The Green Party of the United States supports the demand by a U.N. special investigator that U.S. officials and CIA personnel who authorized and carried out torture must be prosecuted.
Ben Emmerson, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, called for prosecution in the wake of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and “black sites” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, released on Tuesday. Greens urged Sen. Mark Udall (D-Col.) to release the full report before he leaves office.
“The torture revelations — some of which were already known — show the extent to which the U.S. has turned into a ‘security state’ in which human rights and the rule of law have been abandoned. The Senate report exposes the appalling complicity of the Bush and Obama administrations and Democratic and Republican leaders in allowing torture and shielding officials who ordered or approved it from punishment,” said Darryl! L.C. Moch, national co-chair of the Green Party.
“The mentality that favors impunity for officials who authorized torture and other serious war crimes is the same mentality that defends impunity for police who commit murder and brutality and the use of civilian police forces as occupation armies in targeted Black neighborhoods,” said Mr. Moch.
The Green Party has supported investigation and prosecution of torture and war crimes ever since reports began to surface in the wake of President Bush’s order to invade Iraq, asserting in 2006 that such abuses of power were grounds for impeachment (http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2006_01_03.shtml).
Greens said that former President George W. Bush should be among those prosecuted in light of an admission in “Decision Points,” his memoir published in 2010, that he personally approved the use of waterboarding against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The Bush Administration ordered the Justice Department to provide legal justifications for torture and claimed the right to use waterboarding, even though Japanese military officers were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.
Former Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who’ve admitted their support for torture, must also be investigated and prosecuted, as well as Obama Administration officials who enabled torture and indefinite detention of prisoners known to be innocent to continue despite President Obama’s promise to end “enhanced interrogation” techniques and close Guantanamo Bay, said Green Party leaders.
Greens also called for President Obama to overturn the conviction of John Kiriakou, the CIA whistle-blower who is serving a 30-month sentence for exposing the agency’s torture program (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/10/cia-torture-prosecution_n_6298646.html). CIA employees who have refused to participate in such crimes or who have exposed them must be shielded from prosecution and retaliation.
As the CIA itself has publicly acknowledged, torture is not a reliable method for gathering accurate information (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-torture-report-shows-cia-infighting-over-interrogation-program.html). Instead, it often provides useful lies because torture victims tend to tell interrogators what they want to hear. Torture under the U.S.’s extraordinary rendition program provided the Bush Administration with false reasons for launching its war on Iraq in 2003, leading to the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Greens said that U.S. laws and international agreements to which the U.S. is signatory (Geneva conventions, U.N. Convention Against Torture) provided the legal basis for the U.S. justice system and International Criminal Court to begin prosecuting officials responsible for torture and related crimes.
Failure to punish officials will ensure that future administrations will engage in torture and other crimes. Green Party leaders stressed that top-level officials, rather than low-level employees following orders, must be held accountable to prevent a repeat of such abuses of power.
“Torture by the U.S. and the existence of secret prisons have long been a recruitment tool for violent groups like al-Qaeda. The main purpose of torture is to inflict terror. The Bush Administration turned the U.S. into a terror state,” said Starlene Rankin, co-chair of the Green Party.
That’s a very interesting theory about JFK and the CIA. It reminds me of something I heard years ago about MLK, that he was assassinated because he was about to start encouraging young black men to become draft dodgers. I have no idea whether there is any truth to that, but I always thought it was quite a fascinating theory.
The Federal Reserve story is almost certainly untrue. It’s based on a single piece of evidence – an executive order dealing with silver – that was part of a procedure to eliminate silver-backed certificates, not to reinstitute gold and silver as our only currencies. The President had the power to issue silver-certificates, and the EO delegated that authority to, if memory serves, the Secretary of the Treasury. The price of silver was higher than it’s government price (Gresham’s Law) and so sales of silver could bankrupt the Treasury. Kennedy urged Congress to eliminate silver certificates and limit the use of silver to making coins with fiat value. Congress did so, but in the process, took away the authority of the Secretary of the Treasury to buy and sell silver – whereas Kennedy’s intent was to increase the government’s supply of silver back to what it was before the run up in price – it had fallen 80% – so he allowed the Secretary of the Treasury to do so by delegating his own authority back to the Secretary. The whole package enhanced the Fed.
That said, his other policies and statements strongly indicate that he favored a greenback solution. So, his preferences were commodity<Fed<greenbacks issued by Treasury. So yes, he wanted to phase out the Fed, but there's no reason to think he was about it to do it. He knew political reality and was focused on something libertarians wouldn't like at all – moving from the remnants of commodity money to a fully fiat system. He was not engaged in an effort to get rid of the Fed.
The CIA – well, I'm pretty certain he wasn't planning to announce anything in Dallas, but he was royally pissed at the CIA and it's well within the realm of possibility that he was working to eliminate it. Also, it was a frequent tactic of his that, if something wasn't politically feasible but ought to be, he'd just take his case right to the public, so if he decided to eliminate the CIA, a step in that process certainly would have been enlisting popular support. But that wouldn't have been an early step – he would have had to do a lot of behind the scenes work, very carefully and quietly, cutting strings and ties first – then go public when all it would take would be a few actions. So I do suspect he was preparing to eliminate the agency, but think it's unlikely (approaching 0) that he was going to talk about it in Dallas.
It should be kept in mind that the CIA was relatively new at that time. The OSS was formed during WWII, but the CIA wasn't formed until 1947. In 1963, the people involved in its formation were still either active politically or in the CIA itself. It wouldn't have sounded nearly as radical then as it does now. Considering that it grew from the OSS, there's little doubt that its intelligence mission was a far second to its other missions from the start, but the issue was at a head during his Presidency when the CIA frequently went around his directions or simply ignored him. As much as anything else, it was probably an issue to him of civilian control – he viewed civilian control of the military as being based on a principle, an ideal, not just a formality – and so the fact that the CIA wasn't military didn't change the principle.
Plus, the CIA was directly involving itself in politics, attempting to embarrass him out of office. It's clear that he saw it as a cancer and wanted to cut it out. He would have liked the LP's press release, and would not have been surprised by the torture.
But his primary fight wasn't so much to eliminate agencies as to control behavior of other agencies – in particular, the military itself. He had generals disregarding direction instructions because he was the first President in some time to refuse to defer to the Pentagon. There's an assumption that, well, we should listen to experts on the topic – so when it's war, listen to the Pentagon. He took the view that the Pentagon is expert only on how to conduct operations, not whether an operation should be conducted – and, most notably, that they were dead wrong in their belief that an operation should be conducted in Cuba, and he put his foot down instead of giving in. He took the whole "constitution" thing seriously.
Most infuriating, of course, was his belief that he could talk to and try to understand our enemies – a view directly threatening to the bottom lines of key defense contractors.
There’s stories floating around that Kennedy was planning to shut down the CIA, the Federal Reserve, or both, and would make the announcement in Dallas. Is there any evidence that this is true which can be confirmed?
Over the last few years, the Democrats have had more options for candidates who stood in the right place on these issues than the Republicans have. The Republicans had Ron Paul, who got most of these issues right – except immigration and his vote on the authorization of the use of force. The Democrats have had Kucinich, Dean, Gravel, and now, likely, either Warren or Sanders. My prediction – just as they got rid of actual liberals in the past, they will do so again and nominate another DLC neocon, whether it’s Hillary or not. I suspect this is why Warren has been so hesitant to run – who wants to throw away the momentum she’s got by losing the Presidential nomination? The Democrats actually have more mechanisms for controlling their nomination than the Republicans do – and the Republican establishment has their nomination locked down pretty tight itself. The last few that snuck through, that I can think of, were Goldwater in the GOP and Carter in the Democratic Party. Clinton might not have been the favorite, but he wasn’t opposed by the establishment. (He would have been if he’d said before the nomination what he’s said since being out of office, although he’s gotten his toes back on the line now that Hillary expects to be nominated.)
What we really need is more Presidents with incurable diseases likely to kill them not long after their terms. I hate to be cynical (ok, I actually kind of enjoy it) but we need Presidents willing to be shot – and who also want to do things like break apart the warfare state. Reagan was unafraid of being shot, given his age (and was shot, but not for political reasons), but had no desire to break the thing up, so that wasn’t all that helpful. Kennedy, I truly believe, knew he didn’t have long to live due to his health, and so could do things no other President would try. No one should vote without watching the American University graduation speech.
Glad the LP is standing up as well:
http://www.lp.org/news/press-releases/libertarian-party-calls-for-shutting-down-cia-criminal-prosecutions
Thank you for standing up, Green Party. Now, will Sen. Bernie Sanders stand up? Will the Progressive Caucus of Congress? And?!
Clinton now. Obama has to be impeached and removed or term out first.
and then of course, Obama and Hillary Clinton
What Jill said!
Yes, yes, yes!!! Put every single one of them in prison. Don’t let history get it wrong at how they treated us and the rest of the globe.