Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Problem With Torture Part XXXIV

by digby

Blowback:

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

Imagine what these depths of human misery and degradation did to the prisoner? Of course, legal wing nut hacks like David Rifkin are out there saying those memos show awesome legal reasoning and prove that these actions were not torture. So perhaps it was actually much harder on the torturers because they erroneously thought it was torture, in which case it actually was torture — for them.

Apparently, this all came about because there were those in the field who felt they had extracted all useful information but were pressured by Washington to step it up.

And why was that do you suppose? It couldn’t be this:

“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports.

I shouldn’t be flippant about this because the truth is that those who torture do suffer. I wrote about this a long time ago, worried about what our government was doing to their own people, and discussed this article by Jason Vest on the subject at length:

“If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it,” he said. “One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?’ They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn’t even bother to ask questions.” Ultimately, he said — echoing Gerber’s comments — “torture becomes an end unto itself.”

[…]

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the “gloves-off” approach works — but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn’t be emulated today. “I have been privy to some of what’s going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, ‘The agency deserves every bad thing that’s going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'” he said. “In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon — technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations,” he said. “I don’t know how much violence was used — it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

“But here’s the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn’t [emphasis mine –ed]. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that’s never been settled, one that crops up and goes away — do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

In light of the OLC memos Vest’s article is worth reading in its entirety. Retired CIA agents were sounding the alarms about these practices throughout the Bush administration, not that anyone paid attention. (I have to wonder if one of the real stories here is the fight within the agency — or perhaps more importantly, the fight between the agency and the pressure from the administration.)

At the time I commented on Vest’s story, we were still a little bit incredulous about all this. But after four more years of revelations, culminating in those sickening legal memos, I can see that most people have become adjusted to this new reality of an America that tortures (even as the president ridiculously claims “America doesn’t torture” without adding the obvious disclaimer — “anymore.”) The news media didn’t seem particularly exercised, except to the extent that it proclaims worry about how this will empower the boogeyman. With the exception of Russ Feingold and a couple of others there was no outcry from congress. It’s not “news” so it’s not news. We torture. Live with it.

When I originally commented on that Vest piece back in 2005, I concluded with the following:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo — you didn’t question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it’s wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it’s immoral — and, more shockingly, whether it’s a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” he couldn’t ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It’s not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than “pain equivalent to organ failure.” People no longer instinctively recoil at the word — it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.

When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of Islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we’ll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I’m not so sure we will even want to. It’s not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it’s legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with.

At this rather late stage in life, I’m realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable — torture was one of them.

The old Lebanon hand that Vest quotes above concludes by saying this:

I think as late as a decade ago, there were enough of us around who had enough experience to constitute the majority view, which was that this was simply not the way we did business, and for good reasons of practicality or morality. It’s not just about what it does or doesn’t do, but about who, and where, we as a country want to be.”

Now that we’ve let the torture genie out of the bottle, I wonder if we can put that beast back in. He looks and sounds an awful lot like an American.

I hope it is enough that Obama simply says that we won’t do this anymore. But I doubt it.

The Line Of Secession

by dday

With all the talk of torture memos recently, we’ve skipped over the return of secession talk to the national forefront. Seeing Rick Perry mocked on late-night show and cable-chattering show alike, I do think his comments flipped the light switch on for some people. You can’t escape this – for eight years, George Bush broke the economy, rang up massive debt, started unnecessary wars, wiretapped American citizens and committed torture in our name, and crickets from these folks. In under 100 days, Obama has inspired cries of secession. I guess the tax cut wasn’t big enough.

Perry has since tried to walk this back, simply suggesting that he was asserting the sovereignty of the state of Texas under the 10th Amendment. This is classic Overton window stuff, putting secession at the extreme while making this assertion of sovereignty – and by extension the belief that the President is violating the Constitution – seem banal and reasonable. But of course, this is ridiculous. The President in the stimulus package offered states the ability to accept federal funds, with certain qualifying guidelines, the way, you know, highway funds are contingent on the national speed limit. States can comply to the guidelines and accept the funds, or refuse the funds. That actually is the very definition of the 10th Amendment. It’s not the President’s fault that, during a recession, it would be deeply unpopular not to change the guidelines. Indeed, Secessionist Perry’s own legislature in Texas voted to accept stimulus money for unemployment benefits by changing their guidelines. Which I guess makes King Richard want to secede from the Texas legislature.

It’s worth watching indicted former Congressman Tom DeLay make up a bunch of gobbledygook to try and defend this.

Q: You can’t secede from the Union!

DeLAY: Texas was a republic. It joined the Union by treaty. There’s a process in the treaty by which Texas could divide into five states. If we invoke that, and the last time it was voted on was 1985, the United States Senate would kick us out and nullify the treaty because they’re not going to allow 10 new Texas senators into the Senate. That’s how you secede.

About 4% of that is true.

It goes without saying that if any Democratic elected official ever even dipped their toe in the secession water, they’d be the second coming of Ward Churchill and forced to resign. When a Republican Governor does it, Rasmussen runs a poll. They found that 31% of Texans thought that ” individual states have the right to leave the United States and form an independent country,” and 18% answered yes to “If you could vote on the issue, would you vote for Texas to remain in the United States or to secede from the United States and form an independent country of Texas?”

To borrow a Tristero-like construction, roughly one out of every five people in the state of Texas think they should go ahead and form an independent country. If you’re in line at the bank with five people, one of them believes this.

18% of the voting public from the last election would be around 20 million people. Which puts the 250,000 or so teabaggers in perspective, doesn’t it? Maybe they should poll how many of them think Obama is Hitler.

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Why A Climate Cap Will Happen

by dday

The EPA today took a major step by declaring greenhouse gas pollution a danger to the public welfare, making it eligible for regulation under the Clean Air Act.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is officially confirming today that greenhouse gas pollution endangers the health and welfare of the American public, finally obeying the mandate set down by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 2, 2007. Following a review from the White House and agencies across the administration, Jackson is announcing this morning that she has signed the Clean Air Act endangerment finding for six greenhouse gases. By the time the decision is finalized after two months of public comment, it will have been nearly two years since the EPA was blocked by the Bush White House from issuing such a finding.

The implications of this ruling loom large over proposed climate and energy legislation under consideration in the Congress. I agree with Barbara Boxer that this finding will provide a serious boost to those efforts, because now the EPA is obligated under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

The EPA’s endangerment finding will open the door for the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Although the president would prefer not to tackle this issue through his administration’s regulatory power, the threat of EPA regulation could be used as a hammer to persuade moderate senators of both parties to get behind cap-and-trade legislation.

“What it says to the senators on the fence is that it’s not really a question of whether regulation is happening. It’s a question of how it will happen,” a senior aide to Boxer told ABC News.

Call it “blackmail,” as the corporate lobbyists do in this piece, or call it what it is, a requirement under the law mandated by the Supreme Court. So the obstructionists can block legislation in Congress and watch the EPA enact strict mandates, or they can have a say in the regulation. Their choice. We’re not accustomed to this sharp a legislative move coming from the Democrats, but that appears to be exactly what’s happening. As Ed Markey (D-MA) put it, “Do you want the EPA to make the decision or would you like your congressman or senator to be in the room and drafting legislation? … Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation.”

This is happening, so we’d better pay attention to the debate. As it happens, I had the opportunity to sit down with my Congressman, Henry Waxman, to discuss his draft climate and energy bill in the House, which he plans to clear the Energy and Commerce Committee by Memorial Day. You can read about that meeting here.

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Should They Be Prosecuted?

by digby

Impeach The Torture Judge

by digby

It’s not just a bunch of DFHs. Some of the best minds in the legal profession agree:

Impeach Jay Bybee: Why should a suspected war criminal serve as a federal judge?

By Bruce Ackerman

Jay Bybee is currently sitting on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. As assistant attorney general in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, he was responsible for the notorious torture memos that enabled the excesses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other places. While John Yoo did most of the staff work for Bybee, Yoo was barely 35 years old—and his memos showed it. They not only took extreme positions; they were legally incompetent, failing to consider many of the most obvious counterarguments.

Bybee was 49. He was the grown-up, the seasoned jurist. He had been a law professor and had served as associate counsel to President Bush. When he was promoted to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, he became the final judge of legal matters within the executive branch. Yet his opinion on torture was so poorly reasoned that it was repudiated by his very conservative successor, Jack Goldsmith.

Bybee has never been held accountable for his distortions of the law. At the time of his confirmation hearing, news of the torture memos had not yet leaked to the public. When asked about his role in national security matters at his Senate hearing, Bybee stonewalled: “As an attorney at the Department of Justice, I am obliged to keep confidential the legal advice that I provide to others in the executive branch. I cannot comment on whether or not I have provided any such advice and, if so, the substance of that advice.”

If the Senate had known the truth, it would have rejected him. The story of William Haynes offers a cautionary tale. As general counsel of the Department of Defense, Haynes also played a key role in authorizing torture; and he was also rewarded by a nomination to a leading appellate court. But before he could be confirmed, the Bush administration’s involvement in torture became a matter of public record, and the Senate refused its consent to the nomination. Bybee is a judge today only because of timing and the administration’s assertions of executive privilege.

This is unacceptable. The president can rightly claim privilege for his conversations with his confidential advisers. He needs their candid opinions and won’t get them if they aren’t assured of confidentiality. But Bybee wasn’t a presidential confidant. He was the head of a division of the Justice Department that gives authoritative legal guidance to the entire bureaucracy. It goes too far to suggest that the opinions he issued in this role are privileged. This would permit the creation of a world worthy of Franz Kafka—in which the bureaucracy operated under secret rules that bore no obvious relationship to the statutes passed by Congress. Bybee’s refusal to reveal his role at his Senate hearing should not insulate his actions from further scrutiny.

Under the Constitution, impeachment requires a finding of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” This is a high standard. Although Bybee’s opinion fails minimum tests of legal competence, he may have acted in good faith. This should protect him from conviction. But his legal distortions might also be evidence of the abdication of his fundamental legal responsibilities. Instead of engaging in a good-faith interpretation of the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions, he may have merely been responding to political pressures from the White House to liberate the CIA and the military from the rule of law.

Bybee should, of course, be given a full opportunity to clarify this matter at the impeachment proceedings. But at present, his only public explanation is his extravagant appeal to executive privilege. This cannot suffice. He should be required to take personal responsibility for his actions and explain why they don’t make him into a systematic enabler of the war crimes that have disgraced America.

Impeachment should not be confused with criminal prosecution. The Constitution does not permit the Senate to throw Bybee in jail. If it convicts him, the Senate can only remove Bybee from office and disqualify him from future service in “any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.” His impeachment is not a prelude to a sweeping political vendetta. It focuses on a very particular problem: Jay Bybee may serve for decades on one of the highest courts in the land. Is his continued service consistent with his role in the systematic perpetration of war crimes?

This is an issue for Congress, not President-elect Barack Obama. The presidency plays no role in impeachments. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly prohibits presidents from issuing pardons in these cases.

The House should open an impeachment inquiry that moves beyond Bybee’s invocation of executive privilege and explores the facts in a comprehensive fashion. Depending on the outcome of this investigation, it will be up to the full House to consider soberly whether an impeachment trial by the Senate should follow.

Bruce Ackerman is professor of law and political science at Yale, and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism.

I don’t see how they can avoid it.

Compare and Contrast

by digby

I was going to do this, but I see that Adam Serwer got there first. He compared the OLC memos with the ICRC report to compare the difference between what was authorized and what the detainees report happened. It’s even more sickening to see the dry, bureaucratic torture language compared to the reports by the prisoners of how they were actually carried out.

Here’s just one example:

The Bybee memo asserts that stress positions, in which the detainee is forced to maintain an uncomfortable position for a long period of time, “may cause muscle fatigue” but that “any pain associated with muscle fatigue is not of the intensity sufficient to amount to severe pain and suffering.” Detainees told the ICRC they were shackled in “stress positions” with their arms above their heads for two or three days continuously, and two or three months intermittently, and were allegedly kept naked during that time. In one case, a detainee’s prosthetic leg was removed to make standing more difficult.

Detainees said that their legs and ankles swelled as a result of their arms being shackled in the stress position and that they were forced to defecate on themselves. Occasionally, detainees said, they were allowed to sit on a bucket to use the bathroom but were not allowed to clean themselves afterward. Only one of the detainees who experienced this agreed to have his name published. The ICRC reports that detainees were checked regularly by medical personnel while undergoing this procedure.

They must have learned something during this period because later they began to put diapers on the prisoners. But they monitored them for possible rashes so it’s all good.

The cable chatterers have all framed this issue today as “did Obama make America less safe?” which is a sign of the noise machine cranking up. Whether it has any legs is another thing, although the wingnuts seem pretty excited at the prospect of reiterating over and over again that it’s ridiculous to say that putting people in a small box with insects is torture.

The “serious people” all seem to think that while there’s something mildly distasteful about the memos, it’s all waterboarding under the bridge and there’s no need to go all Scooter over this. (After all, someone they know might be involved and nobody wants to relive that nightmare.) I can discern almost no energy to pursue this except among the right wingers who want to portray Obama as a terrorist-symp.

After all, it’s not like anyone besmirched the village with a consensual presidential blow job or anything important like that.

Pretzelhead Logic

by digby

The wingnuts are shrieking like banshees today that the release of the memos has made American less safe because the terrorists know that CIA operatives aren’t going to torture them anymore and now they’ll be able to resist their captors. They are working themselves into a full-on hissy fit over it. That neocon nincompoop Cliff May was on MSNBC earlier, carrying on that the terrorists are all going to kill us in our beds because the terrorists will all know now that when we put a caterpillar in the coffin we’ve locked them that the caterpillar isn’t poisonous.

But President Obama told the terrorists weeks ago that the CIA had to follow the Army Field manual, which anyone who has the internet knows precludes using all these techniques from the Spanish Inquisition, (even if they are “supervised” by a doctor so that if emergency surgery is required because of the torture somebody qualified can perform it.) Here’s what Obama ordered on his second day in office:

Interrogation Techniques and Interrogation-Related Treatment.

Effective immediately, an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict, shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3 (Manual). Interrogation techniques, approaches, and treatments described in the Manual shall be implemented strictly in accord with the principles, processes, conditions, and limitations the Manual prescribes. Where processes required by the Manual, such as a requirement of approval by specified Department of Defense officials, are inapposite to a department or an agency other than the Department of Defense, such a department or agency shall use processes that are substantially equivalent to the processes the Manual prescribes for the Department of Defense. Nothing in this section shall preclude the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or other Federal law enforcement agencies, from continuing to use authorized, non-coercive techniques of interrogation that are designed to elicit voluntary statements and do not involve the use of force, threats, or promises.

(c) Interpretations of Common Article 3 and the Army Field Manual. From this day forward, unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance, officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government may, in conducting interrogations, act in reliance upon Army Field Manual 2 22.3, but may not, in conducting interrogations, rely upon any interpretation of the law governing interrogation — including interpretations of Federal criminal laws, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, Army Field Manual 2 22.3, and its predecessor document, Army Field Manual 34 52 issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

Did they think he was kidding?

So, the boogeymen have known what the limits on their detention are for the last three months. And by some miracle, we are all still alive. (Well, except for the dozens of Americans who’ve been gunned down by nuts right here at home.)

The release of these memos has absolutely no effect on national security under the rules that Obama already set forth. It does, however, expose everyone who is defending these tactics as the illogical, sadistic scumbags they really are. Here’s one from Hinderocket:

You can read the memos here. If you do, you will see that DOJ’s lawyers grappled carefully and fairly with issues that are, by their nature, both difficult and distasteful. I find much to agree with in the memos and little, if anything, with which I disagree from a legal standpoint. Several things about the memos are striking: the concern that is shown for the health and well-being of the detainees; the very limited circumstances under harsh interrogation techniques were used (only when the CIA had reason to believe that the detainee had knowledge about pending terrorist attacks, among other limitations), and confirmation of the fact that thousands of American servicemen have been waterboarded and subjected to the other techniques in question, as part of their training–a practice that continued at least up to the dates of the memos.

I love how these torture apologists are proudly displaying pictures on their blogs comparing Obama to Hitler.

Anyone who can defend those memos is so fucked up I pity their friends and families.

Remove Bybee From The Bench

by tristero

Via Atrios comes this damning observation by Scott Lemieux:

It’s dismaying that John Yoo may never face prosecution. But it’s far worse that an even more important figure behind the Bush administration’s torture regime is not only likely never to stand trial but is a life-tenured federal judge. And, of course, this “forgetting” about Bybee’s record didn’t just happen: Senate Democrats were asleep at the switch. Bybee somehow managed to get two Democratic votes on the Judiciary Committee, including (disgracefully) Chuck Schumer’s, and was confirmed 74-19 although senators had at least some inkling of his role. This was an awful abdication of responsibility, among too many.

Indeed it was.

While this post was queued up, dday sent me the news that LA County Democratic Party passed a resolution to get this unprincipled, amoral hack off the bench:

RESOLUTION TO IMPEACH JUDGE JAY BYBEE
Passed Unanimously by LACDP, 4/14/09
Whereas, the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the people a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances; and,

Whereas the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, the supreme law of the land under Article VI of our Constitution, requires the prosecution of those who authorize torture, waterboarding is torture, and both former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard B. Cheney have admitted to authorizing waterboarding; and,

Whereas former Assistant Attorney General, and current Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Jay Bybee signed the “Bybee Memo,” or “Torture Memo” of August 1, 2002, which advised the C.I.A. that “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment was at times allowable under U.S. law, and authored, co-authored and signed other memos on “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation,” more of which are being currently revealed to the American public as the new administration brings them to light; now,

Therefore be it resolved that the Los Angeles County Democratic Party urges that the United States House of Representatives begin impeachment proceedings against Judge Jay Bybee of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, charging him with facilitating the authorization of torture while employed by the United States Department of Justice; and,

Therefore be it further resolved that a copy of this resolution with its original authorization be sent to the Office of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, and that copies of the signed resolution be sent to each member of the California delegation to the United States Senate and House of Representatives.

dday tells me that he will be contacting other groups as well. Bybee is a perfect example of the up-is-down mentality of the Bush regime: He has no business whatsoever dispensing American justice. It is others who must judge him for his crimes.

Every Day A Torture Memo

by dday

Now that I’ve had some time to marinate in these depraved memos justifying and finding legal rationalizations for torture, I am convinced that the members of the Bush Administration who directed and authorized all this just willed themselves to believe they were doing the righteous and just thing. Sure, they knew enough to find some thin strand of legal reasoning to cover their naked bodies, but that was seen by them as a brave and forthright act. I don’t see another way to live with approving Room 101 techniques like putting someone in a box with a bug unless you’ve convinced yourself of your own worthiness. The memos also produce a fact pattern of deliberate lies by the CIA to put their proposed torture of Abu Zubaydah in the best possible light (claiming he was of sound mental health when contemporaneous reports term him a basket case, for example). Combine that with typical Republican victimhood status, and you have the squealing pigs in the media today despairing about the release of these documents.

Two of the rogue’s gallery, Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, argue in the Wall Street Journal that the President “tied his own hand on terror” due to the release. Here’s a choice quote from these moral lepers.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

We’re always supposed to remember that we simply had to violate laws and shrink to the level of our enemies because that’s how they operate, which is certainly telling on behalf of the cretins defending themselves in this. But the contempt of our enemies was never in question; it’s the contempt of our allies, of indeed the entire world, which is only exacerbated by the defense of these actions, especially considering that they have for the time being been put outside the criminal justice system and above the law. It’s not the “publicizing of the techniques,” as this unnamed coward given sanction by useful idiot Mike Allen to rant today, that weakens national security, it’s the constant defense of them, the daily shame that there are powerful people in the US government convinced that drowning people is a necessary activity that “can never be used again” – as if that’s a bad thing.

And of course, this crowd has no problem lying about the application of torture, its effectiveness, or anything else surrounding the process, as long as it bolsters their argument.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency’s interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of “10 to 15 degrees” and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth “from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches” for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

Following the IG report, the memo’s authors write, they implemented “a number of changes in the application of the waterboard, including limits on the frequency and cumulative use of the technique.” “All of which means that, for a period of time, these limits were not in place,” notes The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein.

In this sense, Richard Armitage is an anomaly – someone who after the fact would be reflective enough to consider the moral issues involved. The others have brainwashed themselves into believing not just the legality of this monstrousness, but the essential nature of it all. And because they continue to run out in the media and talk about the importance of being torturers, and never face a consequence, they harm national security with each passing moment.

And so do those who refuse to hold them to account. I agree that the largely unredacted release is a praiseworthy act by the President. The push to “move forward” and offer no accountability for violations of domestic law and international convention is a huge mistake – one compounded every day by the continued issuing of “torture memos” in newspapers and on cable TV from the Bush Administration weasels who aren’t satisfied with just getting away with the crime, but feel the need to glorify it. This is a Justice Department decision, and they ought to appoint a special prosecutor, taking it out of the political realm. Believers in the rule of law should be screaming for that. Because every day that passes, another torture memo puts distance between us and the world.

As for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, who sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and spends his days officially passing judgment when his judgment is on display in the torture memos for all to see, I know of a movement upon which we can all latch. See here. More later.

…John Conyers:

“As Americans digest the awful revelations in the Bush-era OLC opinions, our nation faces a critical choice – what will we do to ensure that abuses like those described in these memos are never again ordered by our leaders or justified by our lawyers? To me, the answer is obvious. We must have a full investigation of the circumstances under which these torture methods were created, approved, and implemented, preferably by an independent commission as I previously proposed. And if our leaders are found to have violated the strict laws against torture, either by ordering these techniques without proper legal authority or by knowingly crafting legal fictions to justify the torture, they should be criminally prosecuted. It is simply obvious that, if there is no accountability when wrongdoing is exposed, future violations will not be deterred.

“I believe a Commission is the best forum to resolve the difficult issues raised by the ever-increasing documentary record of Bush Administration interrogation abuses. To take just one example, today two former Bush Administration officials again took to the papers to justify these practices by claiming that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydeh had been a clear success and had led to the disruption of terrorist plots. Yet just two weeks ago, former Bush Administration officials who monitored this interrogation told reporters that ‘not a single significant plot was foiled’ as a result. The American people deserve a non-partisan answer to such fundamental questions.

“Finally, I do not understand the statements by the President and the Attorney General yesterday on the issue of potential prosecutions to address the senior officials and government attorneys who crafted and approved these programs. Further, yesterday’s statements did not address the legality of any conduct that exceeded even the minimal boundaries established by the OLC memos, or any interrogations that occurred before legal guidance was provided.”

We need to keep pressing to make this happen.

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Article Of Faith

by digby

Writing about the recount process in Minnesota, Ed Kilgore makes an odd claim:

It’s an article of faith among many progressives that Gore and Lieberman lost the election in 2000 well before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, by exhibiting a naive respect for the rule of law while the Bushies laughed at them contemptuously and blew their doors off in manipulating the process by any means necessary. That’s certainly the impression left by the much-watched HBO movie Recount, where an effete and pompous Warren Christopher, who worried about New York Times editorials and the judgment of history, was decisively outflanked from the beginning by the charmingly vicious Jim Baker. Indeed, the idea that Democrats handed Bush the presidency through a weak and supercilious concern for fair play provided a lot of the impetus (according to some accounts) for the whole “netroots” phenomenon of the ensuing years.

As Josh Marshall notes today via a reader email, Al Franken has been the quieter, more rules-observing contestant in the Minnesota dispute. And that seems to have paid off politically: according to a new poll, 63% of Minnesotans now want Coleman to concede. This is important because it places pressure on MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty to certify Frankel as a senator if Coleman loses his state appeal, without waiting to see what happens in a possible federal suit.

I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s possible that there are those who think the Democrats should steal elections — or excuse me — adopt the tactics of James Baker and Karl Rove but I don’t know who they are. As for it being an article of faith, I very much think not.

The election of 2000 was certainly one of the catalysts for the netroots’ formation, but not because people thought Gore was some sort of wimp who didn’t know how to fight dirty (although some certainly thought he should have fought on.) It was because it was a terrible abuse of the electoral process by the Republicans, the exact opposite of what Kilgore claims. The “netroots” position has always been electoral reform and exposing the Republican Party’s unethical behavior, not emulating it.

We have spent years documenting their nefarious plans and techniques and would be almost ridiculously hypocritical to call for our side to do the same things. Indeed, I’ve not heard a peep from anyone in the netroots (although I may have missed it) complaining that Franken wasn’t playing hardball. I think most people assume he followed the rules and did pretty much everything right.

There is ongoing concern that the Republicans not be allowed to spin the media the way they did in 2000, which may be where Kilgore gets the idea that we endorse Republican tactics. But I see any media strategy as a purely defensive action designed to allow a Democrat the ability — as Franken has had — to legitimately contest or defend an election result. I don’t think anyone believes they should be out there spinning the press to create a clearly erroneous impression of victory in order to draw out or foreshorten the process, which the right clearly thinks is a-ok. And I can’t imagine anyone endorsing the idea of contesting a clearly lost election purely to delay filling a seat as they are doing in Minnesota.

Anyway, I like Kilgore and agree with him more often than not. But in this case, I think he’s giving the netroots a bad rap. There is no article of faith that I’m aware of that suggests we should adopt the right’s scorched earth electoral tactics. We just want fair elections. And on that, I think we agree fully with Kilgore.