(1) Throughout the Bush era, a majority always opposed torture, it was only after Obama took office that a majority expressed support.
(2) Torture supporters vastly over-estimated the number of people who agreed with them, while torture opponents had a far more realistic sense of how public opinion lined up:
Sides summarizes the introductory paragraphs thus [emphasis added]:
Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack....But this view was a misperception...we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency...even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency. Even soldiers serving in Iraq opposed the use of torture in these conditions...a public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.
The Obama presidency, of course, is just when this this madness should have ended. We did, after all, hear from:
(A) FBI interrogator Ali Soufan who testified about the failure of torture to get important information from Abu Zubaydah, which he was able to get rather quickly using established rapport-building FBI techniques.
(B) Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who gave an impressive speech, in which he conclued 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."
"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."
And yet, this was when a majority finally came to support torture!
The need to not investigate allegations of criminality has become a common refrain in Washington, but there are some obvious and unpleasant consequences that come from doing so.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
As one of those who used Dkos/R2000 data on various occasions, resting a fair amount of my own analysis on the assumption that the data was real, I feel personally implicated as well as violated by the revelations that R2000 fabricated its data. That it did so is now beyond dispute, since R2000 owner Del Ali admitted as much openly in his own defense in an email to TPM. His defense is that he didn't fabricate it out of thin air, but "merely" manipulated it within the margin of error:
Yes we weight heavily and I will, using t[h]e margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well.
Although it is not crystal-clear what Ali is suggesting, one interpretation is that he feels he has the liberty "under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist" to adjust his topline results anywhere within the margin of error. Thus, if his raw data had the Democrat at 46 percent and the Republican at 44 percent, and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, the Democrat's number could presumably be adjusted by Ali to be anywhere from 42 percent to 50 percent, or the Republican's anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent.
As you can see, this would give Ali quite a bit of discretion: he could adjust his poll to show essentially anything that he wanted, from a decent-sized lead for the Democrat to a modest one for the Republican. Needless to say, this is not what they teach you in Polling 101....
Long story short, the line between a pollster who is fabricating data and one who mutilates real data beyond recognition is rather blurry, perhaps even intractably so. While I wouldn't want to hire either one of them, it might make quite a bit of difference from a legal standpoint.
The amazing thing here is that Ali actually thinks his confession is a defense!
But he's hardly alone in this sort of delusion. His company includes the New York Times, which has made a similarly damning confession, confirming its conscious and intentional decision to stop correctly identifying waterboarding as torture once the Bush Administration took it up. As the abstract of the Shorensen Center report "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media" explained:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
Just like Del Ali, the New York Times thought that confessing was their best defense, as Michael Calderone reported for Yahoo! News: [emphasis added]
The Supreme Court's refusal this week to hear the claims of Maher Arar, a Canadian sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture in 2002, is appropriately being condemned as another example of the U.S. avoiding any legal or moral responsibility for government- sanctioned torture.
What seems to shock and outrage people about the Arar case in particular is that the facts are not in dispute. Canada, whose security services were complicit in his rendition to Syria, has publicly acknowledged its responsibility, compensated Arar,and launched a criminal investigation of U.S. and Syrian officials. The United States, on the other hand, has still neither admitted its role nor held any U.S. officials accountable. And, it hasn't paid Arar a dime.
The United States' refusal to acknowledge its role in the torture of terrorism suspects even when faced with overwhelming evidence of U.S. involvement has become an unfortunate pattern. But it's heartening to see that other countries aren't dropping the matter.
On Monday, the European Court of Human Rights announced that it would hear the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen seized by Macedonian authorities at the request of the United States. El-Masri was beaten and abused during interrogations in both Macedonia and the notorious "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan. Authorities unceremoniously dumped him on a roadside in Albania without charging him with any wrongdoing.His case against U.S. officials was dismissed by a federal court on the grounds that it would reveal "state secrets." The Bush and Obama Administrations have both invoked State Secrets to stop the disclosure of evidence that may reveal government misconduct.
And last year, an Italian court convicted 21 alleged CIA operatives and a US air force operator for their role in the kidnapping and rendition to Egypt of Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric who was already under surveillance by Italian authorities, who suspected him of having ties to al Qaeda. Omar claims he was held incommunicado and tortured in an Egyptian prison for seven months. He was eventually released without charge.
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that it wants to look forward, not backward, and so has refused to examine the role of senior U.S. officials in the torture of terrorism suspects. In adopting that position, the government is reneging on its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which demands both that torturers be held accountable and that victims receive remedies.
Until the U.S. lives up to those responsibilities, its past practices and officers will continue to be scrutinized by foreign governments and justice systems. Those verdicts will cast judgment not only on the past administration's conduct, however. To the extent that foreign governments have to intervene to bring justice to victims of U.S. policies, they will reveal the extent of the United States' current respect for the rule of law as well.
Opening statements today in the suppression hearing in the Khadr case lay out how both sides plan to argue the motion, which aims to stop the government from using any confessions by Omar Khadr to any of the crimes alleged.
Franz Kafka's book "The Trial" begins "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." There follow many thousands of words describing the ordeal of someone denied the right to know the charges against him, to face his accusers, to be given a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, and so forth. We have read thousands of stories of such "Kafkan" experiences since the advent of the Global War of Terror. But we need a different kind of story now.
Murder seems to be advancing in the U.S. toolkit as a replacement for torture. Both tools, murder and torture, produce exactly the same amount of useful intelligence. Both tools scare the hell out of people abroad and at home. Both tools serve to teach a domestic audience that certain types of people are not fully people and cannot be dealt with humanely. Both tools help to advance the further stripping away of civil liberties through fear and terror. The goals of torture that the CIA has advanced for decades of eliminating a person's entire consciousness and identity, the mission of placing barbarians completely under control of the empire, what accomplishes this better than murder?
It's nice to see that even conservatives are disgusted with Liz Cheney's latest attack on Eric Holder. As you've no doubt heard, Cheney is miffed that there are attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in the past, have defended people accused of nasty crimes. Of course, that's what defense lawyers are supposed to do, but that doesn't stop Liz Cheney from sponsoring scary videos insinuating that defending someone swept up by US forces and accused of terrorism is just fundamentally worse than defending an ordinary serial murderer, rapist or corporate swindler.
The pressure is growing on the Justice Department to produce supposedly "deleted" e-mails that could reveal whether government lawyers during the Bush administration were instructed to devise legal justifications for torture.
A long awaited examination of possible ethics violations by the authors of the Bush administration's torture memos was finally released late last week. As has seemed typical on this topic, the official document raises more questions than it answers.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
Among the many striking aspects of the Justice Department's recently-released ethics report on the creation of the "torture memos" are the repeated indications that John Yoo, the memos' principal author, was in frequent direct contact with the White House and under intense pressure to quickly approve abusive interrogation techniques that policymakers had already chosen to implement but knew might amount to torture.
In reporting on the long-delayed release of the Justice Department's ethics report on the work of Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture of detainees, The New York Times on Saturday wrote that it "brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture."
Yesterday afternoon, former Republican Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr had the audacity to say, "Waterboarding is torture." The reason it took audacity is that he was at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He was promptly booed.
Instead of adhering to the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, conservative ideological leaders and Republican leaders have decided to shoot for political expediency, stubbornness, and sadism.
STATE BLOGS
