{"id":113620,"date":"2014-04-21T14:46:06","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T14:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=113620"},"modified":"2014-04-21T14:46:06","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T14:46:06","slug":"big-jail-kidnapping-torture-assassination-perjury-longer-crimes-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/big-jail-kidnapping-torture-assassination-perjury-longer-crimes-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Engelhardt<\/strong><\/p>\n

How the mighty have fallen. Once known as \u201cObama\u2019s favorite general,\u201d James Cartwright will soon don a prison uniform and, thanks to a plea deal, spend 13 months behind bars. Involved in setting up the earliest military cyberforce inside U.S. Strategic Command, which he led from 2004 to 2007, Cartwright also played a role in launching the first cyberwar in history — the release of the Stuxnet virus against Iran\u2019s nuclear program. A Justice Department investigation found that, in 2012, he leaked information on the development of that virus to David Sanger of the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times<\/span>. The result: a\u00a0<\/em>front-page piece<\/em><\/a>\u00a0revealing its existence, and so the American cyber-campaign against Iran, to the American public. It was considered a serious breach of national security. On Thursday, the retired four-star general stood in front of a U.S. district judge who told him that his \u201ccriminal act\u201d was “a very serious one” and had been \u201ccommitted by a national security expert who lost his moral compass.” It was a remarkable ending for a man who nearly reached the heights of Pentagon power, was almost appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had the president\u2019s ear.<\/em><\/p>\n

In fact, Gen. James Cartwright has not gone to jail and the above paragraph remains — as yet — a grim Washington fairy tale. There is indeed a\u00a0Justice Department investigation<\/a>\u00a0open against the president\u2019s \u201cfavorite general\u201d (as Washington scribe to the stars Bob Woodward once labeled him) for the possible leaking of information on that virus to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, but that’s all. He remains quite active in private life,holding<\/a>\u00a0the Harold Brown Chair in Defense Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a consultant to\u00a0ABC News<\/a>, and on the board ofRaytheon<\/a>, among other things. He has suffered but a single penalty so far: he was\u00a0stripped<\/a>\u00a0of his security clearance.<\/p>\n

A different leaker actually\u00a0agreed<\/a>\u00a0to that plea deal for the 13-month jail term. Nearly three weeks ago, ex-State Department intelligence analyst Stephen E. Kim\u00a0pled guilty<\/a>\u00a0to \u201can unauthorized disclosure of national defense information.\u201d He stood before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who offered those stern words of admonition, and took responsibility for passing classified information on the North Korean nuclear program to Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2009.<\/p>\n

Still, someday Cartwright might prove to be unique in the annals of Obama era jurisprudence — the only Washington figure of any significance in these years to be given a jail sentence for a crime of state. Whatever happens to him, his ongoing case highlights a singular fact: that there is but one crime for which anyone in America\u2019s national security state can be held accountable in a court of law, and that\u2019s leaking information that might put those in it in a bad light or simply let the American public know something more about what its government is really doing.<\/p>\n

If this weren’t Washington 2014, but rather George Orwell\u2019s novel\u00a01984<\/em>, then the sign emblazoned on the front of the Ministry of Truth — \u201cWar is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength\u201d — would have to be amended to add a fourth slogan: Knowledge is Crime.<\/p>\n

Seven Free Passes for the National Security State<\/strong><\/p>\n

With Cartwright as a possible exception, the members of the national security state, unlike the rest of us, exist in what might be called\u00a0\u201cpost-legal\u201d America<\/a>. They know that, no matter how heinous the crime, they will not be brought to justice for it. The list of potentially serious criminal acts for which no one has had to take responsibility in a court of law is long, and never tabulated in one place. Consider this, then, an initial run-down on seven of the most obvious crimes and misdemeanors of this era for which no one has been held accountable.<\/p>\n

*Kidnapping:<\/strong>\u00a0After 9\/11, the CIA got into kidnapping in a big way. At least\u00a0136<\/a>\u00a0\u201cterror suspects\u201d and\u00a0possibly many more<\/a>\u00a0(including\u00a0completely innocent<\/a>\u00a0people) were kidnapped off the streets of global cities, as well as from the backlands of the planet, often with the help of local police or intelligence agencies.\u00a0\u00a0Fifty-four<\/a>\u00a0other countries were enlisted in the enterprise. The prisoners were delivered either into the Bush administration\u2019s secret global system of prisons, also known as \u201cblack sites,\u201d to be detained and mistreated, or they were \u201crendered<\/a>\u201d directly into the hands of torturing regimes from\u00a0Egypt<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Uzbekistan<\/a>. No American involved has been brought to court for such illegal acts (nor did the American government ever offer an apology, no less restitution to anyone it kidnapped, even those who turned out not to be \u201cterror suspects\u201d). One set of CIA agents was, however,\u00a0indicted in Italy<\/a>for a kidnapping and rendition to Egypt. Among them was the Agency\u2019s Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady. He had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a\u00a0la dolce vita<\/em>\u00a0version<\/a>\u00a0of rendition and later fled the country for the United States. Last year, he was briefly\u00a0taken into custody<\/a>\u00a0in Panama, only to be spirited out of that country and back to safety by the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

*Torture (and other abuses):<\/strong>\u00a0Similarly, it will be no news to anyone that, in their infamous \u201ctorture memos<\/a>,\u201d officials of the Bush Justice Department freed CIA interrogators to \u201ctake the gloves off<\/a>\u201d and use what were euphemistically called \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d against offshore prisoners in the Global War on Terror. These \u201ctechniques\u201d included \u201cwaterboarding,\u201d once known as \u201cthe water torture,\u201d and long accepted even\u00a0in this country<\/a>\u00a0as a form of torture. On coming to office, President Obama\u00a0rejected<\/a>\u00a0these practices, but\u00a0refused<\/a>to prosecute those who practiced them. Not a single CIA agent or\u00a0private contractor<\/a>\u00a0involved was ever\u00a0charged<\/a>, no less brought to trial, nor was anyone in the Bush Justice Department or the rest of an administration which green-lighted these practices and whose top officials reportedly\u00a0saw them demonstrated<\/a>\u00a0in the White House.<\/p>\n

To be accurate, a single member of the national security state has gone to prison thanks to the CIA\u2019s torture program. That was\u00a0John Kiriakou<\/a>, a former CIA agent who tortured no one, but offended the Obama administrations by turning whistleblower and going public about Agency torture. He is now serving a\u00a030-month prison sentence<\/a>\u00a0\u201cfor disclosing a covert operative\u2019s name to a reporter.\u201d In other words, the only crime that could be prosecuted in connection with the Agency’s torture campaign was one that threatened to let the American public know more about it.<\/p>\n

Now, however, thanks to leaks from the\u00a0embattled<\/a>Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s 6,300-page report on the CIA\u2019s interrogation and torture program, weknow<\/a>\u00a0that the Agency “used interrogation methods that weren\u2019t approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters.” In other words, its agents went beyond even those techniques approved in the torture memos, which in turn means that they acted illegally even by the standards of the Bush administration. This should be an obvious signal for the beginning of prosecutions, but — not surprisingly — it looks like the only prosecution on the horizon might be of\u00a0whoever leaked<\/a>\u00a0parts of the unreleased Senate report to McClatchy News.<\/p>\n

*The destruction of evidence of a crime<\/strong>: To purposely destroy evidence in order to impede a future investigation of possible criminal acts is itself, of course, a crime. We know that such a thing did indeed happen. Jose Rodriguez, Jr., the head of CIA clandestine operations,destroyed<\/a>\u00a092 videotapes of the repeated waterboardings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9\/11 attacks, and alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, \u201ctapes that he had been explicitly told to preserve as part of an official investigation.\u201d The Justice Departmentinvestigated<\/a>\u00a0his act, but never charged him. He has since defended himself in a book,\u00a0Hard Measures<\/em>,\u00a0saying that<\/a>he was, in essence, \u201ctired of waiting for Washington’s bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.\u201d He is still free and writing\u00a0op-eds<\/a>\u00a0for theWashington Post<\/em>\u00a0defending the interrogation program whose tapes he destroyed.<\/p>\n

*The planning of an extralegal prison system:<\/strong>\u00a0As is now well known, a global network of extralegal prisons, or \u201cblack sites<\/a>,” at which acts of torture and abuse of every sort could be committed was set up at\u00a0the wishes<\/a>\u00a0of the highest officials of the Bush administration. This system was created specifically to avoid putting terror suspects into the U.S. legal system. In that sense, it was by definition extralegal, if not illegal. It represented, that is, a concerted effort to avoid any of the constraints or oversight that U.S. law or the U.S. courts might have imposed on the treatment of detainees. This was a well-planned crime committed not under the rubric of war against any specific power, but of a global war without end against al-Qaeda and like-minded groups.<\/p>\n

*The killing of detainees in that extralegal system:<\/strong>\u00a0The deaths of detainees in CIA custody in offshore (or borrowed) prisons as a result of harsh treatment ordered by their Agency handlers was\u00a0not considered<\/a>\u00a0a crime. In two cases — in the \u201cSalt Pit<\/a>\u201d in Afghanistan and at\u00a0Abu Ghraib<\/a>\u00a0prison in Iraq — such deaths were investigated by the Justice Department, but no one was\u00a0ever charged<\/a>. In the\u00a0case<\/a>\u00a0of Gul Rahman, the prisoner in the Salt Pit, according to the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, \u201ca CIA officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards in November 2002 to strip Rahman and chain him to the concrete floor of his cell. Temperatures plunged overnight, and Rahman froze to death. Hypothermia was listed as the cause of death and Rahman was buried in an unmarked grave.\u201d (In a rare case brought before a military court, a low-level Army interrogator was\u00a0convicted<\/a>\u00a0of \u201ckilling an Iraqi general by stuffing him face-first into a sleeping bag,\u201d and sentenced to \u201cforfeit $6,000 of his salary over the next four months, receive a formal reprimand, and spend 60 days restricted to his home, office, and church.\u201d)<\/p>\n

*Assassination:<\/strong>\u00a0Once upon a time, off-the-books assassination was generally a rare act of state and always one that presidents could deny responsibility for. Now, it is part of everyday life in the White House and at the CIA. The president\u2019s role\u00a0as assassin-in-chief<\/a>, as the man who quite literally makes the final decision on whom to kill, has been all-but-publiclypromoted<\/a>\u00a0as a political plus. The drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, though \u201ccovert\u201d and run by a civilian agency (with much\u00a0secret help<\/a>\u00a0from the U.S. Air Force) are openly reported on in the media and discussed as a seeming point of pride by those involved. In 2009, for instance, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta didn\u2019t hesitate to enthusiastically\u00a0praise<\/a>\u00a0the drone attacks in Pakistan as \u201cthe only game in town.\u201d And best of all, they are \u201clegal.\u201d We know this because the White House had the Justice Department prepare a 50-page document on\u00a0their legality<\/a>\u00a0that it has\u00a0refused to release<\/a>\u00a0to the public. In these campaigns in the\u00a0backlands<\/a>\u00a0of distant places where there are seldom reporters, we nonetheless know that\u00a0thousands of people<\/a>\u00a0have died, including significant numbers ofchildren<\/a>. Being run by a civilian agency, they cannot in any normal sense be \u201cacts of war.\u201d In another world, they would certainly be considered illegal and possibly war crimes, as Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, has\u00a0suggested<\/a>. Top officials have taken responsibility for these acts, including the drone killings in Yemen of\u00a0four American citizens<\/a>\u00a0condemned to death by a White House that has enthusiastically taken on the role of judge, jury, and executioner. No one involved, however, will ever see a day in court.<\/p>\n

*Perjury before Congress:<\/strong>\u00a0Lying to Congress in public testimony is, of course, perjury. Among others, we know that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper committed it in a strikingly bald-faced way on March 12, 2013. When\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0by Senator Ron Wyden whether the NSA had gathered \u201cany type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans\u201d — a question submitted to him\u00a0a day in advance<\/a>\u00a0— Clapper answered, \u201cNo, sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.\u201d This was a lie, pure and simple, as the Snowden revelations on the NSA\u2019s gathering of phone metadata on all Americans (including, assumedly,\u00a0our congressional representatives<\/a>) would later make clear. Clapper subsequently apologized, saying that hespoke<\/a>\u00a0in what he called \u201cthe least untruthful\u201d way possible, which, were crime on anyone\u2019s mind, would essentially have been a confession. Congress did\u00a0nothing<\/a>. Just in case you wondered, Clapper remains the director of national intelligence with the \u201csupport<\/a>\u201d of the president.<\/p>\n

Mind you, the above seven categories don\u2019t even take into account the sort of\u00a0warrantless surveillance<\/a>\u00a0of Americans that should have put someone in a court of law, or the ways in which various warrior corporations overbilled or cheated the government in its war zones, or the ways private contractors \u201cran wild<\/a>\u201d in those same zones. Even relatively low-level crimes by minor figures in the national security state have normally not been criminalized. Take, for example, the private surveillance of and cyberstalking of \u201clove interests,\u201d or \u201cLOVEINT,\u201d by NSA employees using government surveillance systems. The NSA\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0that at least one employee was \u201cdisciplined\u201d for this, but no one was taken to court. A rare exception: a number of low level military figures in the Abu Ghraib scandal were tried for their abusive actions,\u00a0convicted<\/a>, and\u00a0sent to jail<\/a>, though no one higher than a\u00a0colonel<\/a>\u00a0was held accountable in court for those infamously systematic and organized acts of torture and abuse.<\/p>\n

Too Big to Fail, National Security-Style<\/strong><\/p>\n

All in all, as with the banks after the meltdown of 2007-2008, even the most obvious of national security state crimes seem to fall into a “too big to fail\u201d-like category. Call it “too big to jail.” The only crime that repeatedly makes it out of the investigative phase and into court — as with Stephen Kim,\u00a0Chelsea Manning<\/a>, and John Kiriakou — is revealing information the national security state holds dear. On that, the Obama administration has been\u00a0fierce and prosecutorial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite the claims of national security breaches in such cases, most of the leakers and whistleblowers of our moment have had little to offer in the way of information that might benefit Washington\u2019s official enemies. What Kim told Fox News about the North Korean nuclear program was hardly likely to have been news to the North Koreans, just as the Iranians are believed to have\u00a0already known<\/a>\u00a0what General Cartwright may have leaked to theTimes\u00a0<\/em>about the origins of the Stuxnet virus.<\/p>\n

Of course, leaking is a habit that\u2019s often considered quite useful by those in power. It\u2019s little short of a sport in Washington, done whenever officials feel it to be to their advantage or the advantage of an administration, even if what’s at stake are \u201csecret\u201d programs like the CIA\u2019s drone campaign in Pakistan. What\u2019s still up in the air — and to be tested — is whether leaking information in the government\u2019s supposed interest could, in fact, be a crime. And that\u2019s where General Cartwright comes in. If there is, in fact, but a single crime that can be committed within the national security state for which our leaders now believe jail time is appropriate, how wide is the category and is knowledge always a crime when it ends up in the wrong brains?<\/p>\n

If there were one man of power and prominence who might join Kim, Kiriakou, Manning, and Edward Snowden (should the U.S. government ever get its hands on him), it might be Cartwright. It\u2019s a long shot, but here\u2019s what he doesn\u2019t have going for him. He was an insider who was evidently an outsider. He was considered “a lone wolf<\/a>” who went to the president privately,\u00a0behind the backs of<\/a>, and to the evident dismay of, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. He seems to have had few supporters in the Pentagon and to have alienated key Republican senators. He could, in short, prove the single sacrificial lamb in the national security state.<\/p>\n

In Washington today, knowledge is the only crime. That\u2019s a political reality of the twenty-first century. Get used to it.<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt<\/strong>, co-founder of the\u00a0American Empire Project<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s\u00a0TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is\u00a0Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.\u00a0His other most recent book is\u00a0The United States of Fear(Haymarket Books). Previous books include:\u00a0The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond,\u00a0The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, as well as of a novel,\u00a0The Last Days of Publishing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Engelhardt How the mighty have fallen. Once known as \u201cObama\u2019s favorite general,\u201d James Cartwright will soon don a prison uniform and, thanks to a plea deal, spend 13 months behind bars. Involved in setting up the earliest military cyberforce inside U.S. Strategic Command, which he led from 2004 to 2007, Cartwright also played a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-113620","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}