Surfer vote veers left after Kamala Harris announces, “I like Dick!”

Sexy VP "proud" to be endorsed by “America’s most prominent living criminal.”

(Peter Maguire is BeachGrit’s occasional political correspondent providing a lifetime surfer’s take on the machinations of power. Beyond being a surfer, Peter is a war crimes investigator and author of Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade, which Kelly Slater bought the film rights for, Law and War – a book about the Nuremberg Trials, Facing Death in Cambodia, Breathe, the bio on jiujitsu icon Rickson Gracie and, released real soon, its follow up Comfort in Darkness, “a masterwork about the art of combat and the invisible powers within us all.)

Why is Vice President Kamala Harris “proud” to have the endorsement of Dick Cheney, America’s most prominent living war criminal?  I have devoted my entire professional life to legal and historical accountability for atrocities, human rights abuses, and war crimes and don’t make this accusation lightly.  In my expert opinion, Cheney’s war crimes stem from his role as a principal architect of “the New American Paradigm.“When someone shows you who they are,” Maya Angelou wrote, “believe them the first time.”1

Days after 9/11, against the advice of many of America’s military, foreign policy, and intelligence professionals, Dick Cheney convinced President Bush to replace the Hague and Geneva Conventions that govern U.S. soldiers’ battlefield conduct and treatment of POWs, with the New American Paradigm.

On September 16, 2001, the Vice President unveiled his plan to millions of television viewers on Meet The Press:

“We also have to work through—sort of—the dark side, if you will.  We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

The Cheney‑led Bush administration replaced codified and customary international law with new, elastic and ever‑changing standards.  Adversaries were redefined as “illegal enemy combatants,” torture became “enhanced interrogation,” and kidnapping “extraordinary rendition.”

Even though the U.S. Second Court of Appeals compared torturers to slave traders in 1980, after 9/11 only those acts that resulted in death or organ failure were considered torture. According to this new definition, not even John McCain’s treatment at the hands of the North Vietnamese met the Bush administration’s new standard.

Since 2001, I have written and spoken out against “The New American Paradigm.”  I was never motivated by hatred for the United States, or sympathy for fundamentalist Islamic terrorists; in fact quite the opposite.  I worried about what would become of my country if we flouted the most basic norms governing POW treatment and war crimes trials.  “Although military commissions have been used throughout American history, given their uncertain historical legacy the president’s decision raises as many questions as it answers,” I wrote in “Questions Hang Over Military Tribunals,” a November 21, 2001, New York Newsday op-ed.  “Will ‘probative evidence’ in Bush’s military tribunals include information obtained in [illegal] mock trials, as done in many of the 1945 military trials?”  The answer, I would learn in late 2002, was a resounding “yes.”

After America consummated its sordid affair with Cheney’s “dark side,”  brazen disregard for the laws of war was elevated to a matter of principle.  By 2002, CIA paramilitary agents were clandestinely transporting suspected terrorists to top secret “black site” prisons outside the U.S. where they were tortured and interrogated. Afterwards, evidence obtained by torture was selectively leaked by the Bush administration to cabinet members, favored politicians and handpicked reporters to justify their actions.

During investigative trips to Cambodia in 2002–2003, I heard credible rumors about “Cat’s Eye,” a secret American prison in Thailand (also known as “Detention Site Green”) where CIA officials were torturing and interrogating suspected terrorists.

The world would later learn that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded there eighty-three times in August 2002 alone.  After al Qaeda computer expert Abu Anas al-Libi was “rendered” to Egypt for interrogation in 2002, he claimed under duress that Iraq was training al Qaeda on the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Secretary of State Colin Powell would repeat al-Libi’s lies in his infamous 2003 UN speech that justified the invasion of Iraq.  Super-terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “KSM,” confessed to masterminding thirty al Qaeda operations and even wielding the knife that decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl after months of torture, interrogation and isolation.

There was, however, one problem: evidence obtained by torture is not reliable.  A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Abu Zubaydah provided no new or significant information.  Even worse, the same committee concluded that “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”

Nonetheless, the Bush administration loudly declared the New American Paradigm a great success.  Over the course of the next decade, fifty-four foreign governments aided and abetted America’s torture and interrogation efforts.  Some hosted CIA black sites, others captured and transported suspected terrorists, and still others turned a blind eye when their domestic airports and airspace were used to transport prisoners secretly.3

By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, indefinite detention of American citizens, domestic espionage, and “watchlists” were all accepted as facts of life by a stunned and submissive American public who had the luxury of viewing the havoc wrought in their name from afar.  This arm’s-length relationship, however, was shattered in 2004 when Army General Anthony Taguba’s report on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was leaked to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.  Bin Laden himself could not have staged a more successful propaganda coup as photographs of smiling, fresh-faced American girls leading naked Iraqi men on leashes flashed around the world in seconds.

One senior policymaker described the perpetrators to me at the time as “the seven soldiers who lost the war.”

The Taguba Report exposed to the world that not just the New American Paradigm, but also “torture’s perverse pathology,” had taken root. Historian Alfred McCoy would later make the important and overlooked point that torture doesn’t just fail to provide reliable intelligence, it also “leads to both the uncontrolled proliferation of the practice and long-term damage to the perpetrator society.”

In just three short years, America’s use of torture spread from a handful of CIA agents and military psychiatrists to common Army reservists and unaccountable “defense contractors.”

Equally important, America, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s own metrics, was now losing the Global War on Terror (“Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”).

Overnight, the land of the free and home of the brave had been transformed into the land of the surveilled and home of the scared.  Snitches, not truthtellers, were venerated and a bovine body politic passively accepted the Patriot Act’s unconstitutional overreach, the alphabet soup of new three-letter government agencies whose cyber gaze was now focused on American citizens, and the kangaroo courts that did their bidding.

After all, “if you’ve haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

During the early years of the Global War on Terror (2001-2005), I regularly denounced the New American Paradigm on television, radio and in New York Newsday.

I accepted long delays at airports because I “was on a list” and was never surprised to find big, orange Department of Homeland Security cards in my checked bags informing me that their minimum wage mall cops had tossed my dirty clothes.  When people called me on my home phone and asked about the loud clicks, and obvious, audible interference, I explained simply that “the government is probably listening,” then added, “Fuck you, Alberto Gonzales.”

I was more afraid of my great‑grandfather and PhD advisor rolling in their graves for my failure to speak the truth than I was of the U.S. government.

That said, after the Iraq invasion, my work became increasingly lonely.  People I once counted as allies succumbed to various forms of pressure and got with the New American Paradigm.  As a result, I began to distance myself from them and they began to distance themselves from me.

I was fortunate to have a small, but strong, support system.  People like criminal defense attorney Andy Patel, laws of war professors Jonathan Bush and Gary Solis, journalists Ed Vulliamy, my editors Peter Dimock and Leslie Kriesel at Columbia University Press, Spencer Rumsey at New York Newsday, and above all, my fearless Southern wife, Annabelle Lee, always strengthened my resolve.  There were still others—Senator Jim Webb, Andrew Bacevich, Morris Davis—whom I did not yet know, but whose willingness to speak truth to power, also inspired me and reminded me that I was not alone.

Nobody, however, did more to strengthen my resolve than Rich Arant.  Like me, Arant had been very actively involved with the war crimes accountability efforts in Cambodia.  Long before the UN swanned onto the scene and held their imperfect and overpriced trials, the accountability efforts were led by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC CAM).  Both Rich and I supported their efforts.  While I donated my research to DC CAM, Arant translated many of their articles and books from Khmer into English.

Unlike me, Rich was not a civilian, but a slightly mysterious military professional who had worked in Southeast Asia since the end of the Vietnam War.  By 2005, I had spent more than a decade documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities, had interviewed many of the former cadre who had committed them, and knew the inner workings of Security Prison 21 (Tuol Sleng) as well as anyone in the world.

Nevertheless Arant’s short, four-page untitled preface to The Chain of Terror, a 2005 book about Khmer Rouge secret prisons, forced confessions, and executions by Cambodian author Meng-Try Ea, shook me to my core.

Arant wrote:

It was during 2002 that I first saw Meng-Try Ea’s draft of The Chain of Terror in the Khmer language. The author asked me to assist him with the English translation. Little did I realize then how much this work would come to haunt me during the next two years.

I recall as if it were yesterday sitting at a desk in the Thai Armed Forces Intelligence Operations Center in Bangkok during mid-1975 as a young Army NCO, reading the first Thai intelligence reports of the barbarity that swept Cambodia. My immediate reaction was that the reports were incredible, over the top. My assessment— propaganda.

My experience a decade later as an Air Force human intelligence officer interviewing inmates of communist prisons and reeducation camps in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam had, I thought hardened me to the cruelty of prisons and interrogations. More recent memories of interviewing former Khmer Rouge cadre after the United Nations brokered “peace” in Cambodia convinced me I knew what evil these creatures, so unlike us, were capable of carrying out in the name of “The Organization.”

Translating The Chain of Terror was a fascinating opportunity to learn more about the evil perpetrated by interrogators and guards inside prisons that operated far beyond the pale of human decency. For months afterwards I would recall at odd times one female witness’s description of the sounds of clubs smashing the skulls of victims kneeling at the edge of freshly dug pits, “the sounds of coconuts falling to the ground.”

Then late one night in early 2003 I found myself in the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein’s version of Pol Pot’s S‑21, just a few yards from Saddam’s infamous death chamber, and life changed forever. Standing there in shock, I recalled a phrase from a Khmer Rouge interrogator’s notebook—”When the interrogator is clear in his emotions and principles that the enemy arrested and brought in by the party is a ‘spy,’ the interrogator can successfully carry out his duty. Success is digging up the mysteries hidden by the prisoner and demonstrating to the Party that the prisoner was involved with the enemy.”  Upper echelon wanted answers and wanted them now. I soon left, ashamed at being unable to perform my duty.

When I sat down my first “terrorist suspect,’” I began with the question, “Why were you arrested?’’” Immediately I thought of the testimony of one of the witnesses in The Chain of Terror: “When I arrived at the interrogation room, the investigator told me to sit down and began asking questions. The first question every time was, “Do you realize why Angkar brought you here?”

Seldom does any interrogator really have any reliable information about the prisoner who sits before him. The interrogator must harden his heart sufficiently to act as if he already knows the guilt is there, so he can apply the necessary pressure to convince the prisoner that confession is the only avenue out of a bad situation. Just part of the job, I told myself, [but also remembering the witnesses whose testimony I had translated quoting their interrogators:] “Angkar [The Organization] has never made a mistaken arrest.’”

Arant’s preface continues:

Late one night during November 2004 at the American military prison at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan, I stood in the prisoner-in-processing room and listened to a young MP reading the “house rules” to a just-unblindfolded and still trembling “Taliban suspect.” The MP reads the rules verbatim from a sign posted on the wall behind the prisoner’s back. My mind flashed to the Ten Rules of Santebal [Special Security] written on the blackboard at Pol Pot’s House of Horrors, S-21. Every prison has rules, I assured myself.

I watched the stunned expression of newly arrived Afghans and saw the same expressions once registered in the in-processing mug shots taken at S-21. Exploiting “capture shock” is a necessary part of the game. I told myself.

Ugly, but unavoidable.

As I questioned an Afghan prisoner accused by an unknown paid informant of working against US forces, I went after the identities of anyone he knew who was cooperating with the Taliban, but was distracted by the recollection of Khmer Rouge interrogator Pol telling his prisoner Sen:  “Brother if you report the secrets of the party: meaning you betray your party and join with us, we will not be afraid to use you, But Brother, if you do not report, that means you are stubborn and are protecting treasonous forces.”

One night in the prison at Bagram I was interrogating an older man, a man my own age, a former Mujahidin cadre who had successfully fought with American support to drive the occupying Soviet Army from his land. A former Afghan communist prison commander, educated and trained by the Soviets, had recently taken a security position with the new free Afghan government and reported to US Forces that my prisoner was cooperating with the radical Taliban mullahs.

My prisoner had been “implicated,” to use the Khmer Rouge jargon. My prisoner had once been jailed by the Russians. I began describing how the Khmer Rouge had turned on their own cadres and tortured them to extract phony confessions, this during roughly the same era when the Afghan jihad against the Russians was occurring. I was preparing to make the point that he could trust an American interrogator to treat him with more respect than the Russians had. I was stunned to see this dignified man completely collapse in tears, unable to speak. After my interpreter and I gave him a chance to gather himself, he said, “I fought the Russians, our common enemy, and now you Americans have imprisoned me on the word of a son of the Russians. This is my reward.”

Since 2001, the words of American Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson’s opening address have haunted me.  “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.  To pass these defendants the poison chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

After 9/11, Dick Cheney transformed Justice Jackson’s poisoned chalice into a poison keg.  Not only did Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Chertoff, Feith, Perle, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Libby, Tenet and Black drink from it like frat boys during rush week, but so did their eager pledges—Yoo, Addington, Hadley, Miller, Rizzo, Sanchez, Bybee, Haynes, Goldsmith, Bellinger, Frum, and others.     .

Today, more than 23 years, eight trillion dollars, and a million dead later, America has never been more insecure at home and had less power, credibility and moral authority abroad.

“The U.S. is no longer the world’s policeman who will enforce the international rules based order,” one dispirited government official wrote me this year after the Biden administration abandoned the 100 million dollar Airbase 201 in Niger. “We’ve instead turned into the fat middle aged crossing guard, standing there in a neon vest, flapping our arms and yelling at the side of the road for cars to slow down.”

I once thought that the U.S.—Dakota War Trials (1862) and the Yamashita case (1945) were the worst stains in American international legal history.  However, the Kafkaesque farce that has dragged on for more than twenty years in Cuba, out of sight and mind, at Guantanamo Bay, stands without parallel.

Instead of facing the fact that we have hit rock bottom and ending the two decade-long bender, American leaders have unleashed the New American Paradigm on U.S. citizens who dare question whatever non‑oppositional ideology rules the day.

Because half of the country distrusts the Supreme Court and the other half distrusts the Department of Justice, no matter who wins this bleak election, the U.S. cannot move forward without some form of reckoning. The neoconservatives who created this mess and neoliberals who expanded and presently oversee it need to be held, if nothing else, historically accountable. As for Dick Cheney, although he will never wear headphones in the Hague, there is nothing that can redeem him. If the former Vice President had a sense of shame, he would join George W. Bush at his finger-painting studio in Crawford, Texas and vanish from public sight.  Instead, Cheney continues to insert himself into American politics, and it is up to us—democrats, republicans, progressives, libertarians—to shun him like a racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.
See my 2009 essay, “The New American Paradigm,” after the Postscript below.

(This story appears on Pete’s substack Sour Milk, subscribe, it’s free etc.)

Endnotes
1.    My great-grandfather, Robert Maguire, was a judge at the final American trial at Nuremberg and one of my dissertation advisors, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, was chief prosecutor.  Over the past thirty years, I have investigated and documented war crimes, written books (Law and War:  Americans History and International Law and Facing Death in Cambodia and articles about the experience, provided pro bono advice to defendants, plaintiffs, governments, and NGOs in war crimes and other high profile trials and investigations like Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia 1997-2015; David Irving v. Deborah Lipstadt/Penguin Books 2000; Donald Rumsfeld v. Jose Padilla 2004; Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. 2012; Investigation and arrest of Yan Yoeun 2021; John Knock Presidential Pardon 2021; Ann Shively and the estate of Michael Jay Shively v. Utah Valley University, Astrid Tuminez, Karen Clemes, and Sara Flood 2022.
2.    Nations involved in the New American Paradigm’s kidnapping and torture efforts included: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
3.    Some of my more prominent stories:  “Questions Hang Over Military Tribunals,” New York Newsday, 2001; “Our Standards of Judgment Are Whatever We Wish Them To Be” New York Newsday, 2003; “Bush Can’t Have Justice Both Ways,” New York Newsday, 2003; “The Undoing of International Justice,” New York Newsday, 2004; “Here Comes the Judge: Hussein Trial May Set New Low,” New York Newsday, 2004; “Look at Our Prisoner of War Policy Now,” New York Newsday, 2004; “Soldier Serves as Scapegoat in Iraq Scandal While Higher-ups Duck Responsibility,” New York Newsday 2005; “Padilla:  US Courts Can Fight Terrorism,” New York Newsday 2007; “UN-Cambodian War Crimes Court Is Tested,” International Herald Tribune, 2009.

POSTSCRIPT:
When I wrote “The New American Paradigm” in 2009, I was working as a defense contractor designing, testing, and building combat rescue boats for the U.S. military.