Bush era. Daniel J. Jones, the congressional staff member who was
the lead author of the Senate report, told me that, should Trump choose to read
it, he would see that “it clearly details how the C.I.A. internally came to the
conclusion that their interrogation program was ineffective—and that the C.I.A.
should not be operating detention sites.”
As
Trump readily admits, he doesn’t feel he has time to read anything lengthy,
which would seem to preclude his absorption of the five-hundred-page
declassified summary of the Senate report, not to mention the
six-thousand-seven-hundred-page classified original. It doesn’t help, either,
that the Obama Administration, in deference to the wishes of the C.I.A.,
declined to hold anyone in the intelligence community accountable for the
Bush-era torture program. Obama instead chose to, as he put it, “turn the
page.” Unfortunately, that has made it all too easy for a new Administration to
look to the old playbook. These missteps, Jones said, “are just dumbfounding.”
Luckily,
if Trump were to sign the draft executive order, the decision on whether to
return to the brutal detention and interrogation techniques that former
Vice-President Cheney called “the dark side” would not be made by the President
alone. According to the draft, it would be made in consultation with the
Defense Secretary, the Attorney General, and various leaders of the
intelligence community. Congress and the courts have major roles to play as
well. And, while Trump may have missed the lessons of recent history, several
of his top appointees are not just well informed but also have personal
experience in this area.
As
the Times reported, James Mattis, Trump’s Defense Secretary,
like virtually every American military leader, is deeply opposed to the use of
torture and the mistreatment of enemy combatants. As a Major General in Iraq,
Mattis oversaw the swift court martial of U.S. marines under his command who
had killed a captured suspect during a brutal interrogation. Trump seemed
amazed to learn of Mattis’s opposition to torture, telling the Times,
during a meeting with editors and reporters, that Mattis had told him that a
beer and a pack of cigarettes work better. Trump’s surprise was itself a
surprise to anyone with a modicum of understanding of American military
history.
Daniel
Coats, Trump’s choice for National Intelligence director, has also had a
first-hand look at the costs of the C.I.A.’s former detention and interrogation
program. He served as George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Germany, and had to
explain to Germany’s Interior Minister, Otto Schily, that the C.I.A. had made
an embarrassing mistake: it had “renditioned”—meaning
kidnapped—the wrong German, whisking him to a secret black-prison site and
physically tormenting him for five months. Coats convinced Schily not to press
charges, and to keep the intelligence fiasco secret, but, after being freed,
the mistaken suspect, Khalid El-Masri, won a suit in the European Court of
Human Rights, in Strasbourg. The court found that he had been tortured,
publicly shaming the C.I.A., and condemned the countries that had assisted in
the secret program.
Scott
Horton, a human-rights lawyer and advocate, predicts that reopening the
C.I.A.’s program would present huge legal issues. “I think they would do
whatever they can to keep it out of the federal courts, but it’s likely they’d
face troubles trying to do this anywhere in Europe. North Africa and the Middle
East are another question. Where would Trump put these black sites? Morocco,
Egypt, and Israel would be the logical candidates,” he said. He also noted that
“NATO is already under heavy pressure by Trump, but the black-site regime will
again test NATO’s relationship with the U.S. Previously, Hungary, Poland,
Lithuania, and Romania were among the nations providing cover for C.I.A.
torture and ‘disappeared’ imprisonment. Will they be challenged to do this
again?”
The
answer is no, if John McCain, the Senate’s best-known military hero, has
anything to say about it. Trump belittled McCain during the campaign for having
been captured during the Vietnam War, but McCain now is in position to teach
the President a thing or two about how real soldiers think. Using Trump’s
favorite weapon—Twitter—McCain fired back, “@potus can sign whatever executive orders
he likes, but the law is the law – we’re not bringing back torture.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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