Today's report that the CIA possesses videotapes of interrogations of alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh in a secret prison in Morocco is renewing attention to the government's abusive interrogations practiced in secret prisons around the world as part of its "war on terror." But U.S. officials are already saying that the tapes, which have not been publicly released, don't actually show any abuse.
"The tapes record a guy sitting in a room just answering questions," a U.S. official told the Associated Press, which broke the story.
That may be true. But even if the two videos and one audiotape of Bin al shibh's interrogation in Morocco show largely benign interrogations, that shouldn't distract attention from the fact that we know that many of the videotapes that the CIA did successfully destroy in 2005 documented serious abuse. Those destroyed tapes include 92 interrogation videos of two other alleged al Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, both of whom were subjected by CIA operatives to a form of torture known as waterboarding - a controlled drowning intended as a death threat. Abu Zubaydah, we know from Justice Department memos and the diligent blogger Marcy Wheeler, was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 alone.
And as Wheeler aptly points out today, we don't know what parts of those interrogations were not videotaped in that Moroccan prison, or elsewhere. (The AP has a helpful timeline of BinalShibh's custody in various CIA "black sites" here.) The former British captive Binyam Mohamed, Wheeler notes, has claimed that he was brutally tortured for months in that same Moroccan prison around the same time.
The latest set of tapes was accidentally discovered in 2007, tucked under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, the AP reported today. The U.S. government twice told a federal judge that they did not exist.
Justice Department prosecutor John Durham is already investigating whether destroying the Zubaydah and al-Nashiri tapes was illegal. He's now also probing why the Binalshibh interrogation tapes were never disclosed. Durham is also tasked with a preliminary investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law by torturing, threatening and otherwise abusing terror suspects under their control. He has yet to release any of his findings.
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.
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.
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.
According to Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator, waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" procedures actually caused a key Al Qaeda operative to clam up, not provide actionable intelligence as former Vice President Dick Cheney and others have claimed.
Students at Stanford stood still as they listened to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice speak. As the scholars pondered the words of the prominent woman who presented her case for waterboarding, many mused; "Is it Richard Nixon, or Condoleezza Rice? Which person thinks a President is above the law?" One might wonder. Those who viewed a video taped classroom conversation with Secretary Rice, today express astonishment as well. In her defense for actions she took to advocate for this extreme interrogation techniques Condoleezza Rice both blamed her former boss, George W. Bush and justified his decision.
"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
In my analysis of Bybee's reliance on the use of the CIA's interrogation tactics within a training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), I recalled a couple written anecdotes on the subject I had read from books written by ex-SAS (British special forces, analogous to Delta Force) members in the 1990s. I've excerpted them below just to elucidate a couple points I was making in the previous entry.
In part 1, I outlined four categories of problems with Bybee's reasoning. In this piece, I'd like to tackle his (and CIA's) reliance on the use of these tactics in other contexts, most frequently as part of military counter-interrogation training.
In the first portion of the memo, pages 1-6, Bybee outlines some evidence CIA has provided him on the use of these techniques, in terms of the potential harm they cause. The premise of this is sound, but it falls down in Bybee and CIA's reliance on it, because in fact the evidence they're able to gather is far too scattered and in most cases, not nearly applicable enough for any surety as to the safety and harmlessness of these tactics.
Bybee primarily relies on the experience of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, where (voluntary members of the military) are put through a POW-camp escape training exercise, involving recapture and subsequent interrogation by a hostile government power. Inside an analysis of Bybee's use of this.
Digby and DDay have been covering the growing calls for the impeachment of 9th Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee, the author of this OLC memorandum endorsing the legality of the CIA's proposed interrogation tactics on Abu Zubaydah.
I'd like to make my own run at this horrendous document. Many particular passages have been repeatedly quoted, but I don't want to lose the burning forest for the fetid, rotting trees on this one. The thesis of the document is deeply flawed, resting on numerous obviously ridiculous unstated assumptions.
There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract "information" from detainees in that and other facilities.
In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.
Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, "the world" did not "change" on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a "very different country" on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen's (and others) claim.
Amnesty International is starting an ad campaign in UK cinemas on May 9 showing a 90 second ad about water. Well, at about the 50 second mark it turns into a film about the horrors of waterboarding.
Bill Richardson is goal-oriented, assertive and confident. He has served as a Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy and is in his second term as Governor of New Mexico after a landslide re-election victory in November 2006.
Here are five of many reasons why I believe Richardson possesses the experience, vision and leadership skills to be a great President:
1. A Bright Vision for America
2. An Ironclad Promise to Promptly End the U.S. Occupation of Iraq
3. A Bold Agenda To Address The Pressing Challenges Facing Our Nation and Planet
4. The White House and A Landslide Victory for Democrats Nationwide in 2008
5. Comprehensive Immigration Reform In Accordance With the Values Upon Which Our Country Was Founded
Water-boarding is term that describes strapping an individual to a board, with a towel pulled tightly across his face, and pouring water on him or her to cut off air and simulate drowning.
When asked directly last week whether he thought waterboarding is constitutional, Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey was evasive. As noted by NPR, Mukasey "danced around the issue of whether waterboarding actually is torture and stopped short of saying that it is." "If it amounts to torture," Mukasey said carefully, "then it is not constitutional."
Waterboarding is torture, and anyone who is unwilling to identify it as such is not qualified to be the chief legal officer of the United States of America. If I were in the U.S. Senate, I would vote against Mukasey unless he denounces such specific forms of torture.
What about the Democrats in the U.S. Senate and other Democratic Presidential candidates? Will they oppose Mukasey unless he denounces the use of torture by our government?
STATE BLOGS
There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract "information" from detainees in that and other facilities.