Meeting Mr. Chertoff: The Other Torture Guy

http://www.chris-floyd.com/images/
Chertoff,%20Michael.jpg


Chertoff:
Another Accomplice to Atrocity (pre-Katrina)

Chris Floyd

Empire Burlesque
Sunday, 11 September 2005

As we all know, FEMA's Michael Brown has been unceremoniously yanked from the front lines of the Bush crony porkfest known as the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. (Yet another Reconstruction Era? The last one was so successful in binding up the nation's wounds and eradicating racism, wasn't it?). We are supposed to be reassured that the whole shebang is now in the capable hands of Michael Chertoff, the El Greco model who heads the Department of Homeland Security.

But who exactly is Chertoff anyway? A capable man, obviously, with impressive credentials -- no need to pad his resume, like the hapless hack Brown (and his hapless boss, Bush). But to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, capability in the service of extremism is no virtue. And it turns out that Chertoff, like Jay Bybee (see earlier post), was also an accomplice to an on-going atrocity: the torture-infested gulag Bush has built for his captives in the "war on terror." (And by the way, a federal appeals court has just upheld Bush's "right" to put ANY American in prison, indefinitely, without charges, if he arbitrary declares the target of his wrath "an enemy combatant." But that's the subject of this week's Global Eye, so there will be more on this anon.)

We first broached the interesting subject of Michael Chertoff when he was plucked from the judicial perch where Bush had recently placed him and named head of the DHS after Bush's first choice, Bernie Kerik, sank into a swamp of sex-mafia-graft allegations and investigations. A Feb. 3 Global Eye column took up the tale. Here's an excerpt:

From Michael Chertoff: Another Accomplice in Bush's Torture Chamber:

Before Bush elevated him to the federal bench, Chertoff headed the Justice Department's criminal division, where he was frequently consulted by the CIA and the White House on ways to weasel around the very clear U.S. laws against torture, the New York Times reports. Bush and his legal staff, then headed by Alberto Gonzales, were openly concerned with "avoiding prosecution for war crimes" under some future administration that might lack the Bushists' finely nuanced view of ramming phosphorous lightsticks up a kidnapped detainee's rectum or other enlightened methods employed in the Administration's crusade to defend civilization from barbarity.

Throughout 2002-2003, the CIA sent Chertoff urgent questions asking whether various "interrogation protocols" could get their agents sent to the hoosegow. The questions themselves are revelatory of the tainted mindset at CIA headquarters -- officially known as the George H.W. Bush Center for Intelligence. Beyond methods we already know were used -- such as "water-boarding" and "rendering" detainees to foreign torturers -- the Bush Center boys sought legal cover for such additional refinements as "threat of imminent death;" "death threats against family members;" the use of "mind-altering drugs or psychological procedures designed to profoundly disrupt a detainee's personality."

...But Chertoff's involvement in Bush's chamber of horrors goes beyond an advisory capacity, however. He was also instrumental in the earliest cover-up of Bush's torture system: the trial of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" captured in Afghanistan, the Nation reports.
In June 2002, Lindh was due to testify about the methods used to extract his confession of terrorist collusion: days of beating, drugging, denial of medical treatment and other abuses. These were of course standard procedures used - by presidential order - from the very beginning of the "war on terror." To stop Lindh from exposing this wide-ranging criminal regimen, Chertoff, overseeing the prosecution, suddenly offered Lindh a deal: the feds would drop all the most serious charges in exchange for a lighter sentence - and a gag order preventing Lindh from telling anyone about his brutal treatment. Lindh, facing life imprisonment or execution, took the deal. Once again, Bush skirts were kept clean. And the torture system was kept safe for its expansion into Iraq, where thousands of innocent people fell into its maw.

That August 2002 memo used by Chertoff and others to absolve the torturers from their state-ordered crimes was authored by Gonzales underling Jay Bybee...The Bush-Bybee torture authorization was in force until January 2005, when it was ostentatiously replaced by a somewhat broader definition of torture just before Gonzales' confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate. But another Bybee-penned memo - detailing specific, Bush-approved "coercive methods" - remains classified. Is it still in force? Nobody knows.