Month: December 2014

Becoming them
by Tom Sullivan

A few years back I wrote an op-ed about extraordinary rendition flights and the case of Maher Arar, asking readers whether the Bush administration was fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them. In a case of mistaken identity, Arar had been detained at Kennedy International while changing planes on his way home to Canada. He was taken by police in front of his family and sent to Syria where he was tortured for months. He’s been on Twitter recently for some reason:

"4 of the 20 cells at the facility included a bar across the top of the cell"- #TortureReport. A copycat of cell I was detained in in Syria— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Mistaken identity as a terror suspect'd keep u in a Syrian dungeon 4months on end. Not any different in CIA-run prisons as in #TortureReport— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Given the release of the SSCI torture report and this news from the Guardian, I guess the answer to my original question was all of the above.

Abu Ahmed (nom de guerre), a jihadist with misgivings about the brutality of the so-called Islamist State, spoke with Martin Chulov about the inner workings of ISIS and the rise of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the Americans’ Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq:

“We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he told me. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

Baghdadi had inside “a darkness that he did not want to show other people,” Abu Ahmed explained. But he hid it well from the Americans.

Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors. According to Abu Ahmed, and two other men who were jailed at Bucca in 2004, the Americans saw him as a fixer who could solve fractious disputes between competing factions and keep the camp quiet.

“But as time went on, every time there was a problem in the camp, he was at the centre of it,” Abu Ahmed recalled. “He wanted to be the head of the prison – and when I look back now, he was using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.” By December 2004, Baghdadi was deemed by his jailers to pose no further risk and his release was authorised.

“He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”

As Isis has rampaged through the region, it has been led by men who spent time in US detention centres during the American occupation of Iraq – in addition to Bucca, the US also ran Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, and, for an ill-fated 18 months early in the war, Abu Ghraib prison on the capital’s western outskirts. Many of those released from these prisons – and indeed, several senior American officers who ran detention operations – have admitted that the prisons had an incendiary effect on the insurgency.

Mission accomplished, eh?

Who’s the whiniest little spook in Washington?

 by digby

None other than Michael Hayden who’s been caught lying repeatedly to congress, to the press and probably everyone he’s ever met:

“I mean what are they doing—trying to score my public speeches? What’s that about? You want me to go out and score Ron Wyden’s speeches?”

Poor baby. People are bringing up all those times he lied to congress. It’s darned unfair. Wyden’s former spokesperson solemnly replied:

1. That’s really fucking offensive given that all of Ron’s statements are directed towards informing the American people and exposing the [intelligence community’s] attempts to mislead, while Hayden’s all about the lying/misleading. 

2 – While I’m no longer Ron’s official spokesperson, I think I speak for everyone on team Wyden, when I say “Go the fuck ahead.”

She added that she hoped this would result in nobody “ever believing a word that comes out of that man’s mouth.”

That is unlikely. This is now officially a partisan he said/she said and half the nation will end up believing every word he said. And even more depressing, those same people will undoubtedly believe the disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who went on TV today and accused the Democratic Senators on the Intelligence Committee of making up the lurid accounts of torture in the report.

Let’s not forget Michael Hayden’s resume:

20th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency In office May 30, 2006 – February 12, 2009 President George W. Bush Barack Obama Preceded by Porter J. Goss Succeeded by Leon Panetta 

Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence In office 2005–2006 President George W. Bush Preceded by New Office Succeeded by Donald Kerr 

15th Director of the National Security Agency In office 1999–2005 President Bill Clinton George W. Bush Preceded by Kenneth Minihan Succeeded by Keith B. Alexander

He is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. . .

Update: Hayden was on with Blitzer this afternoon and said that “rectal feeding” was a perfectly reasonable way of “getting nutrition” into someone. And he also said that he had no problem waterboarding Americans if they are responsible for killing innocent people.

I wonder how the military feels about that?

.

Here’s What The Media Isn’t Talking About, the Immorality of Torture

By Spocko

I’ve been on the “torture beat” for a long time. It makes me a real drag at dinner parties, so I decided to move those conversations out to the web and to the media.

So much of the current discussion in the media about torture is focusing on, “Does it work?”  There is little focus on, “Is it right?”

People in the media are looking at the legality, but not the morality. Discussing morality makes the mainstream media uncomfortable. To help them out, I’ve been suggesting they talk to Dr. Rebecca Gordon, a philosophy professor at University of San Francisco, who wrote this book:

Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post – 9/11 United States.

(It got great reviews from Torture Magazine! Seriously, there is a Torture Magazine.)

Here she is on Fox News 2 KTVU last night.

This morning she was on the Majority Report with Sam Seder. (Audio link.She starts at 30 minutes in.)

Because she has a depth of knowledge she can talk about the legal and political issues around torture, but especially the moral issues. We need to talk about that. The moral condemnation of acts of torture is not a given today.

Bill O’Reilly thinks torture is moral. From what tradition? Catholicism? I’d suggest the Pope debate him but I think it is a venal sin to subject the Holy Father to Bill O’Reilly. Also, the second you mention the Catholic Church and torture everyone goes to the Spanish Inquisition. I get it, but c’mon they have repudiated that a long time ago.

O’Reilly says torturing “barbarians” is morally right when it is about “protecting the innocent.”

That is a phrase often used on the right, especially by men, to justify certain actions.” What would you do to protect your family?”  Guns everywhere advocates use it because they want you to be afraid and in protector mode.  It makes people feel good about the protecting family and surprise, it sells more guns.

One of the reasons we are seeing people coming out wanting to believe torture works is because that justifies their embrace of a morally repugnant act. “Well at least it keeps us safe.”

Who benefits when we ramp down the fear? Who benefits from a nation of frightened taxpayers? Who benefits from a country that accepts torture as inevitable and even a moral good?

The same people who want us to be constantly afraid, profit from that fear.  Retired generals working for Raytheon and General Dynamics tell us ISIS is the worst of the worst. We need to be afraid so we can feel good about the military protecting us and, surprise! We buy more drones, weapons and bombs. It also boosts the stock price of their employers.

The line they give is, “If we are afraid, we can do whatever we want.” If some entity wants to keep doing whatever it wants, it will keep us afraid.

There are different kinds of strengths that can benefit us, financial, material, physical, but also moral. Torturing people, and then refusing to hold the architects of torture accountable makes us morally weak.

I’d like the media to start talking about this. It would be great if they brought in religious people and secular humanists to talk about torture as morally wrong. They could talk with the fearful, who can explain how their fear should overrule all other values.

If someone sets up this kind of show and wants Dr. Gordon on, drop me a line I’ll help make it happen.

LLAP,
Spocko
spockosemail at gmail. com

Why not hire a professional liar to tell the “truth”?

by digby 

So, I’m watching Wolf Blitzer chat up former CIA honcho Bill Harlow for what seemed like a hour this morning, with Blitzer giving him virtually no pushback and allowing him to spout the litany of talking points we’ve seen from all these pro-torture guys since the report was released yesterday.

Needless to say Blitzer didn’t bring up a little bit of unpleasantness that Jonathan Schwarz flagged today:

Bill Harlow told the CIA’s most blatant lie about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, just weeks before the U.S. invaded in March, 2003. Here’s what happened: By the end of February, 2003, the U.S. case for war with Iraq was disintegrating. That February 15th had seen demonstrations of millions across the world in the biggest antiwar rallies in human history; the British parliament was showing signs it might vote against participating in the invasion; and most crucially, the UN had found no trace of WMD in Iraq. 

At that point Newsweek published what was, to the Bush administration and CIA, the most terrifying story possible – that Iraq likely had no WMD, and the United States knew it. What Newsweek revealed was that in 1995, when Hussein Kamel – Saddam’s son-in-law and head of Iraq’s WMD programs – had defected to Jordan, he told the UN, CIA and British intelligence that in fact Iraq had no WMD left. 

According to Newsweek, “The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.” But the story quickly gained traction online, and when Reuters followed up on the Newsweek story, they went to Bill Harlow:

The CIA on Monday denied a Newsweek magazine report that Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law told the U.S. intelligence agency in 1995 that Iraq after the Gulf War destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them. “It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue,” CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said of the Newsweek report’s allegations that Hussein Kamel told the CIA that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction. 

Newsweek said Kamel, who headed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs for 10 years, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War. “We’ve checked back and he didn’t say this,” a British government source told Reuters. “He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking.” 

Harlow of the CIA said: “Newsweek failed to ask us this question.”

There’s absolutely no ambiguity here; Harlow was lying through his teeth. He wasn’t addressing what Iraq was doing in 2003, or even whether what Hussein Kamel had said in 1995 was true. Rather, he was simply addressing what Kamel said, something that the CIA knew with 100% certainty. Bill Harlow is a liar, and nothing he says should be believed.

No lie! The fact that he’s the big point man on this ciasavedlives.com web-site which is allegedly devoted to telling the truth about the torture program is sadly ironic. You cannot make this shit up. Blitzer seemed to like him though.  Seems like a nice guy.

.

“The Navy had invested too much in me to allow any lasting damage”

by digby

One of the main talking points in favor of the torture techniques developed by the two psychologists (who apparently made 80 million dollars to develop a useless and sadistic torture program) has been that our own military undergo it so how bad can it really be? Anyone should be able to see that 1) we assuredly never inflicted “rectal feeding” on our own troops and 2) the psychology of an American undergoing torture as part of his training is never going to experience it the same way that a captured enemy would experience it.

Here’s Naval Officer Ryan Casey on the subject of SERE and torture:

In February 2003, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq based partly on faulty intelligence emanating from forced confessions by detainees in U.S. custody, I shivered alone in my “POW” cell at SERE school, somewhere in the woods of northern Maine. As a Naval Flight Officer fresh out of flight school, advanced SERE training was the next hurdle in my Navy adventure that had begun more than five years earlier at Annapolis. I hadn’t eaten or slept in almost a week, and I had no idea whether it was day or night. As I peered out through the keyhole, a huge, blinking eye stared back at me, watching my every move. Only later did I realize I was hallucinating. But even in this groggy state–and even after the torture–I still knew well enough I was in training, and this would all be over soon. The Navy had invested too much in me to allow any lasting damage, I figured. Of course, real prisoners aren’t comforted by such a luxury. And in that unpleasant moment, I remember gushing with patriotic emotion, and taking solace in one uplifting thought: “At least my country doesn’t do this to people.”

In retrospect, that seems naive. But at the time, the world did not yet know that the U.S. government had enthroned torture as official policy, and constructed an extensive legal fig leaf to support it. To flex American muscle, the Bush Administration transformed the very methods used on officers like me in SERE training into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. I felt violated and ashamed for my country.
[…]

The American public is woefully uninformed on torture, and few critics have the credibility to confront this damaging and demoralizing blight to our national character. A HuffPost/YouGov poll in April 2014 showed that 68 percent of Americans think government-sanctioned torture is sometimes justified. Sadly, Hollywood ticking-bomb scenarios and fear-mongering pundits shape the views of too many Americans, and even those whose consciences make them morally queasy on torture choose to cover their eyes and ears because they think it works, and they’ve been told it is necessary.

But even as President Obama has called torture by its name, his Department of Justice has so far refused to hold the CIA and top Bush-Cheney officials accountable. At Nuremberg, the U.S. led the effort in prosecuting Third Reich officials who provided the legal basis for Nazi war crimes. Today, in contrast, out of political expediency, President Obama has expressed a desire to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” But abdicating our responsibility to uphold the rule of law only makes government-sanctioned torture during a future war, under a future president, more likely.

America’s new confrontation with asymmetric warfare forces us to rethink challenging moral questions of jus in bello; that is, the right conduct in war. Since George Washington was our Commander in Chief, the United States has pledged to treat all prisoners humanely in wartime. As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, we must uphold these principles and values, not pick and choose which enemies deserve protection under human rights law. Our treatment of even our most heinous enemies reflects on us, not them. This descent into the dark world of torture represents an unprecedented ethical lapse of American ideals, and severely undermines our self-identity as a shining beacon of truth and justice in the world.

My service in the United States Navy has been the greatest honor of my life. But with honor comes responsibility. It is
long past time that we restore America’s honor in the world by reckoning with this sad chapter in our recent past.

Read the whole post, which goes into some detail about the SERE program and how it came to be part of America’s torture regime. It’s a disgrace that people go on television and use the excuse that “if it’s ok to use it on our boys, it’s ok to use it on terrorists” with a straight face. Our boys know very well that they are not going to be maimed or killed, that they are being protected and only undergoing the experience to train them to have some understanding of what they might face. This is clearly not what happened to those prisoners in those black sites. And they know it.

And it’s military officers like Casey who will bear the brunt of all this if they ever get captured on the battlefield. I’m afraid we’ve pretty much destroyed any chance that they will be treated with anything like decency. I’m sure they’re very grateful for their government’s commitment to their safety.

.

A timeline of the modern torture state

by digby

Former defense lawyer and police watchdog Walter Katz has written an important post that illuminates a sense that a lot of us have about all this:  the United States has a culture of impunity for anyone at the top of the social hierarchy.  He specifically delineates the through line from the torture regime of the Bush administration to the rather recent acknowledgement that police on the streets of America are literally getting away with murder. It’s a fascinating timeline of events showing how 9/11 opened the door to the gloves coming off in more ways than one, not the least of which was this notion that the whole world is a battlefield, including the streets of America. The sight of those tanks rolling through Ferguson Missouri made that very real.

I would argue that the rampant taser abuse is part of this as well. I’ve entitled many of my posts on the issue “Dispatch From Torture Nation” for just that reason.  There is no substantial reason why the logic of torturing suspected terrorists  would not be applied to  torturing suspected criminals.  If you engage this argument with torture advocates, they’ll sputter something about terrorists being worse than other people but in the end, they know that what they’re saying is that might makes right. We are the “good guys” and they are the “bad guys” and you don’t need to worry your pretty little heads about anything else.  It’s a classic authoritarian mindset.

Even the fact that Wall Street was given a pass on its criminal behavior vased upon the rationalization that while they might be criminal, the institutions they represent are too important to our system to risk destabilizing the economy with a mundane application of simple morality. We can’t take the risk.  We are in grave danger.  Run for your lives.  Better to accept that this is necessary, that we live in a dangerous world in  war without end, the need for markets to run free lest the whole system fall apart, the need for governments to do what ever they think is necessary to keep the babies safe.

Katz concludes his 9/11 to Ferguson timeline with this observation:

In each of these instances there was an act of state violence which has literally led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and lifelong physical and emotional scars for those who were “merely tortured” or willingly served our country. At the very most, only low-level participants are prosecuted and only rarely so. In the meantime, poor civilians are nickle and dimed for traffic tickets which they can only pay off by filling jail cells and a 12-year old boy is gunned down by an unstable cop for goofing around with a pellet gun. At the lower level of society, there is zero tolerance for the slightest transgression but for those in power – even a young beat cop – there is impunity.

And he quotes Isabel Allende:

I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules. The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom.

Authoritarians know this instinctively. It’s the rest of us who have to keep learning the lesson over and over again.

.

QOTD: Bill O’Reilly

by digby

Bill probably should have been a little bit clearer about which specific barbarians he’s talking about. Otherwise, one might get the impression that he thinks it’s ok to kill Americans. After all, there are a whole lot of people in this world who think torture is barbaric.

More from John Amato, with video.

Update:

This too.

Victims R Us

by digby

I have a piece over at Salon about a famous white conservative activist taking advantage of another famous case of white cops shooting unarmed black men:

They never got to trial. A judge found that the prosecutors had engaged in misconduct by giving wrong instructions to the grand jury and divulging grand jury testimony to a witness, and the indictments were dismissed. But the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had been simultaneously investigating. They got guilty pleas from a number of the police officers involved in the coverup and they tried and convicted the officers involved in the shooting of civil rights violations.

So, you had a situation where the locals in both the police department and the district attorney’s office were corrupt and/or inept and basically allowed police to get away with murder. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice turned out to be little better. In 2013, the federal convictions were also overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The judge vacating the verdict said that the federal prosecutors had engaged in extensive, “highly unusual” and “truly bizarre actions,” including leaks and posting on Internet forums urging witnesses to plead guilty.

We ended up in this case with the police lying and covering up the facts in their shooting of unarmed black citizens and prosecutors at both the local and the federal level apparently engaging in misconduct in trying the cases. There’s a lesson in that somewhere but it isn’t a good one. Even in a situation where it’s quite clear that the cops went over the line and became trigger-happy criminals, it’s nearly impossible for them to be held accountable. You have to wonder what it would take to convict them?

Sadly, I’m afraid we are about to see tragedy turned to farce before our eyes.

Read on …

What the next step on torture?

by digby

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post lays out the next logical step:

President Obama banned torture by executive order upon taking office, limiting techniques to those included in the Army Field Manual. But, even though the new report paints a grisly portrait of what torture as practiced really looked like — and, in the view of some legal experts, confirmed that crimes were committed — there is simply no guarantee that a future president won’t reverse this order.

As the Senate report on torture put it: “These limitations are not part of U.S. law, and could be overturned by a future president with the stroke of a pen. They should be enshrined in legislation.”

Some Democratic staffers have been discussing whether to push forward with some sort of legislative proposal that would codify in statute that such torture techniques are illegal. Though details are scarce, the basic idea would be to make it harder for such a thing to happen again, by requiring that Congress have a say in whether these techniques are resumed, rather than just the president.

Such a proposal would logically come from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s office, perhaps with the support of Senator John McCain, who (unlike many Republicans) endorsed the report’s findings. A Feinstein staffer would only say that her office expects to say something on such recommendations by the end of the week.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, tells me that such a move is the next logical step for lawmakers who actually want to do something about these revelations.

“Our view is that basically all the significant acts in the report are already crimes under federal law,” Anders says. “There really isn’t a need to make anything new a crime, but this would reinforce the prohibitions. A legislative response could take the president’s executive order and make it a statute that Congress passes and the president signs.” Such a law, Anders notes, would put more of an onus on Congress to revisit the statute before any such torture could happen again.

It sounds good but I’d guess the chances of this happening are about as good as Dick Cheney going on CNN and apologizing for every horrible thing he’s ever done. It’s theoretically possible but highly unlikely. And even if someone got it to the floor, almost every Republican and a sizeable number of Democrats wouldn’t vote for it. And beyond that, I’d imagine the president would veto it on the basis of it being a usurpation of presidential authority. (“Just trust me, we won’t allow it to happen again, but this is about the constitution blah, blah, blah …)

The problem here isn’t legal. Torture is already illegal. And sadly, if it became necessary, there’s a very good chance that the government would see fit to find a way to legalize it. That’s what the Bush administration did before and I could easily see the congress doing it too. As I’ve written, making laws is inadequate as the sole method to rein in the government.

But it can’t hurt to get people on the record on this. Who will take the lead?

.

“Enough is enough”
by Tom Sullivan

After #TortureTuesday, I needed a break from thinking about rectal rehydration.

Here’s a link to video of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s keynote address to the “Managing the Economy” conference this week in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by Americans for Financial Reform, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Roosevelt Institute. (sorry, no embed; transcript here)

The speech is being called Warren’s sharpest rebuke to date of President Obama’s nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss for Treasury’s undersecretary of domestic finance. It is another example of “the revolving door at its most dangerous” between Washington and Wall Street, Warren believes, and for a nominee unqualified for the job and from an industry already overrepresented in Washington. The Boston Globe cites an unnamed Treasury official as being unaware of “any prominent Wall Street officials currently serving at the department.”

While Warren spoke alone, she cited her own exprts.

Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin on Weiss’ qualifications:

“The shock of Mr. Weiss’s supporters that anyone would dare question his suitability reflects an unspoken assumption that anyone from Wall Street is of course expert in all things financial. That’s hooey.”

Quoting Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC (a Republican) on the $20 million golden parachute from Weiss’ employer that supporters justify as necessary to induce Wall St. executives to serve in public policy positions:

[She] responded that “only in the Wonderland of Wall Street logic could one argue that this looks like anything other than a bribe.” End Quote. She went on: “We want people entering public service because they want to serve the public. Frankly, if they need a $20 million incentive, I’d rather they stay away.”

Warren concludes her case against the revolving door:

This is about building some counterpressure on the Wall Street bankers. Members of Congress, their staffs, and the regulatory agencies are going to hear the Wall Street perspective loud and clear, each and every minute of each and every day. That isn’t going to change. But we need a real mix of people in the room when decisions are made. When the President has an opportunity to decide who will be at the financial decision making table, he should think about who knows about the economics of job creation, about community banks and access to financing for small businesses, about who has the skills and determination to make sure that the biggest banks can’t take down our economy again.

The titans of Wall Street have succeeded in pushing government policies that made the megabanks rich beyond imagination, while leaving working families to struggle from payday to payday. So long as the revolving door keeps spinning, government policies will favor Wall Street over Main Street. I hope you‘ll all join me in saying “enough is enough.”

I guess she didn’t take Larry Summers’ advice.