Quotes Archive: War Crimes
"Every time that the interrogator asks me about a certain piece of information, and I talk, he asks me if I told this to the Americans. And if I say no he jumps for joy, and he leaves me and goes to report it to his superiors, and they rejoice."
Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, a prisoner the CIA rendered to Jordan, in a smuggled message about the torture he was subjected to on behalf of the US.
''I would simply note that governments don't censor information to conceal lies. They censor information to conceal the truth.''
Ben Wizner, ACLU staff attorney and military commission observer, on the restrictions the Bush administration has set on defendants and observers to prevent fair trials in the name of national security.
"Yoo wasn't acting as a lawyer in order legally to analyze questions surrounding interrogation powers. He was acting with the intent to enable illegal torture and used the law as his instrument to authorize criminality."
Glenn Greenwald on the release of the infamous "torture memo" by John Yoo, which made the president a dictator allowed to torture without legal restriction, and leading directly to the torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc.
"Even if the videotape does not constitute an official record that must be preserved under the law, the videotape would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future. The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency."
Rep. Jane Harman, then ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, in a letter to the CIA following a briefing where they disclosed the existence of the interrogation recordings. This is a textbook example of understatement.
"General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either."
former Navy JAG officer Andrew Williams, in a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper explaining that he resigned his commission to protest the use of torture by the Bush administration.
"Haythem identified his son from what was left of his shoes. His forehead and brains were missing and his skin completely burned. He identified his wife of 20 years by a dental bridge."
Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, who interviewed witnesses and relatives of victims of the Nisour Square massacre by Blackwater.
"The president first authorized military commissions in November 2001, more than six years ago, and the lack of progress is obvious. Only one war-crime case has been completed. It is time for the political appointees who created this quagmire to let go."
Morris D. Davis, former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions, on the utter failure of Bush's attempt to make up his own courts.
"The first thing that happened when I and the other three human rights observers went through security for Hamdan's hearing was an apt metaphor for the rest of the two-day proceeding: We were forbidden from bringing the law into the courtroom. We could not bring in our copies of the Military Commissions Act, the rules of procedure, or even the military's own charges against Hamdan. Apparently the military feared that such basic but essential documents posed some sort of security risk. We were each permitted to bring in only a notepad and a pen."
Hina Shamsi, human rights observer at Guantanamo, on the restrictions that prevent detainees challenging the evidence against them.
"There it was again, the line that separated the rule of law from the lack of it, however thin and tenuous it now seemed. For the Syrian people's sake, I wish that line did not exist at all. For Americans' sake, I wish more cared, like those who were in the courtroom. For Maher Arar, I wish I could erase the ordeal he went through, though none of us can. But his case should be allowed to proceed, as much for his sake as for the sake of our democratic system."
Syrian-American writer Alia Malek, who is covering the case of Maher Arar, on how the line between rule of law and dictatorship is much thinner than he realized.
"Like his predecessors in the job he inherited less than two months ago, [Army Col. Steve] David complained that the commissions were constantly in need of revision and devoid of precedent. He also lamented the admissibility of hearsay, evidence obtained through techniques he considers torture and defendants' lack of rights to see all evidence against them or to confront their accusers."
Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, in an article on the difficulties faced by Guantanamo defense lawyers
"I certainly regret that we did not have the kind of oversight that I would have insisted upon."
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, being asked about the unprovoked killings of Iraqis by Blackwater, regretting she doesn't have the authority she might have if she were, say, Secretary of State.
"It's a kangaroo court system and completely corrupt. Stalin had show trials, but at Guantanamo they are not even show trials because it all takes place in secret."
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, quoted in a story about a whistleblower who calls the trials "unconscionable" in an upcoming Supreme Court challenge.
"The real crime here has always been the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca and the practice of torture around the world. We tried to deliver a letter asking that the teaching of torture be stopped and were arrested. We tried to put the evidence of torture on full and honest display in the courthouse and were denied. We were prepared to put on evidence about the widespread use of torture and human rights abuses committed during interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in Iraq and Afghanistan. This evidence was gathered by the military itself and by governmental and human rights investigations."
Frs. Louis Vitale and Steve Kelly, sentenced to five months in federal prison for trespassing when they tried to deliver a letter protesting torture to the interrogation training center at Fort Huachuca.
"That four great nations, flushed with victory, and stunned with injury, stayed the hand of vengeance by voluntarily submitting their captive enemies to the judgment of the rule of law, was the most significant tribute that power ever paid to reason."
Robert JacksonSupreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor, on the need for fair trials even for our worst enemies. It was read by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, about an hour five minutes into the 10/10/07 Clout podcast.
"A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba's report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse."
Seymour Hersh on how none of the Pentagon's investigations were allowed to include the people most likely to be ultimately responsible.
"I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"
An anonymous Lt. General according to Gen. Antonio Taguba, explaining his unwillingness to look at the Abu Ghraib photos.
"I've had various different threats and actions taken against me, it's a very very difficult thing to do. I believe it's the right thing to do. I was assigned this case, ordered to defend him, but then not given the tools in order to do it. I'm fighting, doing everything possible to make an adequate attorney client relationship. The government, the US government, has done plenty to hurt an attorney client relationship and make it virtually impossible to effectively represent somebody in Guantanamo."
Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, defense attorney for Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, on the obstacles the government puts up to prevent fair trials. Khadr was a boy soldier who was 15 when captured five years ago, and he is still imprisoned.
"The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it."
Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, former high ranking generals, on how US use of torture actually aids the insurgents.
"The U.S. will be the first country in modern history to try an individual who was a child at the time of the alleged war crimes."
Attorneys for Omar Khadr, imprisoned in Guantanamo at age 15 for killing a US soldier while fighting in Afghanistan.
"The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture.' But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture."
Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff in an article on Soviet interrogation methods written in 1956.
"Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back."
An official Guantanamo media escort telling Karen J. Greenberg how to report on Guantanamo while Greenberg was on the official media tour of Bush's gulag.
"The Constitution does not belong to the politicians. It belongs to all of us. And the medicines it prescribes for the ailments of the body politic are ours to administer."
John Nichols, writer for The Nation Magazine, who is traveling Vermont to promote the impeachment resolutions being debated in town meetings and the state legislature.
"The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him"
Eric Fair, a US interrogator in Iraq, revealing that torture was policy, not an accident.
"There is a widespread belief, as well as a need to believe, that the men we're holding in Guantánamo must be bad people. They must have done something to end up there. They couldn't just be, in large part, victims of circumstance, or of the fact the U.S. government was paying large bounties in poor countries for the identification and capture of people with alleged ties to terror. If the bulk of the detainees are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if there's no evidence that some of them did the things of which the government has accused them, then it would mean that we locked innocent people in a hole for five years. It would mean not only that our government wrongfully imprisoned these men but that the rest of us stood idly by as they did it."
Anant Raut, attorney for five Guantánamo detainees, on why they deserve representation and why his firm does pro bono work for them.
"There hasn't been a torture sequence that my character has been involved with that there isn't some kind of a negative repercussion, whether it's emotional. It's very simplistic to try and take what we are doing in this fantasy, in this '24,' which is a television show and try and say that this is a referendum for torture or we are justifying the absolution [he probably meant 'abolition'] of due process or anything like that."
Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer on "24", on the attempt by conservatives to use "24" as a justification for legalized torture.
"Five years have gone by and we are still fighting a Sisyphean struggle. No detainees at Guantánamo or in any other detention facility have yet had a hearing in a court. They are again waiting for our challenges to be heard -- that is, for the Supreme Court, for the third time, to decide that they have rights. But by that time six or seven years will have passed since the first post-9/11 prisoners arrived at Guantánamo."
Michael Ratner and Sara Miles of the Center for Constitutional Rights on the anniversary of the imprisonment at Guantánamo of prisoners who have been tortured and had no hearing in defiance of two Supreme Court decisions.
"So I can't tell you that coercive interrogation has never ever produced an important fact or even saved a life. Perhaps it has. But on the larger balance of the scale there is absolutely no question that it is a self defeating practice, a self defeating policy, and that it stains the very soul of this country that we should be engaged in that practice."
Former Amnesty International USA Director William Schulz on how coercive interrogation, a Bush euphemism for torture, harms the country that allows it.
"They were tried and convicted in the world court before they ever set foot in any courtroom ... while people who are far more culpable and responsible have walked away blameless."
Former U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, at a briefing in Berlin on the attempt to charge US officials with war crimes, on how only enlisted men have been brought to account for torture.
"What the Johns Hopkins team has done in Iraq is a more rigorous version of the technique used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics or question the professional integrity of those doing the survey."
Journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer, on the validity of the Johns Hopkins study of the number of deaths resulting from Bush's invasion of Iraq. Bush questions the survey, but without giving a reason.
Why not just give in to vengeance? Why not just shoot them, as Winston Churchill wanted to do? Why not just succumb to the law of power politics and impose our will without any regard to principle? Why not just give in to violence, which was certainly within our ability and, many argued, within our right?
Why not? Because the United States has always stood for something more. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, writing about the Nuremberg war crimes trials and his father's part in them, in light of the congress's vote in favoring of legalizing war crimes.
"You taught us about the rule of law. You taught us no government worth its salt can subvert the rule of law. We believed you. That's part of what you have as a gift for the world. Then how can you commit Guantanamo Bay? Take back your country.... How about exporting some of your generosity instead of your bombs?"
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for resisting the Apartheid regime in South Africa, asking Americans come to our senses.
"An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end."
Historian and novelist Kevin Baker on the myths of internal enemies perpetuated by the right.
"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past."
Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, who served on a Pentagon task force in the early 1970's which chose to coverup investigations of war crimes by US troops in Vietnam, on how that coverup helped bring about the war crimes committed in Iraq.
"...in a memorandum to the Secretary of Defense dated November 27, 2002, Mr. Haynes recommended authorizing the use of dogs to exploit phobias of detainees. This practice, which clearly violated the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations, was subsequently authorized for use against detainees at Guantanamo. And now two servicemembers have been convicted of crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for using dogs to frighten detainees at Abu Ghraib."
20 former US military leaders, in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination of Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes as a federal judge, because of his role in making torture common.
"Consider that Abu Ghraib, which did not involve killing or torture (though it did include extreme humiliation) became the American and world press' favorite topic for weeks on end, though far more grotesque acts were being perpetrated daily by the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere."
Conservative columnist Mona Charen, telling one of most brazen lies of the war; prisoners were tortured to death, this was established when the scandal broke, and extreme humiliation is a form of torture.
"I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington [David Addington, now Cheney's chief of staff] to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation."
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the process that turned torture into policy.
"I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials—or with the laws of war, or with the Geneva conventions."
Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel of the US Navy who struggled to get the Defense Dept. to prevent the use of torture, on the people who made torture official policy.
"While the government continues to try to claim that the abuse of detainees in US custody was mainly due to a few 'aberrant' soldiers, there is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of the torture and ill-treatment stemmed directly from officially sanctioned procedures and policies -- including interrogation techniques approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."
Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International's Americas Programme Director, in a press release announcing a new report of US use of torture. When I started writing letters at the behest of Amnesty International about 15 years ago, I couldn't conceive I'd ever write that sentence, or that such a report would be necessary.
"Not only do these military commissions betray our commitment to the rule of law, they damage our reputation abroad and undermine our ability to promote the global rule of law as an antidote to terrorism."
Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh in a brief submitted by 21 former US diplomats regarding the case of Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo.
"I have no reason to believe that it has. I believe that cameras are no longer allowed anywhere near a cellblock. But why should I believe it's stopped? We still have the captain from the 82nd airborne division [who] returned and had a diary, a log of when he was instructed, what he was instructed, where he was instructed, and who instructed him. To go out and treat the prisoners harshly, to set them up for effective interrogation, and that was recently as May of 2005."
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former commander and scapegoat of Abu Ghraib, when asked if the torture had stopped since it was revealed.
"I know it's a sad day when a federal judge has to ask a DOJ attorney this, but I'm asking you -- why should I believe them?"
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler referring to senior Guantanamo commanders' responses to allegtions of torture.
"The U.S. government's use and defense of torture and inhumane treatment played the largest role in undermining Washington's ability to promote human rights. In the course of 2005, it became indisputable that U.S. mistreatment of detainees reflected not a failure of training, discipline, or oversight, but a deliberate policy choice. ...the U.S. government's embrace of torture and inhumane treatment began at the top."
Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, in the introduction to the 2006 World Report, which is highly critical of Bush's use of torture. (large download)
''Congress is trying to flex its muscle to provide those checks [on detainee abuse], and it's being told through the signing statement that it's impotent. It's quite a radical view."
Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, commenting on bush's declaration that he can ignore the new torture law when he sees fit, even though the intention was to allow no exceptions.
"What will it take for Americans to re-establish accountability in their government? Bush has gotten away with lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers, and now with the destruction of New Orleans."
Paul Craig Roberts, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal (in other words, very conservative) calling for Bush's impeachment.
"But our conversations with government officials, former detainees and others suggest it's safe to say hundreds, probably thousands, is more accurate for the number of people being held in secret."
David Danzig, spokesman for Human Rights First, on reports of people being held in secret detention by the US government, known as "ghost detainees".
"Not now. At the beginning. Where I am now is like a country club compared to where I was."
Cyrus Kar, according to his relatives, saying he was tortured after being arrested in Iraq. Despite being a US citizen, he was being held incommunicado and his whereabouts were unknown when this article was published.
"The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that, it didn't work. There is no evidence that all the mistreatment and humiliation saved a single American life or led to the capture of any major terrorist, despite claims by the military that the prison produced 'actionable intelligence.'"
Rod Norland, Newsweek Baghdad bureau chief the last two years, offering observations on why the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, went so wrong.
"If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war? Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?"
William Schultz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, on Bush and Cheney's denunciations of Amnesty International now that they're the targets of investigation and criticism.
"Why care? It's not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own paper and others that the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous."
Thomas Friedman saying continuing to run Guantánamo is causing far more harm than good.
"I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words international law again."
An anonymous Guantanamo tribunal president showing the US government attitude while, ironically, trying a British detainee captured in Afghanistan and detained in a US base in Cuba, which the US uses by treaty.
"This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules. It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore or cast the rules aside."
Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch, in a report calling for an independent investigation of torture and human rights abuses.
"Those who wrote the policies are being promoted. Those who are pivotal to the discussions are being promoted, Gonzales being the most obvious... So what's actually happened is the memos have done two things. They've articulated the fact that there was a very lengthy discussion of when, why, and how to use torture..."
Karen Greenburg, editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.
"Someone tell me, please, what marks the difference between the fatal techniques used against my father, Col. Norman Schmidt -- labeled "war criminal" -- and those used on "enemy combatant" Manadel Jamadi, whose death in custody in Baghdad has been classified as a homicide?"
Janet Schmidt Zupan, whose father was tortured to death in the Hanoi Hilton, condeming similar practices by the Bush administration.
"As far as I'm concerned, Bush deserves to be impeached for lying to his employers--us--about Iraq's WMDs. He should face prosecution at a war crimes tribunal for the murder of the 100,000-plus Iraqis he ordered killed by U.S. troops. He deserves life in prison for ordering the torture, and allowing the murder under torture, of countless innocent Afghans and Iraqis. Nothing, not even if the Iraq war sparked the transformation of the entire Muslim world into peaceful and prosperous Athenian-style democracies, could retroactively justify such murderous perfidy."
Ted Rall keeping perspective on Bush's role in changing the Middle East.
"Try this for a shocking news scandal, erupting daily in global media: hundreds of American civilians detained in a foreign prison are found to have been tortured and humiliated by being piled naked in heaps and forced into degrading sexual positions. The US Government would probably go to war in order to get its citizens back and restore American honour; at the very least it would ensure that the country concerned was vilified, punished and ostracised by the world community. Think of the moral frenzy when 70 Americans were taken hostage in Iran 25 years ago – and they weren't even tortured."
Columnist Denis Welch writing about the shocking lack of outcry over Bush's use of torture.
"The commission panel's ignorance of the law and the disparity of resources allocated to prosecution and defence team in a process controlled by the executive, were particularly obvious. ... The prosecution asserted that the only law that binds the panel is 'commission law', a set of rules and orders developed in the US Department of Defense. It is shocking that people could face execution after such trials, which clearly fail to meet basic international standards."
Amnesty International in "Guantánamo - an icon of lawlessness", a report on torture and military tribunals.
"After we found out he was dead, they were nervous. They didn't know what the hell to do."
Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus, a guard who found Manadel al-Jamadi had died under interrogation, speaking of the CIA interrogator and translator.
"The worst sin, though, is the one that goes right to the top. Neither Mr Bush nor Tony Blair is willing to accept blame for what has occurred, nor to demand accountability for it from their cabinets. That is to imply that, for all their condemnations of the abuses, they think them politically unimportant. At least in international politics, they are wrong."
An editorial in The Economist denouncing the failure of the US and UK governments to deal with the practice of torture.
"Not one witness from the chain of command came to this proceeding. Do you think the prosecutors just forgot to call those officers?"
Spec. Charles Graner's defense counsel, Guy Womack commenting on the judge's refusal to allow testimony regarding what Graner's superiors knew or ordered.
"Your administration has as a matter of policy for more than three years denied international human rights monitors, including Amnesty International, access to detainees held by the USA in the 'war on terror', in addition to routinely denying detainees access to the courts, legal counsel and relatives. In addition, US personnel have staged deceptions in order to subvert basic human rights protections and the rule of law."
Amnesty International appealing to George Bush to live up to his statements on human rights, and reminding him of his atrocious record.
"Basically, it appears that the lawyer worked hard to write a legal justification for the type of interviews they (the Army) want to conduct here."
An FBI agent in an e-mail message from Guantánamo in December 2002.
"My question is: What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own it, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elect to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them."
Molly Ivins denouncing Bush's use of torture and calling upon readers to take responsibility for the actions of their government.
"War criminals are not welcome in Canada"
A sign displayed at a protest in Ottawa during Bush's visit.
"your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."
Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General nominee, convincing Bush that his approval of inhumane treatment of detainees was humane.
"For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence that we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts."
Richard Horton of The Lancet in the comment accompanying the study that concluded 100,000 Iraqis died as a consequence of the war.
"However, I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a hand written note on a memo recommending abusive interrogation techniques. He probably wrote it sitting down.
"I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."
George Bush, in a secret document from February 2002, according to Seymour Hersh's report on torture of detainees at Guantanamo in 2002.
"How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."
Ahmed Manajid, another member of the Iraqi soccer team, also on Bush's use of the Olympics in his campaign ads.
