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Craig Benson protege Kelly Ayotte says "we shouldn't torture to get information," but then, perhaps remembering that she's a candidate in an increasingly fringe party, clarifies:
When asked if she would vote to abolish water boarding, Ayotte said, "I would like to think about that further."
Step back and think about that for a minute. Someone who would represent us in the United States Senate needs time to think about whether torture should be abolished as a practice.
Of course, what's an Ayotte newspaper writeup without another statement reaffirming her lack of faith in the rule of law:
By trying Mohammed in New York City, Ayotte said federal prosecutors will give him a chance to "spout off on his anti-American ideas and we will also allow terrorists around the world to get access to intelligence that they can use to harm us."
I'm surprised it's come to this so early in her candidacy.
Both of those quotes represent an America I do not recognize. We are made of stronger stuff than that. At the NHYD Kennedy Awards, when I said that in the face of an increasingly unserious party, "we need to be the adults in the room," this is exactly what I was talking about.
It's become more or less common knowledge that US forces have been using music as an operational tool for some time now, and I've begun seeing lists of the songs that are being used either to inflict pain, to demoralize, or to just generally disorient various people in various sorts of situations.
There are others, wiser than I, who will opine as to the questions of efficacy and the moral issues surrounding these kinds of operations; I will opine, instead, as to the quality of the songs used.
Frankly, had anyone asked, I could have put the torturers onto much better musical choices, just by selecting from my own "My Music" folder--which left me thinking: "hey, it's the weekend...why not do exactly that?"
Got any psychological warfare mission planned for the weekend? Expecting to have to direct amplified sound at an angry mob in a defensive maneuver Saturday night? Planning a Halloween haunted house that goes a bit...fuurther?
Come along with me then, soldier, and I'll provide you a playlist that should do the trick in almost any foreseeable emergency.
When last we met, Gentle Reader, it was to work through a series of legal precedents and statute law; the goal of the exercise being to determine if we could or could not define waterboarding as torture.
We have the kind assistance of Professor Jeffrey Addicott, who has provided us with his written testimony from his recent appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and a personal interview, where he walked me through some of his thinking on the matter.
Today we're going to take a look at the precedent that he has used to reach the conclusion that waterboarding is not torture.
It's also possible that the analysis may result in the discovery of a bit of common ground...but as I noted in Part One, it's common ground that neither one of us might have seen coming.
Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya.
-snip
I have a simple question. To what extent were America's intelligence assets distracted from hunting down Osama bin Laden and the al-Qa'ida network that was responsible for the attacks of 9/11, so that the preemptive war on Iraq could be initiated?
...is just as bad as the Politicization of Justice.
I think Digby might be right (she's pretty much always right, so the odds are in her favor).
Once the conventional wisdom starts settling in as Left = Anti-Torture, Right = Pro-Torture, it's a darker, tougher place from which to emerge. It's a simultaneously fundamental and sinister shift from Torture Under Any Circumstances = Un-American.
And by running away from holding BushCo accountable and focusing on the future, the President is actually calcifying that conventional wisdom, instead of defusing the partisanship on it, which he and his team probably think they are doing.
It's all very sad. Americans one day in the future will have to figure out how to deal with some monster in the Oval Office who will do illegal things while waving around the permission slip of the unchecked precedent being set today.
I would not listen to this argument from anybody else, but Harvey Silverglate never fails to make me think.
[The memos] approve the infliction of terror and pain, but not disfigurement and death.
What is the importance of this distinction? A CIA agent, operating in good faith, could readily consider such DOJ advice to be a binding legal opinion that he could safely follow. And in our legal system, based on an ancient Anglo-Saxon moral and legal tenet incorporated into our own criminal codes, a wrongdoer may be punished only if he knowingly and intentionally committed an act that he believed to be illegal. Given the facts and circumstances - the nation had just withstood the worst terrorist attack in its history and was being led by a president who suddenly declared a full-scale "war on terror" - it is inconceivable that any criminal jury in any American jurisdiction could, would, or even should agree unanimously (which is what it takes to convict) that an agent, acting in accord with DOJ legal advice, is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (another prerequisite for conviction). These are legal realities often missed by those outside the practice of trial law.
Unless we are prepared to allow the war on terror to inflict further damage on our legal system, we need to step back and ask if perhaps better sense, and cooler heads, should prevail in the face of righteous outrage at our government's conduct. Steps might be taken short of prosecution.
Kudos to the Globe for publishing this.
More's conclusion rings true today: "Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent."
I might use that More quote later to apply to Jane Harman (seriously).
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is appearing before the House Foreign Policy Committee today to speak about the overall foreign policy goals of the Obama Administration.
She is taking no prisoners in the answers she is giving to the right wing Republicans on the Committee. She is making them understand that she is part of the team and wasting no opportunity to promote her boss, President Obama
Until I read about the number of times that two terrorists were waterboarded, I did not think that anyone should be prosecuted for torture. Bush is gone, Cheney is sticking pins in a doll in an undisclosed location, move on.
But when I read stories like this:
Several bloggers have noted one memo that said al-Qaida detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, while suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. "That doesn't sound very effective to me," wrote Marcy Wheeler of the Emptywheel blog.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
I said, this whole thing is too immoral, so illegal, flies in the face of what our country stands for, incredibly stupid, incompetent and horrible. Someone needs to be prosecuted to show that we recognize that fact, and that we cannot, as a nation, tolerate this activity.
As a law-abiding, objective citizen, I've long considered it a negative that while prisoners have access to phones and can communicate with the outside world whenever their keepers consider it appropriate, other than their lawyers, the outside world has no right to access them. Which means, in effect, that individuals convicted of crime are shielded from kith and kin who have a claim on them.
Be that as it may, there's likely many a prison warden who's not keen about a prisoner's right to communicate on the telephone either--especially the fellow who was in charge of the prison on Guantanamo Bay when the following conversation occurred.
And today we got to see some of the permission slips they gave themselves to drag the good name of the United States into depravity.
I really do think it'll go down as the Worst Ever. Torture abroad, spying at home, lying into a war, propaganda, letting a city drown, the rank politicization of Justice.
It's like a whole layer of evil on top of one of the most viciously right-wing policy romps in American history, itself a marvel. Massive tax cuts for the wealthiest, surplus into record deficits, deregulation of industry, enabling of polluters, lax or no oversight, giveaways to Big Pharma, the ghoulishness of the midnight rescue of Terri Schiavo.
And Jeb Bradley, John Sununu, Judd Gregg, and Charlie Bass were all active participants and enablers of this nightmarish era.
When are public servants going to learn that it's not about them, but it's about the office they hold?
Of course Barack Obama will run his Administration in a way that is clean from the torture fetishists of those before him. He will set a great example of the way forward.
And by allowing a case involving extraordinary rendition to go forward no differently than under Bush, Barack Obama is clearly signaling that he's not out to punish Bush and the policies of the recent past.
But by so doing, he opens the door to torture to other presidents in the future whose names are not Bush and Obama.
This is not rocket science. Precedent is the permission slip of those who have no other recourse to cover their depravity. History is chock-a-block with bloody exempla.
It's a bird, it's a plane - it's, it's... the Rule of Law!
President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.
I think it was when the secret rendition news came out that I really started to wonder if America's best days were over. To everyone who worked to get Barack Obama elected President, thank you, thank you, thank you, for restoring my faith in the Res Publica.
This is an Open Thread.
UPDATE: Now this photo (screenshot from HuffPost) really made my day. Can you spot the Blue Hamster in the pic watching Obama sign the order to close Gitmo?
Cross-posted at Blue News Tribune. I keep telling myself to stop cross-posting, but this is too big.
Bob Woodward, apparently, is still kicking.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official
Trial Overseer Cites 'Abusive' Methods Against 9/11 Suspect
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 14, 2009; A01
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."
"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.
Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
So there it is. More will follow, I am sure.
Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said.
Military prosecutors said in November that they would seek to refile charges against Qahtani, 30, based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques. But Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, said in the interview that she would not allow the prosecution to go forward.
This is the first I've heard of Susan Crawford, and I am impressed.
What can one say about this? I try to remember that this country has done terrible things before, and we have always come back to our senses.
The psyops aspect of this is unsettling. They went right at Islamic taboos.
"Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."
At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.
The whole story is worth reading.
Crawford said she does not know whether five other detainees accused of participating in the Sept. 11 plot, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were tortured. "I assume torture," she said, noting that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said publicly that Mohammed was one of three detainees waterboarded by the CIA. Crawford declined to say whether she considers waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, to be torture.
(snip)
"There is no doubt [Qahtani] was tortured," Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Qahtani's civilian attorney, said this week. "He has loss of concentration and memory loss, and he suffers from paranoia. . . . He wants just to get back to Saudi Arabia, get married and have a family." She said Qahtani "adamantly denies he planned to join the 9/11 attack. . . . He has no connections to extremists." Gutierrez said she believes Saudi Arabia has an effective rehabilitation program and Qahtani ought to be returned there.
Joe Klein (who really has come a long, long way, hasn't he?):
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention - the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime - did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.
Judge Gonzales advised the President that all detainees should be treated humanely, but as a legal matter, al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are not considered "legal combatants" and are not covered by the Geneva Convention.
There's lots of reasons why he should never be honored with representing Granite Staters ever again - but this one is a clear cut no-brainer.
But in Broder Village, the Smartest Man (No Longer) in the Senate is a champion of civil liberties.
John McCain is a small, petty man who takes comfort in other people's distress. How do I know that? It's what I oberved during his so-called "Town Hall" at the Rochester, New Hampshire Opera House this week.
Judge Gonzales advised the President that all detainees should be treated humanely, but as a legal matter, al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are not considered "legal combatants" and are not covered by the Geneva Convention.
A major address on national security today from Jeanne Shaheen at St. A's IOP:
(5:42) "By rebuilding international alliances, condemning torture, demanding accountability and keeping our promises to our veterans, we can again lead with our values. These values have made us a beacon of freedom for the world. They should never, ever be abandoned. National security that is based on American values makes us stronger.
At first glance I am struck by the similarities of Shaheen's policy statements to the Darcy Burner led Responsible Plan (comparison of bullet points below the fold):
There's been some speculation that Condi Rice wants to be the next Vice President. Given last night's revelations, I endorse this ticket wholeheartedly as an exact mirror of what we have now. Bush-McCain for wars of choice, Cheney-Rice for torture.
The Monitor's March 12 editorial addressing the topic of torture was perhaps the most disgraceful and unprofessional opinion piece I have ever read.
Your assertion that Sen. Judd Gregg and I have been "complicit in what should be seen as crimes against humanity" is outrageous and entirely wrong on all counts.
First, I oppose torture in all forms, and in all circumstances, and supported the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which was signed into law on Dec. 30, 2005. The Detainee Treatment Act explicitly and unequivocally prohibits "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment of persons under the detention, custody, or control of the United States Government."
Believe it or not, the Senator was in office prior to 30 December 2005. Here's his form letter from 28 February 2005 on why we should all support confirming Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General:
Judge Gonzales advised the President that all detainees should be treated humanely, but as a legal matter, al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are not considered "legal combatants" and are not covered by the Geneva Convention. This allows U.S. officials to detain, question, and prosecute terrorist suspects; a critical component of the war on terrorism.
David Hicks, the only person in Guantanamo enemy combatant to have been sentenced through the military tribunal system, was released today to his homeland of Australia.
He was held for five years.
The remainder of his seven-year sentence has been suspended, pending certain conditions, one of which caught my eye:
All but nine months of the sentence was suspended, and under a plea bargain Hicks was allowed to serve the remainder at a maximum security prison in South Australia state. He was told to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.
Under the deal, Hicks forfeited any right to appeal his conviction and agreed not to speak with news media for a year from his sentencing date.
Hmm? Why a year I wonder?
Oh, right. God forbid the public learn what stress positions, forced nakedness, and waterboarding look like from a white Australian guy before the election.
Incidentally, if you haven't seen the Amnesty International video on stress positions, I include it below. They took the approach of actually torturing a volunteer with stress positions, rather than having it "acted".
So what you will see below is what the technique the media softly intones as "stress position use" looks like:
You can go to Unsubscribe me to learn why the volunteer offered to to be filmed enduring this rather than reenact it.
Update: Changed opening paragraph to reflect he spent most recent part of sentence at Adelaide prison. It's unclear to me when he was transferred there.
I love a good contest:
