One has to wonder whether Hayden was more concerned with his CIA colleagues' "security" from al-Qaeda or from prosecution. In any case, he deprived the public -- and any hypothetical future prosecutor -- of crucial evidence of wrongdoing.
Hayden also perpetuated the lie that the Agency's first waterboarding victim, Abu Zubaydah -- waterboarded a staggering 83 times -- was a crucial al-Qaeda operative and had provided a quarter of all the information that the CIA gathered from human subjects about al-Qaeda. He was, in fact, never a member of al-Qaeda at all. In the 1980s, he ran a training camp in Afghanistan for the mujahedin, the force the U.S. supported against the Soviet occupation of that country; he was, that is, one of Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters."
Bellinger later chimed in, keeping the Abu Zubaydah lie alive by arguing in 2007 on behalf of his boss Condoleezza Rice that Guantà ¡namo should remain open. That prison, he said, "serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11."
"He Appears to Lack Basic Knowledge About and Belief in the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Laws, and U.S. Institutions..."
That's the next line of the open letter, and it's certainly a fair assessment of Donald Trump. But it's more than a little ironic that it was signed by Michael Hayden who, in addition to supporting CIA's torture project, oversaw the National Security Agency's post-9/11 secret surveillance program. Under that program, the government recorded the phone, text, and Internet communications of an unknown number of people inside and outside of the United States -- all without warrants .
Perhaps Hayden believes in the Constitution, but at best it's a selective belief. There's that pesky 4th Amendment, for example, which guarantees that
"[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Nor does Hayden appear to believe in U.S. laws and institutions, at least when it comes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established the secret courts that are supposed to issue exactly the sort of warrant Hayden's program never requested.
John Negroponte is another of the signers who has a history of skirting U.S. laws and the congress that passes them. While ambassador to Honduras, he helped develop a murderous "contra" army, which the United States armed and trained to overthrow the government of neighboring Nicaragua. During those years, however, aid to the contras was actually illegal under U.S. law. It was explicitly prohibited under the so-called Boland Amendments to various appropriations bills, but no matter. "National security" was at stake.
Speaking of the Constitution, it's instructive to take a look at Article 6, which states in part that "all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land." Such treaties include, for example, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand non-aggression pact (whose violation was the first charge brought against the Nazi officials tried at Nuremberg) and Article 51 of the U.N. charter, which permits military action only "if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations."
In 1998, Robert Zoellick, another of those 50 Republicans openly denouncing Trump, signed a different letter, which advocated abrogating those treaties. As an associate of the Project for a New American Century, he was among those who urged then-President Bill Clinton to direct "a full complement of diplomatic, political, and military efforts" to "remove Saddam Hussein from power." This was to be just the first step in a larger campaign to create a Pax Americana in the Middle East. The letter specifically urged Clinton not to worry about getting a Security Council resolution, arguing that "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council."
"He Is Unable or Unwilling to Separate Truth From Falsehood..."
So says the letter, and that, too, offers a fair characterization of Trump, who has often contended that President Obama has never proved he was born in the U.S.A., and has more than once repeated the long-disproved legend that, during the 1899-1913 Morro Rebellion in the Philippines, General John J. Pershing used bullets dipped in pig's blood to execute Muslim insurgents. (And that's barely to scratch the surface of Donald Trump's remarkable unwillingness to separate truth from falsehood.) What, then, about the truthfulness of the letter signers?
Clinton never bit on the PNAC proposal, but a few years later, George W. Bush did. And the officials of his administration began their campaign of lies about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, yellow cake uranium from Niger, and "smoking guns" that might turn out to be "mushroom clouds" (assumedly over American cities), all of which would provide the pretext for that administration's illegal invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration didn't limit itself to lying to the American people. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte was dispatched to the Security Council to lie, too. Security Council Resolution 1441 was the last of several requiring Iraq to comply with weapons inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Some members of the Council, especially Russia and France, were hesitant to approve 1441, fearing that the U.S. might interpret it as a license to invade. So, in the discussions before the vote, Negroponte assured the Security Council that "this resolution contains no 'hidden triggers' and no 'automaticity' with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions." The British ambassador used almost identical words to reassure the Council that, before attacking Iraq, the United States and Britain would seek its blessing.
That, of course, is hardly what happened. On February 24, 2003, Washington and London did bring a resolution for war to the Security Council. When it became apparent that two of its permanent members, France and Russia, would veto that resolution if it came to a vote, Bush (in consultation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair) decided to withdraw it. "We all agreed," he wrote in his memoir, that "the diplomatic track had reached its end."
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