What the torture regime revealed about our government
by digby
Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?
“The fact that the intelligence case for detaining an individual is later shown to be less powerful than originally thought does not, in itself, render the original reasonably well-founded decision to detain ‘wrongful,’ ” the C.I.A. response says. An intelligence official who spoke of the classified program on the condition of anonymity added that “the vast majority of those detained in C.I.A.’s program were committed terrorists,” but “in the few instances where we determined that the detainee in custody did not meet the standards for detention, C.I.A.’s general practice was to release that person and compensate him with cash.”
There was no cash in Mr. Bashmilah’s case. Originally from Aden, Yemen, he had a small import-export business in Indonesia in 2003, when he traveled to Jordan with his wife to meet his mother and give her the money for heart surgery. But in Amman, he was arrested by the Jordanian authorities, who were suspicious about the new passport he held and his admission that he had once traveled to Afghanistan.
The Jordanians hung him upside down and beat him in three weeks of imprisonment before turning him over in the middle of the night to C.I.A. officers. There followed 19 months of solitary confinement in two secret prisons in Afghanistan, which he told Salon in 2007 was worse than physical torture.
“Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy,” he said. “Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself.”
Then he was returned to Yemen and held there, reportedly at the Americans’ request. After nine more months, he was convicted of forgery based on an allegedly fake travel document that was not presented in court and sentenced to time served, according to an Amnesty International report.
Ms. Satterthwaite was not able to answer Mr. Bashmilah’s question about an apology or reparation. No apology was forthcoming from the C.I.A., which declined to comment on specific cases. A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Mr. Bashmilah and others flown to prisons on C.I.A. aircraft against an agency contractor, Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., was dismissed on the grounds that it might expose state secrets. Whether the Senate report’s release will change such legal calculations is uncertain.
I cannot imagine anything more horrible than what happened to that man. Put yourself in his shoes. He was a regular guy with no ties to terrorism. And the only thing anyone did to determine if he was one was torture him. That is medieval behavior little better than throwing suspected witches in the pond to see if they drown. It illustrates the reasons why civilized people developed a system of justice designed to at least attempt to determine guilt and innocence based upon reason. It doesn’t work very well, but it’s a damned sight better than this.
These torturers have not only shown themselves to be primitive barbarians, they have shown themselves to be dangerous to society at large. In fact, I would suggest that being as infiltrated into our government as they are, they are as dangerous as the terrorist threat itself. These are people who will use a crisis as an excuse to let their sadistic imaginations run wild.
Now let’s let our imaginations run a little bit wild, shall we? Let’s say we have another terrorist attack, a big one. Or maybe it’s just a massive natural disaster, one that results in major chaos with many lives lost and our infrastructure destroyed. (Think Katrina, only bigger.) Do you feel comfortable with people like this running things? People whose first instinct was to start torturing people with no care about whether they were innocent or guilty?
Americans need to think this through. This is a very revealing episode. Our government officials showed us that they are hysterical panic artists who cannot be trusted to keep their wits about them during a crisis. They proved they will revert to superstition and primitivism when they are afraid. They are openly admitting it this week with all the excuses about how we need to understand the “atmosphere of ear” they were living with in the aftermath of 9/11 and how the panic and hysteria of the moment led to all these “mistakes.”
These are supposed to be professionals, people whose jobs it is to stay calm when the public is frightened. They are supposed to have the cool heads and the experience and training to keep it together in these situations. They are not supposed to be running around in circles, unable to figure out the difference between the enemy and some random guy who had a new passport. They were supposed to already know what countless studies dating back decades (centuries!) have shown: that torture doesn’t work. They were supposed to be good at this.
How can any American feel secure now knowing that the most powerful military and intelligence services in the world are run by misfits like Michael Hayden? How can we feel safe now that we know the nuclear arsenal is secured by a bunch of cheating careerists?
What we know now is that we have entrusted the security of this country to a group of cruel, inept, bureaucratic whiners who wouldn’t know how to find water if they fell out off the side of an aircraft carrier.
I have never felt so unsafe — and I went through the nuclear fallout drills of the 1960s.
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