Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Rigorous Process

by digby

More from the great Billmon:

It’s hard to picture Haji Nasrat Khan as an international terrorist. For a start, the grey-bearded Afghan can barely walk, shuffling along on a three-wheeled walking frame. His sight is terrible — he squints through milky eyes that sometimes roll towards the heavens — while his helpers have to shout to make themselves heard. And as for his age — nobody knows for sure, not even Nasrat himself. “I think I am 78, or maybe 79,” he ventures uncertainly, pausing over a cup of green tea.

Yet for three and a half years the US government deemed this elderly, infirm man an “enemy combatant”, so dangerous to America’s security that he was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

The Guardian
Three years on, Guantánamo detainee, 78, goes home
September 22, 2006

I’ve got more of your rigorous process for you, right here:

August 25, 2006. A German native who was imprisoned by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was released Thursday, more than 18 months after a federal judge in Washington ruled there was insufficient evidence to detain him.

and here:

August 21, 2006. On Jan. 18, 2002, six men suspected of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy were seized here by U.S. troops and flown to Cuba, where they became some of the first arrivals at the Pentagon’s new prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The seizure was ordered by senior U.S. officials in defiance of rulings by top courts in Bosnia that the men were entitled to their freedom and could not be deported. Today, more than four years later, the six remain locked up at Guantanamo, even though the original allegations about the embassy attack have been discredited and dropped, records show.

In 2004, Bosnian prosecutors and police formally exonerated the six men after a lengthy criminal investigation. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked the Bush administration to release them, calling the case a miscarriage of justice.

and here:

February 13, 2006 Five Muslim detainees from China’s western Xinjiang province are stranded in a legal no man’s land at the US terrorism prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

They shouldn’t be there. Even the US military has found that the men, members of the besieged Uighur ethnic group, are not enemy combatants. But their ordeal in custody isn’t over. Because they could face harsh treatment back in China – and the US doesn’t want to set a precedent by granting them asylum here – they sit in a barracks-like detention center waiting for a country to give them a home.

or here:

12 June 2006: One of the three men who committed suicide at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was due to be released – but did not know it, says a US lawyer.

[…]

At the weekend, one top state department official called them a “good PR move to draw attention”, while the camp commander said it was an “act of asymmetric warfare waged against us”.

(These terrifying terrorists are so formidable that they can wage war against us by hanging themselves in their cages. They are the strongest and most powerful enemy the world has ever known.)

or here:

3/10/2004 vAll four men who were arrested on their return to Britain from U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released Wednesday without charge, police said.

A fifth man had not been arrested when the group arrived at Northolt Royal Air Force Base Tuesday, and he was freed within hours.

In case anyone’s not convinced, how about this “Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data:“

There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and “55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.

“Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

“Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.”

But the US insists that no innocent men have ever been held at Guantanamo:

MORAN: Are you holding any innocent men here?

HARRIS: I believe truly that I am holding no innocent men in Guantanamo.

[…]

MORAN: So no man who ever came to Guantanamo Bay came there by mistake [or] was innocent?

HARRIS: I believe that to be true.

(Read that whole interview if you want to see some twisted logic in action.)

The evidence shows that the “rigorous process” allows the United States to capture or buy many innocent or low level grunts and then hold them and torture them in Guantanamo as long as they choose. This is indisputable. And we are now codifying that process — and granting legal immunity to those who do it. There’s nothing more to know. It’s all out there.

And aside from the indefinite imprisonment of both guilty and innocent men,this is what else they are excusing:

The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.

Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil’ Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.

[…]

Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

[…]

The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations.

“They were supposed to help us break them down,” one said.

The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.

They’re all off the hook. All the perpetrators, all the personnel who ordered them to do it, the doctors who betrayed their oaths and all the politicians and their sycophants in the military, the CIA and the Justice Department who sat around in Washington dreaming up this sick, sadistic, perverted program.

And there’s no guarantee that George W. Bush (the man who had his aides scan the reports for him before he personally signed off on 150+ executions in Texas and famously said he knows that none of them were innocent) will not use these measures in the future. The brave Knights of the Big Kabuki, McCain, Huckleberry and Mr Elizabeth Taylor all agreed to allow him to “interpret” decency out of existence. After all, it’s something he knows a lot about.

And there’s nothing these guys in Gitmo can do about it:

Another huge problem remains section 6 (in both of the underlying draft bills), which presumably will “overrule” Rasul, by purporting to strip aliens detained overseas of the right to petition for habeas review, and to drastically limit any further rights of such aliens to seek judicial review of (i) the legality of their detention; (ii) the terms and conditions of their detention and interrogation; and (iii) the proceudres and results of any military commission trial. Jack and others have thoroughly explained why this section is so troubling.

They hate us for our freedom.

Update: The bill is so bad, so convoluted that it’s taking all our smart lawyers awhile to wade through it a figure out just what in the hell is going on. Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings has hit upon something I hadn’t seen before:

I was thinking of the habeas-stripping provisions from the point of view of a detainee, who might wonder: what legal recourse do I have if this bill goes through? How can I protest my detention if, for instance, I have been found innocent but not released, or if I have been tortured? The answer to that question is, as far as I can tell, ‘you have no recourse’; and that horrified me.

But then it occurred to me to think of it from a different angle: from the perspective of the system of extraterritorial prisons that we seem to be setting up. From that point of view, the main question raised by the “compromise” bill (pdf) is a different one, namely: who has the right to question, in a court of law, any aspect of our treatment of alien combatants held outside the US? As far as I can tell, with very limited exceptions, the answer to this question is: no one but the very same government that set the system up in the first place.

This means, basically, that this bill will remove the entire system of detention, with the exception of its military commissions and combatant status review tribunals, from any judicial oversight at all…Literally anything could be going on during interrogation and detention, and the courts would have no way to pronounce on its legality, or to require anything to change.

This means that while the Republicans are pretending to keep the Geneva Conventions intact and prohibiting torture and taking great credit for it, they have removed any means by which one could hold the US government accountable for failing to live up to those rules. Rights without remedies. In other wrods, the whole thing basically just legalized torture for any practical purpose — and that means all of it, from forced enemas to waterboarding to the rack. What’s a furriner gonna do about it? He’s is specifically not allowed any judicial review of anything to do with his treament unless his US government torturers turn themselves in and ask their superiors to punish them.

This is it folks. There will be no judicial oversight of torture which means there is no way to enforce the law. The world will just have to trust George W. Bush to follow those laws based upon his superior morals and decency.

Update II: Here’s the WaPo pretty much saying the same thing. This bill is an abomination.

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Hicks Fer Jesus

by digby

I just watched “Red State” yesterday. It’s very well done. The narrative seems slow moving and kind of meandering at first and then everything just sneaks up on you until by the end you are truly creeped out.

At first I thought it was a slightly unfair portrayal because he was only showing a very particular kind of red state person. By the end I knew why — he had a point to make and it’s scary as hell. He let these people make it for him. There are way too many Americans who truly believe that the government of the United States should be a theocracy. And throughout this film you see how that idea has so permeated a certain constituency that there’s almost no way to get through to them. (The film works well as a companion to Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy” and Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.”)

There is one character in the film — a youngish car dealer in Mississippi — who represents an interesting contrast. He votes GOP because he perceives that they are looking out for his business interests but he doesn’t buy the social conservatism — although it was obviously politically incorrect in his social melieu to come right out and say it. He struggled mightily to make his point without insulting his tribe. (It reminded me a bit of certain hippies I knew back in the day who couldn’t quite come out and say they didn’t want to live in a commune because they thought they’d offend their friends.)

My favorite moment was when Mrs Gill, the Mississippi director of Concerend Women For America, gets upset that she’s been “worked over” by this interviewer who had just asked her what she believed in. It’s clear that when the totality of Mrs Gill’s racism and intolerance became manifest in the few minutes that she spoke, she suddenly realized that she had given herself away as a white supremecist and Christian nationalist. Naturally she claimed victimhood and ended the interview.

One of the things that’s obvious in this film is that these people are practiced phonies too. They say things like “we took us a trip to California and couldn’t believe what we saw out there!” like it’s 1952 and they’re Andy and Barney. You can’t tell me these people don’t watch TV. There’s a good part of their schtick that’s pure poseur — the “heartland hick fer Jesus” is very often a thoroughly modern American who’s playing just as many games as anybody else. Taking their “moral concerns” at face value and thinking they can be persuaded by tweaking issues and changing rhetoric is to be a chump. This is a tribal game.

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The USA Mengele Act

by tristero

I’ve spent a good chunk of the morning reading and re-reading Adam Liptak’s news analysis of the so-called compromise deal regarding the use of torture and unconstitutional trial procedures.* And for the life of me, I can’t make head or tail out of it. Maybe if I spent a week slogging throught the “94-page measure” it would start to reveal its meaning but that’s not the point. The point is that it is deliberately obtuse. And in real-life, ie, when interrogating suspects, it is bound to lead to more, not less, extreme torture and murder paid for by you and I. Y’think any Bush administration lawyer is gonna sift the nuances when asked to interpret the law for commanders in the field?

While the “compromise” is incoherent, what’s quite clear are the moral and legal issues involved. Whether you argue from within a faith or from a purely naturalistic standpoint without recourse to any higher deity or cause, torture is wrong. Always. It’s wrong not because it doesn’t work and leads to false and often dangerously misleading confessions. It’s wrong because it violates the essence of what it means to be a human being, whether you define that essence as a gift from God or derive it from purely naturalistic principles.

It is that simple. And it is beyond mind-blowing that such a basic goes-without-saying moral principle as a ban on torture needs to be asserted in 21st Century America. But it has to be, because the people who have taken over this country are in the process of tossing out every single law and moral principle adhered to by human society since what seems like the code of Hammurabi.

What especially stuck in my mind were these two things from the article. First, a moment of the kind of dark humor my friends in communist Prague used to indulge in about their leaders:

“The McCain, Graham, Warner trio really fought back and prevented the administration from winning its effort to reinterpret Common Article 3,” said Jennifer Daskal, the United States advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The proposed law, at least if it is interpreted honestly, Ms. Daskal said, would prohibit interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, forced standing for long periods and extreme temperatures.

“The proposed law, at least if it it is interpreted honestly…” Now, that’s funny. The other thing that caught my attention isn’t:

But some voiced concern that using statements obtained through coercion, even coercion forbidden by the McCain Amendment to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, would still be allowed in many circumstances. So would be hearsay evidence, as well as a combination of the two.

“You create a situation,” Ms. Daskal said, “in which someone could be convicted based on a second- or third-hand statement from a detainee during an abusive interrogation.”

That sure sounds as if, in many cases, even if information is obtained via torture, even if that torture results in the death of the tortured, that information is admissible against a defendant.

And that’s why I”m calling this law, if it is passed, the USA Mengele Act, because it empowers modern-day American psychopaths to do their worst and pass it off as just trying to do their best for their homeland. Republican Ted Bundy would have loved this law, including the sheer cynicism of it. Torment and maim whomever you want just as long as you get something that can be used against a Bush-fingered terrorist. And yes, it’s true, you can get into biiiiiiiig trouble if you do the nasty a little too much, but let’s get real here. Someone tortures a prisoner to fink on Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and that “information” is used to convict KSM – that person’s a friggin’ hero, for crissakes. Okay, he got a little too enthusiastic, but his only crime was being too eager to protect his country!

The USA Mengele Act permits legal evidence to be gathered for an American legal procedure by committing atrocities against prisoners. Exactly the way Josef Mengele went about gathering his “scientific” evidence during the Nazi era.

And let’s not kid ourselves that this will stop with terrorist suspects. After all, Tom DeLay used the Department of Homeland Security to try to round-up Democrats to pass his gerrymandering efforts. Of course, I’m not saying that Bush intends to torture to death his American political opponents. But it opens up the possibility down the line of using torture to produce legal evidence for American courts in, say, drug cases, and sex crimes. And when that happens, then yes, it will be pretty easy to re-evaluate the defintion of “terrorist.” Let’s say a modern-day Elllsberg – we should be so lucky – leaks a new set of Pentagon Papers. With this law, there’s no reason to have Plumbers to burglarize his psychiatrist’s office – you just grab the doctor and let him find out what a real headshrinking feels like.

I don’t think in his wildest dreams Osama bin Laden could have anticipated such a tremendous and rapid victory over America and its values as Bushn delivered. Yes, the destruction of Iraq and any day now, the fall of Iran and the consequent radicalization of millions of Muslims, the ruination of American prestige and influence, not to mention the vampirical drain on our economy: all that bin Laden joyfully anticipated. But for America to abandon all pretense of adherence to western law and morality, that was a pure gift from God to his obedient servant, Osama.

*Full disclosure: NY Times reporter Adam Liptak is a friend of mine. I know him to be an enormously dedicatd reporter (I believe he also is, or was, a lawyer), scrupulously honest and unbiased. That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything he says, or his analyes. I simply respect him.

Unleashing The Beast

by digby

I have written often about how the Republicans are becoming what they railed against for decades: totalitarians. Unsurprisingly I suppose, it turns out that what they really hated about Soviet communism was the economics. The 50 years of ranting about personal liberty and anti-authoritarian government seems to have been mere political rhetoric. Now that they are in power themselves they have adopted certain Soviet values quite seamlessly.

Here’s a former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, writing in this Sunday’s the Washington Post:

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

I wrote some time back about the ramifications for the torturers in this regime. I quoted liberally from this great article article by Jason Vest in the National Journal:

“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. 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?

This is an important thing for us to think about. It’s not just a matter of abstract morality. It’s a practical question of what happens to societies when they let go. It’s hard to imagine how gay marriage or women’s rights could even come close to the kind of weird, inhumane behavior that is set free when you go this deeply into sanctioned authoritarian sadism. I wrote in that post, called Genie In A Bottle:

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 equavalent 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.

People and societies don’t just wake up one morning to find they no longer recognize themselves. It’s a process. And we are in the process in this country of “defining deviancy down” in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention — saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what “really deserves it” will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.

Sure, right now it’s just a bunch of foreigners and I guess we don’t feel foreigners are entitled to basic human rights. They must not be human — or at least not as human as “we” are. When you think about it, who knows who “we” are either? Right wingers make millions of dollars writing books about how liberals are godless, death-loving, traitors within. Many people who read those books probably believe these liberals are only one step away from being sub-human too —- they are, after all, godless traitors.

But as the soviet experience shows, anyone can be defined as such sub-humans and at some point it usually comes around to catch even the people who wrote the original tales of godless, death-loving traitors within. I don’t know why — maybe it’s a kill the messenger thing.

I would almost guarantee that if we continue down this path there will someday be a fine, loyal conservative who, for reasons of petty insider warfare or political expediency finds himself in a position like this at the hands of his former comrades:

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Perhaps nobody cares that that this very thing is being done every day to hunger strikers in Guantanamo. But do people honestly think it can’t happen to them? Once we unleash this beast it won’t only be terrorists or muslims who will be in danger. In one way or another, we all will be.

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Here We Go Again

by tristero

US Strike group ordered to move off Iran’s west coast. And it looks like Bush is gonna try a blockade. Assuming he does, everyone better brush up on their Cuban Missile Crisis history because that is how they’re gonna try to market this product.

And yes, I know, the situation is in no way analogous to the Cuban Missile Crisis. For one thing, Iran is a little farther from the east coast of the US than Cuba is. That’s the kind of knowledge you glean when you glance at a map. The president of the United States might want to do so every once in a while.

[Update RC in comments linked to two articles about the Eisenhower Strike Group (here and here), the implication being that the deployment to the Gulf is not being moved up because of war but because of exercises. However, RC agrees that Bush is up to something vis a vis Iran. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the ESG deployment is part of that. An already existing plan for an exercise in the Gulf sounds like a pretty good cover, doesn’t it?]

“I Tried”

by digby

Oooh. Chris Wallace interviewed Bill Clinton today and sandbagged him with a question right out of the box about “why he didn’t do more to stop bin Laden.”

Clinton went ballistic. I just saw the excerpt on Fox:

At least I tried. That’s the difference between me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did NOT try. I tried.

No kidding. I remember hearing this kind of garbage constantly:

“Look at the movie ‘Wag the Dog.’ I think this has all the elements of that movie,” Rep. Jim Gibbons said. “Our reaction to the embassy bombings should be based on sound credible evidence, not a knee-jerk reaction to try to direct public attention away from his personal problems.”

And back in the day Republicans were so concerned about encroaching federal police power that they routinely watered down Clinton’s anti-terrorism proposals:

The measure, which the Senate passed overwhelmingly Wednesday evening, is a watered-down version of the White House’s proposal. The Clinton administration has been critical of the bill, calling it too weak.

The original House bill, passed last month, had deleted many of the Senate’s anti-terrorism provisions because of lawmakers’ concerns about increasing federal law enforcement powers. Some of those provisions were restored in the compromise bill.

[…]

Sen. Don Nickles, R-Oklahoma, while praising the bill, said the country remains “very open” to terrorism. “Will it stop any acts of terrorism, domestic and international? No,” he said, adding, “We don’t want a police state.”

Yes, they cared a lot about a police state when a Democrat was in office. So much so that looking back you’d have to conclude that by their standards today they failed to properly anticipate the threat.

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Taking It Outside The Beltway

by digby

Here’s some good news:

Congressional Democrats plan to hold Iraq war hearings on Capitol Hill and around the country, turning an election spotlight on an issue much as the GOP did with immigration during the summer recess.

The Democrats’ will highlight the fact that they intend to go toe-to-toe with Republicans on the issue of national security, believing that this election cycle it can play to their advantage rather than to their detriment as it has in elections past.

And Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), a leading House critic of the war, indicated yesterday that he would give the hearings a degree of bipartisan cover by attending them when he can.

“Any [hearings] up here that I can get to, I’ll attend,” said Jones, who voted for the resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq but has since pressed to bring American troops home. “I wish it was my party, the committees in the House, doing the same thing. The American people want answers.”

Jones said he would try to attend the Senate Democratic Policy Committee’s (DPC) first planned hearing on Monday, provided he can make the five-hour drive from his district in time.

Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.) also said he would consider taking part in the hearings, which Democrats say will be open to Republican lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol.

“I might take them up on it,” Gutknecht said. “I would certainly consider sending them some written testimony.”

The hearing on Monday, featuring military officers who served in Iraq, will delve into “the policy decisions that led to the current situation in Iraq,” according to Barry Piatt, spokesman for DPC Chairman Byron Dorgan (N.D.).

Democrats said they will follow up that hearing with field hearings around the country at least through November. They argue that Republicans have neglected to provide proper oversight of the war in a number of areas, including postwar planning, troop readiness and care for troops and veterans.

Hopefully there will be a one stop shop that people can go to in order to find out where these field hearings are taking place. I know I’ll be attending if there’s one in my area. I’ll keep you posted on that.

This is important stuff. Iraq is a huge issue and it trumps the GOP fearmongering if we can keep the focus on it.

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Outrage And Shame

by tristero

From Marty Lederman

[I]t only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitualted entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions by engaging in Cold Cell, Long Time Standing, etc., and that there will be very little pretense about it. In addition to the elimination of habeas rights in section 6, the bill would delegate to the President the authority to interpret “the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions” “for the United States,” except that the bill itself would define certain “grave breaches” of Common Article 3 to be war crimes.

So tell me, my fellow Americans:

How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture?

How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers?

How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to the American fascists in charge of this country’s legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?

And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn’t torture?

I’ll tell you how I feel. I am outraged and ashamed.

Kudos to Digby for calling this exactly right from the start. Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permittted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina. What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings – that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget?

Tough and Smart

by digby

Democrats have put their trust in Senators Graham, McCain and Warner to push back against the White House, and Thursday they signaled that they intended to continue cooperating. “Five years after Sept. 11, it is time to make the tough and smart decisions to give the American people the real security they deserve,” said the Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada.

Still, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he would press to change a provision in the proposal that would deny detainees a right to challenge their captivity in court.

If you’d like to ask your Senator to support the Specter-Levin Amendment to preserve habeas corpus, you can go here for information and directions.

Update: Here’s some more of that old time clarity:

On the key issue of detainee treatment that had caused the impasse between the White House and the dissident Republicans, the two sides agreed on a list of specified crimes that would provoke prosecution of CIA interrogators and others. They also agreed that past violations of the Geneva Conventions, an international treaty barring degrading and humiliating treatment of detainees, would not result in criminal or civil legal action.

The White House, for its part, yielded in its demand to adopt, with congressional approval, a restricted definition of its obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. That article requires humane treatment of detainees and bars “violence to life and person,” such as death and mutilation, as well as cruel treatment and “outrages upon personal dignity.”

The compromise language gives the president a dominant — but not exclusive — role in deciding which interrogation methods are permitted by that provision of the treaty. It also prohibits detainees from using the Geneva Conventions to challenge their imprisonment or seek civil damages for mistreatment, as the administration sought.

[…]

The biggest hurdle, Senate sources said, was convincing administration officials that lawmakers would never accept language that allowed Bush to appear to be reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. Once that was settled, they said, the White House poured most of its energy into defining “cruel or inhuman treatment” that would constitute a crime under the War Crimes Act. The administration wanted the term to describe techniques resulting in “severe” physical or mental pain, but the senators insisted on the word “serious.”

Negotiations then turned to the amount of time that a detainee’s suffering must last before the treatment amounts to a war crime. Administration officials preferred designating “prolonged” mental or physical symptoms, while the senators wanted something milder. They settled on “serious and non-transitory mental harm, which need not be prolonged.”

These definitions appear in a section of the legislation that specifically lists “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions that might bring criminal penalties.

For lesser offenses barred by the Geneva Conventions — those lying between cruelty and minor abuse, putting them at the heart of the intraparty dispute — the draft legislation would give the president explicit authority to interpret “the meaning and application” of the relevant provisions in Common Article 3. It also requires that such interpretations be considered as “authoritative” as other U.S. regulations.

But the language also requires that such interpretations be published, rather than described in secret to a restricted number of lawmakers. That provision was demanded by the dissident lawmakers, who resented the administration’s past efforts to curtail the number of members who were told of its policies. The provision also affirms that Congress and the judiciary can play their customary roles in reviewing the interpretations, a statement that Senate sources say the White House vigorously resisted.

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that Bush essentially got what he asked for in a different formulation that allows both sides to maintain that their concerns were addressed. “We kind of take the scenic route, but we get there,” the official said.

So the good news is that these fine Republicans were all able to sit in Dick Cheney’s Senate office and hash out what “amount of time that a detainee’s suffering must last before the treatment amounts to a war crime” in the last three days. We can sleep better tonight knowing that they decided that the suffering must do “serious and non-transitory mental harm, which need not be prolonged.” Excellent. And now we know that “cruel or inhuman treatment” that would constitute a crime under the War Crimes Act is comprised of “techniques resulting in ‘serious’ physical or mental pain, rather than ‘severe.'” That’s just the kind of “clarity” they’ve been looking for. On with the interrogations.

Oh and they will leave it up to the president to decide if standing shackled naked in a cold room with ice water splashed randomly on you for 72 hours is torture. Or if being forced to walk around on a leash like a dog or have fake menstrual blood smeared all over your face is degrading. (I wonder what he’ll say?)

The best part is that they might let the prisoners see classified evidence used against them that’s been redacted or summarized, nobody who was tortured will be able to sue the government or hold anyone in it legally liable and there’s a nice fat habeas corpus loophole so these embarrassingly innocent people down in Gitmo will stay under wraps.

It’s tough and smart for St John and the Republicans, for sure. For reasonable people, not so much. This is a terrible bill and I don’t think the Democrats will get any benefit from backing it.

Update: The NY Times Editorial Board doesn’t think it’s much of a bill either.

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Speaking Of Torture

by digby

In the event of conflict, America also accepts our responsibility to protect innocent lives in every way possible. We’ll bring food and medicine to the Iraqi people. We’ll help that nation to build a just government, after decades of brutal dictatorship. The form and leadership of that government is for the Iraqi people to choose. Anything they choose will be better than the misery and torture and murder they have known under Saddam Hussein.

Uhm:

Torture in Iraq is reportedly worse now than it was under deposed president Saddam Hussein, the United Nations’ chief anti-torture expert said Thursday.

Manfred Nowak described a situation where militias, insurgent groups, government forces and others disregard rules on the humane treatment of prisoners.

“What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand,” said Nowak, the global body’s special investigator on torture.

“The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.”

Nowak, an Austrian law professor, was in Geneva to present a report on detainee conditions at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, as well as to brief the UN Human Rights Council, the global body’s top rights watchdog, on the situation of torture in countries around the world.

He said that some allegations of torture in Iraq he received were undoubtedly credible.

Government forces were among the perpetrators, Nowak said, citing “very serious allegations of torture within the official Iraqi detention centres.

“You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are actually abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed,” Nowak told reporters at the UN’s European headquarters. “It’s not just torture by the government. There are much more brutal methods of torture you’ll find by private militias.”

Nowak has yet to make an official visit to Iraq, and said such a mission would not be feasible as long as the security situation was so dangerous. He based his comments on interviews with people during a visit to Amman, Jordan and other sources.

“You find these bodies with very heavy and very serious torture marks,” he said. “Many of these allegations, I have no doubt that they are credible.”