From Scott Horton’s No Comment:
One of the most striking things about this report [in the Washington Post] is the extent to which the entire torture process was driven by healthcare professionals. The account makes clear that contract psychologists Mitchell, his partner John “Bruce” Jessen, and CIA psychologist R. Scott Schumate played a vital role in the entire process. It also makes clear that, contrary to the official Bush White House account, under which they were responding to pleas from the ground to “take the gloves off,” in fact the struggle was consistently between handlers who wanted to stop or limit the rough stuff, and unidentified people in the pinnacles of power in Washington whose appetite for brutality could apparently never be sated. Who was calling the shots? The story tells us that the approvals came from “downtown,” agency jargon for the White House. And there’s another giveaway:
“Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent,” the former official said. “Headquarters said it would be on the team’s back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, ‘You’ve lost your spine.’ “
And who was talking to “headquarters” and pressing them? If you’ve read Jack Goldsmith’s book The Terror Presidency, this cajoling and threatening will sound familiar. In his book, the man consistently on the delivering end was David Addington [Counsel to Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney].
And as Horton points out in another post, the American Psychological Association tried to provide the “health care professionals” with a Nuremberg defense of their own:
As the Bush Administration introduced its torture program in 2002, the APA modified Section 1.02 of its ethics rules, to state that in the event of conflict between ethics standards and law as interpreted by government organs like the Department of Defense or CIA, psychologists are free to disregard the requirements of applicable ethics guidelines and “may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.” This provision was curiously passed just as psychologists undertook their key role in the torture program. And it dovetails perfectly with a scheme introduced by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to undercut the ethics standards of lawyers, doctors, and other healthcare professionals by binding them strictly to the laws and regulations as definitively interpreted by him as Secretary of Defense (DOD Policy Directive 3115.09). It is a full-throated repudiation of the rule fashioned at Nuremberg under which individuals involved in the torture or abuse of prisoners are not entitled to rely on a defense of superior orders. The APA was saying that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were free to suspend the organization’s ethics rules whenever they chose to do so. [italics are Spot’s]
If somebody tries to suspend the laws of war, it that a war crime Spotty?
We’ll have to stay tuned for that, grasshopper.
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