Topic+2

==Topic 2: It is acceptable that the US should continue to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" like isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, in its defense of the nation from terrorist attacks. ==

=The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment= Wikipedia This iis an [|international human rights instrument], under the review of the [|United Nations], that aims to prevent [|torture] around the world/ The Convention requires states to take effective measures to prevent torture within their borders, and forbids states to return people to their home country if there is reason to believe they will be tortured. The text of the Convention was adopted by the [|United Nations General Assembly] on 10 December 1984[|[1]] and, following ratification by the 20th state party,[|[2]] it came into force on 26 June 1987.

Definition of torture

 * Article 1** of the Convention defines torture as:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Actions which fall short of torture may still constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 16.

Ban on torture and cruel and degrading treatment
Because it is often difficult to distinguish between cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and torture, the Committee regards Article 16's prohibition of such treatment as similarly absolute and non-derogable.[|[6]] The other articles of part I lay out specific obligations intended to implement this absolute prohibition by preventing, investigating and punishing acts of torture.[|[6]]
 * Article 2** of the convention prohibits torture, and requires parties to take effective measures to prevent it in any territory under its jurisdiction. This prohibition is absolute and non-derogable. "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever"[|[5]] may be invoked to justify torture, including war, threat of war, internal political instability, public emergency, terrorist acts, violent crime, or any form of armed conflict.[|[6]] Torture cannot be justified as a means to protect public safety or prevent emergencies.[|[6]] Neither can it be justified by orders from superior officers or public officials.[|[7]] The prohibition on torture applies to all territories under a party's effective jurisdiction, and protects all people under its effective control, regardless of citizenship or how that control is exercised.[|[6]] Since the Conventions entry into force, this absolute prohibition has become accepted as a principle of [|customary international law].[|[6]]

Ban on //refoulement//

 * Article 3** prohibits parties from returning, extraditing or //refouling// any person to a state "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture".[|[8]] The Committee against Torture has held that this danger must be assessed not just for the initial receiving state, but also to states to which the person may be subsequently expelled, returned or extradited.[|[9]]

**Torture? No. Except . . .**
By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Friday, May 1, 2009

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility. Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen. The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the "torture memos" noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist "chatter" had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22. Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space -- torture is to empty the word of any meaning.) Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

[|How Cheney Made America A Torture Nation]
By Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, Atlantic Online, 01 Jan 2010 03:24 pm

The comparison with Richard Reid is, of course, instructive. The Bush administration treated the shoe-bomber exactly as the Obama administration has treated the pantie-bomber - and convicted him the way no one has yet convicted anyone directly connected to 9/11. But after years of banging the drum for torture as a routine tool for US government, and accountable only to one supreme leader, the right has now shifted the goalposts again. The ticking time bomb is now an ancient criterion. Torture, for Cheney, is about treating every seized terror suspect as an intelligence target, and the entire system he created - of lawless prisons, disappearances, black sites, freezing cells, stress position shackles, upright coffins, neck-braces to slam prisoners repeatedly against plywood walls, waterboards, sensory deprivation techniques, dietary manipulation, forced-feeding, threats against relatives and children - was designed for torture as its end... Far, far more than thirty people were subjected to the torture techniques Cheney borrowed from the Gestapo, the Communist Chinese and the Khmer Rouge. Hundreds were treated this way at Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Camp Nama (under the authority of Stanley McChrystal), Bagram and in many secret sites taken over from the KGB (yes, I'm not making this up!) in Eastern Europe. But here's the critical line: "You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks." That's the line that defines torture. If you can impose enough mental or physical pain or suffering to //make// someone tell you something you want to hear you have //forced// them to say something, true or false, to get the torture to stop. The fact of the matter is: this is illegal under any rational understanding of domestic and international law. In fact, domestic and international law mandates that governments do not even contemplate such measures, especially in extreme circumstances. So National Review is urging law-breaking at the very highest levels of government. They are urging an extra-legal, extra-constitutional apparatus to seize and torture terror suspects outside of ticking time bomb scenarios as a matter of first resort. And yes, if they are advocating it against the pantie-bomber //now//, days after his capture, it is a first resort. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up. Stephen Hayes, Cheney's stenographer along with Mike Allen, even argued on Fox News that Cheney's assault on the president as an alien threat to the American people was too soft and wanted to "squeeze" the pantie-bomber for more info. These are neo-fascist sentiments, empowering lawless violence by the government, justified solely by fear of terror incidents. Whatever else junking the entire history of Western jurisprudence and the laws of war is, it is not in any way conservative. It is a radical assault on one of the central pillars of our civilization... The principled position on the right with respect to torture is that opposing it is honorable, but of course supporting it is essential. The debate on the right is all but over. If you believe in torture, support the GOP. That's what conservatism is now all about.

George Washington: No Torture on My Watch
Posted By __Scott Horton, Anti-War.com,__ December 24, 2007 @ 11:25 am //“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”// - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775 Washington... issued an order to his troops regarding prisoners of war: //“‘Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands,’ he wrote. In all respects the prisoners were to be treated no worse than American soldiers; and in some respects, better. Through this approach, Washington sought to shame his British adversaries, and to demonstrate the moral superiority of the American cause.”// In the //worst// of times – when foreign troops literally occupied American soil, torturing and murdering American patriots – and few believed that the cause of the revolution could ultimately win against the might of the British Empire, the first Commander in Chief of the U.S.A. set the precedent that this society is to lead even our enemies by “[|benignant sympathy of [our example]] [6].” To win the war against the occupying army of Redcoats, the American revolutionaries needed right on their side.

=U.S. Policy for Assassination of Americans Sparks Outrage=

By Max Fisher on Atlantic.Wire.com, February 04, 2010 4:11pm A 1981 [|executive order] signed by President Reagan explicitly bans assassination by the U.S. government. So it caused considerable controversy when, in 2002, President Bush articulated a policy, as part of what he called the "global war on terror," allowing the CIA to assassinate not just terrorists but [|Americans involved in terrorism]. That controversy is repeating this week: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair [|told Congress] that the government can target Americans it believes to be terrorists. Blair said criteria includes "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans."

Commentators are furious at the admission, citing the illegality of assassination as well as the policy's total disregard for due process. Given that many of these pundits are liberal, some are especially outraged that President Obama would continue what they see as one of the Bush administration's most pernicious policies.
 * **So Much For Due Process** [|Spencer Ackerman examines] the implications: "The so-called assassinations ban isn't ironclad, but still, this appears to be a fairly low standard for killing an American citizen." [|He later scoffed], "There's A Secret Part Of The Constitution Where The Government Gets To Assassinate You If It Thinks You're Dangerous [...] I missed the Constitutional amendment where there's this due-process opt-out."
 * **Obama Forbids Torture But Allows This?** National Review's [|Daniel Foster asks], if the White House supports assassinating American terrorists, shouldn't torturing foreign terrorists be less objectionable? "The point is that, if there are circumstances in which it is permissible for a government to kill American citizens for plotting acts of war against the United States, then surely there must be circumstances in which it is permissible to do a number of things //short// of killing them."

[|Hill Panel Reviewing CIA Tactics]
Investigators Examining Interrogations, Legal Advice By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, May 10, 2009

When the Justice Department said seven years ago that CIA interrogators at a secret prison in Thailand could make a suspected al-Qaeda leader fear he was drowning, it prescribed precise limits: Water could be poured from a cup or small watering can onto a saturated cloth covering his mouth and nose, inhibiting breathing for up to 40 seconds. It could be repeated, after allowing three or four full breaths, for up to 20 minutes. But when the technique was employed on Abu Zubaida and later on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al-Qaeda planner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the interrogators in several cases applied what the CIA's Office of Inspector General described in a secret 2004 report as "large volumes of water" to the cloths, explaining that their aim was to be more "poignant and convincing," according to a recently declassified Justice Department account... Portions of the CIA inspector general report that have been made public and an account of detainees' experiences by the International Committee of the Red Cross highlight other potential excesses: the punching and beating of at least nine detainees in ways that appeared to go beyond authorized abdominal and facial "slaps"; the extended confinement of at least one detainee in a box so small that he had to crouch despite approval only for seated confinement; the slamming of detainees into firm walls, instead of the authorized pushing into a "false" wall that gave way; and the shackling of detainees' arms to overhead hooks or pipes, requiring that the prisoners stand for days at a time, despite the apparent absence of clear, written authorization by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for such shackling before 2005. The videotape study, which the Senate intelligence committee demanded to see in 2005 but did not receive until last year, assessed the legality of interrogations that occurred between April and December 2002. Its conclusions have not been disclosed, and the CIA destroyed the videotapes in late 2005. As early as October 2002, a lawyer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, told officers at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that "the videotaping of even totally legal techniques will look 'ugly,' " a recent report by the Senate Armed Services Committee said. Government officials familiar with the CIA's early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the "top secret" May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month's release of the Justice Department's interrogation memos. According to excerpts included in those memos, the inspector general's report concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information. Officials familiar with its contents said it also concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994. Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks," according to the Justice Department's declassified summary of it. The threat of such an imminent attack was cited by the department as an element in its 2002 and later written authorization for using harsh techniques...

Transcript: "This Week" with Former Vice President Dick Cheney and George Will, Peter Beinart, Paul Gigot and Jane Mayer.
KARL: Now, on that question of trying, you know, dealing as enemy combatants or through the criminal justice system, I came across this. This is a document that was put out by the Bush Justice Department under Attorney General Ashcroft... CHENEY: Right. KARL: ... covering the years 2001 to 2005. And if you go right to page one, they actually tout the criminal prosecutions... CHENEY: They did. KARL: ... of terror suspects, saying, "Altogether, the department has brought charges against 375 individuals in terrorism- related investigations and has convicted 195 to date." That was 2005. Again, seems to make the administration's point that they're not doing it all that differently from how you were doing it. CHENEY: Well, we didn't all agree with that. We had -- I can remember a meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House where we had a major shootout over how this was going to be handled between the Justice Department, that advocated that approach, and many of the rest of us, who wanted to treat it as an intelligence matter, as an act of war with military commissions. We never clearly or totally resolved those issues. These are tough questions, no doubt about it. You want my opinion, my view of what ought to happen, I think we have to treat it as a -- as a war. This is a strategic threat to the United States. I think that's why we were successful for seven-and-a-half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States. And I do get very nervous and very upset when that's the dominant approach, as it was sometimes in the Bush administration or certainly would appear to be at times in the new Obama administration. KARL: Did you more often win or lose those battles, especially as you got to the second term? CHENEY: Well, I suppose it depends on which battle you're talking about. I won some; I lost some. I can't... (CROSSTALK) KARL: ... waterboarding, clearly, what was your... CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that... KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding? CHENEY: Yes.
 * Feb. 14, 2010 —**

Cheney: "I Was A Big Supporter Of Waterboarding"
Andrew Sullivan, The Daily DIsh, Atlantic Online, 14 Feb 2010 10:40 pm That seems to me to be the big news out of [|Jonathan Karl's interview] with the former vice-president today. There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it's the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America's closest Western ally, [|certainly believes] it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture. To have subjected an individual to waterboarding once is torture under US and international law. To subject someone to it 183 times is so categorically torture is it almost absurd to even write this sentence. To give the Wikipedia [|definition]:


 * Waterboarding** is a [|torture] technique that consists of immobilizing the victim on his or her back with the head inclined downwards; water is then poured over the face into breathing passages, causing the captive to believe he or she is dying.[|[1]][|[2]] In contrast to submerging the head face-forward in water, waterboarding precipitates an almost immediate [|gag reflex].[|[3]] It can cause extreme pain, [|dry drowning], damage to [|lungs], [|brain damage] from [|oxygen deprivation], other physical injuries including [|broken bones] due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, if uninterrupted, death.[|[4]] Adverse physical consequences can manifest themselves months after the event, while psychological effects can last for years.[|[5]]

So the former vice-president has just confessed to a war crime. I repeat: the former vice-president has just confessed to a war crime.

"Lynch Holder"
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Atlantic Online, 12 Feb 2010 03:43 pm What you get from Mayer's piece is a tangible sense of exactly how hard it's going to be to restore ourselves to any kind of pre-9/11 footing. I'm just not convinced that we're done with torture. I think that the Obama administration--should push come to shove--is done with torture, but I wouldn't put much money on that. That's a slight on Obama, because I think he bears some responsibility, as one of Mayer's sources says, to "lead us out of fear." But that said, it's also a slight on us. //This is who we are.// We would have torture done in our name, as long as we can call it something else, and as long as it protects our right to a home theater and everyday low prices.

=Meet the Real Jack Bauers= by Marc gthiessen, National Review Online, In Courting Disaster, the real CIA interrogators explain why their methods bear no resemblance to what you see on Fox’s 24.

...I have had the chance to actually meet the //real// Jack Bauers — the CIA officials who questioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other senior terrorist leaders and got them to reveal their plans for new terrorist attacks. They explained to my why their approach has nothing in common with the methods used by Bauer on the fictional //24.//

They explained, for example, that there is a difference between “interrogation” and “de-briefing.” Interrogation is not how we got information from the terrorists; it is the process by which we overcome the terrorists’ resistance and secure their cooperation — sometimes with the help of enhanced interrogation techniques.

...The interrogation process was usually brief, they said. According to declassified documents, on average “the actual use of interrogation techniques covers a period of three to seven days, but can vary upwards to 15 days based on the resilience” of the terrorist in custody.

Most detainees, they told me, did not undergo it at all. Two-thirds of those brought into the CIA program did not require the use of //any// enhanced interrogation techniques. Just the experience of being brought into CIA custody — the “capture shock,” arrival at a sterile location, the isolation, the fact that they did not know where they were, and that no one else knew they were there — was enough to convince most of them to cooperate.

...Harry, it turned out, had interrogated KSM. He explained that interrogations involved strict oversight. There was no freelancing allowed — every technique had to be approved in advance by headquarters, and any deviation from the meticulously developed interrogation plan would lead to the immediate removal of the interrogator.

Harry said the average age of CIA interrogators was 43 and that each interrogator received 250 hours of training before being allowed to come in contact with a terrorist. And even after that, he said, they had to complete another 20 hours working together with an experienced interrogator before they could lead an interrogation on their own. Contrary to the claims later made by some critics, such as FBI agent Ali Soufan, the CIA did not send a bunch of inexperienced people to question high-value detainees.

Harry explained that the interrogations were not violent, as some imagined. He said that the interrogators’ credo was to use “the least coercive method necessary” and that “each of us is put through the measures so we can feel it.” He added: “It is very respectful. The detainee knows that we are not there to gratuitously inflict pain. He knows what he needs to do to stop. We see each other as professional adversaries in war.” (Indeed, Mike Hayden told me years later that KSM referred to Harry as “emir” — a title of great respect in the jihadist ranks.)

Former CIA director Mike Hayden explained to me that, as enhanced techniques are applied, CIA interrogators like Harry would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already know the answers — allowing them to judge whether the detainees were being truthful and determine when the terrorists had reached a level of compliance. Hayden said, “They are designed to create a state of cooperation, not to get specific truthful answers to a specific question.”

Indeed, the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “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.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “You must do this for all the brothers.” The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the //false// perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.

For example, information from detainees in CIA custody led to the arrest of an al-Qaeda terrorist named Jose Padilla, who was sent to America on a mission to blow up high-rise apartment buildings in the United States.

Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of a cell of Southeast Asian terrorists which had been tasked by KSM to hijack a passenger jet and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, KSM’s right-hand-man in the 9/11 attacks, just as he was finalizing plans for a plot to hijack airplanes in Europe and fly them into Heathrow airport and buildings in downtown London.

Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of Ammar al-Baluchi and Walid bin Attash, just as they were completing plans to replicate the destruction of our embassies in East Africa by blowing up the U.S. consulate and Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan.

Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the disruption of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, in an attack that could have rivaled the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

Information from detainees in CIA custody helped break up an al-Qaeda cell that was developing anthrax for terrorist attacks inside the United States.

In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al-Qaeda — giving U.S. officials a picture of the terrorist organization as seen from the inside, at a time when we knew almost nothing about the enemy who had attacked us on 9/11.

In addition, CIA detainees helped identify some 86 individuals whom al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations — most of whom we had never heard of before. According to the intelligence community, about half of these individuals were subsequently tracked down and taken off the battlefield. Without CIA questioning, many of these terrorists could still be unknown to us and at large — and may well have carried out attacks against the West by now.

Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, well over half of the information our government had about al-Qaeda — how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks — came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.

Another reason the program was so effective, Harry and Sam explained, was that because the terrorists were in a secure location, CIA officials could also expose sensitive information to them — asking them to explain the meaning of materials captured in terrorist raids, and to indentify phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and voices in recordings of intercepted communications. This could never be done if the terrorists were being held in a facility where they had regular contact with the outside world. The danger of this information getting out would have been far too great.

Harry and Sam told me that the agency believed without the program the terrorists would have succeeded in striking our country again. Harry put it bluntly: “It is the reason we have not had another 9/11.”

= = =[|"May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us"]=

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, Atlantic Online, 17 Feb 2010 10:37 pm ...It is more than disturbing, especially as we begin Lent, to watch a Catholic cable channel, EWTN, present a self-described Catholic, Marc Thiessen, defending torture on Catholic grounds as compatible with the Magisterium of the Church. ...But the Catechism is very clear about this:

//Torture// which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.

Notice that torture for a Catholic includes "moral violence," in which a human being's body is not even touched - the kind of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, or crippling total isolation deployed by the US government for months at a time. Subjecting someone to weeks of sleep deprivation as was done to al-Qhatani, or freezing human beings to states of near-deadly hypothermia, let alone threatening to crush the testicles of a prisoner's child, as John Yoo said was within the president's legal and constitutional authority in the war on terror, is obviously at the very least moral violence. The idea any of it is somehow defensible as a Catholic position is so offensive, so absurd, so outrageous it beggars belief.

Moreover, the US Catholic Bishops have also made their position quite clear. From Dr. Stephen Colecchi, Director, Office of International Justice and Peace, Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:

"Torture is about the rights of victims, but it is also about who we are as a people. In a statement on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, issued in preparation for our recent national elections [2008], the bishops reminded Catholics that torture is 'intrinsically evil' and 'can never be justified.' There are some things we must never do. We must never take the lives of innocent people. We must never torture other human beings."

This is not a hedged statement. It is a //categorical// statement that what Thiessen is defending is, from a Catholic point of view, intrinsically evil and something that cannot be done //under any circumstances//. Pope John Paul II's Enclyclical, //Veritatis Splendor//, contains the following passage:

"... 'there exist acts which //per se// and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object'. ... 'whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity' ... 'all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.'"

The notion of the integrity of the human person, of human //dignity//, is integral to the Catholic faith. We are all made in the image of God, //imago Dei//. The central and divine figure in our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was brutally tortured. He was also robbed of dignity, forced to wear a mocking crown of thorns, sent to carry a crippling cross through the streets of Jerusalem, mocked while in agony, his body exposed naked and twisted in the stress position known as crucifixion - which was often done without nails by Romans so that the death was slow and agonizing in the way stress positions are designed to be. Ask John McCain. That the Catholic church in the Inquisition deployed these techniques reveals the madness and evil that can infect even those institutions purportedly created to oppose all such things.

Human dignity is reflected in the Geneva Conventions which bars outrages on human dignity against prisoners in captivity. Here is an iconic photograph of an individual robbed of all human dignity: This technique was not invented by Lynndie England. It was also used at Gitmo and directly authorized by the man Thiessen worked for. Forced nudity is another way in which the human being is robbed of dignity: This photograph is particularly striking since it so closely mimics in its form the way in which the Romans exposed Jesus on the cross. Forced nudity of this kind was also //directly authorized// by Thiessen's bosses. The argument that these techniques were somehow invented by low-level soldiers on the night-shift and had nothing whatsoever to do with the waiving of Geneva or the specific techniques authorized by the last president is [|simply, flatly, demonstrably untrue]. We have the memos and the documents and the Red Cross Report and we have the unanimous conclusion of the the :

"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military dogs to intimidate them only appeared in Iraq after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in IUS military custody."

What was done to human beings under the CIA program that Thiessen's boss, Cheney, has repeatedly and proudly insisted he supported and authorized and that Thiessen is now promoting in his new book, was far worse. Waterboarding, which Thiessen describes as the worst of the tortures, was not, in fact, the worst. Sleep deprivation - another medieval torture technique - can be far more grueling. Alex Massie has a [|recent post] on the subject which I urge you to read. It contains this description from a torture victim subjected to sleep deprivation under the apartheiid regime:

"It is the equivalent of bear-baiting, and we banned that centuries ago. I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis. By the week's end, people lose their orientation in place and time - the people you're speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity." It lasts for what seems like for ever. In one case under the direction of Thiessen's boss, Dick Cheney, a prisoner was subjected to //960 hours// of it, with a few short breaks.

On the show, Thiessen argues that this kind of treatment of human beings is compatible with Catholic just war theory, because the hundreds of prisoners subjected to these techniques - many of whom were //innocent// and none of whom had been given fair trials with due process to make even a preliminary assessment of whether they were terrorists at all - knew of impending plots and therefore were still technically fighting the US and metaphorically on the battlefield.

First off, remember that just war theory defends warfare as a //last resort// act of defense. The Vatican opposed the Iraq war on those grounds. Even on the battlefield, just war theory requires that the force used be //minimal// to the goal of self-defense and proportional to the force being fought. The idea that a combatant, already taken out of combat, shackled in a cell, defenseless and weaponless, represents a version of a battlefield threat proportional to the use of torture is so outside any understanding of Catholic teaching it really does quite simply shock the conscience.

Secondly, //every// prisoner captured in war of any kind //may// have information related to pending attacks. Many may have been briefed about future operations. Leading commanders captured may know a huge amount about what may be coming. In the Cold War, nuclear annihilation of the entire country was at stake. But Geneva explicitly bars such acts of torture //under any circumstances//, and explicitly makes the case that //no impending threat// can justify its use, or anything that can remotely be seen as similar to its use. The language is broad and sweeping for a reason. It is not broad and sweeping so that governments can argue that the need to use "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to extract information legitimately allows them to explore how far they can go. It is broad and sweeping in order to tell such officials that they cannot and should not go //anywhere near it// under any circumstances.

And before we get the argument that these prisoners are somehow not eligible for such treatment because they are terror suspects not uniformed soldiers, let me repeat yet again the simple fact that the baseline protections against torture and abuse and outrages on human dignity are not just reserved for formal prisoners of war in uniform. The baseline provisions of Article 3 apply to //any// prisoner of //any// kind, including irregulars out of uniform, including terrorists fighting guerrilla wars. In the past the US has actually [|prosecuted] the use of almost identical enhanced interrogation techniques" against irregulars out of uniform as serious war criminals. One defense of such techniques by the deployers of "enhanced interrogations" were that

"(c) That the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.'

The United States //executed// those responsible for these techniques in 1948, and yet all these decades later, we have a vice-president and his speech writer going on television to brag about them.

More to Thiessen's point that torturing is a legitimate form of self-defense in just war theory, let me again reiterate the US Catholic Bishops' spokesman's statement on the matter: "Torture is 'intrinsically evil' and 'can never be justified.' There are some things we must never do. We must never take the lives of innocent people. We must never torture other human beings."

Then we have the astonishing argument from Thiessen that the torture-victims in the Cheney program he supported were //grateful// for being tortured, because when they were forced beyond what they could endure - which, of course, is Thiessen's unwitting admission that what he was doing was definitionally torture - they were grateful. They were grateful because their duty to Allah had been fulfilled and they were then free to spill their guts. They had done their religious duty and had been brought to a spiritual epiphany that allowed them to tell us so much.

There is much to say about this but let me on Ash Wednesday simply remember the Catholic church's own shameful history of torture. It was done, according to the Inquisitors, as a way to free the souls of the tortured, to bring them to a religious epiphany in which they abandoned heresy and saved themselves from eternal damnation. It is hard for modern people to understand this, but as a student in college of the years in which my own homeland used torture to procure religious conversion, it is important to remember that the torturers //sincerely// believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the tortured. In fact, it was a //sacred duty// to torture rather than allow the victims to die and live in hell for eternity, a fate even worse than the agonies of stress positions or even burning at the stake. Why? Because the torture they would endure in hell would be eternal, while the torture on earth would not last that long.

This is not an exact parallel to the way in which Thiessen defends torture. But the meme that it somehow relieved the victims, that it liberated them, that it helped them to embrace giving information without conflict with their religious faith is horribly, frighteningly close to this ancient evil. For a //Catholic// to use this argument on a //Catholic// television program and to invoke the Magisterium of the Church in its defense is simply breath-taking in its moral obtuseness.

Today is a day for repentance. It is not a day for me to condemn anyone else, given my own failings and sins. And I want to repent today for those many occasions when my anger at what has happened, and my own profound guilt in unwittingly supporting those who made this happen, has gotten the best of me. On a blog, anger can run fast and deep and I will pray today for forgiveness for intemperance. My essays - written over time and in a different rubric - take care not to do this, as evidenced [|here] and [|here]. People do evil most of the time because they think they are doing good. In fact, the greatest evils have been committed in the name of good.

But what has happened in this country, what we have allowed ourselves to do to others, innocent and guilty, is something for which I believe repentance is necessary. As Christians and as Catholics, we are required to follow Our Lord's impossible example and not just love our friends, but to love our enemies. This does not mean pacifism; and I have a long, long record of supporting what I believe were just wars. I mean understanding that war is always evil even when it is necessary, but that some things, like torture, abuse and dehumanizing of others under our total control, are //never// justified. And once done, once perpetrated, they damage the souls of the torturers as profoundly as they destroy their victims.

=[|Marc Theissen, The Catholic View Of Waterboarding And The Validity Of A Victim's Perspective]= Posted by [|Michael Scherer] Swampland, TIme.com. Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 4:58 pm

At the end of the video..., Thiessen justifies the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods like dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation and stress positions by asserting that the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah told interrogators after the fact that his own abuse was a good thing.

//After he was was waterboarded he thanked his interrogators for waterboarding him, and he said, "You must do this for all the brothers."//

According to Theissen's unnamed sources, Zubaydah thanked his interrogators for forcing him to the edge of what he could physically and mentally endure, thereby freeing him of his religious obligation to not talk. The logic of this argumentation, as they say in the business, shocks my conscience.

Does it also follow that a victims of domestic violence who forgives her attacker's violence (or argues that it was justified) can also effectively erases the moral culpability of their abuser? Is Theissen unfamiliar with the reams of research about [|the effects of Stockholm syndrome], which drives victims to identify with their attackers and behave in ways contrary to their own rational physical and emotional interests? Should confessions made under threat of physical and emotional harm now suddenly be considered credible, or germane to a discussion of the morality of that harm?

The history of Western philosophy and of American jurisprudence suggest that Theissen's argument is absurd on its face. Abu Zubaydah's own post-hoc analysis of his treatment is as relevant to a moral discussion of harsh interrogation methods as the horrific fact that girls who are kidnapped and repeatedly raped often choose to pass up opportunities to escape their captors, and even develop relationships of dependence and affection towards them. That Theissen makes such an argument simply strikes me as abhorrent.

Zubaydah's own view of his abuse, even if it could be verified, simply has no bearing on the moral dilemma presented by harsh interrogation, which, [|we now know], included techniques such as simulated drowning and sleep deprivation by use of forced stress position for more than seven consecutive days. It is either morally justifiable or it isn't. The victim does not get to determine the morality of a crime.

=Pardon Them= Jonathan Bernstein, A Plain Blog About Politics, Wednesday, February 17, 2010

...The question, however, is not whether Cheney (or Bush, or Yoo, or CIA operatives) deserve to be in jail -- but how to answer Greenwald's rhetoric questions. What remedies now will make future torture less likely?

If Obama and Holder decide to prosecute, there's little question of the results: Republicans of all stripes would rally around their now-persecuted friends from the Bush administration. Republicans of all stripes would feel the need to justify the actions that the torturers took, and to do so they would double down on tales of how effective torture was at supposedly stopping all sorts of nasty terror attacks. Republicans, I tend to think close to unanimously, would refuse to have any part in any Truth Commission. They wouldn't serve on it, and they wouldn't accept its results; they would brand it a partisan witch hunt. Torturers and those who worked with torturers wouldn't testify. How could they? They'd be incriminating themselves and their coworkers. So the commission might demonstrate some of the truth, but would achieve no reconciliation at all. The deterrent factor for the future would rest on one thing alone, the ability of the Justice Department to obtain convictions and serious sentences, although such sentences would be gone, at least for policy makers once the next Republican president was sworn into office. And yet even then, the more Republicans solidify into the torture party, the more they would be likely to change the law and treaty obligations once they win the White House. In my view, a not at all unlikely result of prosecutions is withdrawal from Geneva during the next Republican administration.

Would pardons avoid this result? I can't guarantee it, but I think it radically changes the incentives. Recall that I'm recommending a blanket pardon for everyone involved in torture, along with a serious commission that would lay out exactly what happened and all the things wrong with it -- and I'm also recommending working hard to try to get as many senior Bush administration officials as possible to publicly accept those pardons. And I'm recommending a generous pardon, with President Obama granting the war criminals (no, he wouldn't call them that) the best of intentions....

Basically, I think criminal sanctions on past war criminals are far less likely to prevent future war crimes than would a restoration of the American consensus against torture. I can't guarantee that pardon plus commission would achieve that, but every bit of political instinct that I have says that prosecutions would prevent it. If one is really against torture, it seems to me that preventing future torture is far more important than punishment of the torturers -- the latter should only happen if it is a means to an end, not for revenge, and not even for justice. The current best path toward that end is a generous pardon, as hard as that might be to swallow for opponents of torture. Separate the acts from the actors, and the chances of preventing future acts are much, much, better.

=Torture, Conscience, and the Tortured Conscience =

Mike Potemra] Thursday, February 18, 2010
The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes. Marc Thiessen, who appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s TV show //The World Over//, defends the practices of the past decade because he believes that these practices are necessary to defend innocent lives. Not having followed his work in detail, I have no reason to believe that he is acting in bad faith. He was a government official with some knowledge of the issue. His conscience tells him that there is a moral necessity to disregard the Catholic Catechism in this particular case — and, as Newman reminded us, conscience has sacred claims. Furthermore, if the polls are to be trusted, he speaks not only for the majority of Americans but for the majority of American Catholics. His is, therefore, a view that it would be unwise to omit from the discussion. The fault was not in giving Marc a platform; the fault, if any, was in not having a guest who defended the official teaching, and thus perhaps leaving a misimpression of what the official teaching is.

I realize I run the risk of being accused of special pleading in this defense of Marc (and of EWTN), so I should probably point out that I disagree with him on the underlying issue. I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable. For heaven’s sake, I — in religious matters — am now a rather liberal high-church Episcopalian, and I find even that pronouncedly lenient ethic hard to live up to. And, on the very issue of torture, it is easy for me to imagine a case in which I would break down and allow it: Say it’s 1942, and the Nazis, having conquered England and the U.S. eastern seaboard, have developed an H-bomb and plan to use it against St. Louis to bring the rest of the U.S. into submission. American forces in St. Louis have in custody a Nazi agent with knowledge of the specifics that would enable them to foil the attack and turn the tide of the war. The Nazi agent is being uncooperative. I concede that it would be morally wrong to torture him — but I also admit that I would more than likely sacrifice that principle. (An interrogator in Iraq, interviewed for an anti-torture video I saw recently, says he and his crew were up against ticking-time-bomb scenarios often, and were able to get the information they needed without resort to torture. I’m not sure I would have the moral courage to take the chance that he is right.)

So the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak: I accuse myself. I have been dismayed by how rapidly the resort to torture has been undertaken in recent years, in response to much lesser threats than the one in my hypothetical. (Two or three incompetent pantybombers in a decade doth not a Hitler make.) But I recognize that my difference from Marc and the others on his side of this discussion is one of degree, not of kind. And there are other reasons to ask people for generosity of spirit – notably because we may have need of it ourselves. I recently found myself in a position that makes me realize what it must be like to be Marc Thiessen, even as I took a point of view quite distant from his. I was at a meeting at a liberal Catholic parish here in New York, the purpose of which was to discuss how to stop U.S.-sponsored torture. People were angrily declaiming, //How is it possible that the U.S. could permit such a heinous practice?// To which I responded, basically, with the following explanation: //It is a negative consequence of something that is actually very positive about our country. More than any other country, we believe that there is no limit to what we can achieve, no problem that can’t be solved, no obstacle that can’t be overcome. This is the attitude that has made us great, but it also exposes us to the risk that we can come to believe that there are no real moral limits that conflict with our desires. When we find that an unborn child is inconvenient, for example, we redefine it as not having ‘personhood,’ and kill it — problem solved! Similarly, now, when he have a real (or just suspected) jihadist in our custody, we say, he should be understood not chiefly as a rights-bearing person with human dignity that should be respected, but rather as a box containing secrets that we can rip apart at will — and now our country is safe! We figure out what we want to do, then we set talented lawyers the task of defining our new limits in accord with our desires. Harry Blackmun spent many months researching the law, consulting medical professionals and concerned citizens, before writing the legal memo “drawing the lines” on abortion — a memo we now call// Roe //v.// Wade//. The legal justifications for torture, and the widespread public support for it, materialized in a similar way.//

Now, there were perhaps, in that room, some people who were not offended by what I said; there may even have been some who were in agreement. But the only audible and visible response was negative — eye-rolling, dark mutterings, and dirty looks, as if to say: //Here we are, trying to have a serious moral discussion about torture, and this right-wing nut has to bring abortion into it.// I’m not so naïve as to have thought there would be no pro-choicers there — but I think I know now what it feels like to have someone read you out of a moral community, even when you’re acting in good faith.

So yes, it’s important to hear Marc Thiessen’s view, expressed as well as he can express it. Only by understanding it can we start to move toward what I hope will be a happier chapter in our nation’s history.


 * UPDATE:** Thanks to all the readers who have written. Most of them have pointed out that Marc does not consider waterboarding to be torture, and therefore cannot be a torture advocate; many have gone on to demand that I offer my own definition of torture. My response is that there were many definitions of torture in existence before the current controversy, definitions under which waterboarding would have been considered torture. But instead of trying to find a definition, and to get everyone to agree to it, I ask myself the following, about any given interrogation practice: “If agents of Fidel Castro’s regime, or of China’s laogai, engaged in this activity, would I condemn it as torture?” That, I think, is the wisest course, because asking this question prevents me from endorsing acts that might be evil simply because it may be in my own self-protective interest (as an American who doesn’t want to be injured or killed in a terrorist attack) to do so. I do not question Marc Thiessen’s sincerity in asserting that waterboarding is not torture. I say merely that I would question my own sincerity were I personally to make that assertion.

=The OPR report: this era's 'Hiroshima'= 21 Feb 2010 02:55 pm (Title of this item changed from previous soft-sell approach.)

...Please read the full Office of Professional Responsibility report on the "torture memo" misconduct of Jay Bybee, now a Federal appeals court judge; and John Yoo, now a tenured professor at the UC Berkeley law school. The report is available as a 10MB, 289-page PDF download [|here]. Seriously, this is a document that informed Americans should be familiar with, as a basis for any future discussion about the costs and consequences of a "global war on terror" and about the maintenance of American "values" in the world.

Through American history, there have been episodes of brutality and abuse that, in hindsight, span a very wide range of moral acceptability. There is no way to "understand" lynchings that makes them other than abominations. But -- to use the extreme case -- America's use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be the subject of first-order moral debate, about whether any "larger good" (forcing an end to the war) could justify the immediate suffering, the decades-long aftereffects, and the crossing of the "first use" frontier that this decision represented.

My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey's [|Hiroshima] was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The OPR report is essentially //t////his era's __Hiroshima__//. As Hersey's book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name -- "our" meaning the citizens of the United States.

If you want to argue that "whatever" happened in the "war on terror" was necessary because of the magnitude and novelty of the threat, then you had better be willing to face what the "whatever" entailed. Which is what this report brings out. And if you believe -- as I do, and have argued through the years -- that what happened included excessive, abusive, lawless, immoral, and self-defeating acts done wrongly in the name of American "security," then this is a basic text as well.

To conclude the logical sequence, if not to resolve this issue (which will be debated past the time any of us are around), you should then read the recent memo by David Margolis, of the Justice Department, overruling the OPR's recommendation that Yoo and Bybee should be punished further. It is available as a 69-page PDF [|here]. Margolis is a widely-esteemed voice of probity and professional excellence inside the Department. What is most striking to me as a lay reader is how much of his argument rests not on strictly legal judgments but rather on a historical/political assertion.

The assertion is that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, anxiety was so high, fears were so great, and standards of all sorts were so clearly in abeyance, that normal rules about prudence and arm's-length deliberation cannot fairly be applied in retrospect. Ie, "you had to be there." Perhaps. (And, of course, we all were there.) In normal life we recognize the concept of decisions made in the heat of the moment, under time pressure, and without complete info. But it is worth noting that the central "torture memos" were from mid-summer 2002, nine months after the initial attacks -- by people whose job was supposed to be providing beyond heat-of-the-moment counsel.

The "torture years" are now an indelible part of our history. The names Bybee and Yoo will always be associated with these policies. Whether you view them as patriots willing to do the dirty work of defending the nation -- the Dick Cheney view, the //24// view, which equates the torture memos with Abraham Lincoln's imposition of martial law -- or view them as damaging America's moral standing in ways that will take years to repair (my view), you owe it to yourself to read these original documents. I tried to make this point in more halting real-time fashion yesterday [|in a talk] with Guy Raz on NPR.

[|The flailing falsehoods of America's war criminals]
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Monday, Feb 22, 2010 08:23 EST I didn't think it was possible, but former Bush officials -- desperately fighting what they know will be their legacy as war criminals -- have become even more dishonest propagandists out of office than they were in office. At //National Review//, Bill Burck and Dana Perino so thoroughly mislead their readers about the DOJ report -- rejecting the findings of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of ethical misconduct against John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- that it's hard to know where to begin. They devote paragraph after paragraph to hailing the intelligence and integrity of the report's author, career DOJ prosecutor David Margolis, in order to pretend that he defended Yoo and Bybee's work, claiming that Margolis "officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee" and that "Margolis rejected OPR’s recommendation and most of its analysis." Perhaps the most deceitful claim is this one:

So, in one corner we have a legal all-star team of Mukasey, Filip, Estrada, Mahoney, Goldsmith [all right-wing Bush lawyers], and Margolis. In the other corner, we have OPR operating far outside its comfort zone and area of expertise. **This shouldn’t have been close -- and it wasn’t, on the merits.**

Compare that to what Margolis actually said (p. 67):

For all of the above reasons, I am not prepared to conclude that the circumstantial evidence much of which is contradicted by the witness testimony regarding Yoo's efforts establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that **Yoo intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client.** //**It is a close question.**// I would be remiss in not observing, however, that these memoranda represent an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel. While I have declined to adopt OPR's finding of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo's loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to adopt opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power while speaking for an institutional client.

Just think about that for a minute. Margolis said that whether Yoo "intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client" when authorizing torture -- about the most serious accusation one can make against a lawyer, as it means he deliberately made false statements about the law -- "**is a close question**." That's the precise opposite of what Burck and Perino told //National Review// readers about Margolis' conclusion ("This shouldn’t have been close — and it wasn't, on the merits"). Moreover, Margolis repeatedly **adopted** the OPR's findings that the Yoo/Bybee torture memos -- on which the entire American torture regime was constructed and which media elites now embrace in order to argue against prosecutions -- were wrong, "extreme," misguided, and the by-product of "poor judgment." As Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin so clearly explained, the **only** thing that saved Yoo in Margolis' eyes was that attorney ethical rules have been written by lawyers to protect themselves, and the bar is therefore so low that it basically includes only "sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems." As a result, Margolis could not ultimately conclude that Yoo -- as shoddy and misleading as his torture authorizations were -- purposely lied because Yoo "was an ideologue who entered government service with a warped vision of the world in which he sincerely believed." Does that remotely sound like exoneration? ......That Bush officials have to cling to the harsh condemnations of Margolis as "vindication" reveals just how wretched and lawless their conduct was. Essentially, the current posture of the U.S. to the world is this:

//Y////es, we implemented a worldwide torture regime that we justified with lawyers' memoranda that were false, wrong, shoddy, lawless, sloppy and extremist, but because those lawyers were such warped radicals, they probably believed what they were saying at the time, so we're going to declare that we had the right to do what we did and are shielded from all consequences, even though we've signed treaties agreeing to prosecute anyone who authorizes torture and demanded that other nations prosecute their own torturers.// //Besides, we have important things to do and thus want to Look Forward, not Backward.//

=[|The End Of The Torture Debate]= Ta-Nehisi Coates, Atlantic Online, May 13 2009, 10:00 AM ET I think Digby [|is right]--we've lost this one. It's deeply disconcerting to watch journalists embrace the language of politicians. I think it says a lot that we hear those claim to be "keeping them honest" using terms like "enhanced interrogation."

This is a deeply depressing failure on so many levels--and yet I feel like I should have seen it coming. My own deep personal experience with police violence says that people will accept the brutality of the state, if they think the state is trying to protect them. Not to flog this, but I keep going back to [|how my buddy was killed] in PG County, and nothing happened to the officer who did it.

The fact is that that officer represented something about us, something about our hatred of drugs and crime, as well as our self-absorbed lack of empathy for any innocent--especially an innocent who we consider as "other"--caught in the crossfire. Likewise, Cheneyism says something about who we are, and where we're willing to go.

I think our politicians failed us. But it's weak to put it on them. I think journalists failed us. But it's weak to put it on them. We have too much faith in our innate goodness, in our exceptionalism. And if there's one big failing of Barack Obama it's that he continues to sell us on this notion that we're special. Maybe that's how it has to be. I'm admittedly confused by all this. I just suspect that someday soon we're going to find out how "special" we really are.

We really have no idea how low we can really go. And when confronted with evidence of it, we obfuscate. As a black man living in [|this country], I should have known better. It all makes too much sense.

=Torture Logic= Aug 25 2009, 10:40 AM ET Who cares if American intelligence agents or private contractors tortured terrorism suspects? That is not a rhetorical question. A widely discussed,[| 2009 Pew Forum poll] suggests that the public is evenly divided over the use of torture, with 49% agreeing that it is "often or sometimes justified" and 47% objecting that it is "rarely or never justified." These results may have been skewed by assumptions about torture's effectiveness in extracting information implicit in Pew's multiple choice question: "Torture to gain important information from suspected terrorists is justified... often, sometimes, rarely, never."

What if Pew has posed some variation of this question: "Torture is likely to produce important information from suspected terrorists that might not be produced by other means (often, sometimes, rarely, never)?" What if Pew had asked "Is torture more or less likely to gain important information than other means?"

Still, public support for torture seems likely to reflect partisan allegiances, however questions about it are posed. As Pew [|noted,] "party and ideology are much better predictors of views on torture than are religion and most other demographic factors," sensibly adding that, naturally, religion plays a role in shaping political ideology. (Some atheists reveled in the finding of disproportionate, white evangelical support for torture, regarding it as evidence of religion's tolerance for cruelty; but I imagine that one religious response to the atheists might be -"You simply don't understand the nature of evil and are unwilling to combat it.")

In any case, I suspect that the public view of torture is essentially pragmatic, turning on whether it is regarded as a necessary or reliable means of obtaining information to save American lives. But, I'd also be willing to bet that people will evaluate competing claims about torture's effectiveness through partisan colored glasses, which means that, in the end, public opinion will be determined mainly by partisan loyalties (and maybe indirectly by religious ideologies). Relatively few people will take (or have) the time to examine objectively available evidence of torture's effectiveness; instead, they'll assume the truth of claims asserted by their political heroes or opinion leaders, right and left. Surely the success of demonstrably false claims about "death panels" allegedly embedded in health care reform proposals demonstrated the irrelevance of facts when confronted with lies (or emotional "truths") circulated by influential political partisans.

...The torture debate will probably not be won by moral arguments and disgust over torture's methods (which some may find titillating) or even empirical truths, but by what a majority of people are led to believe is the answer to the question "did torture keep us safe?" Torture opponents had better start declaring that the answer is "No."

=**Ronald Reagan quotes on torture**= May 20, 1988

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. **Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.**

September 26, 1988

Human rights is not for some, some of the time. Human rights, as the universal declaration of this Assembly adopted in 1948 proclaims, is ``for all people and all nations,'' and for all time.

December 10,1986 Indeed, we've learned through painful experiences that respect for human rights is essential to peace and, ultimately, to our own freedom. **A government which does not respect the rights of its own people and laws is unlikely to respect those of its neighbors.**

=Does It Matter Whether Torture Worked?= Efficacy and morality are two different things.

By [|Marc Ambinder]
The Washington Post's intelligence and national security reporting team [|make the case] that, in the case of 9/11 planner KSM, enhanced interrogation techniques -- EITs --or torture -- facilitated his cooperation with the CIA. The story has produce a violent reaction among supporters and opponents of using the practice, with supporters crowing and opponents accusing the Post of letting Dick Cheney man their editing desk. Well, we know that whether torture worked should not effect the moral case for or against it, but in the mind of the public, which seems to look at the practice through the "24" ticking-time-bomb lens, its effectiveness does seem to be related to its appropriateness in extreme situations where lives are at stake. Given this distortion -- most every instance of torture did not take place with a threshold-level "24" scenario in the offing -- it is quite comprehensible why proponents and opponents of torture are so invested in proving that it never works, or that it almost always works. There is a difference, though. It's become an article of faith for opponents of torture that it doesn't work because most of the evidence available to us -- the testimony of many military interrogators, psychologists and FBI agents, the incompleteness of the interrogation record, the mental projection that a tortured person would say anything to avoid being tortured, and the historical association of torture with bad people -- suggests that its benefits are dubious. But most every engaged opponent of torture doesn't care whether it worked because the moral wrongness of torture exists in nature prior to an evaluation of its effectiveness. The heuristic is: torture never works, and even if it did, it's still never right. Proponents of torture techniques (who may object to my use of the term "torture") are more likely to base their judgment on evidence (or hints) that the tradeoff between using the techniques and the value that is derived from them is worth making. The heuristic is: torture is usually wrong, except in circumstances where we can use it to prevent deaths; don't take this tool out of the toolkit. The standard for proving whether torture worked ought to be the same standard for proving that it didn't work. And proving this is kind of impossible: it is vulnerable to the post hoc ergo propter hoc error. It involves human behavior and its interpretation, intelligence (the value of which is unknowable in isolation) and the fallacy of single causes. There's no double blind study available. So opponents and proponents look at the evidence and make reasonable inferences. If KSM didn't cooperate until after the EITs began, and if it doesn't seem as if anything else happened at the same time, then, for whatever reason, his torture by waterboarding did work. Or, rather, it didn't NOT work. It didn't work 100%, as he still apparently gave false intelligence. Even among those who received the intel that KSM provided there is a debate about whether he really provided much value; there is no debate that, in addition to whatever value he provided, he also provided a lot of useless information. Using the same standard, Abu Zubaydah began to give up actionable information well before he was tortured, and he apparently gave up some information after he was tortured. In his case, it's reasonable to say that torture did not facilitate his cooperation. Was torture the only way to facilitate KSM's cooperation? Unknown, but it seems like other methods were tried and failed. Did his cooperation, once established, provide actionable intelligence that saved lives? Not quite clear, but it seems like most of the people who were directly involved in his interrogations believe that it did. Assuming that the answer to the above questions are yes, then torture opponents would seem to have a problem. As much as torture is abhorrent to them -- and I'll reveal my bias here -- abhorrent to me -- the general public does not separate the right and the good, and they make gradations based on the intent of the interrogator/torturer and the effects of the practice. The heuristic: we are no better than the Nazis if we torture works on //me// as a moral argument, but it does not work for many politicians, and it does not work on most Americans. An American CIA interrogator whose techniques yield valuable information is much less reprehensible than a Gestapo torturer whose techniques resulted in the death of Jews or gypsies. Doesn't mean the CIA guy was right, but it's still hard to disagree with that sentence. If opponents of torture (like me) want to change the minds of Americans, we have to be ready to accept that our preconceptions may need some changing, too. The burden of argument rests on us -- we need to persuade people that the act of torture in a democratic society is always wrong, that the ticking time bomb scenario is rarely -- if ever -- the situation interrogators face, and that even if torture works in a few cases, it is not worth the moral (and tangible) costs to our country. If there's evidence that torture worked in certain cases -- or if it wasn't counter-productive -- even if the evidence isn't complete or is fragmentary, it's not going to advance the anti-torture cause to ignore it. To effectively change the minds of policy makers and the American people, torture opponents should be prepared to accept -- subject to rigorous standards of doubt, of course -- that torture might not always be counter-productive. It's usually counter-productive -- and might have been almost always counter-productive in the setting of Bagram, the secret prisons and GTMO -- but even as I criticize their moral judgment, I can't dismiss out of hand the conviction of those who participated in the interrogations that the EITs were necessary evils, and that other means were tried and found wanting. No doubt, though, that some of the later claims of the effectiveness of the EITs stem from an attempt to justify what in retrospect are morally questionable practices.

=The Gestapo Precedent for "EITs"= by Andrew Sullivan, 01 Sep 2009 12:50 pm

The sadism and murder of Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany do not fall under a torture category. The Nazis were not trying to get information out of them as prisoners of war; they were trying to annihilate them as a race and murder as many of them as possible.

For torture to be torture, it must be a government-authorized official's application of "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" in order to acquire information from an individual suspected of having it. So the correct analogy would be the torture via EITs of terrorist insurgents to get information to avoid guerrilla attacks in a war zone. And we have a very good precedent for that in military history. Here's a document from Norway's 1948 war-crimes trial detailing the prosecution of Nazis convicted of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the phrase in its original German is "verschaerfte Vernehmung)" in the Second World War. Here's a document detailing Nazi bureaucratic description of these techniques. You will note the striking similarities between its content, its legalisms, its bureaucratic tone, and the recent CIA documents pried out of the US government's hands by the ACLU: Notice how the Gestapo, like Cheney, had doctors present, and all torture was very carefully monitored. Blows with a stick, like collaring someone and bashing his body against a plywood wall - were carefully monitored to a maximum number of times. The "windowless cells", and sleep deprivation are identical to Cheney's methods. In the 1948 trial, cold baths were also used to bring prisoners' temperatures down to near-death levels, like those used by Navy SEALS in Afghanistan, by McChrystal's special ops in Iraq, and by Cheney's supervised torture in Gitmo. The victims wore no uniforms (which was used as a defense by the Nazis in the trial as they have been used by some on the right to defend American torture), and, unlike those subjected to Cheney's torture techniques, none of those tortured by the Gestapo died in the process. In fact, the Gestapo's defense at trial was John Yoo's:

Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.

The Gestapo did not use waterboarding - so their methods of interrogation in this case were not as extreme as Cheney's. Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

And they were executed for war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

=Waterboarding for dummies=  **Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water"**
 * Mark Benjamin**, Salon,Mar. 09, 2010

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus...

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.

Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency's "enhanced interrogation program" haven't been mined for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the agency's methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.

These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA's waterboarding was "different" from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. "The difference was in the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed," the document notes. In soldier training, "The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier's face) in a controlled manner," DOJ wrote. "By contrast, the agency interrogator ... continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose."

...On one level, the detailed instructions can be seen as helping to carry out kinder, gentler waterboarding, with so much care and attention given to making sure detainees didn't stop breathing, get pneumonia, breathe in their own vomit or die. But of course dead detainees tell no tales, so the CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 [|released a report] showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA's secret prison network haven't shown up since. The careful attention to detail in the documents was also used to provide legal cover for the harsh and probably illegal interrogation tactics.

As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box, placed in "stress positions" to increase discomfort and doused with cold water, among other things.

The CIA's waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. "In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks," the CIA's Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. "Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness."...

The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:

"NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment."  **-- Mark Benjamin**

=A curious history of the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.=

by [|Jane Mayer] The New Yorker, March 29, 2010
A review of [|“Courting Disaster” (Regnery; $29.95)];[|by Marc A. Thiessen] On September 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attacks on America, another devastating terrorist plot was meant to unfold. Radical Islamists had set in motion a conspiracy to hijack seven passenger planes departing from Heathrow Airport, in London, and blow them up in midair. “Courting Disaster” (Regnery; $29.95), by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter in the Bush Administration, begins by imagining the horror that would have resulted had the plot succeeded. He conjures fifteen hundred dead airline passengers, televised “images of debris floating in the ocean,” and gleeful jihadis issuing fresh threats: “We will rain upon you such terror and destruction that you will never know peace.”

The plot, of course, was thwarted—an outcome that has been credited to smart detective work. But Thiessen writes that there is a more important reason that his dreadful scenario never came to pass: the Central Intelligence Agency provided the United Kingdom with pivotal intelligence, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush Administration. According to Thiessen, British authorities were given crucial assistance by a detainee at Guantánamo Bay who spoke of “plans for the use of liquid explosive,” which can easily be made with products bought at beauty shops. Thiessen also claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the primary architect of the 9/11 attacks, divulged key intelligence after being waterboarded by the C.I.A. a hundred and eighty-three times. Mohammed spoke about a 1995 plot, based in the Philippines, to blow up planes with liquid explosives. Thiessen writes that, in early 2006, “an observant C.I.A. officer” informed “skeptical” British authorities that radicals under surveillance in England appeared to be pursuing a similar scheme.

Thiessen’s book, whose subtitle is “How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit. In addition, Thiessen attacks the Obama Administration for having banned techniques such as waterboarding. “Americans could die as a result,” he writes.

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky. The Bush interrogation program hardly discovered the Philippine airlines plot: in 1995, police in Manila stopped it from proceeding and, later, confiscated a computer filled with incriminating details. By 2003, when Mohammed was detained, hundreds of news reports about the plot had been published. If Mohammed provided the C.I.A. with critical new clues—details unknown to the Philippine police, or anyone else—Thiessen doesn’t supply the evidence. Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert who is writing a history of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” told me that the Heathrow plot “was disrupted by a combination of British intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, and Scotland Yard.” He noted that authorities in London had “literally wired the suspects’ bomb factory for sound and video.” It was “a classic law-enforcement and intelligence success,” Bergen said, and “had nothing to do with waterboarding or with Guantánamo detainees.”

“Courting Disaster” was published soon after a terrorism scare—the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, an alleged affiliate of Al Qaeda, to blow up a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day—and the book has attracted a wide readership, becoming a //Times// best-seller. Recently, Thiessen was hired by the Washington //Post// as an online columnist. Neither a journalist nor a terrorism expert, he got his start as a publicist for conservative politicians, among them Jesse Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina. After Bush’s election in 2000, he began writing speeches for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, eventually, became a speechwriter in the Bush White House. In his book, Thiessen explains that he got a rare glimpse of the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program when, in 2006, he helped write a speech for President George W. Bush that acknowledged the program’s existence and offered a spirited defense of it. “This program has given us information that has saved innocent lives,” Bush declared. (My own history of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, “The Dark Side,” mentions this speech, and says that it supplanted a different version, prepared by Administration officials who disapproved of the interrogation program; Thiessen, in his book, disputes my reporting, insisting that although “many edits” were suggested by critics of abusive tactics, there was “no rival draft.”) In an effort to bolster the President’s speech, the C.I.A. arranged for Thiessen to see classified documents, and invited him to meet agency interrogators. He says that he emerged convinced of the program’s merit. While researching his book, he was granted extensive interviews with several of the program’s key architects and implementers, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence; and Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director. The book, whose cover features a blurb from Cheney, has become the unofficial Bible of torture apologists.

“Courting Disaster” has a scholarly feel, and hundreds of footnotes, but it is based on a series of slipshod premises. Thiessen, citing McConnell, claims that before the C.I.A. began interrogating detainees the U.S. knew “virtually nothing” about Al Qaeda. But McConnell was not in the government in the years immediately before 9/11. He retired as the director of the National Security Agency in 1996, and did not rejoin the government until 2007. Evidently, he missed a few developments during his time in the private sector, such as the C.I.A.’s founding, in 1996, of its bin Laden unit—the only unit devoted to a single figure. There was also bin Laden’s declaration of war on America, in 1996, and his 1998 indictment in New York, after Al Qaeda’s bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. The subsequent federal trial of the bombing suspects, in New York, produced thousands of pages of documents exposing the internal workings of Al Qaeda. A state’s witness at the trial, a former Al Qaeda member named Jamal al-Fadl, supplied the F.B.I. with invaluable information about the group, including its attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. (Fadl did so without any coercion other than the hope of a future plea bargain. Indeed, the F.B.I., without using violence, has persuaded dozens of other suspected terrorists to coöperate, including, most recently, the Christmas Day bomber.)

In order to make the case that America was blind to the threat of Al Qaeda in the days before 9/11, Thiessen skips over the scandalous amount of intelligence that reached the Bush White House before the attacks. In February, 2001, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, called Al Qaeda “the most immediate and serious threat” to the country. Richard Clarke, then the country’s counterterrorism chief, tried without success to get Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda. Thomas Pickard, then the F.B.I.’s acting director, has testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft told him that he wanted to hear no more about Al Qaeda. On August 6, 2001, Bush did nothing in response to a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” As Tenet later put it, “The system was blinking red.”

Thiessen presents the C.I.A. interrogation program as an unqualified success. “In the decade before the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al Qaeda launched repeated attacks against America,” he writes. “In the eight years since the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al Qaeda has not succeeded in launching one single attack on the homeland or American interests abroad.” This is not exactly a textbook demonstration of causality. Moreover, the claim that American interests have been invulnerable since the C.I.A. began waterboarding is manifestly untrue. Al Qaeda has launched numerous attacks against U.S. targets abroad since 9/11, including the 2004 attack on the Hilton Hotel in Taba, Egypt; the 2003 and 2009 attacks on hotels in Indonesia; four attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and the assassination of Lawrence Foley, a U.S. diplomat, in Jordan. In 2007, Al Qaeda attacked Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan, killing two Americans and twenty-one others, in a failed attempt to assassinate Cheney, who was visiting. Indeed, Al Qaeda’s relentless campaign in Afghanistan has helped bring about the near-collapse of U.S. policy there. In Iraq, the Al Qaeda faction led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.

Terrorism experts have advanced many reasons that Al Qaeda has not managed a successful attack inside the U.S. since 9/11. For one thing, Peter Bergen suggests, America, in addition to improving its security procedures, “has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on improving intelligence.” This effort has involved better coördination between the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the international community, as well as tightened surveillance.

Thiessen’s impulse, however, is to credit C.I.A. interrogators at every turn. He portrays the agency’s coercive handling, in 2002, of Abu Zubaydah—he was subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, temperature extremes, and waterboarding, among other techniques—as another coup that saved American lives. Information given by Zubaydah, Thiessen writes, led to the arrest, two months later, in Chicago, of Jose Padilla, the American-born Al Qaeda recruit. But Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent, has testified before Congress that he elicited Padilla’s identity from Zubaydah in April, 2002—months before the C.I.A. began using its most controversial methods. Soufan, speaking to //Newsweek//, said of Zubaydah’s treatment, “We didn’t have to do any of this.” Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, has described Soufan as “one of the most impressive intelligence agents—from any agency.” Thiessen dismisses Soufan’s firsthand account as “simply false,” on the ground that another F.B.I. agent involved in Zubaydah’s interrogation—whom Thiessen doesn’t identify—told the Justice Department’s inspector general that he didn’t recall Soufan’s getting the information.

Thiessen, citing the classified evidence that he was privileged to see, claims that opponents of brutal interrogations can’t appreciate their efficacy. “The assessment of virtually everyone who examined the classified evidence,” he writes, is that the C.I.A.’s methods were justified. In fact, many independent experts who have top security clearances, and who have had access to the C.I.A.’s records, have denounced the agency’s tactics. Among the critics are Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., and four chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Last year, President Obama asked Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, to give a classified briefing on the program to three intelligence experts: Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska; Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel to the C.I.A.; and David Boren, the retired Democratic senator from Oklahoma. The three men were left unswayed. Boren has said that, after the briefing, he “wanted to take a bath.” In an e-mail to me, he wrote, “I left the briefing by General Hayden completely unconvinced that the use of torture is an effective means of interrogation. . . . Those who are being tortured will say //anything//.”

Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray. Nowhere in this book, for instance, does the name Ibn Sheikh al-Libi appear. In 2002, the C.I.A., under an expanded policy of extraordinary rendition, turned Libi over to Egypt to be brutalized. Under duress, Libi falsely linked Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s alleged biochemical-weapons program, in Iraq. In February, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an influential speech in which he made the case for going to war against Iraq and prominently cited this evidence.

Thiessen never questions the wisdom of relying on C.I.A. officials to assess the legality and effectiveness of their own controversial program. Yet many people at the agency aren’t just worried about the judgment of history; they’re worried about facing prosecution. As a report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility notes, the agency has a “demonstrated interest in shielding its interrogators from legal jeopardy.”

“Courting Disaster” downplays the C.I.A.’s brutality under the Bush Administration to the point of falsification. Thiessen argues that “the C.I.A. interrogation program did not inflict torture by any reasonable standard,” and that there was “only one single case” in which “inhumane” techniques were used. That case, he writes, involved the detainee Abd al-Rahim Nashiri, whom a C.I.A. interrogator threatened with a handgun to the head, and with an electric drill. He claims that no detainee “deaths in custody took place in the C.I.A. interrogation program,” failing to mention the case of a detainee who was left to freeze to death at a C.I.A.-run prison in Afghanistan. Referring to the Abu Ghraib scandal, Thiessen writes that “what happened in those photos had nothing to do with C.I.A. interrogations, military interrogations, or interrogations of any sort.” The statement is hard to square with the infamous photograph of Manadel al-Jamadi; his body was placed on ice after he died of asphyxiation during a C.I.A. interrogation at the prison. The homicide became so notorious that the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John Helgerson, forwarded the case to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. Thiessen simply ignores the incident. Thiessen also categorically states, “The well-documented fact is there was no torture at Guantánamo.” One person who would disagree with this remark is Susan Crawford, the conservative Republican jurist whom Bush appointed to serve as the top “convening authority” on military commissions at Guantánamo. Last year, she told Bob Woodward, of the Washington //Post//, that there was at least one Guantánamo detainee whose prosecution she couldn’t allow because his abuse “met the legal definition of torture.” Perhaps the most outlandish falsehood in “Courting Disaster” is Thiessen’s portrayal of Obama and the Democrats as the sole opponents of brutal interrogation tactics. Thiessen presents the termination of the C.I.A. program as a renegade action by President Obama, who has “eliminated our nation’s most important tool to prevent terrorists from striking America.” Yet Thiessen knows that waterboarding and other human-rights abuses, such as dispatching prisoners into secret indefinite detention, were abandoned by the Bush Administration: he wrote the very speech announcing, in 2006, that the Administration was suspending their use.

In fact, the C.I.A.’s descent into torture was ended by an outpouring of opposition from critics inside and outside the Administration—including officials within the C.I.A., who registered their concerns with Helgerson. In 2004, Helgerson wrote a pointed confidential report questioning the legality, the medical safety, and the humaneness of the program, which spurred conservative, Bush-appointed lawyers in the Justice Department to withdraw arguments that had been made to justify the program. F.B.I. officials and military leaders, including the four-star General John Vessey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, turned against the Bush Administration interrogation program. So did Senator John McCain; he later described waterboarding as torture. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that American officials had to treat Al Qaeda suspects humanely, or face charges of war crimes. Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it. ♦

Read more: []

=[|Cheney Knew They Were Innocent]= Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, Atlantic Online, 12 Apr 2010 01:12 pm The inmates at Gitmo were routinely referred to as "the worst of the worst." Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney all knowingly pushed this lie. And it was a lie - because they all knew that the chaotic way in which these terror suspects had been captured had left such esoteric questions as innocence or guilt by the wayside. In a March 24 legal declaration in the Hamdi case, a first-hand eye-witness to the Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process and embrace of torture, stated under oath what he saw on the inside. The statement - widely covered across the world - was largely ignored by the US MSM. But it's devastating to have a former high Bush-Cheney official state under oath that the last administration knew it had countless innocent prisoners, lied about it, and tortured many. Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, is the man putting the record straight. Money quote:

In fact, by late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review. A separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place. Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo... During the morning briefings, Ambassador at-Large for War Crimes, Pierre Prosper, who was a primary person working on negotiating transfers, would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go. I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the U.S. Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DOD. Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, whose position could be summed up as “the end justifies the means”, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office. I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. From these discussions, I learned that it was his view that it was not just Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making. My own view is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so. Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s “cowboy instincts,” Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.

Lie after lie after lie. And the illegal imprisonment and torture of individuals often completely unrelated to terrorism at all. And no accountability. This was America for almost eight years. And Obama has perpetuated the avoidance of responsibility with staggering diligence.

=Jane Mayer's Defenders Chime In = Marc Thiessen] The Corner, National Review Online, Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Over at //True/Slant//, Conor Friedersdorf comes to Jane Mayer’s [|defense], claiming Mayer didn’t really mean that the CIA interrogations “yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit” because — aha! — I left out that she attributed this claim to “many critics.” Please. Asserting that “many critics” say CIA interrogations yielded no intelligence is like saying “many critics say you beat your wife.” It’s disingenuous to cite these many (unnamed) critics and say — oh, but of course, Mayer did not mean she agreed with them. Of course she did. The whole purpose of her review was to rebut the arguments I present in //[|Courting Disaster]// that the CIA program produced invaluable intelligence.

But I would certainly welcome it if Mayer, Friedersdorf, and all the other critics would finally come out and admit publicly that enhanced interrogations did work — that lives were saved thanks to the information the CIA program produced. This would be progress indeed.

Friedersdorf goes on to charge that I incorrectly claim Admiral Blair, Leon, and John Brennan all supported the CIA program. This is not what I said. Their opposition is well documented in my book, and should be obvious to any sentient reader (if they supported the CIA program they would not have shut it down). What I do is quote them admitting that the program worked. The point I made is that Mayer’s claim that CIA interrogations “yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit” is so absurd that even the Obama administration [|officials] who shut down the program disagree with her.

Moreover, in //Courting Disaster//, I do quote Admiral Blair as saying “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means” — and then spend several pages dissecting the merits of his assertion (see pages 339–342). I write: “In other words, we know with 100 percent certitude that enhanced interrogations produced ‘high value information,’ but there is ‘no way of knowing’ whether other methods can produce the same information. This means that the Obama administration is abandoning a proven tool to risk our security on the admittedly unproven prospect that the Army Field Manual will produce the same results.” It’s all in there — though apparently these days critics on the left don’t feel they need to actually read a book before they criticize it.

The bottom line is that critics like Mayer want to have it both ways: They want to say (a) we should not use these techniques and (b) they didn’t work anyway. As even Obama officials admit, the second part is simply not true.

The question is: Will Mayer admit it as well?

=Marc Thiessen vs. Jane Mayer, Cont’d= By CONOR FRIEDERSDORF Over at //The Corner//, Marc Thiessen [|continues his attack] on Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer who panned his book, Courting Disaster, in [|a scathing review] that pointed out its numerous inaccurate passages. Mr. Thiessen responded to that review [|here]. I [|argued] that his response is unfair to Ms. Mayer. Before I address the errors in his latest post, I want to step back for a minute and explain to Mr. Thiessen something about the larger controversy. The core of his argument, in his book Courting Disaster, and in the present exchange, is that the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation tactics,” — a euphemism that encompasses techniques I and many others find to be illegal torture — were indispensable to national security. As Mr. Thiessen puts it in his latest post:

I would certainly welcome it if Mayer, Friedersdorf, and all the other critics would finally come out and admit publicly that enhanced interrogations did work — that lives were saved thanks to the information the CIA program produced.

Despite his assertions, Mr. Thiessen hasn’t proved this to be so, and I want to explain why. Implicit in his work is the assumption that the CIA interrogation program “worked” so long as it can be shown that a detainee subjected to these techniques provided intelligence that saved American lives. This is a flawed metric. One problem is that in any individual case, it is impossible to determine whether an approach other than “enhanced interrogation” could have elicited the same intelligence, or even better intelligence, something that Mr. Thiessen himself admits. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, a case where a detainee who was water-boarded gave up information that he would’ve otherwise withheld. In this circumstance, Mr. Thiessen would claim vindication, point to the American lives saved by the information, and assert it as proof that the CIA’s entire “enhanced interrogation” program “works.” What is myopic about that assumption, and the whole body of Mr. Thiessen’s writerly output, is that //overall// efficacy, //overall// impact on American lives, and //overall// impact in the War on Terrorism is the actual metric that determines whether or not an interrogation program “works.” Were I to implement an interrogation program where the CIA questioners spoke only Chinese, it might well save American lives in a single instance, when the particular detainee hails from Beijing, whereas the failure to elicit information from every other detainee would mean that, on the whole, the strategy didn’t work. Similarly, it may be the case that in a single instance, “enhanced interrogation techniques” elicited useful information, even information that saved American lives, but that other consequences of the program make clear that it was an overall failure. What kinds of “other consequences”? They’ve been discussed endlessly in the debate over detainee treatment, but to quickly rehash the relevant arguments, some of which I find persuasive, and all of which I find plausible: A) Seeing as how the detainees are basically being tortured, “enhanced interrogation” produces false leads from people who just want the pain to stop — and having to track down these false leads is an inefficient waste of resources that distracts anti-terrorism forces, perhaps costing American lives. B) Alternative interrogation tactics that don’t involve torture are simply more effective, either because interrogators have a lot more experience implementing them, or because of the way that the average human being reacts to different methods. Numerous experienced interrogation experts have made this claim. C) The FBI and some talented interrogators are uncomfortable with “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As a result, using them entails the employment of marginally less talented interrogators in the short term, and in the long term affects the number of people who are even willing to train as interrogators. D) The use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” makes some countries less likely or entirely unwilling to give us custody of suspects in the War on Terrorism. E) The fact that we use horrific techniques like waterboarding serves as a recruiting tool for organizations like Al Qaeda, and undermines moral authority that is crucial to winning our wars abroad — General Petraeus makes this latter argument. F) A reputation for the use of “enhanced interrogation” makes the enemy less likely to surrender, and makes anti-terrorist Muslims less likely than they’d otherwise be to report intelligence about other people to American forces, especially when they are unsure of someone’s guilt. Given all these factors, it is wrongheaded, simplistic and indefensible to prattle on about the CIA interrogation program having been proven to work based solely on the argument that some useful information has been gleaned. I am sure there are also other arguments about the strategic benefit of torture, as opposed to its tactical efficacy in a given situation. Suffice it to say that Mr. Thiessen doesn’t have a persuasive rebuttal to these arguments. Incidentally, in his post at The Corner, Mr. Thiessen continues to conflate a tactical success in a single enhanced interrogations with the CIA program “working.” He writes:

Friedersdorf goes on to charge that I incorrectly claim Admiral Blair, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan all supported the CIA program. This is not what I said. Their opposition is well documented in my book, and should be obvious to any sentient reader (if they supported the CIA program they would not have shut it down). What I do is quote them admitting that the program worked.

In fact, I never charge that Mr. Thiessen makes incorrect claims about these men supporting the CIA program — it’s far sneakier than that. What I wrote is that “he purports to defend his own position about enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, by selectively quoting people who turn out to argue that either enhanced interrogation generally, or waterboarding in particular, shouldn’t be used and do more harm than good. That he neglects to mention their words when they are contrary to his own arguments is telling.” I encourage readers to go here and judge for yourselves if you feel misled by the way that Mr. Thiessen quotes his sources. Perhaps he didn’t intend to be misleading, and it is his curious definition of the word “work” that is actually getting in the way here. This is most evident in the case of General Blair, so let’s look at his whole quote again:

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

Mr. Thiessen persists in summarizing the views of a man who says these techniques do overall damage to our interests — that their costs “far outweigh their benefits” — by saying that he believes these techniques “work” (and when he quotes the man he leaves out the second sentence entirely!). That is my well founded objection. So Mr. Thiessen persists in acting as though whether “enhanced interrogation” works is a matter of proving that in some individual instances information was elicited that saved American lives. Before we granted that possibility for the sake of argument. Now let’s grapple with that narrow matter. Even proving that American lives would’ve been lost but for these techniques — a difficult thing to demonstrate — wouldn’t salvage Mr. Thiessen’s project, given other objections just listed. But it is relevant to the dispute with Ms. Mayer that I’ve weighed in on. Mr. Thiessen writes:

Over at True/Slant, Conor Friedersdorf comes to Jane Mayer’s defense, claiming Mayer didn’t really mean that the CIA interrogations “yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit” because — aha! — I left out that she attributed this claim to “many critics.” Please. Asserting that “many critics” say CIA interrogations yielded no intelligence is like saying “many critics say you beat your wife.” It’s disingenuous to cite these many (unnamed) critics and say — oh, but of course, Mayer did not mean she agreed with them. Of course she did. The whole purpose of her review was to rebut the arguments I present in Courting Disaster that the CIA program produced invaluable intelligence.

Even in focusing on a line at the beginning of Ms. Mayer’s piece that was meant to summarize the state of debate, Mr. Thiessen is in the wrong, especially in asserting that these critics are “unnamed.” Ms. Mayer’s review begins by summarizing the //Courting Disaster// assertion that if not for the CIA interrogation program, a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights would’ve succeeded. She writes:

His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

Is Peter Clarke not a named critic who asserts that CIA interrogations yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit? Another named critic in the piece:

Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert who is writing a history of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” told me that the Heathrow plot “was disrupted by a combination of British intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, and Scotland Yard.” He noted that authorities in London had “literally wired the suspects’ bomb factory for sound and video.” It was “a classic law-enforcement and intelligence success,” Bergen said, and “had nothing to do with waterboarding or with Guantánamo detainees.”

Later in Ms. Mayer’s piece:

Thiessen’s impulse, however, is to credit C.I.A. interrogators at every turn. He portrays the agency’s coercive handling, in 2002, of Abu Zubaydah—he was subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, temperature extremes, and waterboarding, among other techniques—as another coup that saved American lives. Information given by Zubaydah, Thiessen writes, led to the arrest, two months later, in Chicago, of Jose Padilla, the American-born Al Qaeda recruit. But Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent, has testified before Congress that he elicited Padilla’s identity from Zubaydah in April, 2002—months before the C.I.A. began using its most controversial methods. Soufan, speaking to Newsweek, said of Zubaydah’s treatment, “We didn’t have to do any of this.”

Is Ali Soufan not a named critic? And still later, Ms. Mayer writes:

Thiessen, citing the classified evidence that he was privileged to see, claims that opponents of brutal interrogations can’t appreciate their efficacy. “The assessment of virtually everyone who examined the classified evidence,” he writes, is that the C.I.A.’s methods were justified. In fact, many independent experts who have top security clearances, and who have had access to the C.I.A.’s records, have denounced the agency’s tactics. Among the critics are Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., and four chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Last year, President Obama asked Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, to give a classified briefing on the program to three intelligence experts: Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska; Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel to the C.I.A.; and David Boren, the retired Democratic senator from Oklahoma. The three men were left unswayed. Boren has said that, after the briefing, he “wanted to take a bath.” In an e-mail to me, he wrote, “I left the briefing by General Hayden completely unconvinced that the use of torture is an effective means of interrogation. . . . Those who are being tortured will say anything.”

Is David Boren not a named critic? I excerpt at such length because it is the only way to show how careless and misleading is Mr. Thiessen’s assertion. “It’s disingenuous to cite these many (unnamed) critics and say — oh, but of course, Mayer did not mean she agreed with them,” he writes. “Of course she did.” Unnamed critics! As for the question of whether or not Ms. Mayer agrees with them, I think it is fair to say that overall she does not think there is compelling evidence that the CIA’s interrogation program “works,” but that neither does she “declare categorically” that they ““yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit” because a reporter as careful as she is, fact-checked by the //New Yorker// staff, doesn’t make unnecessarily strong categorical declarations — rather, she reports on strong critiques, and at the beginning of an article in which they’re presented she writes that the book “offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit.” It is the inclusion of these numerous named critics, saying just that in relation to various examples, that make her summary early in the article a fair one– and it is telling that Mr. Thiessen obsesses on that line, what he inaccurately calls Ms. Mayer’s assertion, when the critiques most devastating to his book are elsewhere. Put another way, the journalistic hedgded assertions of Jane Mayer are nevertheless plenty powerful enough to devastate Courting Disaster.

=[|Fisking Thiessen, Ctd]= 16 Apr 2010 05:41 pm A reader writes:

On [|Friedersdorf's premise]: "Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, a case where a detainee who was water-boarded gave up information that he would’ve otherwise withheld."

It strikes me that most of scenarios like this fail because in fact no real life case will be like that. A better one. Let's say we have a terrorist detainee and we want to know the names of his accomplices. In such a circumstance we won't know, surely, how many accomplices he has. So once the waterboarding starts, we won't know to stop after we learn five names or ten. The whole logic of the exercise is to extract //all// the names: so we won't stop until we believe that he's got no more to give. But by definition some of the names will be innocent men whose names are offered to stop the torture and others will be minor figures who know nothing.

And this, it seems to me, is the internal flaw of the pro-torture argument. It's easy to conjure up fantasy-situations that define when torture should begin. It's impossible to define how it should end and what should be done with the information that it produces.