Hell, I’m relieved that the “reconciliation” language seems to have been dropped. That was mainly a result of the poll showing the public in favor of investigations, lessening the need to try to shoehorn the commission of inquiry into the Obama-approved spirit of Looking Forward Bipartisanly. But Whitehouse’s prosecutor mindset, and the way that his Intel-committee-imparted knowledge clearly weighs on him, also played a role. He said something a week or so ago quite blunt about the need being for justice rather than reconciliation.

I’ve got nothing against a commission of inquiry as long as it doesn’t screw up prosecutions, or substitute for them.

And I know that in persuading the public at large, rehashing Central American realities that a whole hell of a lot of people didn’t even grasp at the time is a losing approach.

But I appreciate very much the chance here to speak from my heart without mincing words.

I hope you can see that not just Pickering, but Farmer and Gunn in particular, are meant to fulfill the role of “respected establishment operatives (aka reliable tools of imperial foreign policy)”.

Leahy has lined up respected establishment operatives (aka reliable tools of imperial foreign policy) to push for a commission of inquiry. I actually agree with most of Pickering’s testimony, especially about leaving the door open for prosecution and therefore being very sparing with grants of limited immunity.

But Pickering’s presence, particularly as he appeared today to represent the outermost limit of opinion among this crop of witnesses, signals to me as strongly as anything can that this commission will play the same role as “plucky reformer” Napoleon Duarte’s “fragile democracy” played in El Salvador during Amb. Pickering’s stint there: a crowd-pleasing facade created to hide the continuation of the same poisonous policy.

Pickering’s stay coincided with the largest bombing campaign in the history of the western hemisphere, as the Salvadoran military hunted people in the countryside from the air — like Sarah Palin going after those wolves. Just like that, only it was human beings who were hunted. The idea, just as in Viet Nam, was to drive noncombatants who were the popular base of the opposition out of the rural areas to isolate the insurgents by depriving them of food and logistical support.

Helicopters landed patrols who captured, raped, and tortured women suspected of being supporters of the armed opposition. They reported hearing men who spoke English and American-accented Spanish during their interrogations.

But because the ultra-rightist factions of the Salvadoran domestic elite hated Pickering, we were all supposed to accept him, and by extension the U.S. policy of the period, supported by Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress as well as the Reagan administration, as “moderate”. Screw that, and screw this commission.

Prosecutions for crimes.

Note that in a NYT article from back in 1988, Pickering was fingered as passing along appeals for weapons from the Contras to Oliver North, and never reporting it, despite the fact such assistance was supposedly illegal at the time. Pickering was then ambassador to El Salvador, and up to his ears in death squads, CIA electoral manipulations, etc.

Pickering and his ilk are not men to be trusted. They are brought in here for one reason only: they are “fixers”, like the guys the mob brings in to clean up the mess after the hit’s been done.

Dr. Carter Malkasian, formerly assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) as an advisor on counterinsurgency, directs the Stability and Development Program, which focuses on counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and post-conflict reconstruction. The team provides objective, analytic perspectives—grounded in an understanding of actual operations—to support decision-makers charged with planning and conducting security and development operations.

The range of issues includes: insurgency and counterinsurgency, ethnic conflict, development of indigenous forces, economic development of war-torn states, “Phase IV” reconstruction efforts, and the establishment of political institutions.

The team most recently spent time on the ground in Afghanistan advising Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

What are PRTs?

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are “non-kinetic” operations carried out jointly by small number of lightly armed military personnel and civilian staff from the diplomatic community and development agencies to promote governance, security and reconstruction throughout the post-9.11 Afghanistan and Iraq. PRTs can be characterized in two ways: one as a miniature of multidimensional peacekeeping operations or “peacekeeping-lite,”and the other as an extended civil-military operation center (CMOC) or “super-CMOC.”

And the PRTs have some questionable activities, beyond humanitarian work:

The PRTs have critics in the international aid community. A recent analysis from the think tank Overseas Development Institute, said “In Afghanistan, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were perceived as blurring the lines between humanitarian and military action.”

Amnesty International ran across some shady operations conducted by some of the PRTs that involved torture:

Amnesty International is concerned that ISAF troops from New Zealand operating in Afghanistan and particularly the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) could be involved in transferring detainees to Afghan security forces.

While New Zealand was not one of those countries surveyed in the AI report, NZ is a participant in the ISAF and has a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. “We are particularly concerned that the NZ PRT, as part of its task in maintaining security in Bamyan Province involving frequent patrols throughout the province NZ Defence Force website; 3rd Nov 2007; http://www.nzdf.mil.nz/operati…..efault.htm “The NZ PRT (107 personnel as of October 2007) Bamyan is tasked with maintaining security in Bamyan Province. It does this by conducting frequent presence patrols throughout the province.”, may apprehend and transfer detainees,” says Amnesty International Spokesperson Gary Reese.

In March this year, Amnesty International raised our concerns to Hon Phil Goff, Minister of Defence, that the 50-70 detainees handed over to U.S. forces by the NZ SAS could be subject to torture at Guantanamo Bay or other secret detention centres in a third country (through the US practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’). The responses from the New Zealand Defence Force to Amnesty questions at this time were vague and unsatisfactory. Assurances from the Minister of Defence that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would follow up any persons transferred by NZ Forces is inconsistent with statements to Amnesty International from the ICRC in Afghanistan…

The transfer by the NZ PRT to Afghan security forces meant transfer to near-certain torture, as this other article by AI makes clear.

Saying all this does not mean that Vice Adm. Gunn is somehow involved in torture. But his connection with an agency that is directly involved in activities advising military activities that themselves have been associated with torture makes him a dubious witness, to be sure. At least someone should have asked him about such links. No one did.

In any case, what we are witnessing is a corralling of all establishment criticism of the interrogations torture, and other crimes of the Bush administration by individuals highly invested in maintaining the legitimacy of U.S. military policy as a whole, including its pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is precisely these operations that involved the mass round-up of prisoners, thousands of whom were and many still remain imprisoned, and an untold number tortured.

These are not the people we should look to as authorities for an investigatory commission. Senator Leahy, what are you trying to pull here?

Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to El Salvador from 1983 to 1985, says that, while it was U.S. policy to publicly denounce the death squads, their “kind of tactics [were] tacitly supported by the U.S. government, even though [they] were freelance.” Other analysts are more blunt. “We did back the guys who went after the bad guys,” says Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985. “And [we] defined ‘bad guys’ pretty broadly.” According to William Leo Grande, a professor at American University and the author of a major study of the conflict, Washington knew that the intelligence it passed to the Salvadoran government eventually made its way to the paramilitaries. “We did support the guys who organized them,” he says, “so it’s a little precious to deny that we supported the death squads themselves.”

Pickering also got caught up in a dispute between mob political cliques in the U.S. and El Salvador, when Sen. Jesse Helms, who was aligned with his protege the torturer Roberto D’Aubuisson and his ARENA party, spilled the means on a CIA election manipulation to put their man, Jose Napoleon Duarte in as president, during a raging civil war with tens of thousands targeted by death squads and torturers.

As a result, enraged D’Aubuisson supporters plotted to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Mr. Helms sent a letter to these partisans that said:

Ambassador Pickering has been the leader of the death squads against democracy. Mr. Pickering has used his diplomatic capacity to strangle liberty during the night.

Senator Helms was censured by the Senate for conducting his own foreign policy. Luckily, Ambassador Pickering escaped murder.

And then we have, on what augurs to be a whitewash of a commission, John Farmer, Jr. Why is this guy testifying? Because he knew how to keep criticism in line at the 9/11 commission? What’s his view on imprisoning “terrorists”? Does anyone remember his op-ed in the New York Times last year. In the name of reform of how “terrorists” have been treated by the criminal courts, and understanding how the Bushistas twisted criminal law into something unlawful, Farmer doesn’t propose an end to that only. No, he wants to create a new system of preventive detention!

A closer look at the Padilla case and other terrorism prosecutions reveals, to the contrary, that the continued reliance on our criminal justice system as the main domestic weapon in the struggle against terrorism fails on two counts: it threatens not only to leave our nation unprotected but also to corrupt the foundations of the criminal law itself.

The use of the criminal law in terrorist cases has never been an easy fit. After all, the primary purpose of counterterrorism is the prevention of future acts, while the criminal law has developed primarily to punish conduct that has already occurred. The question raised by the Padilla trial is whether a case about an attack that never actually happened can be tried in the criminal courts without transforming the nature of that system itself.

The answer is no. In order to make the criminal justice system an effective weapon, we have already started extending the reach of criminal statutes to conduct that has never before been punishable as a crime….

It is time to stop pretending that the criminal justice system is a viable primary option for preventing terrorism. The Bush administration should propose and Congress should pass legislation allowing for preventive detention in future terrorism cases like that of Mr. Padilla. It is the best way to ensure both the integrity of our criminal law and the safety of our nation.

This was a stacked list of witnesses, with the majority enemies of democracy, if not, like Pickering, implemented in exactly the same types of crimes the commission is supposed to address. What a farce! I cannot think of words of base calumny strong enough. This commission should be boycotted, if this is the direction it is headed.