The End Is Always Nearer on the Right Side of the Street

A friend sent me a link received in one of those multi-forwarded, zombie right-wing chain mails that spammers use for harvesting emails for their lists. The email was headed, "Obama to sign away US freedom in December?"

With the forward came this plaintive request:

Please give me your opinion on this fellow - and give me some material to shoot back to the idiots sending it to me
pleeeeeease!

The link (which I won't bother to embed) is to a YouTube clip of one Lord Christopher Monckton, a former Maggie Thatcher advisor and climate change skeptic, speaking before a Minnesota Free Market Institute meeting in mid-October.

There's a climate change treaty to be signed in Copenhagen this December. "In the next few weeks," says Monckton, "unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away for ever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again."

The end is near. Again.

Exaspberated, I replied (tongue firmly in cheek):

But, but, but ... he's melodramatic. He has a classy British accent. He quoted Churchill. He kisses our American asses and says he "so loves and admires" us. He can't be a kook, can he?

Now, you thought they thought Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and defeated communism, and, being a Thatcherite, surely Monckton does. Au contraire! Monckton said Obama will sign our freedom away to a "communist world government" and once done, it cannot be undone. OMG!

Okay, there is that bit about the Congress having to ratify treaties, what with all their pages and pages of exemptions, but why should we let that minor detail get in the way of some good, old-fashioned conservative red baiting?

I mean, it's like that time in 1988 when that pinko Ronald Reagan sold out the the ol' US of A by signing the UN Convention Against Torture (the one Congress didn't ratify until 1994?). That commie rat bastard Reagan signed away America's sovereign, God-given right to torture people! We could have used torture against those Islamofascist bastards, al Qaida, ya know?

But NOOOOO!!!! The UN stopped us dead in our tracks, didn't it?

I, too, think of the US of A as the beacon of freedom to the world. I'm just relieved, as Monckton must be, that even after all that leftist propaganda about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that the world still sees us as he does, as the beacon of freedom. Now if we can only stop those lefties from keeping Miami Beach real estate from slipping beneath the waves like the Hood.

Sorry if I'm just all alarmist-out, but after a decade of the-end-is-near rhetoric from the right, I'm afraid I can hardly muster a yawn.

Do these people bathe in fear because they can't get an erection any more, and a chill up their spines is as good as it gets?

The Proof is in the Lying

Greg Sargent reports that the documents Cheney wants declassified don't say what he says they do, according to Sen. Carl Levin:

Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction.

TPM has the video.

As Stevie might say, You Haven't Proved Nothin'.

Pentagon Rejoins the Fight Over Guantanamo

Conservative talkers will be flogging this story from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of President Obama’s plan to shut down the prison by January. Past Pentagon reports on Guantánamo recidivism have been met with skepticism from civil liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail.

That might be because the Pentagon considers former detainees giving interviews critical of the United States as "terrorism or militant activity." According to a report by Seton Hall Law School's Mark Denbeaux, the "Tipton Three" who participated in the documentary The Road to Guantánamo and one of five Uighurs released to Albania wrote a New York Times op-ed urging "American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus." The Pentagon counts all as anti-American activity under the rubric, "returned to the fight."

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Torture Deniers

Gov. Jesse Ventura is not someone for torture deniers to take on lightly:



Fearful authoritarians like Brian Kilmeade and his ilk are pretty quick to sell their American birthright for what Franklin called a little "temporary security." These are the kinds of Americans who brought us the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. I wrote about the latter at the time it passed (Asheville Citizen-Times 10-22-06):

The detainee treatment question is not about the blackness of terrorists’ hearts.

It is about our own hearts. About our standards of behavior, not theirs. Neitzsche cautioned, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

Fighting terrorism requires tough measures. Tough, but smart. And effective.

Promoting democracy requires living by our principles, not retreating from them.

America aspires to set a standard for the world, a moral high bar so high that sometimes she fails in reaching it. In our post-Sept. 11 zeal we allowed our enemies to re-set that bar for us — ankle-high. Stay one step above those who cut off prisoners heads on videotape and we can still claim moral superiority. Not that the world will pay attention any longer.

Osama bin Laden wants to destroy America? He needn’t bother. We just might do it for him.

I have run out of patience with even describing these "principled patriots" as torture apologists. They are torture deniers.

Now it is about Geneva

There's one thing no one yet seems to have made an issue of from the Daily Beast report that the Office of the Vice-President suggested using waterboarding on an Iraqi intelligence official: Iraq is a Geneva Convention theater.

Using waterboarding on an Iraqi POW would be a clear-cut violation of the Geneva Convention. Even suggesting it might be conspiracy to commit a war crime. Besides, the OLC memos purportedly made the enhanced techniques legal only for use against al Qaida and Taliban members in extreme cases.

Kagro X undercut himself with his suggestion that the torture regime was comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, but his basic points were sound, as Jane reiterated:

1. Private contractors were conducting torture
2. It was torture for political gain
3. Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened

These are points to keep hammering home. But we could add the Geneva element with respect to the Iraqi prisoner Charles Duelfer mentions. The convention doesn't seem to have been an impediment for the OVP, unless they thought that by merely "suggesting" waterboarding that they would not be crossing that line (hoping Duelfer, et. al. would take the hint and act on their own).

Because of the use of unnamed sources, the count is somewhat muddy, but the citations are mounting that the Bush administration used torture for political cover for the Iraq invasion:

1. Maj. Paul Burney - SASC report
2. "A former senior U.S. intelligence official" - McClatchy April 21
3. Charles Duelfer - Daily Beast report
4. One "U.S. intelligence officer" (or two?) in addition to Duelfer - Daily Beast report
5. Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson - Washington Note

Katrina vanden Heuvel just raised the issue on This Week (still in progress).

The trick bloggers have to remember is to be careful about how they report these issues. Go hyperbolic and the argument becomes about how we say things, rather than about the facts themselves.

Kagro X nails it

Now if we can just get the MSM to report the same:



Okay, invoking "Spanish Inquisition" was sensationalist rhetoric that left him open to discrediting, but otherwise he was spot on. Jane Hamsher sums it up:

... watch Kagro X (David Waldman of CongressMatters) on CNN.com and he'll be your hero, too.

The successful hijacking of the torture debate by its proponents obscures the underlying facts, as Kagro makes abundantly clear:

1. Private contractors were conducting torture
2. It was torture for political gain
3. Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened

This cannot be hammered home strongly enough, and is the most concise distillation of the real issue at hand I have seen.

BushCo's White Whale

From the Daily Beast:

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

If I remember my secret OLC memos, those techniques were only authorized for members of al Qaida and the Taliban. And using the harsh techniques on an Iraqi POW would be a violation of both the Geneva Convention (which applied in the Iraq theater) and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (cruel, inhumane or degrading, even if they argue waterboarding isn't torture).

The deeper we go down the torture rabbit hole, the clearer it seems that the torture regime was built, not around any ticking time bomb scenario, but around the Bush administration trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, both before and after the invasion.

In today's Washington Note, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to of Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Likewise, 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.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet.

As dday over at Hullabaloo, puts it,

Over and over again, we have seen Iraq as the white whale to the Bush Administration, as their sole focus through much of the first term appeared to be laying down the basis for invasion and occupation. Everything flows from this original sin.

Formal charges may flow as well. Obama may not be able to stop an investigation now.

Ali Soufan "Snopes" Cheney

All through my reading of the Senate Armed Services report on detainee treatment (Levin report), I kept scratching my head, wondering where did Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld get the idea that they should be using SERE techniques for interrogating al Qaeda prisoners? Civilian contractors were involved, we knew. But today we got more.

From former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan's statement at today's 2-1/2 hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing (video):

In summary, the Informed Interrogation Approach outlined in the Army Field Manual is the most effective, reliable, and speedy approach we have for interrogating terrorists. It is legal and has worked time and again.

It was a mistake to abandon it in favor of harsh interrogation methods that are harmful, shameful, slower, unreliable, ineffective, and play directly into the enemy's handbook. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that was working and naively replace it with an untested method. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that is based on the cumulative wisdom and successful tradition of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement community, in favor of techniques advocated by contractors with no relevant experience.

The mistake was so costly precisely because the situation was, and remains, too risky to allow someone to experiment with amateurish, Hollywood style interrogation methods- that in reality- taints sources, risks outcomes, ignores the end game, and diminishes our moral high ground in a battle that is impossible to win without first capturing the hearts and minds around the world. It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaeda. [Emphasis mine.]

The former FBI interrogator testified from behind a screen to protect his identity. It didn't protect Cheney from incoming fire, though. As someone who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, as someone who was there, i.e., not basing opinions on written or verbal reports from subordinates, Soufan debunked many of the intelligence successes Cheney claims for his torture program. Soufan said Zubaydah gave up the names of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Jose Padilla under the standard Informed Interrogation Approach.

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) was left to angrily walk a very shaky tightrope between formally disapproving of the "enhanced techniques" and trying to stomp down any suggestions of criminality that might require drawing up formal charges against Cheney, et. al.

Soufan had nothing nice to say about the $1000 a day "outside contractors with no expertise in intelligence operations, investigations, terrorism, or al Qaeda" who interfered with his interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Soufan didn't name names, but one supposes that he's referring to "voodoo scientists" Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, recently re-outed by ABC News:

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program.

"The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts," according to Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator.

Both Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to train pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captured.

Read: SERE trainers.

But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them.

"They went to two individuals who had no interrogation experience," said Col. Kleinman. "They are not interrogators."

Soufan said in his testimony today that the contractors employed harsh techniques over the objections of the FBI and CIA interrogators on the scene:

Throughout this time, my fellow FBI agent and I, along with a top CIA interrogator who was working with us, protested, but we were overruled. I should also note that another colleague, an operational psychologist for the CIA, had left the location because he objected to what was being done.

How in the hell, I keep asking myself, are contractors in any position to "overrule" government officials in such matters? Scott Horton, chair of the New York City Bar Association's International Law Committee, suggested in Salon two years ago that "the decision to introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level." Der Spiegel confirmed that just yesterday:

[Soufan] ... asked Mitchell who had authorized him to use the aggressive methods. Mitchell responded that he had received approval from the "highest levels" in Washington. All this happened in April 2002, four months before the Bush administration issued its first torture memorandum to legally justify the interrogation techniques.

No wonder Dick Cheney's everywhere defending his little shop of horrors.

More Kafka than Kafka

Over at Kos, McJoan links to an outstanding (and lengthy) piece in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday magazine on a local attorney, Candace Gorman, who is representing clients at Guantanamo at her own expense. The roadblocks and travails are epic.

Here's the money quote:

"Guantanamo is more Kafka than Kafka."

Waterboarding - How can we justify it? Volume!

The conservative full-court press to defend torture continues. From today's Face the Nation appearance, something I noticed in former VP Dick Cheney's defense of waterboarding. He keeps insisting that two yet-unseen CIA memos prove "precisely how much was achieved" through enhanced techniques, including waterboarding. Nothing new in his rhetoric, I think, but his justification for using waterboarding is that it makes subjects much more talkative [Transcript page 4; Emphasis mine]:

SCHIEFFER: Well, Mr. Vice President, let me ask you this. I mean, I'm not asking you to violate any rules of classification, but is there anything you can tell us specifically that those memos would tell us? I mean, some information we gleaned, some fact that we got that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise?

CHENEY: That's what's in those memos. It talks specifically about different attack planning that was under way and how it was stopped. It talks about how the volume of intelligence reports that were produced from that.

But quantity does not mean quality. In March the Washington Post reported on the quality of "the volume of intelligence reports" gleaned from waterboarding Abu Zubaida:

The application of techniques such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime -- prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction.

Abu Zubaida's revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports.

"We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former intelligence official said.

Jose Padilla, the one-time "dirty bomber," was convicted of being a "terrorist wannabe." Padilla's attorneys allege he was tortured in U.S. custody and his mind destroyed.

Canadian Maher Arar was identified in similar fashion and was detained while changing planes at JFK airport. Arar received an all-expenses paid rendition to Syria and regular beatings for ten months until being released. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after two years of torture in Syria for possible al-Qaida connections. According to The Guardian (London), El Maati eventually "reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal," including Arar. The Canadian government has since apologized for its part in Arar's treatment and paid a cash settlement.

Torture may loosen tongues. It may have loosened Zubaida's and El-Maati's. It may even yield "volumes" of information, but that's not justification for a war crime. As Wanda Sykes joked at the end of her White House Correspondents' dinner performance on Saturday night, "That's like me robbing a bank and going in front of the judge and saying, 'Yes, Your Honor, I robbed a bank, but look at all these bills I paid.'"

Do you smell something?

John Bolton in today's WaPo, wringing his sweaty hands about President Obama not nipping foreign torture investigations/prosecutions in the bud [Emphasis mine.]:

Despite uncertainties here, developments overseas proceed apace. Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzón opened a formal investigation last week of six Bush administration lawyers for their roles in advising on interrogation techniques. Garzón did so over the objections of Spain's attorney general, as he did in 1998 in proceeding against former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet. Under Spain's inquisitorial judicial system, Garzón is essentially unaccountable, whatever the views of Spain's elected government.

A judiciary independent of elected officials? The Horror!

Asked repeatedly about Garzón's investigation, the State Department has said only that it is a matter for the Spanish judicial system. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder went further, implying that the Obama administration could cooperate. "Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it," Holder said. This is deeply troubling.

Troubling indeed. Deeply troubling. "[W]e would look ... and see how and whether we should comply..." Sends a chill up your spine doesn't it? Liberal fascists.

...Garzón's is far from a run-of-the-mill police investigation in which an American tourist abroad runs afoul of some local ordinance. Indeed, from what appears publicly, U.S. consular officials would do more for the tourist than Obama is doing for the former Bush officials.

Whaddya say, John? Threaten to nuke Madrid?

There is never a shortage of second-guessers about U.S. foreign policy. For example, former U.N. high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson said during the NATO-Serbia war over Kosovo that "civilian casualties are human rights victims." She asked, "If it is not possible to ascertain whether civilian buses are on bridges, should those bridges be blown?"

"Be sure of your target," my ass! Blow 'em to hell, John.

And here Bolton channels Tim Matheson from the student court scene in Animal House [Emphasis mine.]:

The question here is not whether one agrees or disagrees with the advice the lawyers gave, or with their superiors' operative decisions concerning interrogation techniques. Nor is it even whether one believes our Justice Department should launch criminal investigations into their actions...

Instead, the critical question is who judges the official actions that U.S. personnel took while holding government office. Is it our own executive and judicial branches, within our constitutional structures and protections, or some unaccountable foreign or international magistrate in some unaccountable distant court?

[Start humming the Star-Spangled Banner here.] "I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!"

But Bolton's not done yet,

... whether or not Obama has decided against prosecuting CIA agents, his decision in no way binds the creative mind of Señor Garzón, a man who has never shied from spotlights. Indeed, U.N. Special Rapporteur Manfred Nowak has already said that the other 145 states party to the Convention Against Torture must launch their own criminal investigations if the United States does not.

Behind-the-scenes diplomacy is often the best, and sometimes the only, way to accomplish important policy objectives, and one hopes that such efforts are underway. But in this case, firm and public statements are necessary to stop the pending Spanish inquisition and to dissuade others from proceeding. The president must abandon his Ehrlichman-like policy and pronounce unequivocally that Spain should take whatever steps are necessary to stop Garzón. [Emphasis mine.]

The Bush's administration's "take whatever steps are necessary" approach is just what led to the OLC lawyers being investigated, Johnnie. So unless you want to try another few rounds of swaggering and tough talk, if we really want to put the brakes on investigations by those other 145 states, the United States could just launch its own investigation. But that scares you too, doesn't it?

Do you smell something? That's the smell of fear sociopaths give off when cornered.

OPR watch

We are closer to knowing whether of not the White House Office of Legal Council (OLC) attorneys Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury will face consequences for the sorry torture memos they crafted in support of the Bush torture regime. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on "memogate" is due out soon, and may reflect badly on the OLC attorneys, say news reports. "Among the questions it is expected to consider is whether the memos reflected the lawyers’ independent judgments of the limits of the federal anti-torture statute or were skewed deliberately to justify what the C.I.A. proposed," the New York Times reports.

If so, the consequences could be considerable. So far, no one wants to admit that all the king's men signed off on what they knew was torture. Each new revelation makes denying that fact more difficult, and avoiding our treaty obligations - "the supreme Law of the Land," per U.S. Constitution Article Six - even more so.

Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan puts it bluntly:

The reason this is vital is that it gets to the core of the question of good faith in authorizing the elaborate torture program that Bush and Cheney constructed as their central weapon in the war against Jihadist terrorism. If we can see that the memos were transparent attempts not to explicate the law in good faith to guide the executive branch - but were emanations of the executive branch to provide phony and flawed legal cover for already-decided illegal acts, then we have a conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Having read the Senate Armed Services Committee report, I have already made up my mind (as has Andrew).

How is giving bad legal advice a crime? The question of culpability for that was addressed last month at Opinio Juris by Melbourne Law School's Kevin Jon Heller. A Nuremberg case involving the deportation of 6,000 French Jews to Auschwitz in March, 1942 has parallels:

Scholars who believe that the individuals who wrote the OLC memos authorizing torture should be criminally prosecuted — as I do — normally cite the Justice Case, decided by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) in 1947...

There is, however, another NMT case that does provide significant support for prosecuting the authors of the OLC memos: United States v. von Weizsaecker et al., better known as the Ministries Case... The critical defendants are Ernst von Weizsacker himself, who was the State Secretary in the Foreign Office, and Ernst Woermann, who was the Undersecretary of State and head of the Political Department in the Foreign Office...

The tribunal found that the two both knew that the deportations violated international law, and that they had a duty to object when Eichmann wrote to ask if they had any objections. They did not. Both were convicted.

Indeed, in one critical respect, the case against the authors of the OLC memos is even stronger than the case against von Weizsaecker and Woermann. The latter’s criminal participation in the deportations consisted solely of omissions – failing to point out that the deportations violated international law. The former’s criminal participation in the CIA’s torture regime, by contrast, consists of both acts and omissions, because Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury not only failed to point out that the torture regime violated international law (and US law, as well), they crafted legal arguments to conceal the illegality of that regime.

At a minimum, the Times suggests, the report may suggest disbarment. Bush administraion officials are already "scrambling" to minimize the damage.

Git 'er done

From the WaPo, Sen. Patrick Leahy:

"The apparent predetermined outcome of these legal memos raises the question of where the demand for this outcome and for approving these policies arose. Press accounts indicate that these were not the results of requests from CIA officers on the ground and in the field, but arose through pressure from senior administration officials in Washington...."

Leahy again:

"I still believe my proposal for a Commission of Inquiry remains the best way to move forward with a comprehensive, nonpartisan, independent review of what happened."

I'm not with Leahy on a commission - a guaranteed whitewash. I'm with Conyers on a special prosecutor, i.e. Patrick Fitzgerald. Give him a clearcut mission, cut him a check, cut him loose, and have him get back to us when he's done (like with Scooter). Obama can then "I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation" for a couple of years while Fitz does his quiet, thorough and methodical thing.

In the meantime, we get national health care done.

The Glass is Half Full of It

Following up on Jon Stewart's April 28 Cliff May interview:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 1
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

In the first part of the extended interview, Cliff May had an intriguing interpretation of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) "torture memos" that I had not heard anyone make before. May contends [2:10] that the OLC was bending over backward to define the line between "aggressive techniques" and torture to ensure that the U.S. did not accidentally stray over that line. They are if anything, he says, "anti-torture memos":

Here's what they say. They say there is a line that you may not cross. You can inflict discomfort. Even some pain. But if you cross this line, it's torture. And we're going to tell you what that line is, and you may not cross it under any circumstances.

In May's view, the "glass is half full" question the memos were trying to answer was: Where is the line between coercion and torture, so we do not accidentally cross it?

That is the ostensible purpose of the OLC memos. But as reflected in the Senate Armed Services Committee report, the single-mindedness administration officials displayed in pursuing "enhanced techniques" and the careless disregard they showed for their own JAG and military interrogation experts' opposition to them (for non-CIA detainees) suggests another interpretation.

Established legal methods of interrogation went unexamined. The comparative effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation methods went unexamined. Employing the "enhanced techniques" was as much a forgone conclusion as the invasion of Iraq, and pursued with the same "don't bother me with the facts" doggedness.

Physical coercion was the only tool in the toolbox, so the OLC provided similar "get tough" advice to both the military and the CIA. Days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported on CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson's non-review of the techniques' effectiveness:

[N]either the inspector general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official -- not an interrogation expert -- was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts.

"Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques -- enhanced or otherwise -- to see what resulted in the best information," said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.

As a result, there was never a determination of "what you could do without the use of enhanced techniques," said the official, who like others described internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

[...]

The limited resources spent examining whether the interrogation measures worked were in stark contrast to the energy the CIA devoted to collecting memos declaring the program legal.

Much like the energy Cliff May and Bush apologists have displayed in defense of both the memos and the legality of using the enhanced techniques. More like CYA than CIA.

Their efforts suggest that the "glass is half empty" question the torture memos were really trying to answer was: Just how much pain and suffering may we inflict on a detainee and still plausibly deny that we are committing war crimes?

Occam's Taser

All else being equal, the most simple-minded solution is the best, a.k.a. "When in doubt, hit something."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Cliff May's a manic piece of work. What's staggering is how much effort the commonsense hard right is putting into defending torture as the only option for getting information from terror suspects. It's common sense. EVERYBODY KNOWS...

The world is flat and the sun moves around it.

When cars run off the road they explode ... multiple times.

Shoot a guy in the chest and he'll fly backward off his feet (probably through plate glass).

You rough up prisoners to get them to talk: 24, Casino Royale, Rambo II, Marathon Man, etc.

Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but he let May entangle him in a twenty-minute, false-choice argument over whether to engage in "stress and duress interrogation" or nothing.

You've got a guy. You know he has plots. You know Americans are going to be killed. Do you get tough with him at all, or do you simply say, 'Nothing we can do, send him back to his cell for a nice dinner with an extra blanket,' and let people die?

May then got to argue at length over where the line is drawn between inflicting discomfort and torture, as though where that line is is the crux of the issue, because abusing prisoners is the only intelligence gathering tool in his toolbox.

And like the Bush OLC, May expends all his considerable energy trying to define - as though any reasonable, law-abiding official would - just how much abuse interrogators can inflict without violating the law, because there is no other option. Because EVERYBODY KNOWS abusing prisoners is how you get them to confess.

When threatened, conservatives are good, as May is, at putting opponents on defense by challenging them on their commitment to defending their loved ones: What would you do if it were your family member at risk?

It's a false choice, and should be called out as such.

What makes Conservatives Without Conscience ASSUME rough handling - including torture - is the best way to get good intelligence out of a captive? What made the amateurs in the White House and the Pentagon ignore their own interrogation professionals who told them otherwise in page after page of the Senate Armed Services report?

But ask them that and they'll look at you as if you're an idiot. Why? Because EVERYBODY KNOWS...

They walk among us

Dr. Ernst Janning was a respected lawyer and jurist before he lost his way...

In response to David Broder's execrable WaPo piece describing bringing torturers to justice as scapegoating, and Michael Sheuer's fear-mongering WaPo tantrum that America is "a half-baked Third World country" if it stops perverting its principles in the name of security, here's a little piece originally published in the Asheville Citizen-Times in 2005. My editors found it shocking enough that they included a caveat. They ran it because I sent them two and a half pages of footnotes.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com
Outsourcing of torture will only wind up imperiling troops, undermining war effort

By Thomas Sullivan
April 9, 2005 6:00 am

Gulfstream’s executive jets are popular with U.S. intelligence agencies, and luxurious. More luxurious than destinations their manacled and diapered passengers disappear to, thanks to “extraordinary rendition,” also known as “outsourcing torture.”

For terror suspects en route to exotic prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Uzbekistan, the tranquilizing suppositories are complimentary. (Note: extensive documentation for the information here is available by contacting Sullivan).

The Gulfstream V, tail number N379P (changed to N8068V, then N44982), Gulfstream N85VM (aka N227SV), and the Gulfstream III, number N829MG, have logged flights around the globe since September 11. Also, a white Boeing 737, number N313P. Many flights originated in Smithfield, North Carolina.

Allegedly, they’re used for extra-judicial “rendering,” a limited practice under Presidents Reagan and Clinton that’s become an expansive dragnet under a classified directive from President Bush. Apprehended (or abducted) “ghost detainees” are held in secret and off the record in a network of prisons from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan. Some go to third countries known for abusing prisoners, where, we’re assured with a wink, they won’t be tortured.

The usually Bush-friendly Washington Times has condemned the administration’s “torture doublespeak” and violations of U.S. and international laws signed by presidents and approved by Congress. Nat Hentoff writes, “One of the CIA’s jets transporting suspected terrorists made 10 trips to Uzbekistan,” where according to Craig Murray, its former British ambassador, “ ‘drowning and suffocation, rape was used... also the insertion of limbs in boiling liquid... it’s quite common.’ Mr. Murray also … received photos of one prisoner who was actually boiled to death.” (The deceased, a Mr. Azavof, was apparently not a CIA rendition.)

German prosecutors have confirmed parts of Khaled Masri’s story. Detained in December 2003 at the Macedonian border, the German citizen was flown to Afghanistan, stripped, beaten and interrogated until May, then released without charge. He may have been mistaken for Khalid Masri, an al-Qaida operative. Flight records show that Boeing N313P visited Skopje, Macedonia en route to Kabul at the time.

Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, was detained while changing planes at JFK airport. Delivered to Syria, he endured 10 months of beatings, then was released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after two years of torture in Syria for possible al-Qaida connections. According to The Guardian (London), El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. Concurrent records show a Gulfstream, number N829MG, logged a flight along the route Arar’s lawsuit describes.

Italian police investigating the kidnapping of an Islamic militant in Milan have sought flight records for Gulfstream N379P. Italian and German prosecutors have not ruled out criminal charges against those involved in violations of human rights and local sovereignty.

Eight men have filed suit in U.S. District Court against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over their detentions in Iraq and Afghanistan. All were subjected to “torture and other cruel and degrading treatment,” which included “repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions,” according to the complaint filed by the ACLU and Human Rights First.

The Washington Times quotes Human Rights First co-counsel, retired Rear Adm. John D. Huston, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, “One of the greatest strengths of the U.S. military throughout our history has been strong civilian leadership at the top of the chain of command. Unfortunately, Secretary Rumsfeld has failed to live up to that tradition. In the end, that imperils our troops and undermines the war effort.”

And it betrays those who serve honorably.

The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed an amendment by Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts denying Iraq supplemental funds for extraordinary renditions. Markey notes, “The war against terrorism is a war against those who engage in torture. If we fight our enemy using the same inhumane and morally bankrupt techniques that we are trying to stop, we will simply become what we have beheld.”

It may take Abu Ghraib-like photos before leaders who bloviate about not needing “permission slips” stop these abominations in defense of inalienable rights. How many of the prison network’s estimated 10,000 detainees were terrorists before being imprisoned is unclear. What is clear is that people from Hong Kong to London, including the Islamic world, are reading about these “torture flights” and wondering, are Bush and company fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them?

After the document releases this week, we now know for sure.

Michael Sheuer began his over-the-top column WaPo column today with yet another ticking time bomb scenario - this one involving interrogating Osama bin Laden. As I read it late last night, I thought I might find at the end of it that I'd been reading a "gotcha" piece mocking Americans who would breathlessly defend torturing prisoners. I had just finished watching "Judgment at Nuremberg" for the first time since I was a child. (After this last week, it was time.) I was shocked that the parallels between then and now were so vivid. Still, I was unprepared for someone writing in the Washington Post to audition so soon for the remake.

This is the GOP's latest strategery?

In the context of people being beaten, shackled and water boarded by order of the highest officials in the Bush administration, I'm not sure the GOP really wants to evoke the phrase "banana republic" too loudly.

"A perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm"

In a story on the CIA's decision to use torture on terror suspects, the New York Times reinforces why a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

The administration of President George W. Bush in seven words.

Ask the prisoners who died under interrogation, those abused at Abu Ghraib, those "renedered" to Syria, or those held for years in Guantanamo then released without even an apology. Ask those who lost everything to the financial crisis. Ask those who would have, had Bush privatized Social Security. Ask Gov. Don Siegleman, fired U.S. attorneys (and Monica Goodling), and the displaced populations of New Orleans and Baghdad.

Molly Ivins warned us not to let Bush anywhere near Washington. Is there anything he touched that didn't turn to shit?

Coming Soon?

(UPDATED and updated again, below)

From the Washington Independent today. The Bush "we don't need no stinkin' Geneva Convention" Executive Order is still out there waiting to see the light of day:

The still-unreleased Office of Legal Counsel memo spelled out for the CIA what interrogation practices were considered lawful after President Bush issued an executive order on July 20, 2007 that sought to reconcile the CIA’s interrogation program with the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3, which prohibits inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” upon wartime detainees.” The Supreme Court, in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, ruled that Common Article 3 protections applied to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a determination that the Bush administration had resisted since creating its post-9/11 detention and interrogation policies. Congress in 2006 responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which reserved for the president the right to define the applicability of Common Article 3 protections for detainees in the war on terrorism. Bush’s order, known as Executive Order 13440, determined that the the CIA’s interrogation program fit within Common Article 3, provided that it met certain criteria, such as the exclusion of practices like “murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming.”

Well, of course. "If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong." It's time to start impeaching the legal degenerates behind this policy.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

UPDATE: Sens. Leahy, Feinstein and Whitehouse are making noise today about future prosecutions/impeachments. Firedoglake and Think Progress are circulating petitions about holding Bush officials accountable for the torture memos and the abominations they justified.

Make some noise yourself. Sign the petitions. But more importantly, call your congressman and senators. Tell them you’re watching. Tell them you’re waiting. Tell them you expect action. Make Obama do it.

UPDATE 2: Add Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to the list above.

"A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane."

Georgetown's David Cole comments on the Bush torture memos in the WaPo:

A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading.

The memos themselves ponder whether, if the law defines a tactic as torture if it causes "pain and suffering," then it might be legal if it causes only pain without the suffering or suffering without the pain.

Nothing else needs to be said.