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About Time
more about "Anti-torture rally hits Washington", posted with vodpod
The Iranian Threat?
14 years ago
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Does Glenn Beck Have a Family?
If so, why are they not having him committed for his own good and that of everyone else. The man needs help!
Glenn Beck Defends Wanting To Pull Out Fingernails And Peel Skin Off With A Cheese Grater. We kid you not. 5/3
Let The Sun Shine In......
Glenn Beck Defends Wanting To Pull Out Fingernails And Peel Skin Off With A Cheese Grater. We kid you not. 5/3
Let The Sun Shine In......
More On Torture
Not for the faint of heart....
Torture: An Author and a Resister
Friday 01 May 2009
by: Ann Wright, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
The funeral for Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, Flagstaff, Arizona. (Photo: Jill Torrance / Getty Images)
As a Bush administration political appointee Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, Jay Bybee, a Mormon, wrote one of four torture memos released last month. Bybee's August 1, 2002, 20-page memorandum laid out in excruciating detail the interrogation techniques he was authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use on al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
Bybee authorized ten "enhanced interrogation techniques" to encourage Abu Zubaydah to disclose "crucial information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against US interests overseas." The torture techniques authorized were (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress position, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box and (10) waterboarding.
The current Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has stated that waterboarding is torture, while the previous Attorney General Judge Mukasey refused to comment on whether waterboarding is torture.
From recently released CIA documents, we know the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
But, we know that from March through June, 2002, according to FBI interrogator Ali Soufan in an op-ed to The New York Times on April 23, 2009, FBI interrogators had already gotten "actionable intelligence" from Zubaydah using traditional, non-torturing interrogation techniques, including that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 and that Jose Padilla was planning to be a "dirty bomber."
Ninety of the 92 interrogation videotapes the CIA admits it destroyed were interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah's British attorney Brent Mickum, in the most detailed account the public has had of Zubaydah's life, states that after all the waterboarding and other torture methods used, the CIA finally recognized Zubaydah was not the senior al-Qaeda leader they had portrayed him to be. According to Mickum, the military commissions at Guantanamo are now "airbrushing" his name from the charge sheets of other Guantanamo prisoners. Mickum reveals Zubaydah was severely wounded in Afghanistan in 1992 while fighting communist insurgents after the withdrawal of Soviet forces. He has two pieces of shrapnel in his head, which have affected his memory to the extent that "he cannot remember his mother's name or face." Mickum states that Zubaydah was shot and severely wounded when he was picked up in Pakistan. His life was saved by a John Hopkins surgeon flown to the region. After being saved from death, he was almost tortured to death by CIA operatives. Mickum says that Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian with no country to argue on his behalf and a United States government now embarrassed at being caught in its own illegal conduct.
We know that combinations of the other nine techniques authorized by Jay Bybee can be classified as torture, as the Convening Authority of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Susan Crawford declared when she dismissed the charges against Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, in January, 2009, in the last days of the Bush administration.
Crawford said that for 160 days al-Qahtani's only contact was with the interrogators and that 48 of 54 consecutive days he was subjected to 18- to 20-hour interrogations. He was strip searched and had to stand naked in front of a female agent. Al-Qahtani was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation and was told that his mother and sister were whores. With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks." He was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus. The interrogations were so severe that twice al-Qahtani had to be hospitalized at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which, in extreme cases, can lead to heart failure and death. At one point, al-Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the interrogation records showed.
The torture techniques Jay Bybee authorized in 2002 migrated to Iraq in 2003. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller traveled to Iraq from Guantanamo to demonstrate to soldiers in Iraq the techniques the military and CIA were using in Guantanamo.
In September 2003, another Mormon, a woman soldier, US Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, said she refused to use the interrogation techniques that Bybee had authorized on Iraqi prisoners. An Arabic linguist with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division at Tal Afar base, Iraq, 27-year-old Peterson, refused to take part in interrogations in the "cage" where Iraqis were stripped naked in front of female soldiers, mocked and their manhood degraded and burned with cigarettes, among other things. Three days later, on September 15, 2003, Peterson was found dead of a gunshot wound at Tal Afar base. The Army has classified her death as suicide.
Jay Bybee, in thanks for his being the loyal soldier to the Bush administration's policies of torture, was nominated and confirmed by the US Senate as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he sits to this day in his lifetime appointment. Jay Bybee, an author of torture, reportedly has a placard in his home for his children that reads, "We don't hurt each other."
Alyssa Peterson, for saying no to torture, is dead, perhaps by her own hand.
To help Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson rest in peace, I say we should demand accountability from our officials and IMPEACH the torture judge, Jay Bybee.
Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army Reserves veteran who retired as a colonel. She was a US diplomat, who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somali, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Mongolia and Afghanistan, where she helped reopen the US Embassy in December 2001. She has traveled to Gaza twice in the past three months and will make her third trip in May 2009. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."
Let The Sun Shine In......
The Demise of Capitalism?
Falling under the crushing weight of its own corruption.
Let The Sun Shine In......
The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy
Friday 01 May 2009
by: Seth Sandronsky, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
In Beijing, a paramilitary policeman raises the Chinese flag in front of the portrait of Mao Zedong. Minqi Li's new book details China's rise. (Photo: Reuters)
"The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy"
by Minqi Li
240 pages, Monthly Review Press, (January 2009)
A bit like Malcom X, author Minqi Li used prison time to read widely. The latter studied radical political economy for two years when Chinese leaders locked him up for a critical public speech after the Tiananmen upsurge in 1989. That was then. He is an author and assistant professor of economics at the University of Utah now. Li's "The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy" is a must-read for all concerned with the future of the earth and its people.
Throughout the book, Li employs a term from world-system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, the "endless accumulation of capital." That process has spread outward from Western Europe over the past four-plus centuries. Formed by distinct historical conditions, this social system encompasses the entire globe now with the entry of China and India, the two most populous nations on earth. Together, they function as "strategic reserves" of land, labor and resources, Li argues. Crucially, this phase of growth places potentially fatal strains on "the requirements of ecological sustainability." That is the case due to the links between industrial production and environmental degradation. To drill down on these points, Li devotes no small effort to an accounting of the "hard facts" around modern industry and ecology.
To improve our understanding of the present conjuncture, Li details China's rise in the modern era. For US readers especially, the sections on the Chinese revolution are quite useful. To this end, he lays out how and why that revolution under Mao and the Chinese Communist Party paved the path for the transition to capitalist industrialization. His is not the conventional wisdom. In this way, the book in part helps to deconstruct the anti-Chinese ideology that has shaped the US's political culture from the post-Civil War era through the cold war and to the present.
Global capitalism, as its backers and detractors maintain, must expand to continue. Within this context, Li holds that the rapid growth of the Chinese economy has stabilized a world system sunk into slow growth since the US-led post-World War II period of prosperity and stability ended in the early 1970s. The rub is that China's development provides a short-term solution only. There is a looming possibility of reversal to world instability, ecologically and economically. An example of the latter is the fragility of US borrowing from China. Its currency surplus helps to fund US deficits. The American penchant for borrowing could well spark a fall in the value of the dollar, the leading reserve currency in the world. Li marshals figures and tables from China, the OECD, US and the World Bank on exchange rates, growth, income, prices, profits and wages to make clear the constraints of each nation in world capitalism for the short and long term.
Li argues that the rise of China heralds the "autumn" of the current global system. He draws on Wallerstein's framework of core, semi-peripheral and peripheral nations locked in competition. The stabilizing role of a core, imperial power such as the US since the end of World War II and Great Britain before it, is to maintain that competitive forward motion. This trend requires nations of the core, periphery and semi-periphery to strike a delicate balance to continue the accumulation of capital for investors. That balancing act is due to the built-in creation and destruction of market relations among and between nations, whose internal class structures are thus in constant flux. By definition, this clash and conflict paves the way for instability. Look no further than the US wage stagnation for the past 35 years. That process propelled the widening gap in income between Main Street and Wall Street and set off repeated asset bubbles, harming working people with job losses state side and abroad.
Li's critique of "sustainable capitalism" is devastating in its breadth and depth. He argues, persuasively, against that notion with proof that requires no more than high school math. His clear prose lays out the costs and benefits for the planet and people under the current social system with respect to nonrenewable and renewable energy, minerals, water, food and climate change. Li reveals, layer by layer, the "laws of motion" of an extractive system of producing and exchanging commodities that is fast careening towards an unsafe future.
To be clear, this book is much more than a compendium of dire analysis, data and statistics. Li analyzes the current crises as the outcomes of history that women and men make under conditions they do not choose. Thus, he offers no hard and fast blueprint for a post-capitalist tomorrow. Li does favor labor internationalism and a shorter working day. Both developments, in his view, are basic to a more rational way of organizing people to sustain themselves and the natural world.
A brief look at Malthusian economics that blames the victims of the system for their poverty would have strengthened the book. That quibble aside, I recommend "The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy" as a vital work of radical political economy. Li furthers our understanding of the vast challenges before us in these troubled and troubling times. Be aware.
Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento. Contact him at ssandronsky@yahoo.com.
Let The Sun Shine In......
The Incredibly Shrinking GOP
Bob Herbert: "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."
But it was Poppy Bush who said that you don't need to fool all the people all the time, but only a majority of the people once, which lowers the bar for liars, war criminals and assassins like the Bushies and other rethugs
Let The Sun Shine In......
But it was Poppy Bush who said that you don't need to fool all the people all the time, but only a majority of the people once, which lowers the bar for liars, war criminals and assassins like the Bushies and other rethugs
Let The Sun Shine In......
No More Welfare For Bankers!!!!!
And no more votes for the DINO jackasses who voted against the people and for the thieving bankers
Senate caves to bankers, passes up chance to help U.S. homeowners
Senate caves to bankers, passes up chance to help U.S. homeowners
The U.S. Senate could have stepped up to the plate yesterday and passed an amendment to help bankruptcy judges help homeowners. Instead, twelve Democrats joined all the Republicans in the Senate--including those two supposed 'moderates' from Maine that we hear so much about--to defeat the amendment.
The amendment to Senate bill 896, called the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 and introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), would have facilitated renegotiation in foreclosures by bankruptcy judges. It was proposed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)--and if only Durbin had been stronger in protecting the rule of law in reaction to that stunt arrest of Gov. Blagojevich, he, other Dems in Congress, and some necessary presidential initiatives would be in a stronger position now. For one thing, they would have an excellent senator in Danny Davis, a gracious and intelligent man. But that's water under the bridge--exc that poor Illinoisians are now stuck with a US Attorney who is not only a Giuliani-Bush holdover but also has a track record of accepting benefits from people he has benefited.
More on that later.
For now, the fate of any legislation, any legislation at all, that would benefit the housing sector and would help deserving people who are losing their houses for reasons beyond their control is an immediate concern.
It is staggering that more of our corporate media outlets do not recognize the housing situation as the impending emergency that it truly is--staggering even in view of the many instances of short-sightedness demonstrated by large media outlets in the past.
Obviously the media personnel who appear on the airwaves to discuss these matters, in so far as they discuss them, do not face foreclosure themselves, and remoteness affects anyone's perspective. Even so, there is a certain blandness, media-wise, about our impending waves of foreclosures that is an all but breathtaking spectacle of obliviousness.
Of the twelve Democrats who joined--once again--all Republican senators in defeating an amendment ardently opposed by the banking industry, only four are members of Class III, up for reelection in 2010. They are
Michael F. Bennet of CO, Byron L. Dorgan of ND, Blanche L. Lincoln of AR, and brand-new or returned Dem Arlen Specter of PA.
Let The Sun Shine In......
Rightwing Against Obama Supremes Pick
Problem is, he hasn't made one yet.
Supreme Court madness: Yet another right-wing nervous breakdown
Let The Sun Shine In......
Supreme Court madness: Yet another right-wing nervous breakdown
Let The Sun Shine In......
Some say the Banks Own Congress....
True, but, apparently, so do the health insurance companies.
Let The Sun Shine In......
Ben Nelson, DINO. Democrat in Name Only. "Sen. Ben Nelson said Thursday that he will oppose the creation of a government-run health insurance plan as part of a health care overhaul...Open Secrets says Nelson received $608,709 from the insurance industry in 2007-2008,"
Let The Sun Shine In......
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Hannity's Waterboarding Distraction Trivializes Torture, Minimizes Murder and Appeals to the Sadist in Us All
Submitted by meg on Wed, 04/29/2009 - 2:10pm. A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSISby Meg White
The blogosphere is all atwitter over the lastest chapter in the Olbermann-Hannity waterboarding story. The attention is unsurprising; who wouldn't pay to see Hannity tortured?
I know cheap thrills are scarce these days, and I don't want to rain on the parade. I just hope you know that you're being had.The Sean Hannity "waterboard me" media circus is no more than a clever ploy. This Fox chickenhawk (along with others in the media) is focusing on waterboarding, when there are much more sinister happenings afoot.
While we're busy obsessing over Hannity's blustering and bugs in boxes, there's one thing that gets glossed over in the torture debate over and over again, on the part of both the government and the media. It's something that has been emphasized by BuzzFlash -- repeatedly.
We didn't just torture people, we killed people.
Though we've been practically screaming this fact from the rooftops, it has gotten little play in the mainstream media. However, the idea slowly seems to be picking up. Today, Thomas Friedman wrote this in his New York Times column:
There is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.
After all, we're not just talking about "enhanced interrogations." Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.
Somehow Friedman twisted his usually sound logic in such a bizarre manner as to come to the conclusion that Obama is correct to avoid prosecuting those responsible for torture, but the fact that he went to the trouble to highlight and italicize the above shows he was half awake (for the beginning of his column, at least).Wilkerson (part of his congressional testimony on the matter is available here) is not the only source of reports of state-sanctioned murder.
This list, compiled four years ago and made available on the National Institutes of Health archive, details what happened to six detainees in Afghanistan and 11 in Iraq, all of whom died following torture.
A Human Rights First report estimated in 2006 that nearly 100 people had died in U.S. custody as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since August 2002:
According to the U.S. military's own classifications, 34 of these cases are suspected or confirmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. In close to half the deaths Human Rights First surveyed, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
ProPublica investigated human rights groups' and CIA documents and determined that at least 32 terrorism suspects that were in CIA custody have gone missing. The CIA declined to comment on the list, aside from saying it was probably "flawed." There's no way to confirm whether these people are even still living, much less what techniques they've been subjected to. However, the whole situation has the stench of Latin American dictators "disappearing" people attached to it.With Americans' heads swimming in these many sets of numbers, the individual stories within this sad chapter of our country's history are easily forgotten. This is why the indispensable documentary Taxi to the Dark Side should be required viewing material for every American. The central victim in this story was not waterboarded. Nor was he thought to be guilty of anything beyond driving by Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base at the wrong time. Still, his legs were beaten to the point that they would've had to have been amputated, had he not died from the beating.
But whether or not the government ultimately concludes that these and other deaths were murders, the fact remains that people died in American custody. The responsibility is ours. Even suicides cannot be ruled out. The military has a history of using suicide as a cover for homicide, and there's no way to say whether or not torture has driven a person to suicide.
There are undoubtedly more terrible torture stories that will be unearthed in the coming months and years, and they will cause Americans to both cringe and deny.
And all these lists, numbers and stories mean about the same as what it would mean if Hannity ever actually were waterboarded: Jack.
(And I don't mean Jack Bauer, but thanks to Maureen Dowd for reducing the crimes of the Bush Administration to wacky high jinx on a Fox television drama and demonstrating that it actually is possible to hate Dick Cheney so much that it eventually drives you mad.)
We will probably never know how many detainees died in our custody, or in the custody of our allies in this so-called "war on terror." The number does not matter. The fact is, the Bush Administration murdered in our name. No matter what intelligence we got from tortured prisoners, no matter who gets waterboarded to prove how pleasant it is, that fact will always remain.
The thing that makes Hannity's supposed willingness to be waterboarded nothing but a trick is the same thing that makes the arguments of proponents of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE, the training program for troops that subjects them to moments of torture so that they can be prepared to resist it if captured) fall flat. Hannity and SERE students know in advance they won't be killed. They know their legs won't be beaten literally to a bloody pulp. They know their anguished cries won't go unheeded and that medical care will not be withheld from them.
Their arguments are nothing but a callous bait-and-switch. And the fact that Olbermann and (most of) the rest of the left seems willing to exchange Hannity's momentary horror for justice makes them look just as sadistic as Team Bush.
Let The Sun Shine In......
Hannity's Waterboarding Distraction Trivializes Torture, Minimizes Murder and Appeals to the Sadist in Us All
As usual, unless otherwise notified, this is an analysis with which we agree.
We must not allow a policy of torture to slide. It matters not that Obama wants to and HAS changed the policy. There must be accountability. Otherwise, it is just a cover-up, which we all know is worse than the crime.
I am not a torturer, I will never be a fan of torture. Why not just eat each other alive?
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
The blogosphere is all atwitter over the lastest chapter in the Olbermann-Hannity waterboarding story. The attention is unsurprising; who wouldn't pay to see Hannity tortured?
![]()
I know cheap thrills are scarce these days, and I don't want to rain on the parade. I just hope you know that you're being had.
The Sean Hannity "waterboard me" media circus is no more than a clever ploy. This Fox chickenhawk (along with others in the media) is focusing on waterboarding, when there are much more sinister happenings afoot.
While we're busy obsessing over Hannity's blustering and bugs in boxes, there's one thing that gets glossed over in the torture debate over and over again, on the part of both the government and the media. It's something that has been emphasized by BuzzFlash -- repeatedly.
We didn't just torture people, we killed people.
Though we've been practically screaming this fact from the rooftops, it has gotten little play in the mainstream media. However, the idea slowly seems to be picking up. Today, Thomas Friedman wrote this in his New York Times column:
Somehow Friedman twisted his usually sound logic in such a bizarre manner as to come to the conclusion that Obama is correct to avoid prosecuting those responsible for torture, but the fact that he went to the trouble to highlight and italicize the above shows he was half awake (for the beginning of his column, at least).
Wilkerson (part of his congressional testimony on the matter is available here) is not the only source of reports of state-sanctioned murder.
This list, compiled four years ago and made available on the National Institutes of Health archive, details what happened to six detainees in Afghanistan and 11 in Iraq, all of whom died following torture.
A Human Rights First report estimated in 2006 that nearly 100 people had died in U.S. custody as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since August 2002:
ProPublica investigated human rights groups' and CIA documents and determined that at least 32 terrorism suspects that were in CIA custody have gone missing. The CIA declined to comment on the list, aside from saying it was probably "flawed." There's no way to confirm whether these people are even still living, much less what techniques they've been subjected to. However, the whole situation has the stench of Latin American dictators "disappearing" people attached to it.
With Americans' heads swimming in these many sets of numbers, the individual stories within this sad chapter of our country's history are easily forgotten. This is why the indispensable documentary Taxi to the Dark Side should be required viewing material for every American. The central victim in this story was not waterboarded. Nor was he thought to be guilty of anything beyond driving by Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base at the wrong time. Still, his legs were beaten to the point that they would've had to have been amputated, had he not died from the beating.
But whether or not the government ultimately concludes that these and other deaths were murders, the fact remains that people died in American custody. The responsibility is ours. Even suicides cannot be ruled out.
The military has a history of using suicide as a cover for homicide, and there's no way to say whether or not torture has driven a person to suicide.
There are undoubtedly more terrible torture stories that will be unearthed in the coming months and years, and they will cause Americans to both cringe and deny.
And all these lists, numbers and stories mean about the same as what it would mean if Hannity ever actually were waterboarded: Jack.
(And I don't mean Jack Bauer, but thanks to Maureen Dowd for reducing the crimes of the Bush Administration to wacky high jinx on a Fox television drama and demonstrating that it actually is possible to hate Dick Cheney so much that it eventually drives you mad.)
We will probably never know how many detainees died in our custody, or in the custody of our allies in this so-called "war on terror." The number does not matter. The fact is, the Bush Administration murdered in our name. No matter what intelligence we got from tortured prisoners, no matter who gets waterboarded to prove how pleasant it is, that fact will always remain.
The thing that makes Hannity's supposed willingness to be waterboarded nothing but a trick is the same thing that makes the arguments of proponents of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE, the training program for troops that subjects them to moments of torture so that they can be prepared to resist it if captured) fall flat. Hannity and SERE students know in advance they won't be killed. They know their legs won't be beaten literally to a bloody pulp. They know their anguished cries won't go unheeded and that medical care will not be withheld from them.
We must not allow a policy of torture to slide. It matters not that Obama wants to and HAS changed the policy. There must be accountability. Otherwise, it is just a cover-up, which we all know is worse than the crime.
I am not a torturer, I will never be a fan of torture. Why not just eat each other alive?
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
The blogosphere is all atwitter over the lastest chapter in the Olbermann-Hannity waterboarding story. The attention is unsurprising; who wouldn't pay to see Hannity tortured?
I know cheap thrills are scarce these days, and I don't want to rain on the parade. I just hope you know that you're being had.
The Sean Hannity "waterboard me" media circus is no more than a clever ploy. This Fox chickenhawk (along with others in the media) is focusing on waterboarding, when there are much more sinister happenings afoot.
While we're busy obsessing over Hannity's blustering and bugs in boxes, there's one thing that gets glossed over in the torture debate over and over again, on the part of both the government and the media. It's something that has been emphasized by BuzzFlash -- repeatedly.
We didn't just torture people, we killed people.
Though we've been practically screaming this fact from the rooftops, it has gotten little play in the mainstream media. However, the idea slowly seems to be picking up. Today, Thomas Friedman wrote this in his New York Times column:
There is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.
After all, we're not just talking about "enhanced interrogations." Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.
Somehow Friedman twisted his usually sound logic in such a bizarre manner as to come to the conclusion that Obama is correct to avoid prosecuting those responsible for torture, but the fact that he went to the trouble to highlight and italicize the above shows he was half awake (for the beginning of his column, at least).
Wilkerson (part of his congressional testimony on the matter is available here) is not the only source of reports of state-sanctioned murder.
This list, compiled four years ago and made available on the National Institutes of Health archive, details what happened to six detainees in Afghanistan and 11 in Iraq, all of whom died following torture.
A Human Rights First report estimated in 2006 that nearly 100 people had died in U.S. custody as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since August 2002:
According to the U.S. military's own classifications, 34 of these cases are suspected or confirmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. In close to half the deaths Human Rights First surveyed, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
ProPublica investigated human rights groups' and CIA documents and determined that at least 32 terrorism suspects that were in CIA custody have gone missing. The CIA declined to comment on the list, aside from saying it was probably "flawed." There's no way to confirm whether these people are even still living, much less what techniques they've been subjected to. However, the whole situation has the stench of Latin American dictators "disappearing" people attached to it.
With Americans' heads swimming in these many sets of numbers, the individual stories within this sad chapter of our country's history are easily forgotten. This is why the indispensable documentary Taxi to the Dark Side should be required viewing material for every American. The central victim in this story was not waterboarded. Nor was he thought to be guilty of anything beyond driving by Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base at the wrong time. Still, his legs were beaten to the point that they would've had to have been amputated, had he not died from the beating.
But whether or not the government ultimately concludes that these and other deaths were murders, the fact remains that people died in American custody. The responsibility is ours. Even suicides cannot be ruled out.
The military has a history of using suicide as a cover for homicide, and there's no way to say whether or not torture has driven a person to suicide.
There are undoubtedly more terrible torture stories that will be unearthed in the coming months and years, and they will cause Americans to both cringe and deny.
And all these lists, numbers and stories mean about the same as what it would mean if Hannity ever actually were waterboarded: Jack.
(And I don't mean Jack Bauer, but thanks to Maureen Dowd for reducing the crimes of the Bush Administration to wacky high jinx on a Fox television drama and demonstrating that it actually is possible to hate Dick Cheney so much that it eventually drives you mad.)
We will probably never know how many detainees died in our custody, or in the custody of our allies in this so-called "war on terror." The number does not matter. The fact is, the Bush Administration murdered in our name. No matter what intelligence we got from tortured prisoners, no matter who gets waterboarded to prove how pleasant it is, that fact will always remain.
The thing that makes Hannity's supposed willingness to be waterboarded nothing but a trick is the same thing that makes the arguments of proponents of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE, the training program for troops that subjects them to moments of torture so that they can be prepared to resist it if captured) fall flat. Hannity and SERE students know in advance they won't be killed. They know their legs won't be beaten literally to a bloody pulp. They know their anguished cries won't go unheeded and that medical care will not be withheld from them.
Their arguments are nothing but a callous bait-and-switch. And the fact that Olbermann and (most of) the rest of the left seems willing to exchange Hannity's momentary horror for justice makes them look just as sadistic as Team Bush.
Let The Sun Shine In......
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
About Torture, the myths and reality
Scott Horton, who has led coverage of Bush-era wrongdoing, exposes three pervasive myths—and the surprising reason Cheney and Rove are keeping the issue alive.
• A torture memo writer refused to comply with a warning about criminal risks—and exposes the truth about the policies.
• Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck.
• Donald Rumsfeld gave step-by-step directions for techniques used at Abu Ghraib.
• Torture techniques originated from the White House shortly after 9/11—long before they were arguably needed on the battlefield.
• Torture was used by Cheney and Rumsfeld to find justification for the invasion of Iraq.
• Jay Bybee was confirmed to a lifetime appointment as all eyes were on Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.
In the space of a week, the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed.
The Bush administration left office resting its case on the claim it did not torture. The gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, it had said, were the product of “a few bad apples” and not of government policy. But the release of a series of grim documents has laid waste to this defense. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report—adopted with the support of leading Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham—has demonstrated step-by-step how abuses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had their genesis in policy choices made at the pinnacle of the Bush administration. A set of four Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush era has provided a stomach-turning legal justification of the application of specific torture techniques, including waterboarding.
As public and congressional calls for the appointment of a prosecutor and the creation of a truth commission have proliferated, President Barack Obama stepped in quickly to try to turn down the heat. A commission would not be helpful, he argues, and he has made plain his aversion to any form of criminal-law accountability.
Republicans, meanwhile, bristle with anger as they attempt to defend against the flood of new information. But, in the end, Obama’s assumption that the torture debate has run its course and that the country can now “move on,” as conservative pundit Peggy Noonan urged, may rest in some serious naïveté: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have different ideas. They’re convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.
The latest disclosures can best be grouped in terms of the destruction of a series of long-enduring myths and the emergence of some new truths.
The Broken Myths
1. Torture was connected to some “rotten apples,” mostly enlisted personnel from rural Appalachia who were improperly supervised.
The Senate Armed Services Committee meticulously documents the abuses that were chronicled at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and other sites and links them directly to techniques that were approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials in the Bush administration. Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, it shows step-by-step how directions given by Rumsfeld that the harsh techniques he adopted for Guantánamo be imported to Iraq, specifically for use on high-value detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility. Among the 232-page report’s conclusions: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
2. The torture techniques were derived as a last resort, only after other techniques had failed and that interrogators in the field pushed for their use.
Conversely, the report (and other documents emerging since its release) shows that interrogators in the field raised sharp objections to the use of the techniques and steadily questioned their efficacy. The team dealing with one prisoner, for instance, voiced the view that he had already furnished all the evidence he was likely to produce and that further waterboarding would be pointless. Nameless “higher ups” overrode their judgment. That group might well include Cheney, who is known to have maintained a sharp interest in this particular detainee and kept on his desk a file marked “detainees” in which he collected data related to the use of torture.
The Senate report documents a series of military officers who raised objections against the use of torture and insisted that their opposition be recorded. And today a further report has emerged from July 2002 (just as the OLC memos were being commissioned), in which the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency expressly referred to the techniques, which were being reverse engineered from the SERE program (that JPRA oversaw), as “torture” and insisted that, if used, they would not produce reliable intelligence.
3. Bush lawyers may have made “honest mistakes” in their legal analysis owing to the extreme pressure that existed in the immediate wake of 9/11, in which they were pressed quickly to give opinions before matters could be fully evaluated.
One of Bush’s OLC chiefs, Jack Goldsmith, makes the argument, now accepted as a mantra-like defense for the Bush-era torture lawyers, that tremendous pressure and short deadlines were to blame for their failure to properly assess the law. The torture memoranda gave seriously faulty analysis of the law, Goldsmith claims, because of this pressure-cooker environment. We should all be prepared to excuse their lapses for this reason. Goldsmith is not the most objective analyst of the question, and his adamant insistence that he was divorced from the process of giving a green light to torture appears less persuasive as time passes. But the writings of the torture memo writers, particularly of John Yoo, look suspiciously like their academic writing, in which they sought to expand presidential power and authority at the expense of the rights of the other branches. It seems more plausible to conclude just the opposite of Goldsmith’s claims—namely, that they seized upon the crisis that arose in the wake of 9/11 as an opportunity in which they could realize their ideas about limitless presidential powers in wartime.
The Emerging Reality
1. The impulse to torture had a clear motivation: Cheney and Rumsfeld were increasingly desperate to find evidence that would support their decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
The push for application of torture techniques occurred as the Bush administration scrambled to come up with evidence to support its claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda or was pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction. Two major spikes in the use of the harshest techniques occurred in the weeks just before the Iraq invasion and the couple of months after the occupation of Iraq had begun. The first spike coincides with a period of difficulty with America’s principal ally, Britain, shortly following the famous Washington meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the latter expressed concern about the lack of evidence supporting claims about a WMD program. Blair had been informed by his attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, that the legal case for invading Iraq was exceedingly tenuous and badly needed to be bolstered with evidence showing an imminent threat coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also in this period, Vice President Cheney was doing his best to make this case by talking up evidence that proved specious—including reports of a meeting in Prague between an al Qaeda figure and an Iraqi diplomat.
In the end, Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The crown jewel of his evidentiary case turned on claims supplied by Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. (AKA Curve-ball) Al-Libi had been tortured using the new techniques to secure this evidence. It was subsequently determined to be false—offered up by Al-Libi to escape the torments to which he was subjected with the full understanding that this was what his interrogators wanted to hear. By curious coincidence, as Powell delivered his speech to the U.N. Security Council, a Judiciary Committee hearing room emptied out, and the nominee then under consideration got a free pass to confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. His name was Jay Bybee, and more than a year later, the public would learn that he had been a principal author of the torture memoranda.
The new reports make clear that torture was used to secure information to justify the invasion of Iraq, but—just as experts from the military and the FBI warned—the information proved false. America’s credibility on the international stage was seriously damaged as a result.
2. The torture trail started and ended in the White House.
The Bush administration went to great lengths to fabricate a narrative under which it agreed to demands from interrogators on the ground to allow the use of harsher methods, effectively “removing the shackles” on their interaction with prisoners. But the Senate Armed Services Committee report shows that the effort to introduce these techniques dates from 2001, before there were any prisoners. It also shows that these techniques emanated from the White House and specifically from the office of Vice President Cheney. Finally, it documents a protocol that was in effect governing the use of the techniques. Interrogators would propose a full program of torture techniques to be applied to an individual prisoner. This proposal would be vetted and approved by higher ups in the CIA (including the senior CIA officials who, not coincidentally, vehemently opposed disclosure of information surrounding their own engagement), and then it would go to the White House, where discussions occurred in the National Security Council. Formal signoff occurred by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, involving her lawyer, John Bellinger. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are also recorded as having been informed and having approved its use. If the torture story is therefore a tale involving a “handful of bad apples,” then, the “bad apples” were sitting at the very top of the government.
3. Experts advised the administration lawyers that their opinions on torture were wrong and possibly criminal in nature and the lawyers attempted to destroy evidence of this fact.
Contrary to the uninformed assertion of Washington Post columnist David Broder that the “memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places,” the newly released documents are filled with evidence that military law experts and others repeatedly warned the Bush administration, and particularly its lawyers, that the techniques being introduced constituted torture and that torture was a federal crime, punishable with penalties up to capital punishment in cases in which death occurred (and it did).
In addition, a senior military lawyer tells me that he directly confronted one of the torture memo writers advising him that the techniques proposed would be viewed by most experts as criminal in nature. He insisted that the memo be rewritten to reflect this risk. But the memo writer refused, he states. Phillip Zelikow, a senior counselor to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, also described a memorandum he wrote warning of risks associated with the torture memoranda. He explained last week that an extraordinary effort was launched by the Bush White House to round up and destroy all copies of his memo. Prosecutors would probably characterize all of this as reflecting mens rea—a state of guilty mind—a realization by the torture memo writers that they were engaged in a criminal act.
(And they would be right)
Why did the memo writers issue their opinions in the form that they did without signaling the risks of criminal law involved in the scheme that the White House was implementing? It’s likely that they were acting under instructions to issue “clean opinions,” which would make it easier for the White House to act and provide more effective insulation from criminal prosecution to those who received the memos.
The new disclosures have transformed the parameters of the debate. The fallback position urged with increasing vigor by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove is simple and includes both offensive and defensive elements. The critical top note is that torture works and keeps America safe. Cheney repeats this claim at every public appearance. He claims that these techniques yielded information that allowed the U.S. to thwart attacks. But Cheney has been extremely slippery about the details of these claims.
Cheney has also filed papers with the National Archives seeking the declassification and disclosure of two CIA reports, which he notes are in a file from his office marked “Detainees.” Curiously, neither report dates from the period of heavy use of torture techniques like waterboarding—they are from a subsequent period in which information gained is probably being crunched or evaluated in an effort to prove that the application of torture yielded something useful. Critics object to Cheney’s request, but they don’t object to disclosure of information about the fruits of the program. They argue that Cheney cannot be allowed to cherry-pick the evidence as he did with intelligence relating to the Iraq War. Instead, they argue, there should be a comprehensive study of the question that reaches some results—perhaps best in the form of a commission of inquiry like the one that the congressional Judiciary Committee chairmen, John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, have proposed.
President Obama and his advisers have reacted to these disclosures through a series of unconvincing gyrations.
It is clear that Obama’s principal concern throughout this process has been that the controversy surrounding torture will prove a distraction that might encumber his efforts to push through an ambitious agenda including financial-industry reform, bailouts, health-care reform, and an array of foreign-policy initiatives. His steps have been ham-handed. On the question of possible prosecutions, Obama went to the CIA to deliver public assurances that no intelligence officers who relied on government legal opinions would be investigated or prosecuted for what they did. Shortly thereafter, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel and press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced that there would be no prosecution of legal memo writers or policymakers either—steps violating clear-cut rules about the involvement of White House political figures in criminal-justice matters. The White House was forced to pull back the next day, insisting that the Justice Department would handle these questions.
Obama insists America must “look forward.” He views the torture question as resolved by a series of orders he issued coming into office. But Cheney and Rove suggest another idea. It’s clear that in their view America is just one more 9/11 attack away from a transformation in which their use of the “dark arts” will again carry popular endorsement and provide a powerful wedge issue to use against Obama. Obama’s optimism about closure on the torture issue may therefore be seriously misplaced.
Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.
Could be, Scott, that Cheney and Rove are counting on just such a terrorist attack. More, they may be hoping for one. Even worse, they and their Neocon pals may be busy planning one, feeling sure that the Obama administration and American "libruls" will get the blame. I would not count on that, if I were them. Do they not know that they are being watched?
• A torture memo writer refused to comply with a warning about criminal risks—and exposes the truth about the policies.
• Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck.
• Donald Rumsfeld gave step-by-step directions for techniques used at Abu Ghraib.
• Torture techniques originated from the White House shortly after 9/11—long before they were arguably needed on the battlefield.
• Torture was used by Cheney and Rumsfeld to find justification for the invasion of Iraq.
• Jay Bybee was confirmed to a lifetime appointment as all eyes were on Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.
In the space of a week, the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed.
The Bush administration left office resting its case on the claim it did not torture. The gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, it had said, were the product of “a few bad apples” and not of government policy. But the release of a series of grim documents has laid waste to this defense. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report—adopted with the support of leading Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham—has demonstrated step-by-step how abuses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had their genesis in policy choices made at the pinnacle of the Bush administration. A set of four Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush era has provided a stomach-turning legal justification of the application of specific torture techniques, including waterboarding.
Rove and Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.
As public and congressional calls for the appointment of a prosecutor and the creation of a truth commission have proliferated, President Barack Obama stepped in quickly to try to turn down the heat. A commission would not be helpful, he argues, and he has made plain his aversion to any form of criminal-law accountability.
Republicans, meanwhile, bristle with anger as they attempt to defend against the flood of new information. But, in the end, Obama’s assumption that the torture debate has run its course and that the country can now “move on,” as conservative pundit Peggy Noonan urged, may rest in some serious naïveté: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have different ideas. They’re convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.
The latest disclosures can best be grouped in terms of the destruction of a series of long-enduring myths and the emergence of some new truths.
The Broken Myths
1. Torture was connected to some “rotten apples,” mostly enlisted personnel from rural Appalachia who were improperly supervised.
The Senate Armed Services Committee meticulously documents the abuses that were chronicled at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and other sites and links them directly to techniques that were approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials in the Bush administration. Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, it shows step-by-step how directions given by Rumsfeld that the harsh techniques he adopted for Guantánamo be imported to Iraq, specifically for use on high-value detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility. Among the 232-page report’s conclusions: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
2. The torture techniques were derived as a last resort, only after other techniques had failed and that interrogators in the field pushed for their use.
The report shows, however, that the effort to identify and seek authority to use harsh new techniques started shortly after 9/11—that is, in 2001, well before there were any prisoners on whom they could be used. It also shows that the effort had its origin in the White House, specifically in the office of Vice President Cheney and involved a series of people who had Cheney’s confidence.
Conversely, the report (and other documents emerging since its release) shows that interrogators in the field raised sharp objections to the use of the techniques and steadily questioned their efficacy. The team dealing with one prisoner, for instance, voiced the view that he had already furnished all the evidence he was likely to produce and that further waterboarding would be pointless. Nameless “higher ups” overrode their judgment. That group might well include Cheney, who is known to have maintained a sharp interest in this particular detainee and kept on his desk a file marked “detainees” in which he collected data related to the use of torture.
The Senate report documents a series of military officers who raised objections against the use of torture and insisted that their opposition be recorded. And today a further report has emerged from July 2002 (just as the OLC memos were being commissioned), in which the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency expressly referred to the techniques, which were being reverse engineered from the SERE program (that JPRA oversaw), as “torture” and insisted that, if used, they would not produce reliable intelligence.
3. Bush lawyers may have made “honest mistakes” in their legal analysis owing to the extreme pressure that existed in the immediate wake of 9/11, in which they were pressed quickly to give opinions before matters could be fully evaluated.
One of Bush’s OLC chiefs, Jack Goldsmith, makes the argument, now accepted as a mantra-like defense for the Bush-era torture lawyers, that tremendous pressure and short deadlines were to blame for their failure to properly assess the law. The torture memoranda gave seriously faulty analysis of the law, Goldsmith claims, because of this pressure-cooker environment. We should all be prepared to excuse their lapses for this reason. Goldsmith is not the most objective analyst of the question, and his adamant insistence that he was divorced from the process of giving a green light to torture appears less persuasive as time passes. But the writings of the torture memo writers, particularly of John Yoo, look suspiciously like their academic writing, in which they sought to expand presidential power and authority at the expense of the rights of the other branches. It seems more plausible to conclude just the opposite of Goldsmith’s claims—namely, that they seized upon the crisis that arose in the wake of 9/11 as an opportunity in which they could realize their ideas about limitless presidential powers in wartime.
The Emerging Reality
1. The impulse to torture had a clear motivation: Cheney and Rumsfeld were increasingly desperate to find evidence that would support their decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
The push for application of torture techniques occurred as the Bush administration scrambled to come up with evidence to support its claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda or was pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction. Two major spikes in the use of the harshest techniques occurred in the weeks just before the Iraq invasion and the couple of months after the occupation of Iraq had begun. The first spike coincides with a period of difficulty with America’s principal ally, Britain, shortly following the famous Washington meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the latter expressed concern about the lack of evidence supporting claims about a WMD program. Blair had been informed by his attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, that the legal case for invading Iraq was exceedingly tenuous and badly needed to be bolstered with evidence showing an imminent threat coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also in this period, Vice President Cheney was doing his best to make this case by talking up evidence that proved specious—including reports of a meeting in Prague between an al Qaeda figure and an Iraqi diplomat.
The new documents make plain that interrogators using the new harsh techniques, including waterboarding, were pushing their subjects for information that would justify the Iraq war. For instance, Major Paul Burney, a medical professional attached to interrogation efforts at Guantánamo, told investigators that “we were there a large part of the time. We were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link… there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.” Numerous other sources involved in the interrogation effort recorded the same intense pressure to secure “results” that would justify a decision that had already been taken in Washington to invade Iraq.
In the end, Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The crown jewel of his evidentiary case turned on claims supplied by Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. (AKA Curve-ball) Al-Libi had been tortured using the new techniques to secure this evidence. It was subsequently determined to be false—offered up by Al-Libi to escape the torments to which he was subjected with the full understanding that this was what his interrogators wanted to hear. By curious coincidence, as Powell delivered his speech to the U.N. Security Council, a Judiciary Committee hearing room emptied out, and the nominee then under consideration got a free pass to confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. His name was Jay Bybee, and more than a year later, the public would learn that he had been a principal author of the torture memoranda.
The new reports make clear that torture was used to secure information to justify the invasion of Iraq, but—just as experts from the military and the FBI warned—the information proved false. America’s credibility on the international stage was seriously damaged as a result.
2. The torture trail started and ended in the White House.
The Bush administration went to great lengths to fabricate a narrative under which it agreed to demands from interrogators on the ground to allow the use of harsher methods, effectively “removing the shackles” on their interaction with prisoners. But the Senate Armed Services Committee report shows that the effort to introduce these techniques dates from 2001, before there were any prisoners. It also shows that these techniques emanated from the White House and specifically from the office of Vice President Cheney. Finally, it documents a protocol that was in effect governing the use of the techniques. Interrogators would propose a full program of torture techniques to be applied to an individual prisoner. This proposal would be vetted and approved by higher ups in the CIA (including the senior CIA officials who, not coincidentally, vehemently opposed disclosure of information surrounding their own engagement), and then it would go to the White House, where discussions occurred in the National Security Council. Formal signoff occurred by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, involving her lawyer, John Bellinger. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are also recorded as having been informed and having approved its use. If the torture story is therefore a tale involving a “handful of bad apples,” then, the “bad apples” were sitting at the very top of the government.
3. Experts advised the administration lawyers that their opinions on torture were wrong and possibly criminal in nature and the lawyers attempted to destroy evidence of this fact.
Contrary to the uninformed assertion of Washington Post columnist David Broder that the “memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places,” the newly released documents are filled with evidence that military law experts and others repeatedly warned the Bush administration, and particularly its lawyers, that the techniques being introduced constituted torture and that torture was a federal crime, punishable with penalties up to capital punishment in cases in which death occurred (and it did).
In addition, a senior military lawyer tells me that he directly confronted one of the torture memo writers advising him that the techniques proposed would be viewed by most experts as criminal in nature. He insisted that the memo be rewritten to reflect this risk. But the memo writer refused, he states. Phillip Zelikow, a senior counselor to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, also described a memorandum he wrote warning of risks associated with the torture memoranda. He explained last week that an extraordinary effort was launched by the Bush White House to round up and destroy all copies of his memo. Prosecutors would probably characterize all of this as reflecting mens rea—a state of guilty mind—a realization by the torture memo writers that they were engaged in a criminal act.
(And they would be right)
Why did the memo writers issue their opinions in the form that they did without signaling the risks of criminal law involved in the scheme that the White House was implementing? It’s likely that they were acting under instructions to issue “clean opinions,” which would make it easier for the White House to act and provide more effective insulation from criminal prosecution to those who received the memos.
The new disclosures have transformed the parameters of the debate. The fallback position urged with increasing vigor by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove is simple and includes both offensive and defensive elements. The critical top note is that torture works and keeps America safe. Cheney repeats this claim at every public appearance. He claims that these techniques yielded information that allowed the U.S. to thwart attacks. But Cheney has been extremely slippery about the details of these claims.
Cheney has also filed papers with the National Archives seeking the declassification and disclosure of two CIA reports, which he notes are in a file from his office marked “Detainees.” Curiously, neither report dates from the period of heavy use of torture techniques like waterboarding—they are from a subsequent period in which information gained is probably being crunched or evaluated in an effort to prove that the application of torture yielded something useful. Critics object to Cheney’s request, but they don’t object to disclosure of information about the fruits of the program. They argue that Cheney cannot be allowed to cherry-pick the evidence as he did with intelligence relating to the Iraq War. Instead, they argue, there should be a comprehensive study of the question that reaches some results—perhaps best in the form of a commission of inquiry like the one that the congressional Judiciary Committee chairmen, John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, have proposed.
Rove’s counterattack takes a different form. He argues, using formulations that instantly reverberated though the airwaves as dozens of Republican commentators took them up, that any effort at accountability would be a primitive act of retribution. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, Rove invoked the image of “Latin American colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” claiming that any effort to investigate breaches of law would be a “criminalization of an honest policy dispute” that would undermine the fabric of American democracy.
President Obama and his advisers have reacted to these disclosures through a series of unconvincing gyrations.
It is clear that Obama’s principal concern throughout this process has been that the controversy surrounding torture will prove a distraction that might encumber his efforts to push through an ambitious agenda including financial-industry reform, bailouts, health-care reform, and an array of foreign-policy initiatives. His steps have been ham-handed. On the question of possible prosecutions, Obama went to the CIA to deliver public assurances that no intelligence officers who relied on government legal opinions would be investigated or prosecuted for what they did. Shortly thereafter, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel and press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced that there would be no prosecution of legal memo writers or policymakers either—steps violating clear-cut rules about the involvement of White House political figures in criminal-justice matters. The White House was forced to pull back the next day, insisting that the Justice Department would handle these questions.
Obama insists America must “look forward.” He views the torture question as resolved by a series of orders he issued coming into office. But Cheney and Rove suggest another idea. It’s clear that in their view America is just one more 9/11 attack away from a transformation in which their use of the “dark arts” will again carry popular endorsement and provide a powerful wedge issue to use against Obama. Obama’s optimism about closure on the torture issue may therefore be seriously misplaced.
Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.
Could be, Scott, that Cheney and Rove are counting on just such a terrorist attack. More, they may be hoping for one. Even worse, they and their Neocon pals may be busy planning one, feeling sure that the Obama administration and American "libruls" will get the blame. I would not count on that, if I were them. Do they not know that they are being watched?
Let The Sun Shine In......
• A
•
•
• Torture techniques originated from the
• Torture was used by
•
In the space of a week, the torture debate in
As public and congressional calls for the appointment of
Republicans, meanwhile, bristle with anger as they attempt to defend against the flood of new information. But, in the end,
The latest disclosures can best be grouped in terms of the destruction of a series of long-enduring myths and the emergence of some new truths.
The Broken Myths
1. Torture was connected to some “rotten apples,” mostly enlisted personnel from rural Appalachia who were improperly supervised.
The
2. The torture techniques were derived as a last resort, only after other techniques had failed and that interrogators in the field pushed for their use.
The report shows, however, that the effort to identify and seek authority to use harsh new techniques started shortly after 9/11—that is, in 2001, well before there were any prisoners on whom they could be used.
Let The Sun Shine In......
Cheney's Disinformation On Torture
We are with you, Joe! Let's let it all hang out!
It's also time for serious accountability. Without it, we can expect something like this to happen again in the future, if not something much worse.
Dick Cheney has called for declassifying memos he claims will vindicate the Bush administration’s torture policy. Now former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV urges the former vice president to extend his demand for transparency to his still-secret testimony in the Scooter Libby obstruction of justice case.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s reemergence on the political stage after his ignominious departure on Inauguration Day, eschewing the traditional handshake with his successor and the new president, is nothing if not ironic. The most secretive individual in American politics is now calling for the selective release of documents that remain classified in one of his own files marked “Detainees.”
We have also learned that a principal reason for having tortured senior al Qaeda detainees was not, in fact, to defend the Homeland, but rather to build the case for war with Iraq based on alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Despite literally hundreds of waterboarding sessions, there was no evidence developed that such a link existed.
But that did not stop Cheney.
I know something about Cheney’s disinformation. When I, and a number of others, including a four-star Marine Corps general, Carleton Fulford, and the then-U.S. Ambassador to the West African nation of Niger, reported to the CIA that there was no evidence to support the assertion that Iraq had entered into a contract to purchase 500 tons of uranium yellowcake, our conclusions were ignored by the Bush administration.
Instead, the president, in his State of the Union address in 2003, proclaimed a falsehood: “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was trotted out to assert that we could not afford to “wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” and Cheney himself asserted that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.
There is no longer any question that we were misled by an administration that had already made the decision to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq, and did everything it could to force the facts to justify their action. Cheney, the architect of the Bush administration’s disastrous national security and foreign policies, now wants to declassify certain classified documents that he believes will vindicate his advocacy of a war of choice in the Middle East and his support of torture. Cheney asserts that the ends justify the means whatever the insult to international law, the conscience of the world, and damage to the long-term U.S. national-security interests.
Cheney’s request for the declassification of material is a welcome development, but it should not be limited to his narrow request. Our country’s understanding of what was done in our name by the Bush administration depends on the release, not just of the documents Cheney has designated, but of all documents related to the efforts of the Bush administration and Cheney himself to defend the indefensible—the decision to invade Iraq despite the knowledge at the time that Iraq did not have a nuclear program, had no ties to al Qaeda, and posed no existential threat to the United States or to its friends and allies in the region.
The disinformation campaign to manipulate public opinion in favor of the invasion, the torture program, and the illegal exposure of a clandestine CIA agent—my wife, Valerie Plame Wilson—were linked events.
In their desperate effort to gather material to whip up public support, Cheney and others resorted to torture, well known in the intelligence craft to elicit inherently unreliable information. Cheney & Co. then pressured the CIA to put its stamp of approval on a series of falsehoods—26 of which were inserted into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, Cheney was furiously attempting to suppress the true information that Saddam Hussein was not seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger. After I published the facts in an article in The New York Times in July 2003, Cheney tried to punish me and discredit the truth by directing the outing of a CIA operative who happened to be my wife.
Among other documents Cheney should release is his testimony to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald about the role he played in the treasonous leak of the identity of a covert CIA officer. His chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury for his efforts to ensure that the “cloud over the vice president,” as Fitzgerald noted, was not penetrated.
As a witness in the Libby case, Cheney has the legal grounds to release his own testimony. If he feels more comfortable, he can ask permission, though he does not need it, from former President George W. Bush—and ask that Bush release his testimony as well. Because Cheney has called for transparency, why should he or Bush object? Then Pat Fitzgerald can make public the transcripts. It’s time for this coverup to end.
The American people deserve to know the truth at last, not to depend on Cheney’s selective and biased versions. Let us take the former vice president up on his demand for documents and declassify them all. Then, and only then, will we fully understand what he and his henchmen did in the name of the United States.
UPDATE: This article originally stated Wilson's New York Times op-ed ran in 2002. It has been revised to reflect that it ran in 2003.
Joseph C. Wilson IV served as ambassador to two African nations in the administration of George H.W. Bush, and as senior director for African Affairs for President Bill Clinton. He was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and was the last American diplomat to confront Saddam Hussein before Desert Storm. He is the author of the bestseller The Politics of Truth. He is married to former CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose identity was betrayed by senior officials in the George W. Bush administration.
Gathered from politico
Let The Sun Shine In......
Arlen Joins The Democrats
The consensus here is; WAIT AND SEE.
During his press conference today, what what I largely heard is that Specter didn't feel he could be re-elected as a Republican because of the Club for Growth backing a far-right candidate against him in a primary.
He did, rightly state, that there is no room for moderates in the Republican Party anymore. While I agree that this is true and disturbing, does he not believe that the pendulum must swing away from the far right and their shameful cover-ups of any scandal having to do with the Bush years; one of the most criminal in the history of this nation?
Arlen Specter has crushed Republican spirits while causing Democrats to rejoice, but his stunning party switch came with a warning label: The Obama agenda isn’t suddenly a slam dunk just because he’s a Democrat now.
“I will not be an automatic 60th vote,” Specter said Tuesday afternoon. “I would illustrate that with my position on employee choice, also known as card check. I think it’s a bad deal and I’m opposed to it. I will not vote to impose cloture. … If the Democratic Party asks too much, I will not vote with them."
Specter will be the 59th Democratic senator, and if Al Franken eventually pulls out his Senate race in Minnesota, Democrats will have a filibuster-resistant 60-vote majority in the Senate, something the party could only have dreamed of at this time last year.
But even though he promises to be no rubber stamp for Democrats, Specter's party switch could have a dramatic effect on some of the most challenging issues before the Senate, changing the dynamic on health care reform, economic policy and it may even tilt the global warming debate back toward the Democrats. The impact could extend to the Supreme Court, where Specter — a senior member of the Judiciary Committee — could be a key ally if the president makes a Supreme Court justice pick in the future.
Specter’s abandonment of the Republican Party also sets off an internal Senate shuffle in which he may leapfrog some Democratic senators on key committees like Appropriations, and it means that several Republican staffers who worked for him on the Judiciary Committee may now be without jobs.
Specter had been in secret talks with Senate Democratic leaders for months, according to Senate sources, but his final move to become a Democrat came after a recent poll showed him badly losing a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year. Specter talked with Obama Tuesday morning, and the president said he was "thrilled" to have Specter joining the Democratic side of the aisle. According to White House aides, Obama was handed a note by an aide that read: "Specter is announcing he is changing parties."
Specter said Tuesday afternoon that Obama told him he would campaign for him in Pennsylvania.
In a statement, Specter said he does not want to be "judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate." Specter was mobbed by reporters Tuesday and joked, "I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald had this big a crowd trailing him." (Geebus, what a very odd thing to say, as he joined the party of John F. Kennedy!)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), still stymied by filibusters on key issues, may have been one of the happiest people in Washington on Tuesday.
“Sen. Specter and I have had a long dialogue about his place in an evolving Republican Party. (I believe the word, Senator Reid, is "devolving".) We have not always agreed on every issue, but Sen. Specter has shown a willingness to work in a bipartisan manner, put people over party and do what is right for Pennsylvanians and all Americans,” Reid said. “I welcome Sen. Specter and his moderate voice to our diverse caucus and to continuing our open and honest debate about the best way to make life better for the American people.”
Republicans in the Senate were in disarray on Tuesday afternoon, reacting with surprise, anger and cynicism. Specter’s abandonment of the Republican Party is as significant as any electoral blow the party has experienced over the past two election cycles.
"I'm stunned ... I'm very surprised. I had no idea this was coming," said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). "I'm stunned."
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who’s in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Specter’s move was a pure political play.
“I think it's about Sen. Specter's sense of political self-preservation," said Cornyn. “[Specter] knew he'd have a hard time winning the Republican primary. He wasn't ready to quit, so he decided to quit [the party]. I think it's as simple as that."
But Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a fellow moderate, didn't seem surprised. On the national level, she says, "you haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how [the GOP] views moderates. Either you are with us or against us."
Now, where have we heard that before?
Let The Sun Shine In......
The real reason for torture
| The debate over the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists raises some difficult moral questions. Having written many times in opposition to it, though, I find little evidence that its supporters care about those issues. A sensible, humane person could say: "Torture is tragically necessary in some instances to save innocent lives, but it is a terrible thing for a government to engage in; it must be subject to strict safeguards, and it must be used only when the information needed is vital to avert disaster, time is of the essence or other methods have been exhausted." But its defenders, many of whom I have heard from, never sound like that. In fact, they show no regrets or reservations. They make several arguments: saving innocent American lives is far more important than respecting the rights of suspected terrorists; these methods work; al Qaeda engages in far worse; and so on. Far from recognizing the need for safeguards and limits on such techniques, they would give the government a free hand to do whatever it chooses. There is ample doubt whether deliberate infliction of pain actually yields useful information. But ultimately, judging from my reader mail, that's irrelevant. The support stems mainly not from desire to get answers but the urge to inflict pain on people we find vile. Its advocates make it obvious that this cruelty is not an unfortunate byproduct but a positive attribute. That's why so many people endorse inhumane methods while disregarding any evidence that suggests it is ineffective. Their hatred of our enemies has made them indifferent to civilized norms. They want to see our enemies suffer hideously regardless of whether that enhances or degrades our security. The point of torture is torture. It is not a means to an end. It is the end itself. |
in Defense and national security | Permalink
Let The Sun Shine In......
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