Month: April 2008

The Fallacy That It’s Business As Usual, More Or Less

by tristero

One can be utterly appalled at the dreadful details of past American behavior and yet make a convincing case that the torture discussions at the highest levels of the Bush administration are something dangerously new. The Torture Presidency is not “merely” an extremist-fueled extension of pre-existing foreign policy but a revolution that establishes a New Normal, where paranoia and racism overwhelm any semblance of commonsense, human rights abuses are considered routine and legal, and the response of choice to nearly any major contradiction of US interests is war.

It is wildly misleading to assert Bush simply built upon the crimes of previous administrations in his public approval of torture discussions (and in the torture practiced by his henchmen). It represents a failure to recognize the radical nature of Bushism and its dangers.

One major consequence of such a specious assertion is to blunt the outrage all of us should rightly feel at the extent of the Bush regime’s serial crimes. Another consequence is that it encourages cynicism at precisely the moment our disgust can turn into useful action (no matter how limited its immediate effect may be).

No one is suggesting that America’s past disgraceful behavior be ignored or condoned. But it is not the real issue.* Bush’s behavior is. And this administration’s grotesque foreign policy, one that normalizes torture to such an extent that an American president would publicly boast that it had been planned in the White House is without parallel.

To protest the Torture Presidency effectively not only requires sustained anger at its self-evident immorality but a sharp, sustained focus. It requires a recognition that these are Bush’s unique crimes and we need to do what we can to concentrate our country’s attention on them.

Discuss.

* [UPDATE: To clarify, it’s not the real issue in the sense that it is not the proximate issue.]

Fighting The Good Fight

by tristero

A new piece of propaganda called Expelled is about to be inflicted on an America that needs more lies the way a dog needs a huge helping of chocolate – if we enthusiastically consume it, it will make us sick and is possibly fatal. This particular movie says that Darwinian ideas are responsible for the Holocaust. It is an insult to millions of educated people, let alone working scientists, to so much as acknowledge, let alone refute such stupid assertions. But this is 21st America, where a person’s bowling style is more important than the planning of torture at the highest level of the US government. So for the record, Darwin’s ideas had less to do with the Holocaust than the rabid anti-semitism of, say, Luther, which is rarely invoked as causing the Final Solution.

Scientists and organizations have decided, perhaps counter-intuitively, to make a big deal out of the release of Expelled, the reasoning being that this is the perfect time to overwhelm the nonsense in the movie – “intelligent design” creationism – with a full court press of science combined with a rhetorical confrontation of outrage at and mockery of the film’s pretenses and makers. It’s a risky strategy. By deliberately “engaging” the film in withering criticism, you are, of course, helping publicize it and Expelled’s producers are hoping to bank on that. Scientists are betting that, at least in this case, bad publicity is, in fact, bad publicity. And so far, Expelled has received rotten reviews from mainstream media and also from some extreme right media such as Fox News.

I think it is the right thing to refute Expelled and do so loudly; I think it will work. And if it does, even those liberals and moderates who don’t care that much about the issues at play over the teaching of evolution should pay attention. It just might elicit other ways to marginalize the toxic junk food of far right nonsense that has made mainstream political discourse in this country so bitterly unpalatable.

[UPDATE: A mixed metaphor was unscrambled.]

What Would They Do?

by digby

Obama on torture, rendition and illegal wiretapping today:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated.

You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity.

You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Robert Parry has argued in his book Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq that Clinton would do what her husband did and let the crimes of the previous administration go because he didn’t want his first term consumed with investigations.

The book opens with a scene early in the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency with him explaining to White House guests why he didn’t pursue geopolitical scandals that had implicated George H.W. Bush in gross abuses of power and arguably criminal acts.

President Clinton made clear he saw historical truth as less important than his hopes for Republican cooperation on his domestic agenda. But this willingness to sweep major scandals under the rug left the White House back door ajar for a restoration of the Bush Family dynasty a half dozen years later – with disastrous consequences for the American Republic.

[…]

As waiters poured coffee at the wedding reception and Clinton voiced his complaints about the media hostility, Stuart Sender saw his chance to ask Clinton why he hadn’t pursued leads about the Reagan-Bush secret initiatives in the Middle East.

“I had this moment to say to him, ‘What are you going to do about this? Why aren’t you going after them about Iran-Contra and Iraqgate?’” Sender said. “If the shoe were on the other foot, they’d sure be going after our side. … Why don’t you go back after them, their high crimes and misdemeanors?”

But Clinton brushed aside the suggestion.

“It was very clear that that wasn’t what he had in mind at all,” Sender said. “He said he felt that Judge Walsh had been too strident and had probably been a bit too extreme in how he had pursued Iran-Contra. Clinton didn’t feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people.

I have long written here as well that I think Clinton’s decision to drop the investigations was the worst decision he made and I agree with Parry that putting his agenda before the historical truth was disastrous. Hopefully, Charlie Gibson will ask Senator Clinton about her position on this at the debate on Wednesday.

I also find Obama’s answer unsettling. I’m glad he has agreed to have his Attorney General look into the matter. But setting the bar that high — that they had to “knowingly and consciously” violate the law — means that there will be no investigation and they will probably be exonerated. The Yoo memos were written for that very reason, after all. (Powell is already using the excuse that they were operating under official DOJ legal findings.)

I don’t think it’s useful to mention the difference between lawbreaking and “really dumb policies” in the context of torture. Torture is clearly not a dumb policy, it’s an illegal and immoral policy. And at this point there’s really no doubt that the Principals sat around the white house discussing how to torture prisoners. Regardless of whether they can excuse their behavior because some authoritarian hack in the Justice Department told them it was ok — it was not ok.

Perhaps Gibson can delve into this a bit more with him as well and get him to clarify his position a bit. I don’t think we can afford to care if the Republicans perceive pursuit of these issues as a partisan witch hunt. This is really, really bad stuff. They escalated so hugely this time that they’ve actually created a national security crisis and made this country less safe as a result of their actions. This regime must be repudiated in no uncertain terms.

* And before you all start the predictable flagellation for my allegedly saying no to impeachment, please read the post I wrote about it again and you’ll see that I never said that.

UPDATE: This piece by Dan Froomkin succinctly puts the latest torture revelations together in easy to digest form.

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We Win One

by dday

This emphasis on the Torture Regime in Washington and the demand for accountability can seem quixotic, I fully acknowledge that. The Congress isn’t going to lift a finger and the Bush boys will obfuscate and indemnify and pardon their way to a long life outside of government, so saith the cynics. My take is that some fights are worth fighting no matter what the chances for success. In addition, sometimes by sticking together and making something an issue, you get results. For months and months it appeared that the Bush Administration would get blanket amnesty for the phone companies that aided them in their illegal wiretapping program. Between the Bush Dogs in the House and the forces behind Jello Jay Rockefeller in the Senate, it was a virtual certainty that immunity would be granted, shutting down all the lawsuits that sought the truth about how many Americans were spied upon, to what purpose, and for how long. There certainly didn’t seem to be much stomach for a battle from the Democratic leadership, or really any politician in Washington.

But that’s not how it worked out.

House Republicans are poised to shift their focus from national security to the economy, hoping to rally opposition to what they claim are Democratic plans to raise taxes amid the economic downturn.

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is expected to announce Thursday that the House GOP floor emphasis will transition away from passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and earmark reform to “stop the tax hike.”

Republicans pulled out all the stops on this one. Their noise machine called Democrats traitors who wanted to weaken America’s defenses. They ran ridiculous ads that insisted a terrorist attack was just moments away if we didn’t give the President this authority. Nearly every Republican voted in lockstep and was unified in their talking points.

And it didn’t matter because people stood up in opposition, emboldening Democrats for the first time in years not to shrink from a fight on national security. Here’s Glenn:

This is the first time in a long time that right-wing fear-mongering on Terrorism hasn’t succeeded. Given that virtually everyone (including me) assumed that the Congress would ultimately enact the new FISA bill demanded by Bush, it demonstrates that smart strategies combined with intense citizen activism can succeed, even when the Establishment — its lobbyists, Congressional representatives and pundits — lines up in bipartisan fashion behind their latest measure. And it removes the Democrats’ principal excuse that they cannot resist Bush’s Terrorism demands without suffering politically.

There’s a similiarly bleak picture on the horizon for those who want accountability for the Torture Regime. There’s no bipartisan consensus on torture, but certainly an overwhelming consensus on not doing much of anything about it. Torture has yet to be discredited, and these revelations of torture being approved at the highest levels have caused barely a ripple.

But there’s always a chance that some sustained citizen activism can turn this around. That’s why we don’t have telecom immunity right now.

One thing we can do is try and get ABC to ask some sort of question on this in this week’s Democratic debate. They BROKE the story, after all, so they have a little connection to it. You can contact them here and demand that they follow up their reporting on torture by pushing it into the Presidential race. Contacting World News Tonight with moderator Charlie Gibson and ABC News Programming Specials would probably be the most helpful.

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Rand To The Rescue

by digby

As you know, I’ve been extremely dismissive of the value of the allegedly great American novel “Atlas Shrugged” and think it is one of the most pernicious, subliminal influences on our culture’s view of government, freedom and capitalism of the past half century. Imagine how thrilled I was to find out that big corporations are endowing universities now with big bucks, asking only one thing in return: they have to teach Rand to business students.

There is so much wrong with that it’s hard to sort it all out. I write a bit about it over at CAF today and pose an important question. I’ll be anxious to hear your answers. It’s not impossible that we could actually do a little something along these lines.

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Nice Hedge You’ve Got There

by dday

After a weekend of total radio silence on the revelations that the American President approved and designated torture tactics on detainees, a reporter finally got up the gumption to ask John McCain a question about it at the Associated Press annual meeting, without referring to the President, of course. And in his answer, McCain got all mixed up again.

Reporter: You oppose torture… Why doesn’t the same principle apply to detainee enemy combatants, don’t we stand for something better than…

McCain: Yes, and I’ve made it very clear, I’ve made it very clear in my statements and in my support of the Detainee Treatment Act, the Geneva Conventions, etc., that there may be some additional techniques to be used, but none of those would violate the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act…And we cannot ever, in my view, torture any American, that includes waterboarding.

The “American” slip-up may have been a slip-up from our doddering GOP candidate. But the weasel language of “there may be some additional techniques to be used,” there, my friends, lies the rub. Considering that McCain already voted against banning the CIA from using waterboarding, which he very specifically describes as torture, then that must be one of those additional techniques. And I’m guessing they wouldn’t violate those international agreements and American laws because… the President says so.

McCain is essentially setting out exactly the same position as the President has – forcefully stating that we do not torture in public, while authorizing and directing torture techniques in private, and finding lackeys to write legal opinions indemnifying the conduct. The consequences of those techniques has been nothing short of murder, dozens of homicides of prisoners while in US custody. Let’s pick a couple at random:

Detainee was found unresponsive restrained in his cell. Death was due to blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.Contusions and abrasions on forehead, nose, head, behind ear, neck, abdomen, buttock, elbow, thigh, knee, foot, toe, hemorrhage on rib area and leg. Detainee died of blunt force injuries to lower extremities, complicating underlying coronary artery disease. The blunt force injuries to the legs resulted in extensive muscle damage, muscle necrosis and rhabomyolysis. Electrolyte disturbances primarily hyperkalemia (elevated blood potassium level) and metabolic acidosis can occur within hours of muscle damage. Massive sodium and water shifts occur, resulting in hypovolemic shock and casodilatation and later, acute renal failure. The decedent’s underlying coronary artery disease would compromise his ability to tolerate the electrolyte and fluid abnormalities, and his underlying malnutrition and likely dehydration would further exacerbate the effects of the muscle damage. The manner of death is homicide […]

Cause of death: Closed head injury with a cortical brain contusion and subdural hematoma. Manner of Death: Homicide. Iraqi male civilian detainee died in US custody 12 hours after a reported escape attempt. Physical force was required to subdue the detainee, and during the restraining process, his forehead hit the ground. Closed head injury: subarachnoid hemorrhage over brain, cortical brain contusion, right subdural hematoma. Additional injuries: fractured rib, multiple contusions and abrasions to head, torso and extremities. Abrasions on wrists and ankles consistent with restraint. Hemorrhage of right muscle of neck. No evidence of natural disease. DOD 003329 refers to this case as “1 closed head injury – died 12 hours after escape attempt.”

This is, after all, typical McCain. He says that US troops require significant educational benefits but won’t sign on to support a 21st-century GI Bill. He attacks Democratic groups that are “funded by George Soros” and has taken hundreds of thousands from Soros himself. He promises “straight talk” and gets kicked off the Project Vote Smart board for refusing to answer the questions in their “Political Courage Test.” He calls himself a public financing champion and attacks Barack Obama for possibly opting out of the Presidential public financing system, while he illegally spends money for the primary despite not being taken out of the public financing system by the FEC. And on and on.

The press loves McCain (for the honor of speaking to him, they handed him the gift of coffee and donuts today) so this massive hedge on torture, combined with recent votes allowing the CIA to continue to engage in it, will probably go unnoticed. The elephant in the room, George Bush’s admission of guilt in violating domestic and international laws regarding toture, has gone almost completely unnoticed, after all.

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The Manly Wimps

by digby

I’ve been thinking about torture all week-end which naturally led me to think about Glenn Greenwald’s new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics which is being released today.

It’s not that the book is about torture, but it is about the Republican psyche, in particular about their weird cult of masculinity, which is what leads to over-the-top notions of violent necessity in dealing with national security. Great American Hypocrites expands on some themes that we’ve all be discussing for eons here in the blogosphere and Glenn pulls it all together, as only he can, in a damning portrait of the swaggering, hypocritical phonies who have been running this country for the past seven years.

I’ll be writing about the book all week, but I wanted to start out with Glenn’s first chapter, in which he dissects one of the greatest examples of Republican hypocrisy ever — John Wayne, the patron saint of American conservative manliness (and creator of the image that Ronald Reagan simply assumed out of whole cloth) was a draft dodger. In World War II!

In fact, conservative icons Wayne and Reagan were among the few Hollywood stars who didn’t enlist for overseas duty, instead staying here at home playing heroes on the big screen, making big bucks, growing their careers. Others, like Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Clark Gable all sacrificed during those peak earning years — as did millions of other Americans — to fight the Nazis.

What Glenn picks up is how that affected their psyches:

Despite (or because of) his fanatical combat avoidance during World War II, john Wayne would spend the next forty years of his life strutting around as though he were some sort of uber-patriotic war hero. He became as well known for his far-right, pro-war political views as he was for his acting career. In 1944, he helped found the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, eventually becoming president.

Not only in films, but particularly in politics, he deliberately held himself out as a symbol of manly courage and resolute strength. And perhaps most reprehensibly of all — given his own history — he was often found leading the demonization of those Americans who opposed war, and especially those who did not want to fight in combat.

[…]

Worse still, after World War II, Wayne repeatedly and viciously attacked various films for being allegedly anti-American or insufficiently reverent of America. In one interview, he complained: “high Noon was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. the last thing in the picture is ol’ Coop [Gary Cooper] putting the Unites States Marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret running [screenwriter and Communist] Carl Forman out of this country.”

Wayne’s boast that he ran Foreman “out of this country” references the fact that, in the 1950’s, Wayne became a fervent and paranoid anti-Communist McCarthyite. He actively assisted the House Un-American Activities Committee in its effort to ferret out suspect Communist sympathizers in Hollywood.

I’m sure by now that you can see where this leads. The same psychology that took hold of men like Wayne and Reagan, both of whom became the leading conservative icons of the past fifty years, is what grabbed conservative Vietnam avoiders like Bush and Cheney. It’s a psychology that you don’t find much among real military types (although it does happen — Generals like Curtis Lemay and Jerry Boykin do exist.) As obvious as it seems, men who fetishize warrior values and fail to live up to them, often feel they have something to prove. That’s at least partly how we wind up with people sitting around a table calling Colin Powell a wimp for timidly mentioning that torture might not be a good idea.

Glenn’s book goes far beyond the exploration of this conservative masculinity obsession, but that’s at the heart of his thesis and I think it’s as good as anything we’ve seen to explain these people. They are not good at the things they purport to believe in and it leads them to overcompensate with violence and behave hypocritically in every aspect of their lives. This internal dissonance and unwillingness to admit their own failures leads to psychopathic responses like torture and to a general inability to govern and lead the country effectively. We’ve seen it too often to discount it. These are damaged people.

As we go forward, we should remember that we have recently had a new generation exposed in the same ways. The 101st Keyboarders are the George W. Bush and the Dick Cheneys of the future and there are a bunch of them. When faced with what they themselves consider to be the crucible of their generation — the war against “Islamofascism” (or WWIV) — they know that they failed to step up under their own terms. It’s a recipe for future bloodletting.

I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s worth it for the dissection of John Wayne’s myth alone, but the entire book is fascinating and fun to read. I’ll be talking about other aspects of it throughout the week, so stop by and discuss it if you’ve read it. And buy it if you haven’t. You won’t be disappointed.

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Make Them Listen

by digby

John Amato at Crooks and Liars has joined with the ACLU in its call for an independent counsel to investigate the “principals” for their complicity in torture.

Join the ACLU and our friends at Crooks & Liars: Call on your members of Congress to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate possible violations by the Bush administration of laws including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act and federal assault laws. Please sign on.

It’s the least we can do.

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“A War Of Sexual Humiliation”

by dday

Let me add to the chorus of those expressing their total revulsion in the President’s admission that he approved high-level meetings inside the White House to direct what kinds of torture could be used on specific detainees, to the extent of acting out interrogation scenes right there in the room. I’ve been also spending a lot of my weekend time online reading over my posts from back when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and we first learned of the beginnings of how torture was employed in our names. I had just started blogging about 10 days before the pictures came out in Sy Hersh’s New Yorker article and on CBS. Here was my initial reaction.

I’m really just saddened today. Saddened and sickened by the latest reports that have come from Iraq, tales of torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (which should now be called My Lai 2.0), of forcing naked Iraqis into simulated sexual positions, of attaching electrical wires to others.

Somehow, we live in a country where we still believe we can take the moral high ground, despite all evidence to the contrary. The official Army reaction was that “this is a small minority of the military, and it’s not the Army.” In fact, it seems that mercenaries have been running the prison, which is enough of an outrage, that the military is not even in direct control of prisoners of war (This is the true inevitable consequence of outsourcing, as a nation not of workers but of administrators we eventually descend into chaos as we lose all sense of what anyone is doing in our name). This is fucked up on so many levels the eyes are bugging out of my head.

(The wires weren’t attached to any electrical source, we later learned.)

I figured that as the months went by this would surely consume the Presidential election debate and doom the chances for the Grand Inquisitor-in-chief. And there were certainly enough revelations out there for that to happen. We learned about forced sodomy, dozens of murders, the fact that these policies were widespread and not limited to a few bad apples, the release of many relevant memos which showed that this was authorized at the highest levels. The information was there to make this the issue that would crumble the Bush Administration, if not at the ballot box then by criminal investigation.

But it didn’t work out that way. Torture became the new third rail of American politics, barely mentioned above a whisper in 2004 and really not a factor on the campaign trail this year, unless you’re talking about the Jack Bauer clones on the right musing about how much torture detainees deserve. Instead of becoming the foundational principle that America has broken, instead of recoiling from torture we accepted it, mainstreamed it, ritualized it, portrayed it in our horror movies and made jokes about it. We certainly never used it as a symbol of an Administration committed to breaking all the moral precepts upon which the country was founded. It gets a polite one-line “No more torture” in Democratic stump speeches, and everyone cheers, and moves on.

We should not move on, ever, until we force ourselves to look at the stain which will never come out. And at the risk of stepping on Dennis Hartley’s turf, I want to tell you about Errol Morris’ latest documentary “Standard Operating Procedure,” which I was able to see a couple days ago.

Morris is probably my favorite filmmaker, and he takes a small-bore approach at determining just what happened at Abu Ghraib and just what is depicted in those now-infamous photos. He uses primarily the source material of the photos themselves, and interviews with most of the military police who took them and participated in them, including Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl and Javal Davis. It’s a complex and difficult film, in one respect because it’s hard to presume that these narrators are totally reliable. They’ve rarely been given such a platform to describe their conduct and set it in perspective, and the fact that ringleaders Ivan “Chip” Frederick and Charles Graner did not appear in the film (Both were in jail at the time of filming and the military prevented any interviews) gives the remaining participants a lot of leeway to blame them for the practices and techniques. There’s a lot of “Graner told me to get in the picture so I did” in the film, along with repeated efforts to cast themselves as innocents caught up in a situation beyond their control. England even blames it on being “in love” with Graner; Ambuhl eventually married Graner, even after he fathered a child with England.

But one of the things Morris is a master at is challenging long-held perceptions and forcing you to look at subjects in a different way. It is true that we never have seen and never will see the worst of Abu Ghraib; that happened in the interrogation rooms. We are glimpsing the “softening up” military police was ordered to perform on detainees, and quite a bit of it fell along legal guidelines that military investigators termed “standard operating procedure,” incuding some of the more humiliating scenes of stress positions, forced nakedness, even the shot of the hooded man standing on the box with the wires around his fingers. What’s shocking is what was authorized as legal. And even what we have to witness is only a fraction of these procedures; in a memorable scene, an MP recounts the day that the head of the prison Col. Pappas, in the immediate aftermath of the revelations in the press, ordered an amnesty for any and all destruction of documents, photos, or any material related to detainee abuse. We are shocked at the destruction of two or three CIA tapes when practically everything at Abu Ghraib was shredded.

A notable scene in the film explores the picture of Sabrina Harman smiling in front of a dead Iraqi detainee packed in ice. The Iraqi died during a brutal interrogation session; the official line at the time was that he had a heart attack. He was locked in a room overnight while top prison personnel tried to figure out the next step. Harman gained access to the holding cell, and first took a posed picture, but then took a series of photographs of the body which revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man was beaten to death and did not succumb to heart failure. Afterwards, personnel took this ghost detainee who was unknown to the Red Cross, stuck an IV in his arm, strapped him to a gurney, and wheeled him out of the cell block, never to be seen again. Harman actually documented the beginnings of a cover-up for murder. In another context she could have received a Pulitzer Prize. Instead she got a year in jail.

(Incidentally, there is a companion book to the film, also called Standard Operating Procedure, co-written by Morris and Phillip Gourevitch, and a substantial article excerpted from the book appeared a few weeks back in the New Yorker. Harman actually went into the Army to gather enough money to go to school. She wanted to be a cop, and specifically a forensic photographer.)

The film is full of these touches, these upset expectations, these deliberations into who these people were and why they did what they did. Morris throughout tries to return some context, to fill out the edges of the frames of these photos, to explain the conditions and the circumstances, and really show that in many respects, a lot of these abuses took place BECAUSE the cameras were present, because there was an artificiality that entered because the participants knew they were being documented. For example, the famous photo of Charles Graner with his arm cocked ready to punch a detainee was a posed photo, according to the MPs.

Afterwards there was a discussion with the filmmaker Errol Morris, and it was fascinating. His belief is that these “few bad apples” were imprisoned for the very act of photography, for leaving a trail for others to find about these abuses (which in the view of Sabrina Harman was her point, she wanted to take the pictures “to show people what was going on here, because otherwise nobody would believe it). Morris said that the question of whether or not the scenes depicted rose to the level of torture is misplaced and spirals into irrelevant questions of precise definitions. Ultimately there is a question of “the principle of fair play and common American decency… you don’t punish the little guys and let the big guys get away scot-free.” Even without the admission of guilt from the President being known to Morris, he was well aware of his culpability. After all, the Yoo memo justifying the already-enacted sins of the Bush Administration come down to assertions that a President can do whatever he pleases in a time of war. “Well, if he can do whatever he wants, then doesn’t that make him responsible? And if so, why hasn’t he been impeached?” By the Administration’s own logic, there can be only one man to blame, and the fact that he hasn’t reflects a basic cowardice and a failure of will.

Morris believes that the scandal at Abu Ghraib helped Bush get elected in 2004, because it gave us someone to blame. We looked at the scenes of abuse and immediately accused those inside the frame of responsibility, instead of those outside the frame demanding that these acts be undertaken. “The Iraq war,” said Morris, “was essentially a war of sexual humiliation.” We invaded to show Iraq and the world how tough we are. That we could dominate the rest of the world. That we could impose our will and muffle the sounds of dissent. Abu Ghraib was merely a complement to a war of humiliation. And that comes from the top down.

There’s a significant moment in the film, a re-enactment of a spot of blood from the dead prisoner dropping on one of the MPs who was holding him up and unaware of the circumstances. He says “I didn’t have anything to do with this guy dying,” and yet Morris shows the drop of blood over and over, staining the military uniform. In essence we all have that spot of blood on us. We are all responsible. The spot is deep and full and will be very hard to get out. Our will in getting to the truth about torture, in forcing the nation to recognize that spot of blood, to internalize it, to hold to account those who have stained us, will be the defining factor in whether we can ever be washed clean.

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Torture Nation

by digby

In keeping with tristero’s advice to keep talking about the immorality of torture, I thought I would reprise some of my earlier posts on the subject. There are, sadly, many of them.

The following post was written back in June of 2004, when we had recently been informed of the DOJ’s definition of torture and news had begun to filter out about the extent of the program. But as appalled and horrified as I was at the time, I’ll admit that I never dreamed that Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, George Tenent, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and others personally and unanimously signed off a regime that filtered all the way down to troops on the ground in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib. I certainly couldn’t have imagined they sat around the white house choreographing the torture techniques for the “high value” prisoners.

Testimony

“Torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

In case anyone’s wondering about the specific torture methods that are considered legal in the various gulags we now have around the world, there has been some work done on this by Human Rights Watch, even before Abu Ghraib. They found that at the “detention centers” in Afghanistan, torture as it was defined under the Geneva Convention was used routinely, often against innocent civilians.

According to the two men, bright lights were set up outside their cells, shining in, and U.S. military personnel took shifts, keeping the detainees awake by banging on the metal walls of their cells with batons. The detainees said they were terrified and disoriented by sleep deprivation, which they said lasted for several weeks. During interrogations, they said, they were made to stand upright for lengthy periods of time with a bright spotlight shining directly into their eyes. They were told that they would not be questioned until they remained motionless for one hour, and that they were not entitled even to turn their heads. If they did move, the interrogators said the “clock was reset.” U.S. personnel, through interpreters, yelled at the detainees from behind the light, asking questions.

Two more detainees held at Bagram in late 2002 told a New York Times reporter of being painfully shackled in standing positions, naked, for weeks at a time, forcibly deprived of sleep and occasionally beaten.

A reporter with the Associated Press interviewed two detainees who were held in Bagram in late 2002 and early 2003: Saif-ur Rahman and Abdul Qayyum.86 Qayyum was arrested in August 2002; Rahman in December 2002. Both were held for more than two months. Interviewed separately, they described similar experiences in detention: sleep deprivation, being forced to stand for long periods of time, and humiliating taunts from women soldiers. Rahman said that on his first night of detention he was kept in a freezing cell for part of his detention, stripped naked, and doused with cold water. He believes he was at a military base in Jalalabad at this point. Later, at Bagram, he said U.S. troops made him lie on the ground at one point, naked, and pinned him down with a chair. He also said he was shackled continuously, even when sleeping, and forbidden from talking with other detainees. Qayyum and Rahman were linked with a local commander in Kunar province, Rohullah Wakil, a local and national leader who was elected to the 2002 loya jirga in Kabul, and who was arrested in August 2002 and remains in custody.

According to detainees who have been released, U.S. personnel punish detainees at Bagram when they break rules for instance, talking to another prisoner or yelling at guards. Detainees are taken, in shackles, and made to hold their arms over their heads; their shackles are then draped over the top of a door, so that they can not lower their arms. They are ordered to stand with their hands up, in this manner, for two-hour intervals. According to one detainee interviewed who was punished in this manner, the punishment caused pain in the arms.

In March 2003, Roger King, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, denied that mistreatment had occurred, but admitted the following:

“We do force people to stand for an extended period of time. . . . Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people’s inhibition about talking or their resistance to questioning. . . . They are not allowed to speak to each other. If they do, they can plan together or rely on the comfort of one another. If they’re caught speaking out of turn, they can be forced to do things, like stand for a period of time — as payment for speaking out.”

King also said that a “common technique” for disrupting sleep was to keep the lights on constantly or to wake detainees every fifteen minutes to disorient them.

Several U.S. officials, speaking anonymously to the media, have admitted that U.S. military and CIA interrogators use sleep deprivation as a technique, and that detainees are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, and held in awkward, painful positions.

Here is some direct testimony of men who have been interrogated under rules that allow torture short of the pain accompanying “organ failure or death”

“stress positions”

Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named “Mouse,” who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.

You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

“dietary manipulation”

Our normal diet consisted of either rice or bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was usually made from a boiled seasonal vegetable such as cabbage, kohlrabi, pumpkin, turnips, or greens, which we very appropriately called, “sewer greens, swamp grass and weeds.

“sleep deprivation”

Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.

The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That’s a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don’t know.

“… obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other … prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that’s the way I’ve got to spend the night.”

“isolation”

The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to — well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It’s not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot

Oh, sorry. My mistake. Those illustrations and some of the comments are by former POW Mike Mcgrath about his time in the Hanoi Hilton. Other comments are from the transcript of Return With Honor, a documentary about the POW’s during the Vietnam War. How silly of me to compare the US torture scheme with North Vietnam’s.

It’s very interesting that all these guys survived, in their estimation, mostly because of their own code of honor requiring them to say as little as possible, fight back as they could and cling to the idea that they were not helping this heartless enemy any more than they had to.

As I read the vivid descriptions of these interrogation techniques of sleep deprivation, sensory manipulation, isolation, stress positions and dietary manipulation I had to wonder whether they would be any more likely to work on committed Islamic jihadists than they were on committed American patriots.

The American POWs admitted that they broke under torture and told the interrogators what they knew. And they told a lot of them what they didn’t know. And over time, they told them things they couldn’t possibly know. The torture continued. Many of them, just like the reports from Gitmo, attempted suicide. They remained imprisoned never knowing when or if they would ever be set free.

“unlimited detention”

We began to talk about the war. How long are we going to be there and everything and I — I was thinking well I’m only going to be there about six months or so. And then uh, Charlie says oh, we’re probably going to be here about two years. Two years? And when I — I finally came to that realization, my God, that’s going to be a long time. And when I – it just kind of hit me all at once. And I just took my blanket and kind of balled it up and I just buried my head uh, in this — in this blanket and just literally screamed with — with this anguish that it’s going to be that long. Two years. And then when I was finished, I felt oh, okay. I — I — I can do that. I can do two years. Of course, as it turned out, it was two years, and it was two years after that, and two years after that. Uh, until it was about seven years in my case. You know? But who was to know at that time.

I would imagine that our torture regime is much more hygienic than the North Vietnamese. Surely it is more bureaucratic with lots of reports and directives and findings and “exit interrogations.” We are, after all, a first-world torturer. But at the end of the day it’s not much different.

“bad apples”

And he announced to me, a major policy statement. Some officers and some guards had become so angry at what the Americans were doing to their country that they had far exceeded the limits which the government had wished they would uh, observe in treatment of prisoners. That they had um, brutally tortured us. That was the first time they ever acknowledged that it was torture not punishment.

Same excuses, too.

The good news is that the mental torture that was used in North Vietnam, the isolation, the sleep deprivation etc. did not seem to create a lot of “long term” damage in the men who lived through it. Most have done well since. Therefore, all the mental torture they inflicted on our POWs was perfectly legal and above board under the Bush torture regime. So that’s nice.

“When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I’m certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around.” John McCain

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