It’s Hard to Be “Gorby”

Since Barack Obama has been proclaimed the new Gorbachev and a reformist, a few questions remain: Is he a real Gorbachev or just a pretender? And when it comes to evaluating his progressive reforms – just how progressive are they?

New doubts about Obama’s Gorbachev-like nature came up after the president visited CIA headquarters and assured America’s chekists that “the administration is as prepared to protect them as they are to protect the American people.” The statement had to do with more than just maintaining a good relationship with America’s KGB; it referred more specifically to a particular controversy. Will the CIA employees responsible for using special methods, i.e. torture of individuals suspected of terrorism during interrogation, be brought to justice, or won’t they?

Under the U.N. Convention on torture, some of the methods used in Guantanamo are perfectly suitable. Guantanamo is under the American jurisdiction and the U.N. Convention does not recognize any special circumstances: “No special circumstances, no matter what they might be, during war or under a threat of war, can serve as justification for torture.” The Convention is set up in a way that does not allow for any jurisdictional hooks for the defense.

Besides the Convention, there’s real life. And even during a war, which is, more or less, conducted by the rules, there are situations where the detainees need to be stimulated into talking, and all armies involved in serious conflicts perform these simulations. During an irregular war, like the American war against a terrorist network, it’s even harder to imagine what methods that do not fall under the U.N. Convention the Americans were using against the Islamic underground in order to find out names, passwords, and other vital information. Former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney confirmed that the special methods “were successful.” And that is completely possible. Torturous methods are not used so much for sadistic pleasure as for their effectiveness.

Another matter is that all this does not sit well with international conventions on freedom around the world, or with the revered (at least in words) principle that the phrase “I was only following orders” does not relieve one of responsibility.

The current principle, which was set up after 1945, is generally considered universal, although it differs in practice. First, in reality, it only applied to Nazi criminals. In those cases the application of this principle had to do with the fact that those criminal orders far exceeded anything known at that time. In contrast to violations of the ideal principles that occur in any war, currently, there is no precedent for organized annihilation of notorious noncombatants.

Secondly, all of the Reich’s top ranking officials were dead and any soldier could have blamed them for their actions. Those who gave the orders could not have been consulted. There was also a third circumstance: a complete break in the line of succession. Germany’s condition was defined as “zero hour” and they thought that if all those responsible are brought to justice, who might be giving orders in the future was not an important consideration.

Because the United States’ situation is not “zero hour,” it is crucial for the administration to maintain CIA’s domination. This puts significant restrictions on Obama’s “perestroika.”