I got pulled over for speeding in Texas yesterday and the officer looked like the kind of guy who dreamed about using his taser. So when he asked for my license and registration, I slowly got them out and handed them over.
Have you heard of Ishmael? He is the bogeyman of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
In his column today, Cohen says that Ishmael, a fictionalized "terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything you want" who the U.S. will capture one day, won't talk because the Obama administration has outlawed the use of waterboarding and other abusive "enhanced" interrogation techniques.
In the wake of the latest blow to those who favor America's torture policy, their rhetorical ground for approving it has shrunk to a downright claustrophobic space. As it turns out, this development is not confining but downright liberating.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.
There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: "All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."
Three weeks ago at a Baptism party in Virginia, Prince William County police tasered the grandfather of the boy being Baptized. Here is a local news report on the incident:
The grandfather was tased multiple times for the crime of being drunk on private property while trying to show his I.D. Tasering has become routine. Cop thinks you're being mouthy: you're tased. If the charges are later dropped, which they often are, the tasing was your punishment for the crime of not being deferential enough. An internal investigation concluded procedures were followed.
A New York mom was tasered in front of her kids because she questioned why she was being ticketed for driving with a cell phone when she didn't have one. She filed suit this week. Take a look at the video:
In this case our "heroic and manly" officer, embarrassed at his own mistake, tries to save face by tasering the mom in front of her crying kids. All charges against her have been dismissed and police are conducting an internal investigation to see if they can find a way to justify what happened.
In Michigan, two teenage boys died this spring in separate incidents. These and many other cases are detailed inside.
Michael Vick, the football player who's all over the news, should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.
It's Not So Much That We're Sadists, More That We Trust The Wrong People
The following graphic from The Economist caught my attention:
Showing that only a handful of countries have more people willing to endorse torture--we're neck-and-neck with Egypt, while Nigeria, India, Turkey and South Korea are the only countries with substantially more pro-torture sentiment the US.
And so I went back to the report it's based on, World Public Opinion on Torture (pdf), from worldpublicopinion.com. It has a more nuanced, though less graphic chart showing that most support for torture is limited to terrorists in the "ticking time-bomb" scenario--an exceeding rare situation. It presents a less harrowing picture of the US, but still a troubling one. Chart on the flip, with more info.
Nationally Renowned Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law and Appoint Prosecutor to Investigate Allegations of Torture and Other Serious Crimes
SALT LAKE CITY - Several prominent Americans, including authors, artists, legal experts, and renowned voices of conscience, today transmitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and civil liberties committed by former government officials and others. The signatories to the letter are:
If Attorney General Eric Holder creates a special prosecutor for torture but forbids him or her to prosecute the lawyers who facilitated torture or the top officials who ordered it, proposing to go after only torturers who exceeded the limitations outlined in the lawyers' memos, what are the risks?
It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick writes at Newsweek. Only problem is, experts are virtually unanimous: they're utterly wrong. Torture doesn't work to extract information quickly. In fact, it doesn't work to extract reliable information at all. Dahlia gets into all that in her Newsweek piece, as well as the rather pointed observation that Bauer knows what he's doing is illegal, and expects to pay a price for it:
that is the real source of his heroism-to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment.
All in all, she does a very good job of hitting the high notes in the crazy world of taking "24" as blue-print for fighting terror.
But there is another TV show that actually does provide some valuable insight into combating terrorism, the CBS show about FBI profilers, Criminal Minds. The premise of profiling is quite simple: to catch a criminal, you have to know how to think like a criminal. And not just any criminal, but the particular criminal that committed the particular crime you're trying to solve. Profilers are most famous for their work with serial killers, but profiling can be applied to a much wider range of crimes, including those that are political. A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.
There's a deep irony here: On the one hand, conservatives are utterly horrified at the very thought of trying to understand the terrorists who attacked us. So horrified, they can't even focus on what it means. At one point, Karl Rove mocked liberals, saying, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
Awhile back, Digby wrote she feels the torture debate slipping away. I'd like to try and put this in context. This was always going to be tough. It is a fight worth fighting, but nowhere in the world has the still potent previous ruling order ever rolled over and taken their lumps for the crimes they committed while in power without a massive fight. While we may make references to Nuremburg, the most important difference there was that the Nuremburg trials were an act of imposing international law on Germany and Japan after conquering them. This is an attempt to have domestic law enforcement mechanisms go after the leaders of the previous government for their official policy. In the US, I don't believe such a thing has been done. Worldwide, it isn't so common either.
Watergate is not an apt comparison either. Nixon's motivies were clearly about personal advancement. He wasn't ordering buildings firebombed and journalists murdered to "protect" America, he was cheating in the competitive game of politics. Further, he acted guilty and had been stupid enough to tape himself. The war crimes of the Bush Administration exist in a different realm, because they mostly lack a personal benefit motive on the part of the players involved. They are still all over television brazenly defending what they did and attacking Obama for not continuing all of it. It is still possible for them to claim all this was done to defend the nation, for the greater good and so on. Nixon's claims of this sort were not credible. For whatever reason, time and again personal failings bring down the scandal avalanche in a way that other illegality does not. No doubt part of this is the pernicious US domestic news media, but not all of it. People just seem to viscerally loathe bright line personal corruption in a way that makes, say, $90,000 in a freezer a much bigger deal than 90,000 (or 900,000) dead innocent Iraqi civilians. It's a serious challenge for the long term viability of democracy.
We've heard of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, and maybe even Jay Bybee. Some of us recall John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and even David Addington. William Haynes, Stephen Bradbury, and Douglas Feith occasionally make the news. If I had any say about it all 40 of these facilitators of torture would be universally known -- plus the eight more that readers of this article will call to my attention and angrily accuse me of trying to cover for by only being aware of 40. I would also make universally known the fact that two of the worst now work for President Barack Obama.
(Remarks at Torture Accountability Action Day rally in Washington, D.C., June 25, 2009 -- video of this and other speeches at AfterDowningStreet.org)
Have you ever held a little baby in your arms? Raise your hand if you have. A toddler is as delicate and precious as a baby, but able to move around and get hurt. Bigger kids can move faster and farther. Our instincts should be to protect them.
I was reading yesterday about a boy who was probably 12 years old when our nation imprisoned him in 2002. We held him in Afghanistan, but I don't mean "held" in the sense in which one lovingly holds a baby. We put a hood on him, stripped him, shackled him and shoved him down stairs. We brought him to Guantanamo, kicked him, beat him, broke his nose, pepper sprayed him, and deprived him of sleep for many days. In 2003 he tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall.
Thursday, June 25, 2009, has been designated Torture Accountability Action Day by a large coalition of human rights groups planning rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.'s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.
http://accountability4torture.com
Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; Tampa, FL; Philadelphia, PA; and Anchorage, AK, with details available online:
http://tortureaccountability.w...
The evidence for the necessity to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the use of torture continues to grow. Light is being shed, not only on the acts of torture, but also on the indiscriminate and wantonly careless manner in which detainees were designated as such "high value" that they should be considered appropriate subjects for torture interrogation techniques.
On Tuesday, June 16th, the Washington Post reported (CIA Mistaken on 'High-Value' Detainee, Document Shows) that CIA documents confirm the Bush administration was mistaken about Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah being a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.
The Post report confirmed what Brent Mickum, one of Abu Zubaydah's lawyers, told a torture accountability forum on May 30th, that "Abu Zubaydah was never even a member of al-Qaeda much less a high-level member." Nevertheless, Zubaydah, a Palestinian, was held at a secret CIA facility after his capture in Pakistan in March 2002 and was subjected 83 times to waterboarding.
Mickum on his client Abu Zubaydah at torture accountability forum May 30th:
Mickum wrote about these mistakes by the Bush administration in a March 30th article "The Truth About Abu Zubaydah" published in the British newspaper Guardian.
The facts surrounding the handling and treatment of Abu Zubaydah that have so far come to light raise enormous doubts about Dick Cheney's assertions that the techniques he authorized were used sparingly, only on "high-value" suspects and yielded positive results. Closer to the truth is that the use of these torture techniques was reckless, in most cases based on implausible and mistaken information, and may involve a cover-up by the OLC.
This week Random Lenghts News published a story I wrote on the emerging evidence about the role of torture in producing phony evidence for the Iraq War, and reality of how deeply entwined we are in the modern practice of torture. I've covered some of this on Open Left before, but I felt this telling of the story was well worth sharing.
Torturing Truth To Get To War?
"I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions." -- Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), speech to the US Senate, June 9. 2009.
For more than a month now, former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on a media blitz pushing the cause of torture under a more sanitized name. At the same time, more and more holes have been poked in his rosy view of the effectiveness of physical and psychological coercion. There's even evidence that getting bad intelligence to justify invading Iraq may have been part of the point, almost from the very beginning.
On April 22, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) released a report, "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," which concluded that harsh treatment "increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies." It also included testimony that torture was used in an attempt to establish a non-existent operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda. On May 13, Ali Soufan, formerly a top FBI interrogator, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture and borderline torture) "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."
That same day, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, wrote in the Washington Note, "What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."
We've been lobbying the Department of Justice all these months without realizing that the key to justice lay in the Department of the Interior, and specifically in the National Park Service, which has told activist Steve Lane he will be prosecuted if he attempts to demonstrate waterboarding at Thursday's anti-torture rally in Washington, D.C. The permit for the rally reads "Waterboarding exhibit will not be allowed for safety reasons."
Sometimes, during a tsunami of bad news, it's nice to come up for a breath of encouraging air. The only way to do that this week that I know of is to read a beautiful 42-page order by a judge (PDF). Usually such things don't strike me as beautiful, but this one says that leading torture lawyer John Yoo can be sued in court by one of his victims. It also says that his arguments for immunity are a load of crap, his arguments for the legality of torture are at least plausibly as fetid a pile of feces as they appear to the naked eye, and the treatment received by Jose Padilla is rather glaringly in conflict with our laws, basic standards of decency, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us and warned against sacrificing our rights on the temple of war. Here's an analysis of exactly how well thought out (not just beautiful) this order is, and how very likely it is to withstand challenge.
Torture is neither new nor peripheral to American foreign policy, historian Alfred McCoy reminds us.
In 1972, fledgling historian Alfred McCoy published one of the most shocking exposés of an exposé-filled decade, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented decades of cooperative relationships between the CIA and drug dealers, beginning with deals that allowed the almost-dead heroin trade to revive after WWII, and culminating in the role of the CIA in the drug trade surrounding the Vietnam War, which lead to the addiction of tens of thousands of US troops. The CIA tried-and failed-to have the book suppressed. A revised, updated and expanded version, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade was published in 2003.
One thing, at least, could be said in the CIA's defense: McCoy never claimed that the CIA set out to promote the global drug trade. It was simply a byproduct of how it chose to "fight Communism." But this could not be said about his subsequent investigation into the CIA's role in developing torture techniques, the subject of his 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror . The CIA's development of novel torture techniques was intentional, deliberate, and took place over more than a decade at enormous cost, after which its methods were shared with authoritarian allies around the world.
McCoy previewed his findings in a 2004 article for TomDispatch, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib", an excerpt of which I'll present on the flip. It's safe to say that no critic has thought harder and studied more intently the hidden role and hidden costs of torture in modern American history.
Last Sunday, TomDispatch published a new article by McCoy, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture" that throws a chilling historical light on Obama's ongoing efforts to magically make torture disappear. Real change, of course, would mean putting an end to this nearly 60-year history of US involvement in modern torture. Instead, McCoy explains how Obama is simply preparing us for more of the same sordid history.
I want my colleagues and the American public to know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions.
The speech goes further than President Obama's and Russ Feingold's and Carl Levin's calls on Cheney's lies in two ways. First, those other calls focused on whether the documents Cheney wants declassified actually say what he claims they say; Whitehouse focused on whether Cheney's more basic claims about torture are true. And second, Whitehouse here focuses not on whether we needed waterboarding to get intelligence (Obama, for example, said, "the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques -- which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques -- doesn't answer the core question, which is: Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?), but whether we actually got any useful intelligence from the methods at all.
But for me, even more important was the sentiment of patriotic indignation, exquisitely expressed in relentlessly thorough logic, and culminating in lead quote above, toward the end of the speech carrying with it the accumulated weight of the various key falsehoods Whitehead had knocked down the course of his speech. This was a masterful conclusion to a compelling presentation in which Whitehouse framed the issue of torture in terms of values, not just in the abstract, but in terms of lived history confronting threats far more dangerous to our survival as a nation. This speech clearly defined for one and all what a progressive perspective on torture looks like.
It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick 
On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
