torture, photos, commissions...

On balance I am disappointed that President Obama decided against releasing the torture photos. Short-term I suspect they WOULD inflame some in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, potentially endangering American troops and other interests.

Of course, it really wouldn't be the PHOTOS that do that, but just further confirmation of the fact that the United States under the de facto Bush Administration was torturing people. In the long run I think these photos will get out anyway. Better to release them all at once and get it over with.

I'm less critical on the decision to keep military commissions. Trying terrorism suspects will be difficult. Personally I think the courts can probably handle it. But military commissions with greater legal protections for the accused may be okay. We'll have to see how this goes. But on balance, I think this is a wrong decision - less wrong than the photos, but wrong anyway.

Oh and I'm sorry senior CIA people but your agency's credibility on torture and the reasons for it are totally shot. The TIMING of the most intense torture of people like Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed - in other words, in late 2002/early 2003, precisely at the time Cheney and his crowd wanted "proof" of the links between Al Qaida and Saddam's Iraq - is just too convenient. Hey, these guys had been coming out with information under normal interrogation techniques, but would NOT admit to Al Qaida/Iraq links (for the excellent reason that there WERE NONE). If one thing has been proven about torture, it is that it is very good at getting the victims to say what the interrogators WANT them to say. So, you waterboard those thugs often enough and ask them over and over, "Al Qaida and Saddam were working together, right? Right?", eventually they will wise up and say "Yes" just to make the torture stop.

dishonest republicans and a too-credible columnist

William Kristol, who is paid by the media to promulgate GOP agitprop, suggests the GOP go after Obama instead of gazing into its navel. Well, oppositions are there to oppose, so fine.

But Kristol wants to go after Obama on debts. MOST OF WHICH were accumulated by de facto President George Bush in times of economic PROSPERITY. Bush and the Republicans hate Bill Clinton so much they got rid of all he did INCLUDING the budget surplus.

Kristol says Obama is cutting defense spending. Well that is, what is the word, oh yes a big fat lie. Obama and Gates want to reprioritize defense spending, having noticed that the Soviet Union is no more and we are unlikely to fight big conventional tank battles in the Fulda Gap. And they INCREASED defense spending (well, have proposed to anyway). Increased, not cut.

And Richard Cohen is clearly having a Senior Day today. He wonders if Dick Cheney "the old Faithful of Nonsense" is right when he asserts that torture I mean "enhanced interrogation" really stopped attacks. Cohen notes that Cheney wants two CIA memos released, two memos that "support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved."

Cohen has forgotten a few things. First, he has forgotten that Cheney and the rest of the Cheney-Bush regime weren't shy about browbeating intelligence types into coming up with conclusions that supported the Cheney-Bush preconceptions of things. "Want connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Coming right up sir! "Proof" of WMD in Iraq? Sure, and would you like that with fries?"

And Cohen ignores the fact that the CIA upper types - put there by Cheney-Bush - would be anxious to "prove" that the perversion of American ideals, the torture of our prisoners, had SOME benefit to offset the black stain it put on our country's image and soul. So with the White House wanting it, and CIA leadership wanting it, is it ANY surprise that a couple of memos might be out there saying "Hey, we waterboarded this guy and crushed his testicles and because of that, we stopped a planned attack on a boat show in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin?"

With all those ulterior motives, any such memo should be taken with a gallon of salt. And Cohen should know better.

bolton moans about prosecutions

Former Bush hack John Bolton aka The Walrus (check out his 'stache) writes today to moan bitterly about the Obama Administration not doing enough to protect the people from the de facto Bush Administration from possible prosecution by nasty foreigners.

Boo hoo.

Bolton also writes, I believe strongly that criminalizing policy disagreements is both inappropriate and destructive.

Actually, I agree. But the issue here isn't policy disagreements. Nobody wants to penalize the Bushies for supporting war against Iraq, even though many strongly disagree with that.

It's about torture. And you see, this isn't criminalizing a policy disagreement. This is going after deliberate circumvention of existing US law and US treaty obligations. Big difference.

In any case, if Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility has its way, nobody will be prosecuted. What, are they siding with fellow lawyers out of professional loyalty?

a tortured scenario

Ex-CIA agent and Osama Bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer resorts to a scenario worthy of an episode of 24 to criticize the Obama Administration for revealing the torture memos. Scheuer says when we have Bin Laden in our grasps and a bunch of nukes are about to go off in American cities, we will just have to say "shucks, hope they don't nuke my home town" because nobody will torture Bin Laden.

This fanciful scenario ignores a few things. It ignores the unlikelihood of Al Qaeda getting nukes they can use. It ignores the unlikelihood of us getting Bin Laden or anybody else as the proverbial fuse burns. It ignores the problem that information gained through torture is not always true - if Bin Laden after being waterboarded for the 37th time in a day says "praise Allah, we will blow up Kansas City on Thursday," why the hell would ANY person BELIEVE him?

Scheuer should know better.

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Also on torture, Frank Rich on the banality of evil, Bush-Administration-style.

And Kathleen Parker (hardly a leftist) notes correctly that if you have to ask, "is this torture" it probably is. On the memos, Parker writes: Most important, we can hardly present ourselves as arbiters and protectors of human rights when we selectively abuse those in our custody, no matter how compelling our cause. When we parse definitions of "mental pain" and "suffering," we begin to slip down the slope of moral ambiguity where deceit finds company among the dead.

regrets, he's had a few

At least that's what friends say about federal judge and de facto Bush Administration torture defender Jay Bybee.

But the defense is a bit feeble. One guy said, "On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him. What I understand that to mean is, any lawyer, when he or she is writing about something very complicated, very layered, sometimes you can get it all out there and if you're not careful, you end up in a place you never intended to go. I think for someone like Jay, who's a formalist and a textualist, that's a particular danger."

So the words just piled up and before you know it, you're legalizing TORTURE? Pardon my skepticism.

Look, I know it must be tough to be working in a government agency and to know you have the ruler of the country - oh and not just Dick Cheney but also the President - leaning on you to come to a certain conclusion in your work. We saw this with how Cheney and his allies in the Administration leaned on CIA analysts to come up with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and "proof" that Iraq had an active WMD program. It must have been hard for Bybee and others to resist when Cheney's bigfoot David Addington was pressuring them for some after-the-fact legal findings that the extreme measures being employed against some detainees were legal.

And Jay Bybee may really regret it now. But that's not an excuse. "Just following orders" went out of vogue with the Nuremberg Trials. If this process really went to places where Bybee felt uncomfortable, legally or morally, he should have done the honorable thing and refused to sign the memos.

Or he should have quit.

an insidious republican meme

Amid all the news about President Obama's decision to release the infamous torture memos is the insidious idea being bruited about by Dick Cheney and other Republican supporters of torture (although they prefer to call it something else). The latest is South Dakota GOP Senator John Thune, who criticized the Obama Administration, saying "They would be well served not to depart abruptly from the policies that have kept us safe the last seven years."

See, they're setting things up so that if some sort of big terrorist attack does happen, they can say it was because Democrats were soft on terrorists.

Never mind that most of the info gleaned from high-value captured terrorist types like Abu Zubaida was obtained BEFORE the "enhanced interrogation techniques" began.

Never mind the observation of knowledgeable types that torture and coercion "usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain."

Never mind that even the Israelis, with legitimate security/terrorism concerns and a no-nonsense attitude, concede that torture does NOT gain reliable information AND damages the torturers.

Obama HAS made the right call. And I'm sympathetic to NOT prosecuting working-level interrogators as long as they followed what was at the time the legal policy.

Go after the policymakers and go after the lawyers who perverted their professional morals to ofter after-the-fact justification for what the de facto Bush (and Cheney) Administration had already decided to do.

tortured logic

It's always good to see a Marc Thiessen op-ed piece in the Post because I know it will be easy to read and understand. Deep he ain't.

For example, today he is writing about what he daintily calls enhanced interrogation. You and I know it as torture. Thiessen says the extra-special interrogations worked and saved lives and got good information!

How does he prove his point? By citing one lonely memo from Bush's Justice Department. The same Justice Department that provided that lovely legal reasoning by which things like waterboarding and walling and sleep deprivation - things we would be very irate about were they done to Americans - are not considered torture also said that not only is it not torture, it works!

Well, accepting the defense's testimony as proof that the defense is innocent would make Thiessen a bad lawyer. But it makes him a good Bush speechwriter, since this is a rather thin defense for the ex-Bush types. And not even a good one.

Oh, and Thiessen at the end says lots and lots of people will die because Obama released the info, yadda yadda yadda.

torture memos

It's good that the Obama Administration has released the memos and won't prosecute the actual people who tortured, as long as they followed the guidelines. The guidelines were wrong; the people who advocated those policies are the ones that should suffer.

(Incidentally, the argument that releasing the details of torture would deter people from government service is stupid - although it might deter some sadists.)

The memos are pretty awful. This was torture in the name of Americans. And full of evasions and lies. This one, as excerpted by Talking Points Memo, caught my eye:

"You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation."

Bullshit. Sleep deprivation of the sort encouraged by the Bushies causes serious mental and physical damage to all. It is a facile cop-out to say "only the nut jobs flip out when kept awake for days on end." Talk about blaming the victim.

and for what?

Hey, you know how the de facto Bush Administration had Abu Zubaida tortured in our name? The Bush crowd said it got us valuable information and stopped terror attacks.

Except it turns out it did NOT. The best info they got from Abu Zubaida was from before the waterboarding and other torture began. And professionals in the government say it stopped NOTHING.

So they tortured and besmirched our name. For nothing.

And speaking of torture, the following six ex-Bush officials may want to cancel their vacation to Spain: Alberto Gonzales, Doug Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee; and William Haynes II. A Spanish court is considering bringing charges against them for their role in providing legal cover for the torture at Guantanamo...

who gave the order to torture?

That's the question. There should be an investigation to see who gave the authority to torture. Because it was a policy decision made somewhere pretty high up in the US government...

As Anne Applebaum writes, The guilty, however senior, should be named, forced to testify and called to account -- because the rule of law, and nothing else, is what makes us exceptional.

torture, says red cross

The International Red Cross keeps its reports on conditions at POW camps confidential; that is so that it can gain access. But its report on Abu Ghraib was obtained and leaked somehow by professor and author Mark Danner. It confirms what has been alleged - systematic ill-treatment of high-value prisoners in a manner consistent with torture, the word used by the Red Cross.

The bad guys in question all were consistent in describing their treatment. But "A U.S. official familiar with the report said, 'It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves.'"

But surely these high-value terrorists were kept isolated, right? If so, to make such consistent claims would tend to confirm the validity of what the Red Cross found. If they were making it up or were exaggerating, they would be unlikely to come up with the same consistent story...

the sins of the recent past

The Sins of Torture and Covering Up

Speaking about the fact that the CIA destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations, spokesman George Little said "If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."

Well then Mr Little, perhaps you would care to enlighten us. Because it doesn't look good. US government agencies, famous for their pack-rat tendencies, don't usually get rid of - destroy - documents and records like those videos lightly. Especially after court orders instructing their preservation are issued, as was the case here.

Face it, it looks bad. If the Agency has some "facts" that would better explain what to the uninitiated might look like "destruction of evidence of torture" or "covering their ass", maybe they would like to share with the class? Otherwise, I think we can all safely assume (even if we can't prove it in a court of law) that the CIA has intentionally destroyed proof that it was torturing people, in the name of the American people. Which is sickening. And illegal (torture and destruction of evidence).

The Sins of Trampling on Our Rights

Meanwhile, a batch of Bush-era legal memos post-911 have been released. Seems those memos, including some by the infamous John Yoo, were all rescinded because they contained "errors" in legal reasoning. Although some of them weren't rescinded until the last WEEK of the woeful de facto Bush era.

"Errors"? How kind. They weren't "errors." They were clear efforts by lawyers who were more loyal to Bush-Cheney than to the Constitution to provide legal cover for illegal and unconstitutional actions. They weren't errors, they were POLICIES.

just leave, already

I didn't watch de facto President George Bush's presumably last TV address. I didn't need to. I knew he'd be doing the full self-justification thing. And I knew watching him would only make me angry.

But it's good to see Bush, Condi Rice, Laura, and the rest all giving each other awards and plaudits. They better - ain't nobody else ready to give them anything but a one-way bus ticket to Dallas.

Oh, and they should be careful about their foreign travel plans. Attorney-General designate Eric Holder told the Senate he thought waterboarding was torture. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Holder's counterparts in other countries thought so, too. And a bunch of prosecutors. And you know, in international law, torture is one of those things anybody can grab and prosecute somebody for.

Remember ex-Chilean President Pinochet was arrested in Europe and was only let off from being tried because of his health...

bush official on torture

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani." Who said that? Susan J. Crawford, life-long Republican and experienced judge, who is the convening authority of military commissions.

Crawford didn't lay it solely on the interrogators, either, saying the techniques were authorized.

She detailed the physical and mental abuse heaped on Qahtani (who, no doubt, would have been happy to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, as he had planned).

We already know torture is ineffective, that there are better techniques to get information, and that even the Israelis agree torture doesn't work.

But Crawford also made this point about the torture she has found in her investigation: "I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."

Well said. Even if torture WERE effective, we as a country should be above using it.

pinko america haters meet obama, urge unilateral disarmament

A bunch of aging old busy-body socialist bleeding-heart pinkos met with Barack Obama and demanded that American throw away a valuable tool in the war against terrorism and anti-Americanism. They told Obama that America had to stop using interrogation techniques that renowned experts like Dick Cheney think are no-brainers to use.

Who were these wusses who are so afraid of going to the dark side to protect all Americans from radical Islamofascist terrorists, even if it means beating them until their legs are turned to pulp and they die from their injuries?

A bunch of retired US military officers. Generals and admirals.

People like retired Navy rear admiral and ex-JAG John Hutson, who said "Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that's important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough."

The technique of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough. Well put, Admiral Hutson.

Let's review this again, boys and girls. Torture is ineffective. It gets all sorts of false positives from people who will say anything to make it stop. Even the ISRAELIS don't torture because they realized it just doesn't work.

And even more to the point, torture is un-American. It demeans you and me to have people torturing in our name. It even demeans the torturer. And it puts us in greater danger by angering people in countries around the world, some of whom decide to take up arms and join terrorist organizations against a country that tortures their fellow countrymen.

Outlawing torture should be one of the first things Obama does upon assuming office.

just a reminder about torture

A former Army interrogator who successfully turned "hard cases" in Iraq writes today about his experience.

He and his team did not torture people. They used a methodology "based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information."

Some of the people, the pseudonymous Matthew Alexander said, were convinced they would be tortured, and when they weren't, decided to cooperate because they realized what they had heard about Americans wasn't accurate.

Except for the ones that WERE torturing prisoners in Iraq.

"Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives."

torture investigations

Former Justice Department high-level lawyer Jack Goldsmith suggests we not have any more torture investigations beyond the ones underway.

One reason Goldsmith gives for recommending such forbearance is it would make lawyers too cautious in giving advice: "Second-guessing lawyers' wartime decisions under threat of criminal and ethical sanctions may sound like a good idea to those who believe those lawyers went too far in the fearful days after Sept. 11, 2001. But the greater danger now is that lawyers will become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment."

Bullshit.

There are few things as clear to any non-Bush lawyer than the fact that torture was illegal under American law, under the military's rules, and under our treaty obligations. The Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo were in fact substituting "predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment." They KNEW that Dick Cheney and probably George W. Bush WANTED them to find legal justification for indulging in the "dark side" stuff Cheney so fervently advocated. They knew because they'd been told so.

Deciding to forgo torture investigations will just as clearly send the signal that lawyers can make even the most tortured (pardon the pun but it's the right word) legal argument to twist their way into a legal finding that they believe will satisfy their bosses. Just like John Yoo and David Addington did.

there is no decency in george w. bush

I'm sorry Michael Gerson but you just brought me off of my post-election buzz. You cannot write about the decency of de facto President George W. Bush without explaining to me how a "decent" man can authorize the use of torture in the name of the people of the United States of America.

Soviets torture. Nazis torture.

Americans should not torture. We are better than that.*

George W. Bush has to answer for that, at a bare minimum.

*Never mind the proven ineffectiveness of torture. Even the hard-ass Israeli security forces have come to that realization.

three examples of republican america

Three otherwise unrelated bits today redolent of modern day Republicanism. First, the report that one in four working families are low-wage, according to Working Poor Families Project, based on Census Bureau data. And people are working long hours for low wages - "an average of 2,552 hours per year in 2006, the equivalent of almost one and a quarter full-time workers per family." Indicative of the family-unfriendly Republican slant against workers in favor of investors and employers...

Second, when asked what John McCain could do to turn his campaign around, former Speaker of the House and bomb-thrower in chief Newt Gingrich said

McCain has to focus on the Reid-Pelosi-Obama machine and the threats they pose to most Americans: Nancy Pelosi's call for "harsh measures"; the Democrats' proposal Monday to abolish 401(k) plans; the plan to strip Americans of the right to vote in a secret-ballot election before being coerced into joining a union; the tax increase on the investors who are needed to regrow the stock market and retirement plans, and their likely flight from American investments; the use of tax money to pay the liberal group ACORN, which is engaged in massive voter fraud in its registration drives in multiple states; the close ties Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and Barney Frank have to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and the trillion-dollar spending increase in the Obama campaign promises. If McCain can make these facts stick, he can get back into the race.

The problem with Newt's "facts" is that they are all lies. Nobody is going to force people to join unions. ACORN collects voter registrations - some of which are inacccurate, but that is NOT "voter fraud" (voter fraud is what the Republicans do). Obama's ties to Fannie Mae are grotesquely exaggerated - and in any case Republicans are equally closely tied to the two. As for the tax increase on "the investors who are needed to regrow the stock market and retirement plans", would those be the same god-damn geniuses who got Wall Street and now Main Street into the mess it is in now? This is 21st Century Republicanism, of which Newt Gingrich is one of the fathers - lies and innuendos rather than addressing real problems because partisanship and winning power trumps all else.

And finally, this little story about how the CIA finally got in writing permission from the de facto Bush White House to torture people. They are torturing people in the name of the United States of America, the bright light, the beacon, the land of the free and home of the brave. And it is the fault of Republicans.

The above, and many more reasons, are why we should all vote for Barack Obama in November. Even if you don't like anything about him (although personally I find a great deal about him that I do like), he has the tremendous advantage of being None of the Above. We can't take more of this.

the "t" word flip flop flip

Did anybody else notice that twice on Friday night's debate, John McCain said the word "torture" in the context of our so-called war on terrorism?

So McCain, who opposed the Bush policy on torture before he supported it, now apparently opposes it again. Is that a flip flop flip?