Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  William Langewiesche, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote from Baghdad, “However vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional ‘collateral’ casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces.”57 Dahr Jamail, one of the BBC’s correspondents in Iraq, reported, “Coalition and Iraqi security forces may be responsible for up to sixty percent of conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq—far more than are killed by insurgents, confidential records obtained by the BBC’s Panorama programme reveal.... One of the least reported aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is the oftentimes indiscriminate use of airpower by the American military.”58

  The American press only rarely, and then usually anecdotally, describes the deaths of civilians killed by American troops. American newspapers and television broadcasts routinely remove pictures of non-combatants killed by U.S. forces even though they do not flinch from showing the bodies of people killed by insurgents. One reason may be surmised from an October 2001 set of instructions a Florida newspaper issued to its staff: “DO NOT USE photos on page 1A showing civilian casualties from the war on Afghanistan. .. . DO NOT USE wire stories that lead with civilian casualties. . . . They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT.”59 The American press has similarly never reported on the nightly use of “flash bombs” fired by Apache helicopters to light up the fields along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These high-tech American bombs have burned thousands of acres of fields and decimated groves of date palms. Hovering helicopters have also made it impossible for Iraqis to sleep on rooftops in the sweltering summertime, as was their custom in order to escape the stifling heat.60

  There are no “official” statistics on this mayhem because, as former Centcom commander General Tommy Franks put it, “We do not do body counts.” (Franks was speaking of the war in Afghanistan but also making policy for the subsequent war in Iraq.) Such a statement signaled to the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq that the United States did not care how many local citizens it killed. However, as Maria Ruzicka, an American peace activist who was killed on April 16, 2005, on the road to Baghdad International Airport, had discovered, it is also a lie. The U.S. military does do body counts, but only publicizes them when they are of propaganda value to the American side.61

  American soldiers and contractors working in the war zones are authorized to use lethal force at their own discretion whenever they feel threatened. The soldiers are unaccountable for their acts to any authority except their military superiors, and the contractors are, so far as I can ascertain, simply unaccountable. The U.S. military itself invariably conducts its own investigations into any charges of excessive use of force, and these investigations are normally oriented toward covering up what happened. As one knowledgeable human rights observer in Iraq put matters, “The American troops have adopted an atmosphere of impunity. Arrogant and violent behavior goes unpunished and continues.”62 Patrick Cockburn, a journalist for the Independent of London with long experience in Iraq, adds, “Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by U.S. troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.”63

  In Afghanistan, there are relatively few unofficial estimates of the numbers of civilians killed by U.S. forces and no official ones. In December 2001, Robert Fisk, the veteran journalist of the Islamic world, reported that high-level bombing of Afghan villages by B-52s had claimed some 3,700 victims.64 After that time, there were mostly reports of individual deaths, including a Red Cross account of 52 people, half of them children, killed by bombing in eastern Afghanistan on December 29, 2001; 16 villagers killed on January 23, 2002, by U.S. forces at Hazar Qadam; and 14, including women and children, killed when a U.S. jet attacked a vehicle on March 6, 2002, in eastern Paktia province.

  On June 30, 2002, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a cluster of six villages a hundred miles north of Kandahar in Uruzgan province. In the village of Karakak, the aircraft sprayed a wedding ceremony being held at night to escape the heat with hundreds of bullets. The Americans repeatedly claimed that their planes had come under antiaircraft fire and that they were only retaliating. However, a U.S. Special Forces investigation on the ground found no antiaircraft gun or expended cannon shells. What they did find were forty-eight bodies, all but three women and children. Afghan officials believed that the United States either relied on intelligence from Afghan informers who were perhaps settling personal scores or were simply shooting up the area in hopes of killing Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the overthrown Taliban regime, who was raised less than a mile from the village. The Americans later admitted the raid was a mistake and promised to build schools, roads, and hospitals and drill wells in the district but there is no evidence that they ever did so.65 The “independent” Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly asked the U.S. military to obtain Afghan authorization before carrying out attacks, but American officials up to and including President Bush have refused all such requests.66

  American killings of civilians have been on a far greater scale in Iraq because that country is more populous and urbanized, and the war and insurgency there have proved much more intense than in Afghanistan. On October 28, 2004, physicians and other researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities in the United States and the al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad published a report in the British medical journal the Lancet that concluded, “The risk of death from violence [in Iraq] in the period after the invasion was fifty-eight times higher than in the period before the war.... We think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. . . . Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.”67

  Some other nongovernmental analysts believe this estimate may be too high. The London-based group Iraq Body Count puts the total of civilians killed by foreign troops at between 34,711 and 38,861 as of May 1, 2006. However, it counts only deaths directly reported by the media or mentioned by official groups.68 The Lancet’s estimate was based not only on an elaborate survey of households but on a comparison of mortality rates in the first nearly eighteen months after the invasion with the almost fifteen-month period preceding it. As the authors note, “The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death.” They excluded the city of Fallujah from their investigation because it was too dangerous to do research there. “We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected happened after the invasion outside Fallujah and far more if the outlier Fallujah cluster is included.”69

  During the “shock and awe” barrage of cruise missiles and other airborne weaponry that opened the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill “high value targets” (HVTs), including Saddam Hussein and General Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq’s number two official. According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike “thought likely to result in the deaths of more than thirty civilians.” The air war commander, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, proposed fifty such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one.

  As it turned out, none succeeded. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound south of Baghdad was a major fiasco. American intelligence reported Saddam there in an underground bunker that would require particularly large bombs. He was not there, however, nor was any bunker, but the air force killed a lot of Iraqi civilians. Similarly, an April 7 raid in the Mansur district of Baghdad killed only innocent bystanders. The deaths accomplished nothing ex
cept to show off America s lethal, high-tech weaponry. Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the “high-value targeting cell” within the Pentagon, described the entire campaign as an “abject failure” and added, “We failed to kill the HVTs and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population.”70

  Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, commented on these and later destructive attacks, “American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion.... The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, American public opinion, media and the [2004] election victory of the Bush administration have left the world’s most powerful military without practical restraint.”71

  As a second example of the administration s failure to think and make moral judgments, consider the global network of military prisons it has created in which inmates are routinely tortured. On May 17, 2004, the Army Times reported that around the halls of the Pentagon a caustic label had emerged for the enlisted soldiers shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos: “the six morons who lost the war.”72 I would suggest that there were actually seven morons, not six, and they were not enlisted men. The seven are President George W. Bush; his former legal counsel and subsequently attorney general of the United States Alberto Gonzales; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq until mid-2004; Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander at Guantanamo until April 2004, when he took over Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John W. Warner (Republican from Virginia).73

  These are the people who disgraced the United States and did nothing about it when the details of Abu Ghraib in particular began to be revealed to the public. As the Israeli court that sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death insisted: “The degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand.”74 This is as true in cases of official torture as it is for genocide.

  President Bush was directly responsible for removing the legal restraints against torture. On the evening of September 11, 2001, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he returned to Washington and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Following his speech, he met with his senior officials concerned with the crisis in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, who was there, Bush entered the room and said, “I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.” In the ensuing discussion, according to Clarke, “Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room. T don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ “75 As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, “We got off on the wrong foot on the very first day.”76

  Without question Secretary Rumsfeld heeded what the commander in chief told him. Later that autumn, during the interrogations of John Walker Lindh, our first post-9/11 torture victim, Rumsfeld instructed his legal counsel to order the military intelligence officials to “take the gloves off.” In the early stages of his interrogation under torture, Lindh’s responses were cabled to the Pentagon hourly followed by return orders to keep up the pressure.

  Lindh was then a twenty-year-old, white, middle-class American citizen from Marin County, California, who had converted to Islam, gone to Yemen and Pakistan to study religious texts and Arabic, and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, barely a month before the 9/11 attacks. The CIA found him, badly wounded, in a prison of one of the Northern Alliance warlords, our allies in the war against the Taliban.

  His American captors stripped and humiliated him, denied him medical treatment, and tortured him for information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. According to Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, who was shown secret military documents detailing the treatment of Lindh, he “was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days.”77 Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to try Lindh as a traitor but in the end settled for a guilty plea on charges of aiding the Taliban and a twenty-year sentence rather than let Lindh’s lawyers seek testimony from captives held at Guantanamo about his torture. As part of his plea bargain, Lindh was forced to sign a statement saying: “The defendant agrees that this agreement puts to rest his claims of mistreatment by the United States military, and all claims of mistreatment are withdrawn. The defendant acknowledges that he was not intentionally mistreated by the U.S. military.” As journalist Dave Lindorff observes, Lindh “remains almost certainly wrongfully imprisoned.”78

  Thus began practices that would ultimately infect and contaminate virtually all aspects of the “war on terror.” Thanks to the research of Alfred W. McCoy, who has studied the history of U.S. government torture and the CIA’s application of it from the early days of the Cold War, its use was not unknown in American clandestine operations.79 In collaboration with the British, the CIA invented new forms of mental torture that relied on inducing terror, which often did irreversible psychological damage, in addition to such techniques as “water-boarding” or what our Latin American military allies call the “submarino.” It involves being held under water until you think you will die. There was, however, great nervousness about using these techniques because laws and international treaties passed and signed during the middle and late years of the Cold War had clearly made torture a crime. Bush and Rumsfeld ordered these restraints removed, and all the old methods were soon back in use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and at secret CIA prisons around the world.

  Bush’s responsibility for legalizing torture came in two key decisions. The first was his September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Agreement, or “finding”—jargon for a presidential directive authorizing a particular CIA covert operation. This vastly expanded the CIA’s activities worldwide, including its payments to the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan to resume the civil war against the Taliban with American air support. Bush also authorized the global pursuit of al-Qaeda “permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations [in some eighty countries] without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation” and—most important—removed ail constraints and safeguards over the CIA’s already existing program of “extraordinary rendition.”80

  The latter term is a euphemism for abducting people anywhere on Earth, including inside the United States, and secretly flying them to countries whose police and intelligence personnel are more than happy to torture them for us or where the United States runs its own secret prisons for doing so. Such countries and territories reportedly have included Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia, Pakistan, and unidentified Eastern European nations. The military or the CIA also run some twenty-five prisons in Afghanistan and seventeen in Iraq.81 Rendition is a violation of international law, since the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted December 10, 1984, and ratified by the U. S. Congress in October 1994, specifically says, “No state . . . shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The Geneva Conventions also contain articles stipulating the same prohibition.82

  Bush’s most fateful decision on tort
ure, however, came in a presidential memorandum drafted by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, and endorsed by Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the president. Dated January 18, 2002, the memo was (without evident irony) entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.” On February 7, it was disseminated to the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the director of the CIA, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the memo, captives from the battlefields of Afghanistan need not be given prisoner-of-war status and the U.S. government would therefore not abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war.83 This key decision opened the door to the torture of captives at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo naval base, Cuba, and most infamously at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

  Why did Bush do it? It was, in a sense, an admission of guilt. Once he got caught up in his own rhetoric about the “global war on terror” and had issued orders to the CIA and military to act secretly against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I believe he felt that he had to protect his agents from being charged under the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty. By declaring captives to be “illegal combatants,” a term that does not exist in international law, and asserting that the Geneva Conventions simply did not apply to them, he freed his agents to torture and do as they pleased. As one intelligence official told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’“84

  Had the president restricted his target explicitly to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which had carried out the 9/11 attacks, and moved against it through law enforcement means, the Geneva Conventions would indeed not have come into play and the whole issue of torture could have been avoided. He would have received global cooperation (including from the governments of most Middle Eastern countries) and would surely have been more successful in countering the threat of terrorism than through the route he actually chose. There is widespread agreement among officials in the field, including FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo, that information extracted under torture is usually worthless, that torture largely compels its victims to say what the torturer wants to hear, and that the use of torture precludes building a legal case against a particular captive. Moreover, the people rounded up in Afghanistan usually did not have valuable information, since most of them had been turned over to the Americans by Northern Alliance warlords for the bounties the United States was paying.85 In October 2004, the deputy commander at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Martin Lucent, said to the press that most of his 550 prisoners had revealed nothing of value: “Most of these guys weren’t fighting, they were running.”86