Jon Stewart tackles Obama (lack of) transparency

A real story from GTMO

Jeff Tietz is doing a series of posts titled “You Think You Know How Bad Gitmo Really Was? A Teenage Detainee’s Story”. There are provocative and horrifically eye-opening. An excerpt from the most recent entry:

During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. The man spat in his face and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria—places where they tortured people the old-fashioned way: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa—Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Chilling.

Blogosphere bitch-slap

Publius brings on the snark (and Big Lebowski references):

[T]oday’s Richard Cohen column is quite possibly the worst op-ed in history.  It’s truly terrible — and it’s time the Post retires his unceasingly pointless columns.

It would be one thing for him to openly defend torture.  Say what you like about the tenets of Yoo/Cheney torture, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.  Cohen, however, uses the even more pathetic dodge of — hey, what if Cheney’s right?  I’m not saying he is.  Cheney kind of sucks.  But the man asked a question, didn’t he?

Seriously though, this column is so chock-full of clichés and thesaurus-replaced words you’d think this guy was writing for his high school rag.

ReTweet: “The Fruits of Cheney”

Andrew Sullivan:

Two Americans captured by the North Koreans and about to be put on “trial” prompted this nugget from a news story:

“The rumor was that they are being housed at one of the guest villas,” said Han S. Park, a University of Georgia expert who was visiting North Korea as part of a private U.S. delegation after the women were captured. Park told CNN International that the North Koreans scoffed at any suggestion that the Americans were receiving harsh treatment. “They laughed. ‘We are not Guantanamo.’ That’s what they said,” Park said.

We may want to “move forward”. But those in the wider world – the tyrants and the persecuted – keep seeing what’s behind us. And until we face and cauterize it, they always will.

Indeed.

Dick Cheney: the film collage

by Andrew Sullivan

“We could have done this the right way”

"Implements of torture" by Javier Kohen

I missed this when it came out. It’s a must read. Ali Soufan is going to be an explosive witness if this thing ever gets to court… if it doesn’t get to court, we’re going to be in trouble as nation: no longer being subject to the rule of law.

Last week Soufan, 37, now a security consultant who spends most of his time in the Middle East, decided to tell the story of his involvement in the Abu Zubaydah interrogations publicly for the first time. In an op-ed in The New York Times and in a series of exclusive interviews with NEWSWEEK, Soufan described how he, together with FBI colleague Steve Gaudin, began the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They nursed his wounds, gained his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial intelligence—including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla—before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics.

“I’ve kept my mouth shut about all this for seven years,” Soufan says. But now, with the declassification of Justice memos and the public assertions by Cheney and others that “enhanced” techniques worked, Soufan feels compelled to speak out. “I was in the middle of this, and it’s not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective,” he says. “We were able to get the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a couple of days. We didn’t have to do any of this [torture]. We could have done this the right way.”

Soufan’s assertion was buttressed by Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who last week called Soufan “one of the most impressive intelligence agents—from any agency” that the panel encountered. After joining the Bush administration in 2005, Zelikow argued against the enhanced-interrogation techniques. He wrote a memo questioning the legal justification for the methods—advice he says the White House ordered destroyed.

This is gross

Watch Liz Cheney try to tip-toe around this program… no it’s not really torture… but wait it worked some of the time… and the icing on the cake:

“This was a good program. People are very proud of what we’ve accomplished.” (6 minute mark)

Stomach turning.

More transparency en route

Via Marcy Wheeler:

By orders dated June 9, 2006 and June 21, 2006, the Court directed the Government to release twenty-one photographs depicting the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. By opinion dated September 22, 2008, the Second Circuit affirmed this Court’s orders. On November 6, 2008, Appellants filed a petition for rehearing en banc only as to the panel’s decision on FOIA exemption 7(F); that petition was denied March 12, 2009. As the Government has now determined that it will not seek certiorari of the Second Circuit’s decision, the Department of Defense is preparing to release the 21 photos at issue in the appeal and 23 other photos identified as responsive. In addition, the Government also is processing for release a substantial number of other images contained in Army CID reports that have been closed during the pendency of this case; these other images will be processed consistent with the Court’s previous rulings on responsive images in this case. The parties have reached an agreement that the Department of Defense will produce all the responsive images by May 28, 2009. [Wheeler's emphasis]

The ACLU has been an agent for truth.

“Cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’”

From the Senate Detainee Report:

UNCLASSIFIED

Executive Summary

“What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight … is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. “

– General David Petraeus

May 10,2007

(U) The collection of timely and accurate intelligence is critical to the safety of U.S. personnel deployed abroad and to the security of the American people here at home. The methods by which we elicit intelligence information from detainees in our custody affect not only the reliability of that information, but our broader efforts to win hearts and minds and attract allies to our side.

(U) Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies. In fact, the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” cited “pervasive anti U.S. sentiment among most Muslims” as an underlying factor fueling the spread of the global jihadist movement. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U. S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat -are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

(U) 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. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

UNCLASSIFIED

xii

(Danke: Sullivan)

Some sanity from the right

FOX News’ Shep Smith:

more about “Some sanity from the right“, posted with vodpod

It’s about time we had some mainstream media disgust for this on the right. What sucks is that most people are going to focus on the f-bomb, not the lucidity of Smith’s convictions.

“We are America. We do not fucking torture.” Hear hear.

(Danke: Sullivan)

The difference between S&M and rape

An apt analogy by Saletan.

Torture as a legal, not just moral, issue

Where does this leave us as a country? We’re a banana republic:

This is the deepest and darkest aspect of the impact of Bush-Cheney’s torture program on the constitution and the future. Leave aside for a moment the policy debate over torture in the abstract. From the very beginning, that has been largely moot. Why? Because even if you believe that the president has the duty to torture terror suspects, under the constitution, he has no legal right to do so without Congress’ passage of legislation repealing the laws and treaties governing such torture. The use of torture is part of the laws of war and only Congress has the constitutional authority

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water

It can’t really be clearer than that. And the reason, of course, is the colonists’ memory of the power of the monarch, especially with respect to torturing and mistreating prisoners of war.

And Obama’s not off the hook:

[President Bush] failed to [open an investigation and prosecution of the guilty parties], another breach of the law. Moreover, any president privy to that information is required to initiate an investigation and prosecution – or violate the law and the Geneva Conventions.

And so Obama’s refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture’s cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

This is a legal issue. If we’re going to continue to be a nation of laws we need to uphold those laws. And that means there need to be prosecutions when a crime is committed. Any way you shake it, torture is illegal: by both United States and international law it is a war-crime.

Criminal behavior warrants criminal prosecution. Get on it, Obama: or you become complicit.

Summing it up

"Implements of torture" by Javier Kohen

Torture doesn’t work:

In abstract terms, trained interrogators already have decent methods for getting accurate information out of prisoners. Subjecting the prisoner to coercion, physical suffer, and mental torment can certain get someone to say more things but the very fact that the “things” were coerced out of the captive by torture limits their value. You’ll almost certainly get him to say some accurate stuff. He might, for example, correctly insist that he doesn’t know anything more. But he’ll also say all kinds of inaccurate stuff. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get you to stop torturing him.

In historical terms, you don’t look back on the Spanish Inquisition or on Stalin’s Russia and say man, those guys had some crack investigators! Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear.

 

When fiction becomes reality:

Update: Hilzoy makes the same “obvious comparison”. Her excerpts are a little longer if you need some context for either the memo’s or the novel’s passage.

Via Sullivan:

“You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him,” – Jay Bybee, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal,’” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four.

A dark day… but a hopeful one

The toture memos were released. You can read one of them at WaPo here. Sullivan’s initial reaction:

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day until now.

Stay tuned as I try to unpack and make sense of these documents. There is some feeling of relief that we now have the oncontrovertible evidence in front of us. But there is also a feeling of great nausea as well. Look what they did to these suspects. And look what they did to America.

The benefit of sunlight is that we can now address these horrific crimes. Rather than existing as a hidden rot  on America’s soul, it is now out for all to see, for all to discuss, for all to mourn. We can fix it. We can heal. It’s going to hurt, but this was the first step.

Obama has indicated his desire to restore dignity to the White House and to the United States. There’s a ways to go… but we’re moving in the right direction.