{"id":24071,"date":"2014-08-12T20:31:21","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T04:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=24071"},"modified":"2014-08-12T20:31:21","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T04:31:21","slug":"the-rear-guard-defense-of-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/12\/the-rear-guard-defense-of-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rear-Guard Defense of Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Rizzo, the CIA\u2019s former Acting Counsel General, is feeling the heat for his role in blessing what President Barack Obama has now admitted was \u201ctorture\u201d during the Bush\/Cheney administration. Rizzo went on friendly Fox News<\/a> to charge that the (still withheld) Senate Intelligence Committee investigation report on torture reflects a \u201cStar Chamber proceeding\u201d and accused some lawmakers of \u201ccraven backtracking,\u201d claiming that they had been briefed on the interrogation program years ago.<\/p>\n

Rizzo also revealed that he and other former CIA officials implicated in the torture scandal have found an ally of sorts in current CIA Director John Brennan, who was a senior aide to CIA Director George Tenet when the torture practices were implemented and who is now leading the rear-guard defense against the Senate report.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s been with us \u2018formers\u2019 during this period. He has been the honest broker,\u201d Rizzo told Fox News. \u201cHe has done the best he can. He is in an extraordinarily difficult position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rizzo\u2019s audacity in defending torture should have prompted some kind of reaction like the one that finally called Sen. Joe McCarthy to account: \u201cHave they no sense of decency, at long last? Have they left no sense of decency?\u201d But Rizzo, like other defenders of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d torture policies, have yet to face any meaningful accountability. Rather, some like Rizzo remain respectable figures.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Exhibit A was the fawning reception accorded Rizzo earlier this year at Fordham Law School. After that event, I wrote the following column for \u201cThe Catholic Worker,\u201d where people care about public issues of morality:<\/p>\n

I could hardly believe my eyes as I read that John Rizzo, the CIA lawyer who got the Justice Department to approve CIA interrogations using \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d had been invited to speak at Fordham Law School on Jan. 30, 2014. Rizzo would be discussing his book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA<\/a><\/i><\/b>\u2013 an unapologetic apologia for his behavior in cooperating with faux lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department who authorized techniques like waterboarding, when he had ample legal precedent to justify his simply saying \u201cNo,\u201d and trying to stop the torture. What lessons would aspiring lawyers at Fordham learn from Rizzo?<\/p>\n

I traveled up from Washington, DC, because I needed to see for myself how Rizzo would try to defend abhorrent practices now euphemistically labeled \u201cEITs,\u201d but formerly known as torture. Indeed, the very term \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d is a literal translation of \u201cverschaerfte Vernehmung\u201d <\/i>from the Gestapo Handbuch<\/i>, and most of the specific techniques Rizzo told CIA officers they could legally use were from the Gestapo Hadbuch\u2019s<\/i> list 75 years ago under the heading \u201cverschaerfte Vernehmung.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

I thought I had somewhat outgrown my outrage at seeing those who gave \u201clegal\u201d justification for torture (not to mention those who ordered it and carried it out), walking free, writing tell-some books, and being invited into otherwise respectable places, when they should be behind bars.<\/p>\n

The only difference I can see between those responsible for verschaerfte Vernehmung<\/i> and those responsible for enhanced interrogation techniques is that Germany lost the war, and German torturers were held accountable. Nazi lawyer, Wilhelm Frick, defended his lawyerly approach to torturing and killing Jews with these words: \u201cI wanted things done legally. After all, I am a lawyer.\u201d Frick was one of the 11 defendants the Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced to death. He was hanged on Oct. 16, 1946.<\/p>\n

The thought of Rizzo at Fordham was downright disorienting from a moral, as well as legal point of view. This is my alma mater, Fordham \u2013 the Jesuit University of the City of New York \u2013 where I spent nine years studying, teaching and earning two degrees. And this was Fordham Law School from which my father graduated in 1933, and where he was a professor of law until 1963, teaching a whole generation of budding lawyers.<\/p>\n

Had the catastrophe of 9\/11 changed Fordham\u2019s moral assessment of torture, just as it had changed other formerly accepted moral and legal norms? Had torture slid out of the moral category of \u201cintrinsic evil?\u201d<\/p>\n

There was no ambiguity on this issue 55 years ago at Fordham College, where we were taught that torture, together with rape and slavery, were \u201cintrinsically evil.\u201d Fordham\u2019s permissive slide on torture was shown in bas-relief two years ago when Fordham President Joseph M. McShane SJ described the morality of torture as a \u201cgray area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Succumbing to the \u201ccelebrity virus,\u201d McShane had invited kidnapping-torture-and drone aficionado (now CIA director) John Brennan to give the main address at Commencement, and threw in an honorary doctorate \u2013 in \u201chumane letters\u201d (sic). It was, I suppose, because Brennan was a Fordham alumnus who worked in the White House. Does it matter what he actually did there?<\/p>\n

When a number of graduating seniors objected to this profaning of their graduation, McShane gave a glib gloss on torture and drone killings in these words: \u201cWe don\u2019t live in a black and white world; we live in a gray world.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so it is with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, each of whom has said waterboarding is torture but left the CIA torture lawyers and waterboarders in place. Now the country\u2019s two most senior lawyers are winking at another torture practice \u2013 force-feeding of men without hope who have chosen death by starvation as their only way out of Guantanamo.<\/p>\n

If moral reasoning is a shambles, so is a pitiful legal profession that cannot find its institutional voice amid gross violations of the Constitution and other legal and moral norms. It strikes me that this amounts to a petri dish in which the celebrity virus can grow and flourish \u2013 and law students can be given scandal. What was it that Jesus said about giving that kind of scandal? Something to do with millstones and necks, I think.<\/p>\n

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He came to Washington over 50 years ago and worked as a CIA analyst under seven Presidents, one less than Gates. Ray now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).<\/i><\/p>\n

Reprinted with permission from Consortium News<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Rizzo, the CIA\u2019s former Acting Counsel General, is feeling the heat for his role in blessing what President Barack Obama has now admitted was \u201ctorture\u201d during the Bush\/Cheney administration. Rizzo went on friendly Fox News to charge that the (still withheld) Senate Intelligence Committee investigation report on torture reflects a \u201cStar Chamber proceeding\u201d and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-24071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24071"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24073,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions\/24073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24071"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=24071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}