The Repuglicans have clearly decided that being the torture party is a winner for them.
Okay by me.
I normally can't tolerate hearing O'Reilly, but this is a good segment. JedL: Special Forces officer schools O’Reilly on torture Bill O’Reilly was desperately in search of a good argument for torture, but thanks to Cato Institute legal analyst David Rittgers — a former Army Captain — he came up empty.
Kurtz (TPM):Just a One Time Thing?
U.S. torture apologists could learn a thing or two from the Interior Ministry in the United Arab Emirates.
ABC News obtained a videotape smuggled out the UAE showing the crown prince's brother torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods, and wooden planks with protruding nails before pouring salt in the man's wounds and running over him with a Mercedes. A man in police uniform also appeared on the tape, aiding the sheik.
Confronted with the tape, the UAE had this peculiarly candid yet defiant response:
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed."The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior," the Interior Ministry's statement declared.
The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa's brother.
The government statement said its review found "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department."
This is the sort of response I'd expect if Monty Python were running a country's internal security force: Yes, the sheik did it, but it was merely a one time thing, so no need to be alarmed -- and our policeman followed all the rules, the first of which is do whatever the the sheik says. Carry on, now, carry on.
atrios: The Purpose Of Torture
Aside from providing an outlet for sadists is, of course, to extract false confessions.Thanks, Oh Wise Men Of Washington. It's always a bit traumatic remembering those crazy days of 2002 when only stupid dirty fucking hippie bloggers thought invading Iraq was a bit of a bad idea.
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.
“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.
That worked out well.
- atrios: Only Liars And Idiots
The Saddam-al Qaeda-9/11 connection was always transparently false. It was an obvious fabrication. I don't know if all involved with torturing the shit of people knew that, but certainly the people pushing for the "information" did. So false confessions were, you know, what they were looking for.
Thanks Oh Wise Men Of Washington.
atrios: The Wise Men Of Washington
McJoan (DailyKos): Leahy Determined to Launch Torture ProbeThe author, Alter, is a Village liberal, remember.
In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren't talking at all.
Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly "Sept. 10"--living in a country that no longer exists.
Thanks Oh Wise Men Of Washington for all you're responsible for.
CQ is reporting that Senate Judiciary Patrich Leahy is determined to proceed with a torture inquiry.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy said Wednesday that if Republicans do not back an independent commission to investigate the George W. Bush administration’s detainee interrogation program, he will launch a committee probe.
"If we can’t get a bipartisan commission to do this then we’ll do it in the usual way," Leahy said.
An independent commission would be preferrable, but so would a Republican party that didn't support the premise that Republicans are above the law. Witness Ileana Ros-Lehtinen:
"I’m greatly concerned about reports that the administration may have changed our policy on investigating and possibly prosecuting former administration officials," said ranking Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. "This is an extremely negative development, when we need to work together to counter extremist Islamic militants who seek our destruction."
Because you can't simultaneously uphold the Constitution and keep the country safe, apparently. And is Rep. Ros-Lehtinen suggesting that Republicans won't work with Democrats and the President "to counter extremist Islamic militants" if investigations take place? That sounds a little like blackmail. Wouldn't that be treason?
Heather Wednesday Apr 22, 2009 9:30am
From The Ed Show April 21, 2009. Pat Leahy responds to Dick Cheney's remarks and says if he feels so strongly about what he said, let him appear before his committee under oath and answer some questions.
John Amato:
Sen. Pat Leahy also wants a special prosecutor and a bipartisan commission to investigate the torture issue we've been presented with. He then took a very strong position against Jay Bybee and said that he should do the honorable thing and resign from the bench.
Leahy: If the Bush/Cheney administration told the truth about him, and he told the truth about what he did, he never would have been confirmed by the Senate. He never would have become a judge. I think the only decent and honorable thing for him to do now that these facts have come out is to resign. Resign for the good of the Judiciary. What he's done is a total blot on the and it reflects on him and the rest of the Judiciary and he should do the decent and honorable thing and step down.
The liberal blogosphere has been calling for him to be impeached, but if he was a true patriot he would step down and not bring a scandal to the bench. However, if a man can write a memo like that, then I highly doubt that is a realistic option.
I think Judge Bybee should read Digby's intense post called Torturers In Common, so he can take a hard look at what he has done.
Yglesias: Refuseniks
Jane Mayer reminds us that it’s simply not the case that 2002 was such a crazy time that everyone was swept up in torture fever and so there’s no sense holding anyone accountable:
By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.
If the FBI could see that this was no good, then why not the CIA? And doesn’t it seem relevant that among the various federal agencies, it’s the FBI that does the most work in the field of questioning malefactors to try to obtain reliable information about other bad activities? The CIA does a lot of things, but it’s not really an investigative agency at all.
Scherer: The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Fallacy
This is the sort of paragraph that can be printed on the tombstone of this entire chapter of U.S. history. From the Senate Armed Services Committee report that was released last night, page XXV:
It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiers and that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel. While some argue that the brutality and disregard for human life shown by al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists justifies us treating them harshly, General David Petraeus explained why that view is misguided. In a May 2007 letter to his troops, General Petraeus said, "Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we - not our enemies - occupy the moral high ground."
Yglesias: Ignatius: We Must Cover Up CIA Misdeeds to Ensure the Viability of Future Misdeeds
Reporting on the intelligence community is very interesting to read. Since intelligence activities are, by definition, secret, there’s a lot of interest in journalism that pierces the veil of secrecy. But this leads to frustrating situations. To do intelligence reporting you need intelligence sources. And to have intelligence sources, you need to be pretty kind to the institutional interests of the intelligence people who are serving as your sources. What’s more, since the whole thing is supposed to be shrouded in secrecy, there’s an incredibly low bar for what constitutes a journalistically viable level of sourcing.
Which is how you get things like this David Ignatius column warning darkly of the pernicious impact on CIA morale of the release of the torture memos and the even more dire impact that further pursuit of legal accountability would have. His main example is, however, pretty unconvincing:
For a taste of what’s ahead, recall the chilling effects of past CIA scandals. In 1995, then-Director John Deutch ordered a “scrub” of the agency’s assets after revelations of past links to Guatemalan death squads. Officers were told they shouldn’t jettison sources who had provided truly valuable intelligence. But the practical message, recalls one former division chief, was: “Don’t deal with assets who could pose political risks.” A similar signal is being sent now, he warns.
Lets get real here. Guatemalan security forces killed hundreds of thousands of people. I would like to see David Ignatius go visit the mother of someone killed by a death squad in Guatemala and explain to her why it is that making the CIA feel good about taking “political risks” was more important than making the CIA feel bad about killing her kid. He could do it tomorrow. Then visit another mom the following day. Then another the following day. It would take him well over 400 years to finish explaining himself to everyone.
By “political risks,” in other words, we’re talking about the risk of complicitly in mass murder and it strikes me as eminently reasonable to want the CIA to be wary of that kind of thing. And to be wary about torture, too! A lot of commentary sort of regrets that the torturing happened, but says you have to understand what a tough position the torturers were in, and so we should let them off the hook. But what about the next time a CIA operative is asked to torture someone? If he can say “sorry, boss, that’s illegal the last guys who tortured people on the basis of flimsy and absurd legal reasoning went to jail” then he’ll be in a strong position to avoid following illegal and immoral orders. But if he can’t say that, if his boss can say to him “look, everyone knows this isn’t really illegal; nobody’s ever been punsihed for anything” then he’s really in quite a pickle.
If the CIA had a sterling track record as a hugely effective agency that had made one random slip-up, I’d be sympathetic to this view. But the evidence is overwhelming that that’s not the case. Instead, alongside occasional doses of incompetence, the CIA veers between out-of-control behavior (death squads, torture) and whining that past efforts to prevent it from going rogue are the reason that it can’t do its job. As Spencer Ackerman has written:
Truman didn’t want to institutionalize the OSS for the cold war, yet the only people with experience in the shadows to staff the espionage organization he wanted were OSS veterans, and they quickly took charge of the nascent agency. These unsentimental elitists did not wait for Congress to authorize such an entity through legislation, since they were used to simply taking the money they needed and doing as they pleased. State Department appropriations became slush funds to finance disinformation efforts, bribe foreign officials and pay for three-martini lunches in European capitals. By the time Congress passed an act creating the CIA in 1949, the agency had already become a playground for paranoid alcoholics like Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angleton to tinker with the US-Soviet balance in Europe. The only ironclad provision in the agency’s deliberately vague charter was that it could not spy on US citizens domestically. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to violate that prohibition.
The CIA’s successes were meager. After numerous “missteps”–which, in practice, meant getting local proxies killed–the CIA managed to oust Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. Perhaps the agency’s most competent director, Richard Helms, kept the criminally insane Angleton on as head of counterintelligence because he stopped the Soviets from penetrating the agency’s highest levels. Meanwhile, Angleton told nearly every secret the agency had about its European assets to his drinking buddy, the Soviet agent Kim Philby. To call the CIA comically incompetent in its early years would be to diminish the considerable achievements of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In 1950 William Wolf Weisband, an employee in the CIA’s cryptanalysis division whose job was to translate intercepted Soviet communications, gave the agency’s code-breaking secrets to the USSR. The catastrophe had more than one fateful consequence: in addition to what an official history later called “perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history,” it led to the creation of the National Security Agency, which under George W. Bush implemented a constellation of illegal, unconstitutional programs for warrantless domestic surveillance. It should be clear that even at that early date, CIA analysis was a sideshow to the much sexier realm of covert action.
Men like Wisner and Helms knew that public exposure of the agency’s failures would mean the agency’s end. Their solution, and that of their colleagues and successors, was to lie. In 1961 Johnson toured the CIA station in Berlin. The Berlin chief, Bill Graver, wowed the Vice President with stories about how many East Germans, Czechs and Poles, military officers and civilians, were snitching on the Soviet empire. “However, if you knew what we had,” recalled Graver’s subordinate Haviland Smith, “you knew that the penetration of the Polish military mission was the guy who sold newspapers on the corner,” not the roster of well-placed finks peddled to a starry-eyed LBJ. The only thing more routine than lying to Congress was ignoring it. Helms, as luminous a star as the CIA ever produced, was eventually convicted of lying to Congress under oath.
You sometimes hear that we should “get rid of” the CIA, but I don’t think it makes sense to say that you’re not going to have an intelligence agency. And the CIA’s basic intelligence analysis work, though at times wrong, is definitely better to have than not to have. But to worry that the CIA will somehow feel “constrained” about undertaking illegal operations is nuts. The problem has always been the reverse; that the CIA, in order to curry favor with the President-of-the-moment, is too inclined to bend over and agree to undertake illegal operations.
The Stopped Clock: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 The Contest Resumes
Apparently, feeling that he was falling behind his peers, Marc Thiessen has decided to pull out all the stops. Speaking of the torture of suspected terrorists, Thiessen relies upon a memo written in 2005, which contends by torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the CIA gained information that may have prevented a terrorist attack against the Library Tower in Los Angeles. Mind you, he confessed to 31 plots, past and future, including a scheme to assassinate Jimmy Carter.
Strangely, although KSM's confession was to a plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Plaza Bank building in Seattle and the Empire State Building in New York, Thiessen mentions only the Library Tower... doesn't he think the other confessions were credible? Thiessen neglects to mention that these attacks were supposedly to occur in 2002, and KSM was not captured until 2003. So perhaps KSM wasn't the best or most important source of intelligence on that.... But it makes for great hyperbole ("without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York"), so... whatever. One of the glories of arguing in the manner of Thiessen is that you can present whatever horrible you want, contend that torture prevented it, and declare victory in the argument. Who cares about the details, right?
It shouldn't need to be said, but Thiessen's argument is circular: torture works because it worked. Is it better at eliciting information than other forms of interrogation? Is it the best way to get accurate information? Is it moral and is it consistent with our nation's values? Sorry, Thiessen doesn't think those are important issues, so you'll need to get your answers somewhere else.
In terms of morality, history informs us of many ways to pacify restless populations and elicit information that we now deem vastly out of line with civilized society. Does Thiessen give so much as a breath to saying why we shouldn't simply open the floodgates - at what point do moral issues become so pressing that we simply won't go there, even if we know we could benefit? The question should have occurred to him but, of course, he gives no answer.
Is this claim supposed to be reassuring, or disturbing:The Office of Legal Counsel memo states "we discuss only a small fraction of the important intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained from KSM" and notes that "intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda."So throughout 2004, the world of U.S. intelligence operations turned on KSM's torture-based confessions. And the best Thiessen claims for it is that it may have helped foil a plot that was supposed to have been put into effect a year before KSM's arrest? Thiessen's quick to blame Obama for this - he's supposedly sitting on mounds of evidence we could not have collected but for the torture of KSM. Yet Thiessen's former boss, G.W. Bush, proudly bragged about the fruits of the "enhanced interrogation" of KSM back in 2006. When did Bush or Cheney ever back away from declassifying information they believed would help their political agenda? Certainly not when giving that speech. No, don't think - you should instead accept the speculation of a former speechwriter and shut up.
Thiessen is, of course, continuing his line of personal attacks on Obama - that Obama's backing away from torture is putting us all in danger. That Obama's actions are among the "most dangerous and irresponsible acts ever by an American president during a time of war" and "Americans may die as a result". That Obama's deliberately withholding evidence that would show us all how great and useful torture is. Left unanswered: why would Obama do such a thing? If I were to speculate, even Thiessen was able to see how directly addressing that question would reveal him as an unprincipled hack.
Thiessen also suggests that Obama's releasing the secrets of our torture will prevent us from being able to effectively torture people in the future. Apparently because everybody who isn't in U.S. custody is oblivious to the fact that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and friends remain alive and their families unharmed by U.S. forces. Is Thiessen seriously contending that unless captured terrorist suspects thinks we're going to kill them or torture their children, torture won't work? Because I suspect that by now, most of them have figured out that we won't do the former (on purpose) or the latter.
This is the best part:Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship."We know that torture works because when we tortured Abu Zubaydah and then asked, "How do we know you're telling the truth now," he answered, "Because you've tortured me so much that Allah's cool with my telling you the truth." While Thiessen should have recognized this as begging the question, he nonetheless uses the claim in support of his own circular argument - essentially supporting one circularity with another. Thiessen should have quit while he was "ahead", back when he was accusing Obama of burying all the evidence of how great torture is.
If torture is so great, and is so defensible, why did the Bush Administration work so hard to distance itself from the term? Why does Thiessen still attempt to advance a rhetorical sleight of hand - under which we want to inflict so much agony on a terrorist suspect (in Thiessen's words, "help[ing] the terrorist do his duty to Allah") that he cannot take any more brutality (at which point, in Thiessen's words, the suspect has "reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship")? If this truly takes waterboarding somebody with the astonishing frequency that was imposed upon KSM, why are people like Thiessen so afraid of a little bit of blood?
- Sully: Thiessen's LA Tower Canard, Ctd.
Yglesias weighs in:
...this sorry tale further illustrates some of the problems with torture. You can’t very well say “well, we brutally tortured this guy dozens of times and it was all basically pointless.” Having ordered the torture, you now have a bunch of torturers, orderers of torture, etc. invested in overstating the utility of torture. And of course if torture worked so well on the one guy, why not torture some more people? Indeed, the whole rotten idea of torturing KSM seems to have stemmed in part form an unwillingness to admit that torturing Abu Zubaydah was pointless.
And, worse, all kinds of legitimate intelligence work aimed at trying to understand al-Qaeda’s structure were compromised by the fact that some people now had a strong incentive to keep overstating Zubaydah’s significance.
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