You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes
by digby
“The United States of America is awesome. This administration wants to talk about how not awesome we are.”
It’s just like the Rolling Stone UVA story and the IRS scandal. Also too Russia. And Jonathan Gruber.
Notice they’re not saying it wasn’t torture anymore. They are mounting a full-throated defense of torture as a virtuous tactic.
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Uhm, remember who led the torture charge?
by digby
November 5, 2001
Torture Seeps Into Discussion by News MediaBy JIM RUTENBERG
In many quarters, the Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter is considered a liberal. Yet there he was last week, raising this question:“In this autumn of anger,” he wrote, “even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to . . . torture.” He added that he was not necessarily advocating the use of “cattle prods or rubber hoses” on men detained in the investigation into the terrorist attacks. Only, “something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history.”
The column — which ran under the headline “Time to Think About Torture” — set off alarm bells at human rights organizations. The sense of alarm was heightened because Mr. Alter is just one of a growing number of voices in the mainstream news media raising, if not necessarily agreeing with, the idea of torturing terrorism suspects or detainees who refuse to talk.
On Thursday night, on the Fox News Channel, the anchor Shepard Smith introduced a segment asking, “Should law enforcement be allowed to do anything, even terrible things, to make suspects spill the beans? Jon DuPre reports. You decide.”
One week earlier, on CNN’s “Crossfire,” the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said: “Torture is bad.” But he added: “Keep in mind, some things are worse. And under certain circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils. Because some evils are pretty evil.”
The legitimacy of torture as an investigative tool is the latest in a progression of disturbing and horrific topics the news media is now presenting to its audience, like the potential of an Ebola attack on an American city or a terrorist nuclear strike, the kind that, as an article in The Economist put it in its latest issue, could cause the disappearance of everything below Gramercy Park in Manhattan.
Some human rights advocates say they do not mind theoretical discussions about torture, as long as disapproval is expressed at the end. But they say that weighing the issue as a real possible course of action could begin the process of legitimizing a barbaric form of interrogation.
Journalists are approaching the subject cautiously. But some said last week they were duty-bound to address it when suspects and detainees who have refused to talk could have information that could save thousands of lives. Plus, they added, torture is already a topic of discussion in bars, on commuter trains, and at dinner tables. And lastly, they said, well, this is war.
The historian Jay Winik, in an opinion article on Oct. 23 in The Wall Street Journal, detailed the reported torture in 1995 of the convicted terrorist plotter Abdul Hakim Murad by Philippine authorities that led to the foiling of a plot to crash nearly a dozen United States commercial airplanes into the Pacific and another into C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia. Mr. Winik went on to write, “One wonders, of course, what would have happened if Murad had been in American custody?” He did not, however, endorse the use of torture but suggested the United States may have to significantly curtail civil liberties, as it had done in past wars.
In Slate, the online magazine, Dahlia Lithwick wrote, “There’s no doubt that torturing terrorists and their associates for information works.” But the Oct. 19 article, “Tortured Justice,” primarily raised a host of moral and legal problems associated with torture.
Mr. Alter said he was surprised that his column did not provoke a significant flood of e-mail messages or letters. And perhaps even more surprising, he said, was that he had been approached by “people who might be described as being on the left whispering, `I agree with you.’ “
The problem with those comments, he said, was that they presumed that by writing about torture, Mr. Alter was advocating it, which he said he was not doing, as evident in his point about torture producing false information. (“I’m in favor of court-sanctioned sodium pentothal,” he said in an interview. “I’m against court-sanctioned, physical torture.”)
The Fox News Channel was less apologetic about its report on Thursday night, in which advocates for torture said desperate times called for desperate measures and critics said that by abusing suspects the United States would lose its moral standing in pressuring other governments on human rights violations.
“They’re sitting around and not talking and may have information that could save American lives here and abroad,” Bill Shine, the executive producer of the Fox News Channel, said of current government detainees. “And people are starting to say how can we get information out of them,” he added, “while respecting their constitutional rights.”
Mr. Shine, however, said he was amazed that it was a subject for a news report at all. “It shows you where we are now,” he said.
But where Fox News Channel was willing to run a traditional, network- news style segment on the pros and cons of torture and “suspending writ of habeas corpus,” the broadcast news divisions have shied away from doing the same.
Jim Murphy, the executive producer of “Evening News with Dan Rather” on CBS, said he would address the topic only if a CBS News correspondent found that law enforcement was seriously considering using torture. He said that speculation about torture and discussion of its merits were, for now, best left to talk shows and columnists.
“At this point, for me, it is being covered where it belongs to be covered,” he said. Until his network is presented with real evidence that torture is being used or being considered, he added, “It’s like the conversation you or I would have at dinner: `I wonder if we should torture?’ “
Of course, even that level of discourse is considerably disturbing to groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which criticize the use of torture by regimes around the world. And yet, even their leaders said they understood the source of the sentiments.
“It reflects people’s fear, and the somewhat unexamined instinct to do whatever it takes to meet the threat,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “And when people step back for a moment, they understand there are reasons why you don’t want to open the door.”
Mr. Roth said he had appeared on CNN and Fox News Channel to discuss those reasons, chief among them that torture often produces false information and that various international laws forbid it.
Mr. Roth and the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA, Curt Goering, said they believed that if the discussion of torture grew, they would be able to counter it on television or in print.
Mr. Roth said he was heartened by one thing. “To the government’s credit,” he said, “it’s not the government proposing this. It’s various commentators.”
And, of course, there was Dershowtitz
It’s a little hard for me to believe that all this talk of torture coming so soon on the heels on 9/11 was ever about “getting information.” They didn’t know what they didn’t know or even who to capture.
This was about punishment not intelligence. I think it always was.
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(I’m re-running this post by batocchio for your files …)
The Torture Apologia Chart
by batocchio
It can be difficult keeping up with all the torture apologist appearances and their BS du jour. Generally, they rotate through the same old long-debunked arguments, although occasionally they try out new lines of defense and attack. Some, like Clifford May on The Daily Show, try the “shotgun” approach combined with the style of a pushy car salesman – don’t stop talking, talk over everybody else, change the subject if challenged, you-don’t-buy-that-well-how-about-this, what can I do today to get you in the seat of amnesty for war criminals, friend?
Typical of torture apologists, it’s a disingenuous performance that makes much more sense if one realizes he’s arguing from a conclusion, not larger principles – don’t prosecute or investigate any of the culprits. Because of this, torture apologists frequently offer extremely convoluted and even contradictory arguments. As I’ve written before, their defenses normally fit into a pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Leading torture apologist David Rivkin has argued both that waterboarding isn’t torture and conceded that it is – with different audiences. Scott Horton recently highlighted some of the contradictions in Dick Cheney’s big “I saved the country through torture” speech (and several other sites picked up on another key Cheney inconsistency). Meanwhile, Dahlia Lithwick captured this dynamic beautifully with Lindsay Graham at the Senate hearings on prisoner abuses in May:
All morning, Graham clings to the argument that he believes in the rule of law. And as he does so, he explains that the lawbreaking that happened with respect to torture: a) wasn’t lawbreaking, b) was justifiable lawbreaking, c) was lawbreaking done with the complicity of congressional Democrats, d) doesn’t matter because al-Qaida is terrible, or e) wouldn’t be lawbreaking if the Spanish police were doing it.
These contortions would be merely comical if it weren’t for the extraordinary damage done, and the Beltway pundit consensus that no one should be held accountable. And the more torture apologists can muddy the waters and confuse the public, the more likely they can prevent a full investigation and possible criminal trials, and the less likely they will be forced to offer the same weak defenses in court.
What follows is a chart of torture apologist arguments, the text of the chart, and an explanation. I might make a sort of annotated version later, with more detailed explanations, rebuttals of the major arguments, and links. But many fine sites (including Hullabaloo) have offered detailed debunks of individual arguments in the past, and I’ve given my shot in “Torture Versus Freedom.” (This is also in part a companion to an earlier piece, The Torture Flowchart.) Regardless, if you like visual aids to dissect your daily dose of hackery – and somewhat busy, low-res charts – here ya go.
The Chart
(Click, or go here or here for larger views.)
Here’s the text:
We Did Not Torture
A. We did not torture because:
1. SERE training proves these techniques are not torture.
2. OLC memos say it isn’t torture.
3. “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” are not the same as torture.(Just look at the name, guys!)
4. These techniques do/did not cause permanent or lasting harm.
5. Psychologists said it was all right.
6. If you call it torture, you will have to prosecute (and you don’t want to do that).
7. It’s unpatriotic to say Bush officials authorized torture.
We Did Not Break the Law
B. What we did was legal because:
1. OLC memos say it isn’t torture.
a. They were sound legal positions.
b. They were written in good faith.
2. There’s no precedent for prosecuting such abuses.
3. American legal statutes are unclear on torture.
4. The Geneva Conventions:
a. Define torture vaguely.
b. Do not apply to these prisoners (nor do other legal protections).
5. Torture is in the eye of the beholder.
6. Psychologists said it was all right.
7. When the President does it, it’s not illegal.
We Did Not Endanger the Country
C. What we did was necessary because:
1. We were panicked after 9/11.
2. There was an imminent threat (and only this would work).
3. There might have been an imminent threat.
4. The CIA requested these techniques.
5. We obtained key information that saved lives.
6. We obtained confessions necessary to justify a war.
7. Abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo:
a. Were the result of a few bad apples and not official policy.
b. Should not be conflated with our “interrogation” of high-value prisoners.
c. Did not radicalize insurgents who attacked American and coalition troops.
8. Bush kept the country safe.
We Were Not Reckless
D. We treated these prisoners decently, because:
1. Extreme techniques were only used when other methods didn’t work.
2. This was an emergency (tick tick tick…).
3. Waterboarding was only used on three prisoners.
4. These methods were never used more than necessary.
5. These techniques do/did not cause permanent or lasting harm.
6. These were bad people who deserved far worse. (Why do you care?)
7. They don’t observe the Geneva Conventions, why should we?
8. Guantanamo is like a holiday resort.
9. Reports? What reports? (Red Cross, Senate, JPRA, etc.)
We Were Not Immoral
E. Torture is not immoral because:
1. Torture is not inherently immoral.
2. It is immoral, but in special circumstances, it’s necessary.
3. These people are not like us and do not deserve humane treatment.
4. Treating these bad people harshly or humanely does not:
a. Dissuade their fellows from bad conduct.
b. Affect our relationship with allied countries.
c. Endanger our troops.
5. The prisoners aren’t saying what we want them to say.
6. Torture is a kindness, giving prisoners an excuse to confess.
7. We needed to justify a war.
We Are Not Arrogant
F. Torture opponents are more sanctimonious than torture apologists because:
1. Remember 9/11. (9/11! 9/11!)
2. What we did was necessary.
3. What we did worked.
4. Torture “works” (in general).
5. Compared to rapport-building techniques, torture is:
a. More effective (obtains information humane treatment will not).
b. Quicker (it’s an emergency).
6. The Constitution is not a suicide pact (civil liberties are a luxury).
7. They want the enemy to win and hate America.
8. All of the abused were guilty; all of the tortured were bad men.
We Should Not Be Held Accountable
G. Prosecutions (and/or investigations) would be bad because:
1. It would criminalize policy differences.
2. It would create a chilling effect on counsel.
3. It would infringe on the powers of the presidency.
4. Holding leaders accountable would:
a. Create a bad precedent politically.
b. Disgrace America.
5. It won’t happen again.
6. The torturers have learned their lesson.
7. It would be divisive (Broder and Rove will be upset).
8. Both parties are (equally) culpable.
9. It will reveal our secrets to the enemy.
10. We’re all going to die if you do! (And it’ll all be Obama’s fault)
You’ll notice some repeats and overlaps, and I’ve tried to use a rough color scheme, but feel free to improve on this sucker if you find it at all useful. Red roughly corresponds to authoritarian arguments, fear-mongering, bullying and bigotry. Somewhat contradictory to those are the claims of responsibility and utility in blue. Green is for legal matters, and purple is mostly for arguments about politics and fallout (often a mix of authoritarian and utilitarian pitches). Black is for particularly noxious, immoral arguments (all of which have actually been made, unfortunately).
I’ve got “We were panicked after 9/11” in grey (C1), separate from the more bullying, don’t-challenge-us, “Remember 9/11!” (F1). Personally, I think “we were panicked after 9/11” would be the most compelling argument for mitigating a sentence in court, but the problem – for the key figures, at least – is that the evidence and timeline simply don’t sustain a defense of “good faith.” (See Marcy Wheeler’s invaluable “The 13 who made torture possible” and hertorture timeline for more, as well as Digby’s recent post, “Panic Artists,” on Richard Clarke – who was recently trashed by Dick Cheney.) The Bush administration was repeatedly warned off this course, but ignored counsel, squelched and punished dissent, hid what they were doing (even from some of their own people), andreportedly started torturing at least some prisoners only after they wouldn’t “confess” to the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection the Bushies wanted to justify a war with Iraq. That level of evil and abuse of power shouldn’t be blithely excused, especially before a full investigation. I think mitigation and forgiveness also depend on some recognition and admission of wrong-doing by the culprits, and Cheney and the gang are instead warning doom, attacking all critics and insisting they were right, dammit. Why should anyone believe they won’t abuse power in some way again if they can? There are indeed true believers in the cause (Torture! War! Monarchial powers!) but it’s very easy to be both a zealot and a liar, and the many lies and omissions in prominent torture apologist arguments just don’t support a “good faith” interpretation, either. Most every torture apologist argument really seems to boil down to two items – (G10) ‘We’re all going to die!’ and (D9) “Reports? What Reports? (Red Cross, Senate, JPRA, etc.)” (in its own special yellow at the bottom center). The strategy is to keep everyone afraid and to ignore/hide/challenge the growing mountain of damning evidence. But this chart can certainly be improved.
I’m a bit facetious with a few items, but torture apologists often advance arguments implicitly rather than explicitly (normally to get someone to concede a false premise). I’ve featured a few arguments that torture apologists try to avoid altogether – I’ve yet to hear anyone (not even Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney) come right out and use the defense, “We had to torture to justify our beautiful war, dammit!” However, our mostly complacent media hasn’t forced many torture apologists to justify that stance or refute that explosive charge. Nor has the media forced many torture apologists to respond to accountsthat American human rights abuses radicalized many of those who attacked and killed American and coalition troops in the Middle East. David Waldman, Matthew Alexander and a handful of others have made one or both of these points in media appearances, but the media as a whole has somehow shied away from these items, even though they’re clearly newsworthy, make for attention-grabbing headlines, and are kinda important.
In any case, I think I’ve covered most of the major arguments, and wouldn’t you know it, nearly all of them are problematic, severely flawed or outright false. I might post a revised version later, recapping the many existing debunks and rebuttals, organized per argument, or might handle most of that yet again through a future torture apologist roundup. This chart probably works best as an oversized bingo grid – watch a torture apologist and see how many arguments you can spot! Rebutting every one of Cliff May’s rapid-fire bullshit arguments would probably be great training for a TV appearance, although I think pinning him or another apologist down would be even better: How do you respond to the bipartisan Senate report, and the charge that torture was used to obtain confessions to justify the Iraq War? How do you justify abuses that have directly lead to attacks on American and coalition troops and made that war of choice even worse? If the law requires that credible allegations of torture be investigated, what possible reason is there not to investigate? (Wouldn’t a failure to do so set a dangerous precedent that some people are above the law?) If what Dick Cheney and you are saying is true, wouldn’t a full investigation (or even a trial) exonerate everyone?
(Actually, the Tom Tomorrow cartoon Digby linked earlier says it all better.)
Batocchio 6/02/2009 03:30:00 PM
What about Guantanamo guys?
by digby
I don’t think we’ve had a real reckoning yet …
A veteran interrogator at Guantánamo told The New York Times in a recent interview that it became clear over time that most of the [Guantanamo] detainees had little useful to say and that “they were just swept up” during the Afghanistan war with little evidence they played any significant role.
“These people had technical knowledge that expired very quickly after they were brought here,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Most of the emphasis was on quantity, not quality,” the interrogator said, adding that the number of pages generated from an interrogation was an important standard.
Well, say hallelujah! The truth shall set us free. This has been known for at least a year, but who’s counting? In January of 2004, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair:
According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity:”Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”
You remember General Geoffrey Miller, don’t you? The former artillery officer who was responsible for torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and never paid a price? Sure you are:
In July 2003, as Slahi’s “special interrogation” continued, Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller added another brutal ruse to Slahi’s interrogation plan. Following days of intensive questioning, Slahi was to be forcibly removed from his cell by a team of military police in riot gear, escorted past menacing dogs, and loaded onto a helicopter, where he would be flown out over the ocean and threatened with death or rendition to a Middle Eastern country—a threat to be made all the more real by the presence of Egyptian and Jordanian interrogators on the flight. The general’s plan was subsequently revised because, as his intelligence chief later told Justice Department investigators, “Miller had decided that [the helicopter] was too difficult logistically to pull off, and that too many people on the base would have to know about it to get it done.” Instead, on Aug. 24, 2003, in accordance with the plan that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ultimately signed, Slahi was abducted from his cell and taken on a three-hour boat trip into the Caribbean, where he was beaten and threatened by U.S. military personnel and two Arab interrogators.
It was the Army too. Are we going to pretend that the top command didn’t know about it?
And by the way, this happened yesterday:
The Pentagon’s approach throughout my client’s case has offered a disturbing glimpse into the US military bureaucracy’s mentality: Though indifferent to human suffering, the US defense department is strikingly keen to be sure evidence of that suffering never sees the light of day.
When news of Abu Wa’el’s possible release reached us here at Reprieve a short while back, we sent Abu Wa’el mango juice, in order to help him come down safely from his hunger strike. But in a bizarre twist I would have thought beyond the grim imagination even of his captors, the juice was confiscated. Rather than easing up on a man it knows full well would shortly be free to speak his mind, the Pentagon preferred to fiddle with timetables, in the dim hope he would land here in Uruguay before anyone could see what terrible shape he’s in.
This secret approach echoes the Obama administration’s attitude to the force-feeding tapes – the evidence that may well have gotten Abu Wa’el released. Days before they put him on that plane, the Obama administration filed an appeal against a judgment that the public and the press had the right to see this footage. (The Guardian is involved in the lawsuit.) Officials had insisted that the tapes would “inflame Muslim sensibilities”. We consented to hiding the faces and voices of guards; but it is the face of Abu Wa’el – his voice – that the US government is afraid you’ll see.
Make no mistake: the force-feeding tapes are upsetting. If they do go public, you will probably never see Guantánamo quite the same way again. The footage cuts through years of Pentagon rhetoric. It will force people for whom Guantánamo is a long-forgotten memory to see a human being trapped at the dark heart of the national security state. The tapes show a system that damages not just detainees but the young servicemen and women we ask to participate in it. They are, in short, the truth.
Are we going to pretend that the administration doesn’t know about this either?
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“The American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name”
by digby
Like most conservatives, Senator John McCain has an empathy gap and can only relate to something that he or someone close to him has personally experienced.
He has experienced torture and so he spoke against it very eloquently today:
FLOOR STATEMENT BY SENATOR JOHN McCAIN ON SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT ON CIA INTERROGATION METHODS
Dec 09 2014
Washington, D.C. –U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today delivered the following statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods:
“Mr. President, I rise in support of the release – the long-delayed release – of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summarized, unclassified review of the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were employed by the previous administration to extract information from captured terrorists. It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose – to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies – but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.
“I believe the American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values.
“I commend Chairman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort to again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from many members of the intelligence community, from officials in two administrations, and from some of our colleagues.
“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.
“They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good.
“What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? Did they make us safer? Less safe? Or did they make no difference? What did they gain us? What did they cost us? The American people need the answers to these questions. Yes, some things must be kept from public disclosure to protect clandestine operations, sources and methods, but not the answers to these questions.
“By providing them, the Committee has empowered the American people to come to their own decisions about whether we should have employed such practices in the past and whether we should consider permitting them in the future. This report strengthens self-government and, ultimately, I believe, America’s security and stature in the world. I thank the Committee for that valuable public service.
“I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture, as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary; and, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders and as the Committee’s report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.
“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.
“I know, too, that bad things happen in war. I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.
“I understand the reasons that governed the decision to resort to these interrogation methods, and I know that those who approved them and those who used them were dedicated to securing justice for the victims of terrorist attacks and to protecting Americans from further harm. I know their responsibilities were grave and urgent, and the strain of their duty was onerous.
“I respect their dedication and appreciate their dilemma. But I dispute wholeheartedly that it was right for them to use these methods, which this report makes clear were neither in the best interests of justice nor our security nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and treasure to defend.
“The knowledge of torture’s dubious efficacy and my moral objections to the abuse of prisoners motivated my sponsorship of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ of captured combatants, whether they wear a nation’s uniform or not, and which passed the Senate by a vote of 90-9.
“Subsequently, I successfully offered amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, prevented the attempt to weaken Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and broadened definitions in the War Crimes Act to make the future use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ punishable as war crimes.
“There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.
“Will the report’s release cause outrage that leads to violence in some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that’s possible, perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today. But that doesn’t mean we will be telling the world something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows that we water-boarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, secret prisons. Those practices haven’t been a secret for a decade.
“Terrorists might use the report’s re-identification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now.
“What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure – torture’s ineffectiveness – because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.
“Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods.
“The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes, we can and we will.
“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.
“We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world, not by just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests, but by exemplifying our political values, and influencing other nations to embrace them. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea, not for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a king, but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. How much safer the world would be if all nations believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget it ourselves even momentarily.
“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. This executive summary of the Committee’s report makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re fighting. We should be grateful to have that truth affirmed.
“Now, let us reassert the contrary proposition: that is it essential to our success in this war that we ask those who fight it for us to remember at all times that they are defending a sacred ideal of how nations should be governed and conduct their relations with others – even our enemies.
“Those of us who give them this duty are obliged by history, by our nation’s highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to protect them, by our respect for human dignity to make clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any war. We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.
“Thank you.”
I don’t know if he knows it, but according to his cohorts on the right this makes him a traitor who doesn’t know how to keep America safe.
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A little context for America’s exceptional moral authority on torture report day
by digby
Richard Engel said on MSNBC that this is all about rewriting history to absolve the politicians of their responsibility, including the Senators who were tasked with oversight. Other experts say that the CIA was just doing what it was tasked with doing and they believe torture was effective and we need to take that into account. “Who knows who’s right?” This is now just another matter of policy dispute.
Will the people care? If history is any guide, not really.
According to historian Ken Hughes, it’s the historical context that makes for a convincing argument. He calls My Lai “a political threat to Nixon,” and points out that a substantial part of Nixon’s support base refused to believe that killing civilians in a war zone was a crime. According to Hughes, Nixon’s approval rating dropped by 10 points after Lieutenant William Calley received a life sentence for murdering civilians at My Lai.
Nixon intervened, and Lt. Calley’s sentence was reduced. He was paroled after only three years under house arrest.
To be clear, it was association with the prosecution of Calley, not with the massacre itself, that was a “political threat” to Nixon.
As Perlstein reminded us a while back, in his epic Nixonland:
The President was glad for a politically useful distraction. On March 29,[1971] after the longest court-martial trial in history, Lieut. William “Rusty” Calley was convicted of murder by a jury of his military peers.When Calley had first been called to Washington in June of 1969, he thought it was to receive a medal. He was shocked to learn it was for a court martial: “It seemed like the silliest thing I had ever heard of. Murder.” It betokened a national confusion. At the trial his defense lawyer said, “This boy’s a product of a system, a system that dug him up by the roots, took him out of his home community, put him in the Army, taught him to kill, sent him overseas to kill, gave him mechanical weapons to kill, got him over there and ordered him to kill.” He argued that the decision to scapegoat Calley went all the way up the chain of command–better to indict a lieutenant, shut down this whole embarrassment incident as neatly as possible, than the entire system of “pacification” and “free fire zones” and “search and destroy missions” itself. He tried to call Defense Secretary Laird as a witness. The judge overruled him.The argument was lent support by the fate of Calley’s commander, Major General Samuel Koster. Koster had witnessed the massacre from his observation helicopter and complained only that they weren’t recovering enough enemy weapons. He signed off on an Army report that noncombatants had been “inadvertently killed…in the cross fires of U.S. and V.C. forces.” After the Army’s investigation into the My Lai massacre, he suffered a mere reduction of a grade in rank. Everyone else involved ended up acquitted or with their charges dropped.Calley stood ramrod straight at his sentencing and mewled in a breaking voice about his victimhood: “Yesterday, you stripped me of all my honor. Please, by your actions that you take here today, don’t strip future soldiers of their honor.” He was sentenced to life at hard labor. You didn’t have to construe Calley a put-upon innocent to conclude that something stunk. “Calley Verdict: Who Else Is Guilty?” read Newsweek’s cover line. “Who Shares the Guilt?” asked Time.
John Kerry, the VVAW spokesman, had an answer: “We are all of us in this country guilty for having allowed the war to go on. We only want this country to realize that it cannot try a Calley for something which generals and Presidents and our way of life encouraged him to do. And if you try him, then at the same time you must try all those generals and Presidents and soldiers who have part of the responsibility. You must in fact try this country.” It was a common conclusion of liberals: Senators Ribicoff and Hatfield, the New Yorker, Telford Taylor, a prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg and the author of Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy.But that was what the Communists were saying, too, conservatives observed. And if Calley was their villain, he must be our hero.
The VFW’s national commander Herbert Rainwater led the way: “There have been My Lais in every war. Now for the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty.” A little Mormon boy in Utah, Timmy Poppleton, wrote his senator begging him to intervene: “I’m only eight years old, but I know that Lieut. Calley was defending our freedoms against Communism.” His mother–many mothers–had explained that the villagers of My Lai must have done something to deserve it. Joseph Alsolp agreed. The hawkish one of the columnizing brothers complained in his second column after the verdict about what his editors did to his first one: “by no fault of this reporter, the persons Lt. Calley was convicted of killing were miscalled ‘civilians.’…. These victims from My Lai in fact came from a ‘combat hamlet’ of a ‘combat village.’ From about the age of four on up, all persons in a ‘combat village,’ of both sexes, are trained to kill. by the iron rules of the Viet Cong, if they do not follow their training, they are killed themselves after one of the VC kangaroo-trials.”The American Legion post at Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning, pitched in a promise they would raise $100,000 to help fund Calley’s appeal “or die trying”: “The real murderers are the demonstrators in Washington who disrupt traffic, tear up public property, who deface the American flag. Lieut. Calley is a hero. He’s an all-American. He fought for us in a country where Communism is still trying to take over. We should be proud of him. We should elevate him to saint rather than jail him like a common criminal.” Calley was now Columbus’s favorite son. At a revival at the football stadium, the Rev. Michael Lord pronounced, “There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don’t think we need another crucifixion of man named Rusty Calley.”Entrepreneurs stood at attention. “Free Calley” stickers managed to blossom on car bumpers within 24 hours, like toadstools after a spring rain. A Nashville record producer slapped a solemn recitation as if in William Calley’s voice over a backing track of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and moved 200,000 45-rpm records in a day and a million in a week:While we were fighting in the jungles they were marching in the streetWhile we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeatWhile we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreatAs we go marching on…
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, ‘Did you fight or did you run?’
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood
We took the jungle village exactly like they said
We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had
And when the smoke had cleared away a hundred souls lay dead…
There’s no other way to wage a war when the only one in sight
That you’re sure is not a VC is your buddy on the right…
Glory, glory hallelujah, glory, glory hallelujah…And radio stations played the silent majority’s “Four Dead in Ohio” over and over again, only pausing in between to call for donations to Rusty Calley’s defense fund, as respectable editorialists stood aghast. “We responded to their rifle fire”? A jury of six decorated combat veterans had ruled there had been none. “For the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty”? The stockades were full of soldiers and Marines tried for killing Vietnamese captives in combat. “The only difference,” wrote William Greider, who covered the four-and-a-half month trial in the Washington Post,“is that, instead of 22 people, most of them killed only one or two.” The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “This is a young man duly convicted of taking unarmed prisoners entirely at his mercy, throwing them in a ditch, and shooting them. Is this nation really to condone such an act, as a strange coalition of super-patriots seems to urge?” The Washington Star said “the day this country goes on record as saying that unarmed civilian men, women, and children of any race are fair game for wanton murder, that will be the day that the United States forfeits all claims to any moral leadership of this world.” Scott Reston, in the Newspaper of Record, wondered whether “somebody were going to propose giving Lieutenant Calley the Congressional Medal of Honor.”Above and beyond all the commotion, Nixon spied simple commonality: super-patriots and peace were on the same side.The White House had done its polling. 78 percent disagreed with Calley’s conviction and sentence; 51 percent wanted him exonerated outright. Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls, and letters. They were 100 to one for Calley’s release. Meanwhile the President’s handling of Vietnam in general he was heading into Lyndon Johnson territory: 41 percent approval, 47 percent disapproval. On March 30 the White House alerted the media that on March 7 the President would go on TV to announce more troop cuts. Then they got to work exploiting Calley.Nixon delegated the legal questions to John Dean’s office. Overnight his staff became experts on military law. The conclusion: the conviction was by the book, the sentence would likely be reduced on appeal, the President was extremely limited in his power to intervene, and that any White House interference mitigating “a gross violation of the customary law of war” could have a domino effect weakening the good order of the military justice system.Military justice be damned. Nixon conferred with his new favorite political enforcer John Connally. He complained to Haldeman and Ehrlichman the “lawyers provide no political gain for us on the argument.” It was Chuck Colson who came up with his first move: he could immediately order Calley released from the stockade until his appeal was decided. On April 1 President made the call to Admiral Moorer. “That’s the one place where they say, ‘Yes, Sir,’ instead of ‘Yes, but,'” he pronounced with satisfaction. The action was announced at the House of Representatives; the floor broke out in spontaneous applause (the President was so proud of the response he noted it in his memoirs).And a man convicted by fellow Army officers of slaughtering 22 civilians was released on his own recognizance to the splendiferous bachelor pad he had rented with the fat proceeds of his defense fund, as featured in a November 1970 Esquire feature laid out like a Better Homes & Gardens spread–padded bar, groovy paintings, and comely girlfriend, who along with a personal secretary and a mechanical letter opener helped him answer some 2,000 fan letters a day.April 2, in San Clemente, the leader of the Free World allotted almost a full day for discussion of l’affaire Calley (save for three hours with the governor of California to try to talk him down from sabotaging the Family Assistance Program as part of Reagan’s “all-out war on the tax taker”). White House polls showed 96 percent of the public was following the case, the highest they’d recorded on any subject. They had to move: it was time for some virtuoso difference-splitting. The Old Man ordered a course “on the basis of what does us most good”–anything to to buck up his approval rating to end Vietnam “our way.” Ehrlichman summarized the final recommendation: “The President does nothing”–in a way that strongly hinted at a future pardon.At the next day’s morning briefing Ron Ziegler said before any sentence was carried out the President would “personally review the case and finally decide it.” Ehrlichman took the podium: this “extralegal ingredient” was appropriate in a case which had “captured the interest of the American people,” and which required “more than simply the technical, legal review which the Code of Military Justice provides.” The officers involved in the appeal, he reassured the press, would be in no way influenced by their Commander in Chief.The political reviews were stellar. Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the “Conscience of the Senate,” released a statement: “I think the President performed a very wise and useful service to his nation…. it was impressively evident that the President caused many Americans to pause in their judgement, to gain perspective, and to replace emotion with reason.” Senator Robert Taft (whom Nixon called in other contexts a “son of a bitch…peacenik”) said he had restored the morale of the military. The White House’s private polling showed his actions found favor with 75 percent of the American people. Only 17 percent disagreed.The legal reviews were not so salubrious. Privately, Secretary Laird complained, “Intervention in the Calley case repudiates the military justice system.” Publicly, the case’s prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel, wrote the President, in a four-page single-spaced letter made available by Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern’s office, “The greatest tragedy of all will be if political expedience dictates the compromise of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent unlawfulness of the murder of innocent persons.” Bill Greider asked in the Post: “Should it open the doors at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and release all the other soldiers convicted of the same offense as Calley?”Then there were those enraged the President hadn’t gone nearly far enough. On the front page of The New York Times on April 4, one of the Green Berets charged but never tried for killing a Vietnamese civilian, Robert F. Marasco, now a life insurance salesman in New Jersey, announced he had carried out murder on “very, very clear orders” from the CIA. “He was my agent and it was my responsibility to eliminate him with extreme prejudice.”John Dean once more proved his usefulness to the President by crafting the White House’s subsequent talking point: in such ongoing legal cases, “it would be improper and inappropriate for White House staff members to make any comments or statements.”That would turn off some problems. Secretary Laird, Colonel Daniel, Robert F. Marasco, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the rest would have to howl in the wilderness.*****Luckily for the President the Post and Times weren’t howling as loudly as they might. Two days later, on April 5, Senator Hatfield read the “Winter Soldier” testimony from Detroit into the Congressional Record. He stated on the floor that they revealed “the institutionalized racist attitudes of the military in the training of men who are sent to Vietnam–training which has indoctrinated them to think of all Vietnamese as ‘gooks’ and subhuman,” and that atrocities were the consequences of “policies adopted by our military commanders.” If the Times had reported on it readers would have learned about, from SP/4 Gary Keyes, the time “there were some fishermen out on the ocean and a couple of our sergeants thought it would be good sport to use them as target practice”; or of Marine Sergeant Scott Camil, whose buddy, when a woman one of their snipers shot asked for water, “stabbed her in both breasts, they spread her eagle and shoved an E-tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.” Or the prisoner of war interrogator, Lt. Jon Drolshagan–discharged soldiers bravely using their names and stepping up publicly didn’t risk court martial any more, just ostracization from their communities–who described one of their “normal things”: “The major that I worked for had a fantastic capability of staking prisoners, utilizing a knife that was extremely sharp, and sort of filleting them like a fish. You know, trying to check out how much bacon he could make of a Vietnamese body to get information.”The Times did, however, run a sentimental story on Nixon’s latest appeal to the silent majority.He went on TV Wednesday, April 7 from the Oval Office at 9 PM (first he read a handwritten note from Henry Kissinger: “Because you go on tonight I want you to have this note to tell you that–no matter what the result–free people everywhere will be forever in your debt. Your serenity during crisis, your steadfastness under pressure have been all that has prevented the triumph of mass hysteria. It has been an inspiration to serve”).The speech was the usual: it announced a dizzying new pace of troop withdrawals; included the selective historical review, the optimistic assessment (“tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded…. Look again at their chart on my left. Every action taken by this administration, every decision made, has accomplished what I said it would accomplish”); the affirmation of the selflessness of the American effort (“never in history have men fought for less selfish motives–not for conquest, not for glory, but only for the right of a people far away to choose the kind of government they want”); the mournful lament that the only roadblock to progress was the recalcitrance of the enemy negotiators in the face of generous American offers, the wild-eyed insanity of setting a date for withdrawal (“we will have thrown away our political bargaining counter to win the release of American prisoners of war…we will have given enemy commanders the exact information they need to marshal their attacks against our remaining forces at their most vulnerable time…. Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that–by our own actions–consciously turns the country over to the Communists?”). He again mobilized the trope of shame as cheap shot at those who argued for a different way (“I know there are those who honestly believe that I should move to end this war without regard to what happens in South Vietnam. This way would abandon our friends. But even more important, we would abandon ourselves…. We would lose respect for this nation, respect for one another, respect for ourselves”).Then finally, as ever, he wound up for the sentimental dénoumente. Which this time was a masterpiece. “While we hear and read much of isolated acts of cruelty, we do not hear enough of the tens of thousands of individual American soldiers–I have seen them there–building schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, who, through countless acts of generosity and kindness, have tried to help the people of South Vietnam. We can and we should be very proud of these men. They deserve not our scorn, but they deserve our admiration and our deepest appreciation….”His voice took on a honeyed Norman Rockwell tone.“The reason I am so deeply committed to peace goes far beyond political considerations or my concern about my place in history, or the other reasons that political scientists usually say are the motivations of Presidents.“Every time I talk to a brave wife of an American POW, every time I write a letter to the mother of a boy who has been killed in Vietnam, I become more deeply committed to end this war, and to end it in a way that we can build lasting peace.”(You cared about peace because you cared about those brave Americas left behind in the Hanoi Hilton. They, on the other hand, do not.)“I think the hardest thing that a President has to do is present posthumously the nation’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor, to mothers or fathers or widows of men who have lost their lives”–he was nearly whispering–“but in the process have saved the lives of others.”This was a rhetorical gambit. It let him end with a story about little Kevin: the Checkers of 1971.“We had an award ceremony in the East Room of the White House just a few weeks agao. And at that ceremony I remember one of the recipients, Mrs.–Karl–Taylor.“He charged an enemy machine gun single-handed and knocked it out. He lost his life. But in the process the lives of several wounded Marines in the range of that machine gun were saved.“After I presented her the Medal, I shook hands with their two children, Karl, Jr.–he was 8 years old–and Kevin, who was 4. As I was about to move to the next recipient, Kevin suddenly stood at attention and saluted.”Pause.“I found it rather difficult to get my thoughts together.”His voice deepened.“My fellow Americans, I want to end this war in a way that is worthy of the sacrifice of Kevin Taylor.”He was speaking very slowly.“And I think he would want me to end it in a way that would increase the chances that Kevin and Karl, and all those children like them here and around the world, could grow up in a world where none of them would have to die in a war; that would increase the chance of Americans to have what it has not had in this century–a full generation of peace.”
Papa bear
by digby
“It’s the nature of the business”
by Tom Sullivan
And all this time I thought regulatory capture of the Supreme Court just had to do with the sitting justices. Reuters’ lengthy, 3-part series on the attorneys who appear most frequently before the Supreme Court is titled, “The Echo Chamber.” Really, though, these lawyers need their own “Lifestyles of” show. (An overwhelmingly white-male cast, of course.)
A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.
They represent less than 1 percent of lawyers who file appeals to the Supreme Court, yet appear in 43 percent of the cases the court heard from 2004 through 2012. Fifty-one of the 66 represent firms whose work is primarily for corporations. “It’s the nature of the business,” Ashley Parrish, a partner at King & Spalding told reporters. Which is why firms avoid individuals’ cases against current or prospective corporate clients. Pro bono First Amendment and criminal cases that don’t conflict with moneyed clients’ interests are the exception.
Michael Luttig is general counsel for Boeing Co.:
“It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other,” Luttig said. The court and its bar have grown “detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law.”
We’ve come a long way from first principles and our rustic notions of citizen legislators. Why should we expect any different for our courts? Specialization is the name of the game, and law firms that hope to play attract elite, former law clerks to their Supreme Court practices, attorneys who know sitting justices personally. Reuters explains that “Supreme Court clerks are so prized that the market-rate signing bonus is $300,000.”
Which is not to say that these attorneys are just mercenaries.
“It’s not that there aren’t lawyers at these large firms who aren’t public-spirit minded and don’t want to do these [individual] cases. It’s that their business model won’t allow it,” said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the mid-sized firm Cohen Milstein, who argued against Wal-Mart at the Supreme Court.
Nor is it to say that these elite law firms don’t have principles.
Law firms have different goals than advocacy groups – profit, for one – but their Supreme Court practices often share an ideological interest in shaping the law for clients. For firms that are most active before the high court, those clients are more often than not corporations.
[snip]
“We hired people with commitment, belief and purity of purpose,” said Claffee, who can quote by heart phrases from Powell’s 1971 memo. “It’s all part of strengthening our brand and our substance.”
That would be the memo from soon-to-be Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging them (among other things) to exploit the judiciary to advance the interests of business.
In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), corporate monies flooded electoral politics nationwide from city hall to state legislatures to congressional and presidential elections. And the Sunlight Foundation estimates (2012): “For every one member of Congress, the influence industry produces about $12.5 million in lobbying.” Meanwhile, the America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) crafts corporate-written bills that get filed verbatim in state capitals — the analogue of what lobbyists do in Washington. “The Echo Chamber” simply confirms the corporate capture of the judicial branch as well. As if we didn’t already see that in SCOTUS decisions.
Getting back to first principles, what vestigial meaning has the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it is all the same power?
The president of the ACLU wants Obama to pardon the torturers
by digby
And it makes some sad sense:
BEFORE President George W. Bush left office, a group of conservatives lobbied the White House to grant pardons to the officials who had planned and authorized the United States torture program. My organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, found the proposal repugnant. Along with eight other human rights groups, we sent a letter to Mr. Bush arguing that granting pardons would undermine the rule of law and prevent Americans from learning what had been done in their names.
But with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.
That officials at the highest levels of government authorized and ordered torture is not in dispute. Mr. Bush issued a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to build secret prisons overseas. The C.I.A. requested authority to torture prisoners in those “black sites.” The National Security Council approved the request. And the Justice Department drafted memos providing the brutal program with a veneer of legality.
Why a pardon though? Well, sadly, because it’s too late for anything else:
My organization and others have spent 13 years arguing for accountability for these crimes. We have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor or the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, or both. But those calls have gone unheeded. And now, many of those responsible for torture can’t be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has run out.[…]
The spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora’s box of torture once and for all.
President Obama will not do this, I’m sure. It would open the door for some successor to “pardon” him to make a political point. But it’s a very potent statement anyway: the only way we can even acknowledge that a crime was committed is to pardon the people who committed it after the statute of limitations has run out.
And I’m afraid I don’t see that it would close the Pandora’s box of torture. The minute they get the chance the torture advocates will simply make it legal. The taboo has been broken and banking on the law is a losing propositions in these situations. This is now a cultural problem more than a legal problem.
Back in the day the conservatives all used to wring their hands over what was happening in Bill Clinton’s pants, asking the plaintive question, “what can we tell the children?” Sex is always a dicey thing to talk about with kids and I’m sure there were some uncomfortable moments around American dinner tables. What else is new?
But what in the hell do you tell your kids about torture? That some people think the “effective way to get to the truth”? That they shouldn’t swing the cat around by the tail but in the hands of trained investigators it’s ok? This was never a hard question before. Torture was never ok, always wrong, you simply cannot do it ever. That’s not true anymore. Leaders in our country, very important people, are now saying that torture is not immoral. We’re going backwards.
.
Bracing for reprisals
by digby
Evidently, the CIA is bracing for terrorist attacks against their employees when the torture report is made public:
[T]he CIA remains concerned that close readers will be able to figure out, based on cross-referencing and context clues, who the anonymous officers are. (Some very senior and well known officials will be mentioned by name in the report.)
Current and former CIA personnel say they are fearful for their personal safety, and that of their families, should they be identified after the report is released and become targets for harassment or retribution. So the agency has agreed to determine their degree of exposure to any risk of identification, according to one senior intelligence official who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “They will help people assess their individual situations, assessing their homes and helping them keep a low profile,” the official told The Daily Beast.
Roughly 15 agency employees were directly involved in running the program, but the official was not aware of how many had accepted the CIA’s offer of assistance. The CIA would not be providing security, this person said. The agency didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Separately, a lawmaker said the CIA had briefed him on the possible need for “personnel moves” related to the security fallout from the interrogation report. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the security preparations publicly.
I don’t doubt that CIA torturers will feel vulnerable when the Senate Report comes out tomorrow. Nobody wants a reputation as a torturer (although Dick Cheney and his pals seem to be sleeping well at night.)But you cannot help but think of incidents like this when this subject comes up:
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 4, 2005In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA’s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.
Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.
The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.
Unlike the military’s prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases — there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation– a process called “rendition” — is also responsible for policing itself for errors.
The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.
One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.
“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.
Estimates put the number of suspects subjected to extraordinary renditions at just over 100 to thousands. A European parliament-approved report in 2007 concluded that the CIA had operated more than 1,000 rendition flights over Europe alone in the previous six years. The practice was first authorised in 1986 by the then US president, Ronald Reagan, and developed in the 1990s under the Clinton administration as a way of tackling Islamism. Its use is thought to have been extended after George Bush Jr declared his “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Some suspects are alleged to have been transferred to “black sites”, secret prisons operated by the CIA outside US legal jurisdiction.
According to testimony of witnesses, Omar was bundled into a van after being stopped, apparently by Italian police, on a Milan street in February 2003. The prosecution said that he was driven to the US airbase at Aviano, near Venice, and then transferred to another American military facility, at Ramstein in Germany. He was allegedly flown from there to Egypt.
Four years later he was released without charge. He said he had been reduced to a “human wreck” by torture he had undergone in a Cairo jail.
or this:
Rogue State
by digby
It certainly is interesting that the Italian authorities have finally gotten fed up with America’s illegal behavior and issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents accused of kidnapping terrorist suspects and rendering them to Egypt for “interrogation.”
But we’ve done this with Guantanamo prisoners as well. I wrote about this last February in a long post about “how great we are.” This story is from the New Yorker by Jane Meyer called “Outsourcing Torture”:
Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.
At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.
Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.
Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.”
In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:
Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.
As I wrote back in February, I don’t know if this woman’s husband is a terrorist. But I do that it’s incomprehensible that the “tribunal” wouldn’t have looked at the evidence collected by the Bosnian Supreme Court that exonerated him before declaring him a “non-combatant” and locking him away indefinitely with no appeal.
We kidnapped this man off the street as he left a courthouse that freed him for lack of evidence. He was sent to Guantanamo. And he has no further recourse anywhere to assert his innocence.
We have no way of knowing how many people we have done this to, but clearly there are quite a few. It makes me sick to my stomach to contemplate that innocent people are caught up in it. And without due process we simply cannot be sure that there aren’t. In fact, we know there are.
I’m getting old now and I don’t know how long it will take for this stuff to sort itself out. Maybe I won’t be alive to see it. But at some point there is going to be some sort of reckoning. It’s happening in Argentina right now. Cambodians are beginning to come to terms with what was done. And no I’m not comparing us to them, except to say that unless we get some transparency there is every reason to fear that we are heading into that territory. As I wrote in that post in February:
We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren’t afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It’s already happening.
John Yoo, one of the primary architects of the Gitmo regimes said:
“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”
Because we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. If we can fashion laws that cover behavior like genocide, war crimes, child molestation and serial killing, surely we can find a way to cover terrorism. But then, Yoo also believes:
Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
I guess we are all torturers now.
Nobody’s family deserves to be targeted and the government should protect them from harm if they are. But I do not buy the excuse that the people who did this were just doing what they were told and bear no responsibility. They could have said no. Nothing terrible would have happened to them if they had. And if they had resisted this program would likely not have gone forward.
I sincerely don’t wish that any of these people become victims of violence. But there needed to be a reckoning for this hideous, immoral policy and this is the inadequate, weaselly way we’ve come up with. It would be nice if I believed it would shock the consciences of Americans so much that they would insist it never happen again but from the looks of it, that’s not going to happen. After tomorrow, the Republican Party (and some Democratic hawks who operate out of fear and intimidation) are going to be officially pro-torture.
We will be fighting about this for a long time to come unfortunately. And these operatives who could have said no bear some responsibility for that as well.
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