Mayer writes, according to the New York Times who along with the Washington Post obtained an advance copy of the book, that the Red Cross “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Perhaps in a truly just world this would happen. But I wouldn’t count on it, at least not in the United States, where lawlessness like this when committed by the powerful is merely seen to be a political difference at best and rewarded or justified at worst.

The Washington Post goes into further detail about the CIA report on Guantanamo:

The classified CIA report described by Mayer was prepared in the summer of 2002 by a senior CIA analyst who was invited to the prison camp in Cuba to help Defense Department officials grapple with a major problem: They were gleaning very little useful information from the roughly 600 detainees in custody at the time. After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters. Previous published reports have described the CIA analyst’s visit but have not provided details of its findings.

According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half – were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.

What was the administration’s response to these assessments? Apparently Vice President Cheney’s staff director David Addington simply stated “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.” And that was that. What the dear leader says is true is all that matters. Damn the facts. If our imperial president calls torture simply a humane form of interrogation, then that’s what it is. And if innocent people illegally held – and possibly subject to these interrogation techniques – are deemed “enemy combatants,” that’s what they are. Case closed.

None of this is really a surprise. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want — including breaking our laws — and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country — live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We’ve collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws — that when they break the law, there will be no consequences.

Truer words couldn’t have been spoken. As we see now impeachment is “off the table” according to the Democrats. The President’s illegal surveillance program has been sanctioned by the so-called opposition who at one time was outraged by it and pledged to hold those resposible to account. But no. All attempts at standing by principle and the rule of law are bound to fail in such a climate. In a futile effort, Rep. Dennis Kucinich from Ohio is trying to force a vote on impeachment. His original 35 articles now slimmed down to one: the well known fact that Bush knowingly “deceived” Congress and the American people “into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to get lawmakers to back a U.S.-led invasion of the country.”

You’ve got to hand it to Kucinich, he won’t quit or backdown. Unfortunately for us there are far too few people of principle like him in Washington, and any realistic chance of this administration being held to account is dwindling fast.

Related posts:

1. The Obama Administration, Propaganda and Liberal Hypocrisy