John Ashcroft's Shameful Defense of Waterboarding

John Ashcroft cements his legacy as a public servant.



You have to give him credit for being more forthcoming that Michael Mukasey--but then you have to remember that this is a man defending the practice of waterboarding:

"The reports that I have heard, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, indicate that they were very valuable," Ashcroft said, adding that CIA Director George Tenet indicated the "value of the information received from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques -- I don't know whether he was saying waterboarding or not, but assume that he was for a moment -- the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources."

Waterboarding is a technique designed to simulate drowning. The agency has acknowledged using it on terror suspects. Some critics regard it as torture; others say it is a harsh interrogation technique, and proponents say it is a useful tool in the war on terror.

Ashcroft, who stated his opposition to torture, said the Justice Department has determined that waterboarding -- as defined and described by the CIA -- doesn't constitute torture.

"I believe a report of waterboarding would be serious, but I do not believe it would define torture," Ashcroft said, responding to questions from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California.

Only, we now know that the practice drove the men insane. We now know it killed men. We know that there were people arguing against it, touting the proven method of building rapport. We have defined deviancy down to the point where monstrous things are commonplace discussion. Flippant, ridiculous, self-serving and intellectually bankrupt defenses of waterboarding signal many, many years of batshit crazy discourse ahead.

Yep, the worst times in our country's history are upon us. We're living them and we're seeing the deviancy up close, and it's truly an awful thing. Awful.

[video below the fold]

Hey, go read this

...because it is a brilliant take down of some conventional wisdom that is floating around.

When the Soviet Stalinist government of the 1930s meant to discredit old elements of the regime, labelling former cadre of the Communist Party "enemies of the state", the intended result was the "false confession." At that time, the Dewey Commission in the United States (named after the respected U.S. academic who chaired the investigation, John Dewey) investigated and cleared Leon Trotsky and other "old Bolsheviks" from the wild prosecutorial claims of the Russian prosecutors. It was the "confessions" of some of these former leaders of the Soviet Union that seemed so inexplicable at the time. The drama of the situation was captured by novelist Arthur Koestler in his famous novel, Darkness at Noon.

Much later, the supposed confessions of Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty after his 1948 arrest by the Stalinist police greatly puzzled Western observers. It was supposed that he was tortured, but even then, how had he been made to "confess" in such a relatively brief period of time?

The issue of false confessions elicited under torture had its largest airing when, in 1952-53, captured U.S. airmen told their captors that they had engaged in dropping biological weapons on North Korea and China as part of the U.S. air campaign against those countries. The accusation was vigorously denied by the United States, and a propaganda campaign was begun in the guise of investigating the "brainwashing" of U.S. prisoners. Wild stories of mind control drugs and secret interrogation techniques that could gain unique influence over the personalities of its victims were circulated. It was in this environment that Albert Biderman, Lawrence Hinkle, Harold Wolff, Robert Jay Lifton and others were enlisted to study how the Chinese had produced the "false confessions" of U.S. POWs.

Except, were the confessions false?

Publicly, that was the story. But when researchers met behind closed doors, or at professional meetings, a different story emerges. At a 1957 symposium organized by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) on "Methods of Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Interviews", Dr. Louis West noted that "the enemy had a considerable degree of success in obtaining intelligence information and in forcing prisoners to engage in propaganda activities" (emphasis added; the quote is from GAP Symposium No. 4, July 1957, published by GAP Publications Office).

Invictus is a Daily Kos blogger, and his regular site just went on my bookmarks. Invictus is also on the Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus along with this site, so we are kindred spirits, of a kind, and it's always wise to link to someone who we should have been linking to all along. It's called "rectifying the situation" in my parlance.

This person nails the whole supposed story about the use of Chinese techniques from the Korean War and knows his stuff.

Bravo, Mr. Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens agrees to be waterboarded. He deserves credit for volunteering to undergo what most Americans still can't quite grasp--torture at the hands of someone else. Pictures below the fold.

As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance. Mr. Nance is not what you call a bleeding heart. In fact, speaking of the coronary area, he has said that, in battlefield conditions, he “would personally cut bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic M.R.E. spoon.” He was to the fore on September 11, 2001, dealing with the burning nightmare in the debris of the Pentagon. He has been involved with the sere program since 1997. He speaks Arabic and has been on al-Qaeda’s tail since the early 1990s. His most recent book, The Terrorists of Iraq, is a highly potent analysis both of the jihadist threat in Mesopotamia and of the ways in which we have made its life easier. I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States.

The argument goes like this:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Masked by these arguments, there lurks another very penetrating point. Nance doubts very much that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted that long under the water treatment (and I am pathetically pleased to hear it). It’s also quite thinkable, if he did, that he was trying to attain martyrdom at our hands. But even if he endured so long, and since the United States has in any case bragged that in fact he did, one of our worst enemies has now become one of the founders of something that will someday disturb your sleep as well as mine. To quote Nance:

Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.

Now, if only more wingnuts would subject themselves to this experience, maybe then we could have an honest debate about it. If a 59 year-old writer like Hitchens can handle it, why not the Jonah Goldbergs, the William Kristols, and the rest of the Fox News crowd?

What's a matter? Chicken?

"...for the protection of the American people."

Even though we write about this topic a lot, we don't write about it nearly enough. We are never going to stop pounding this drum--it's going to go down as the worst thing our country did in the name of protecting the American people.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden admitted, in his February testimony before Congress, that the Central Intelligence Agency used a technique known as waterboarding on three high-profile Al Qaeda detainees. He also said the CIA had not used the technique in five years -- though the administration seems to be asserting that the agency can use it, when necessary.

President George W. Bush told ABC News in April, "I'm aware our national-security team met on this issue. And I approved.” The president was referring to reports that the National Security Council’s “principals committee” -- the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the head of the NSC and the CIA director -- discussed and approved the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking with Google employees in Mountain View, Calif., in May, said, “after Sept. 11, whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks of Sept. 11, but the anthrax attacks that happened, we were in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount.” She added, “there has been a long evolution in American policy about detainees and about interrogations...we now have in place a law that was not there in 2002 and 2003.”

In just the last few weeks, a parade of White House, Defense Dept. and CIA lawyers have squirmed before hostile Congressional committees, giving testimony eerie in its clinical treatment of what most of the world thinks is torture. The hearings produced countless stunning quotes, but one attributed to a CIA lawyer stands out: "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

Indeed, they have been doing it wrong. But they all say they are doing it for us -- for the protection of the American people.

If that was the motivation, no thanks. No one has to be tortured to keep anyone safe.

--WS

We Will Know Them By Their Incompetence

The New York Times has a story about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and, sure enough, there's another reason to condemn the Bush administration buried in the details:

In the Hollywood cliché of Fox’s “24,” a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormentors stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning.

Mr. Martinez’s success at building a rapport with the most ruthless of terrorists goes to the heart of the interrogation debate. Did it suggest that traditional methods alone might have obtained the same information or more? Or did Mr. Mohammed talk so expansively because he feared more of the brutal treatment he had already endured?

A definitive answer is unlikely under the Bush administration, which has insisted in court that not a single page of 7,000 documents on the program can be made public. The C.I.A. declined to provide information for this article, in part, a spokesman said, because the agency did not want to interfere with the military trials planned for Mr. Mohammed and four other Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The two dozen current and former American and foreign intelligence officials interviewed for this article offered a tantalizing but incomplete description of the C.I.A. detention program. Most would speak of the highly classified program only on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request...

The very fact that Mr. Martinez, a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists’ native languages and had no interrogation experience, would end up as a crucial player captures the ad-hoc nature of the program. Officials acknowledge that it was cobbled together under enormous pressure in 2002 by an agency nearly devoid of expertise in detention and interrogation.

“I asked, ‘What are we going to do with these guys when we get them?’ ” recalled A. B. Krongard, the No. 3 official at the C.I.A. from March 2001 until 2004. “I said, ‘We’ve never run a prison. We don’t have the languages. We don’t have the interrogators.’ ”

In its scramble, the agency made the momentous decision to use harsh methods the United States had long condemned. With little research or reflection, it borrowed its techniques from an American military training program modeled on the torture repertories of the Soviet Union and other cold-war adversaries, a lineage that would come to haunt the agency.

We kind of suspected this all along--when faced with the question of what to do when it came time to do what was necessary to defend America, the Bush Administration went with the Soviet option. Oh, and they videotaped it. And lost the videos, of course. But it was legal. Except it wasn't.

The fact that Condoleeza Rice was the National Security Advisor at the time--and is heralded by anyone who still believes it as an "expert" on the former Soviet Union--do you think she was the one who suggested that they go with the Soviet techniques? Do you think someone like Bob Woodward or David Broder would ask that question? Do you think anyone in the elite media is going to make that connection?

Is anyone paying attention when these little details emerge?

--WS

SERE Training Used as a Legal Dodge?

A commenter we all know and love, elmo, says something worth noting:

I was glad to see them dig in to the obvious S.E.R.E. relationship I saw as clear from the beginning. Chickenhawks are so sloppy...

And that made me think of this issue a little more closely, and I wonder if the whole emphasis on SERE Training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) wasn't just a big legal dodge that allowed the bureaucrats who were deciding how to go forward on detainee interrogations a form of legal cover in order to do what they felt they needed to do.

If you go by doctrine, then the doctrine says that someone who undergoes torture when they are captured will have a breaking point, and they will break, but what they will do at that breaking point is say anything and everything in order to get the torture to stop. That means, quite obviously, that torture is then not a means to get reliable information--torture is designed to break and damage the subject for other purposes. The military Code of Conduct spells it out:

V- When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.

That "utmost" is a matter of seconds when being waterboarded. So when members of the military go through SERE, they will be broken with waterboarding. However, what they are doing at the SERE school is controlled and is done in a friendly environment--as in, there is no threat of compromising national secrets.

By extension, the involvement of the SERE school shouldn't surprise anyone:

The SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of counter-resistance techniques used by SERE instructors to break down detainees. The New Yorker notes that in November, 2001 Banks was detailed to Afghanistan, where he spent four months at Bagram Air Base, "supporting combat operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters".

Nor should it comfort us, either. Salon was all over this two years ago:

Human rights advocates have long suspected a link between interrogations in the "war on terror" and a secretive military survival school that trains elite U.S. troops to resist torture. Jane Mayer explored the evidence of a connection between the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school at Fort Bragg, N. C., and real-world interrogators in a July 2005 piece for the New Yorker. Now Salon has the first hard proof of that connection, via one document buried among 1,000 pages obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act. A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.

"When I arrived at GTMO," reads the statement, "my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO ... The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators."

"This is the missing link," declared Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. "It is proof that the SERE training was in fact used, for a time at least, as a basis for interrogations at Guantánamo." "That is what I inferred had happened," agreed retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, former commanding general of the Southeast Regional Army Medical Command, "but I have never seen this documented anywhere." The sworn statement suggests that Fort Bragg was the incubator of the abuse that later migrated from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, and is further evidence of the systematic nature of torture in the war on terror.

The interrogations chief, whose name is redacted, but who is listed as serving at Guantánamo from December 2002 until June 2003, asserts that instructors from the SERE school taught techniques to interrogators at Guantánamo sometime before his arrival, a period when the Department of Defense was developing some of the aggressive and controversial interrogation protocols that later surfaced in Iraq. The statement was produced as part of an investigation by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt into alleged "degrading and abusive" treatment of prisoner Mohammed al-Khatani, the so-called 20th hijacker.

Salon was incorrect--SERE was never hidden. The methods used were, obviously, keep secret to deny them to any possible enemy. When the Air Force tried to add the component that surfaced during the first Gulf War--the sexual abuse of females held by the Iraqis in the 1990-91 conflict--they ran into all sorts of problems when there were questions about the sensitivity of it all.

If you'll recall, when they switched from having the FBI interrogate Khatani to having the DoD interrogate him, they had to wait for Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to approve the methods:

[Late Nov 2002] The Pentagon informs the FBI that it will again take over interrogations of Guantanamo detainee Mohamed al-Khatani, believing that the use of aggressive techniques, which are about to be authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (see November 27, 2002), will be more successful. [New York Times, 6/21/2004] However, the first tactic used against al-Khatani is a subtle one. According to the detention logs of al-Khatani, or “Detainee 063,” his interrogators suggest that he has been spared by Allah to reveal the true meaning of the Koran and to help bring down Osama bin Laden. During a routine medical check, a sergeant whispers to al-Khatani: “What is God telling you right now? Your 19 friends died in a fireball and you weren’t with them. Was that God’s choice? Is it God’s will that you stay alive to tell us about his message?” Al-Khatani reacts violently to the exhortation, throwing his head back and butting the sergeant in the eye. Two MPs wrestle him to the ground, and as al-Khatani thrashes and tries to spit on the sergeant, he crouches down next to the prisoner and says: “Go ahead and spit on me. It won’t change anything. You’re still here. I’m still talking to you and you won’t leave until you’ve given God’s message.”

Now, I have no problem with that whatsoever. I have zero issue with that kind of provocation and that kind of leading questioning--it's the physical torture and driving them insane I'm not in favor of.

So the real question is--how could they take training used to keep US personnel from breaking (even though it is clear that there is no possibility of preventing them from doing so) and extrapolate that into the legal basis and doctrine for torturing people when we know that the techniques will break someone yet yield nearly useless information given up under duress?

Someone somewhere just decided to torture people for the hell of it, rather than use the long, slow process of building rapport, which is proven to work and is proven to give the interrogators useful information.

Anyway, that's my imperfect take on this.

A Moment of Clarity

We've been reading through the McClatchy series on Guantanamo Bay and the treatment of detainees--and when you start to look at the .pdf files and the declassified document dump, you see all manner of chilling things.

Here is a moment of stark clarity and sanity, from a document dated December 17, 2002 [click to enlarge]:



The quality of the image is poor, and I hope it can be read. What you are seeing is a statement that turns on the lights for me and illuminates everything. At a very early stage in the process of handling the detainees, an individual named Timothy James is basically telling anyone who will listen that torture doesn't work.

No one listened.

And that's why we are where we are today.

--WS

McClatchy: We Got The Wrong Guys

We don't express, often enough, the enormous debt that we owe organizations like McClatchy--they do the heavy lifting of the actual reporting, we do the blogging, and they do excellent work. THIS series is Pulitzer worthy already--it details what we need to know about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a way that shows that the US is not fighting the war on terror in a way that would make us proud:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that [Mohammed] Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

Why did this happen? Well, for starters--poor leaders. Weak, ineffective leaders who did not know, chose not to respect, or ignored the rule of law meant we had people in the field doing things that reflect badly on them and on all of us. To date, many have been put on trial, but, really, that's just scapegoating. Like the old adage--if a ship runs aground, the Captain of the ship is relieved--then the policy should be that if troops under a general officer's command abuse detainees or prisoners, they should be relieved. If you make THAT the rule, every commander will sit up and pay attention--and respect the rules of war.

McClatchy's expanded coverage adds this to the mix:

The Defense Department has said that detainee abuse in places such as Bagram was the work of a handful of wayward soldiers. Even after Habibullah and Dilawar were beaten to death, U.S. military officials continued to say that such violence was isolated.

Cammack and other soldiers say the abuse was the outcome of sending troops, often reservists with no background in detainee operations, to installations where the rules were unclear and they received little support.

"It tore us down mentally really bad," said Cammack, who pleaded guilty to hitting Habibullah and received three months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge. "You had no support whatsoever ... everybody hit their boiling point."

Cammack was a specialist in the 377th Military Police Company, a reserve unit based in Cincinnati. Many of his buddies were small-town police officers or, like him, blue-collar laborers. He was one of four soldiers from the unit who agreed to interviews with McClatchy.

No one at Bagram, Cammack said, had any idea what he was doing. Senior officers who came through the Bagram Collection Point paid no attention to the privates and sergeants, who, Cammack said, were slowly losing control of themselves in the face of the war in Afghanistan.

I'm not going to fault Cammack for his perception--he was there, I was not. But I suspect that there are two issues here. One, if he, as a member of a Military Police unit, didn't know how to handle people in his custody, then he hasn't been trained properly. Military Police units should all be required to know how to handle detainees and prisoners in any and all events. If he and the members of his unit are predominantly police officers, then they know that there are rules for treating people in their custody. Those rules should have been defined and explained to them in Afghanistan--as in, hell yes, you can shoot someone if they're a threat to you, but no, you can't just beat the hell out of people because you don't like how fast they're eating. Second, it wasn't a "wayward soldier" issue. It was a leadership issue, and clearly, Cammack was made a scapegoat for failed leadership.

What the McClatchy series does is peel away the covers on how we handled these issues--the capturing, the detaining, and the processing of people suspected of being terrorists. If you want a clear cut example of what this process looked like in, for example, 2004, please see THIS .pdf file and note that a very clear-cut legal basis for capturing, holding, and putting these detainees on trial was attempted by the Bush Administration.

I say, "attempted" for obvious reasons--the legal basis for what they were doing was shaky, at best, and many of the sources were unreliable.

Mozzam Begg is in the McClatchy database of detainees, and his case is one found in that .pdf. You can see the government going back and forth--is he or isn't he?

McClatchy details his story here:

From childhood, Moazzam Begg relished tales of heroes, those who protect the very weak from the very strong. In his Jewish school, he heard them from his teachers. In his Muslim home, he heard them from his father. Later, on weekends, he heard them from an English lady-friend of his father.

The stories were about vastly different peoples: from ancient Jews to Arabian legends to more modern Britons. But to Begg the stories had several things in common: All were about people who stood up for what was right, no matter how strong the opponent. And all inspired him.

He never dreamed, however, that an arrest and three years of what he calls "torture light" in a superpower's prison would put him in a position to carry on their fight. Today, as he travels around the United Kingdom, speaking to university gatherings, politicians and civic groups, exposing what he describes as the inhuman nature of the U.S. Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison, he thinks that it has.

Begg was arrested on Jan. 31, 2002, at his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, while his wife and children slept nearby. During the next three years, U.S. authorities would accuse him of operating, funding and supporting al Qaida camps and operations. He maintains that while he'd supported Islamic causes in the past, including Kashmiri groups favoring secession from India in the mid-1990s, he'd never been involved in al Qaida or any movement that promoted violence against the West. In the 1990s, he'd traveled to Bosnia during its war and he'd attempted to travel to Chechnya during the conflict in that breakaway Muslim republic of Russia.

He says that what the U.S. claimed was an al Qaida camp he'd funded and was directing in Afghanistan was a girls school. The school in Kabul was an experiment under Taliban rule, which didn't allow co-education, to prove that girls could be well educated within a Muslim country. He says that he and his wife raised money for two years before heading to Afghanistan in 2001, and both taught there. His daughter even attended the school, he said.

He said they fled Afghanistan for Pakistan when the U.S. began bombing to oust the Taliban regime, and hoped to return to Afghanistan to reopen the school. He'd been in Islamabad for about three months when he was arrested.

Begg said that from the first moment of his arrest, he was convinced that the Americans had no idea whom they were seizing.

"When they put me in the vehicle, an American guard, who was trying very badly to look Pakistani, showed me a pair of handcuffs and told me, 'These were given to me by the wife of one of the September 11 victims. I promised her I'd use them to handcuff one of the men responsible.' He then put the handcuffs on me. All I could think was, 'Won't he feel stupid when he realizes I'm the wrong guy.' In the end, I don't think he cared. I was dark-skinned, that's all that mattered," Begg said.

And I go back to this issue--who the hell was that soldier and why didn't he have someone in his chain of command tell him to knock it off? He may very well have been given handcuffs and told to go get someone who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Well, did it ever occur to the guy to get the right person? Instead of just any person?

My position is this--we are going to make mistakes in a time of war. But if we maintain a solid foundation in the rule of law and make damned sure we have good leaders doing what they are supposed to be doing, we'll be able to do what we need to do--and that is kill the terrorists and protect this country--while still having a framework that allows us to criticize our conduct, evaluate what we do, and compensate anyone who is not treated fairly.

I am all for fighting the war on individuals who use "terrorism" as their chief tactic of achieving their goals. I am against being a dumbass about it. The smart way to fight terrorism is to spend a little bit of time and effort to find the Mohammed Akhtiars and the Moazzam Beggs and whoever else and ask them, pay them, and recruit them to fight on OUR side where possible. I'm funny that way--I see the world in a way that must make the neoconservatives giggle and fall down. I see the world as being many, many shades of gray, and if we are intelligent and surgical in the way we counter the ideology of the people against us by convincing the fence sitters and the somewhat apolitical people in their society to join us and help us if we promise not to abandon them (our track record there isn't so hot, I admit) then maybe--just maybe--we can counter the rise of the individuals who use radical Islam as their foundation for recruiting followers.

I would submit that we are in the position that we're in because the leadership at the top didn't pay attention to the important things. They paid attention to consolidating their power and demonizing their political enemies back home.

And we're suffering because of those choices.

For the record, no. I don't hate America. But thanks for asking. It makes me feel special.

"the utter lack of sophistication and circus-like atmosphere..."

Every time someone says that the United States does not torture, remember this one salient point:

The CIA has acknowledged waterboarding [Abu] Zubaydah, in part out of concern that he had information that could prevent another imminent attack.

That is all the proof one needs in order to show that the US government tortures.

The larger revelations found in the Justice Department audit of the system in which detainees were handled raise troubling questions about the tactics and the mindset of the people who were charged with keeping America safe. Did they, unwittingly, endanger America even more by operating well outside the boundaries of common sense and decency?

The report, written by Glenn Fine, the Inspector General of the US Justice Department, reached several disturbing conclusions:

While the Inspector General's report "...found no instances in which an FBI agent participated in clear detainee abuse..." it blamed the FBI for failing to give clear instructions to its agents in the field.

The split, pitting the FBI against the CIA and Pentagon, came to a head over the treatment of the so-called 20th hijacker Muhammad al-Qahtani. Qahtani is accused by the government of attempting to enter the United States in August 2001 to be a muscle hijacker on one of the planes used in the 9/11 attacks. He was turned away at the Orlando airport and not allowed entry into the country.

Fine's report raises troubling questions about CIA and Pentagon interrogators whose use of snarling dogs, short shackles, mocking of the Quran and other abuses of detainees overseas appear to have overstepped what U.S. courts would allow in collecting evidence.

At the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, FBI agents in 2002 openly clashed with military interrogators bent on "aggressively" interrogating al-Qahtani by confronting him with agitated dogs and keeping him awake for continuous 20-hour interviews daily.

Didn't the US Military just apologize for desecrating a Koran in Iraq? Why the change of heart, one wonders.

The most glaring aspect of the revelations in this report are not that the US tortures detainees--we've become accustomed to learning that about our government. What stands out like a sore thumb, at least to me, is the rejection of proven methods for interrogation:

Such tactics "have been employed only when traditional means of questioning - things like rapport-building - were ineffective," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Tuesday.

In al-Qahtani's case, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said no evidence of torture has ever surfaced after extensive internal reviews. Al-Qahtani, designated as an additional hijacker for the 2001 attacks, was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog while at Guantanamo Bay, according to a 2005 Pentagon report.

Whitman also said he was unaware of any Pentagon actions that would have delayed the Justice report. Fine's audit, however, describes seven months of foot-dragging and negotiating by the Pentagon over how much information in the report should be classified or otherwise shielded from public review. The 438-page report issued Tuesday is only sparsely blacked-out.

The report surveyed over 1,000 agents, interviews with hundreds of other witnesses and a review of more than a half-million documents. It concluded FBI agents in nearly all cases refused to participate in harsh interrogations and left the room when they were ongoing.

Agents also were fairly vigilant about reporting their concerns to their superiors, the report shows.

At Guantanamo Bay, two FBI agents "had concerns not only about the proposed techniques but also about the glee with which the would-be (military) participants discussed their respective roles in carrying out these techniques, and the utter lack of sophistication and circus-like atmosphere within this interrogation strategy session," the report found.

Within the system, there has emerged a few leaders who are trying to resist the CIA and the Bush Administration. We have seen this with the lawyers who have refused to go forward with the trials, and we're also seeing it with the men who have been brought in to clean up the mess:

Interrogators at Guantanamo got intelligence from detainees that helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan attack Taliban fighters last summer — and they did it through casual questioning and not torture, the military's chief interrogator [there] said.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press, veteran interrogator Paul Rester complained that his profession has gotten a bad reputation due to accounts of waterboarding and other rough interrogation tactics used by the CIA at "black sites."

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, however, allege their clients have been subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation and threats at this U.S. military base in southeast Cuba.

Wearing a blue-striped business shirt without a tie and looking more like a harried executive than a top interrogator, Rester groused that his line of work is "a business that is fundamentally thankless."

He sat hunched over a table in a snack room inside the building where the top commanders keep their offices. In an attempt to keep personnel from blabbing about intelligence-gathering, a poster showed a picture of a hooded gunman and the words: "Keep talking. We're listening" — today's version of the World War II-era admonishment that "Loose lips sink ships."

"Everybody in the world believes that they know how we do what we do, and I have to endure it every time I turn around and somebody is making reference to waterboarding," Rester said. He insisted that Guantanamo interrogators have had many successes using rapport-building and said that technique was the norm here.

For security reasons, he would only discuss one of the successes, and that was only because his boss, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, had already described it in a speech last month. Buzby said several detainees, using poster board paper and crayons, drew detailed maps of the Tora Bora area in eastern Afghanistan that enabled coalition forces to wipe out safe houses, trenches and supplies last summer as Taliban forces were returning to the stronghold they had abandoned more than five years ago.

Rapport-building actually works. But it is slow, tedious and not very glamorous to "make nice" with the enemy and use a more "diplomatic" way to getting information out of them.

It's not hard to see why anything relating to "talking" or "diplomacy" or "common sense" is universally rejected by the Bush Administration.

Senator Kit Bond Proposes New Interrogation Procedures

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) has changed his overall position on "waterboarding" and sent a letter to Senate colleagues yesterday that specifically named "waterboarding" as a technique to be banned, but has introduced the legislation in non-binding language:

The AP [Associated Press] reports that Bond appears to have had a change of heart and is searching for a “compromise” over how the CIA can interrogate prisoners. In a letter to fellow senators yesterday, [Thursday, May 8] Bond proposed explicitly outlining what tactics are banned, rather than which ones are allowed:

One proposal has been to require our intelligence agencies, when conducting interrogations of individuals in their custody, to use only the nineteen techniques explicitly authorized by the Army Field Manual (AFM). This has received immediate objection by the DNI and CIA Director who expressed concern that the AFM fails to exhaust the universe of techniques that could be authorized consistent with the Geneva Conventions. I believe there is a better legislative alternative that, unlike current proposals, satisfies two key objectives: (1) to forbid the use of harsh interrogation techniques that may run afoul of the Geneva Conventions; and (2) to give our intelligence agencies the tools and flexibility they need to conduct full and timely interrogations of terrorists and other detainees.

Rather than authorizing intelligence agencies to use only those techniques that are allowed under the AFM, I believe the more prudent approach is to preclude the use of specific techniques that are prohibited under the AFM. In this way, the Congress can state clearly that certain harsh interrogation techniques will not be permissible. At the same time, this approach allows for the possibility that new techniques that are not explicitly authorized in the AFM, but nevertheless comply with the law, may be developed in the future. This alternative ensures that our intelligence operators know the exact parameters of what is lawful, rather than forcing them to rely on and interpret a Manual that was written solely for military intelligence operations.

Specified prohibitions in conjunction with intelligence interrogations would include: forcing the detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee and using duct tape over the eyes; applying beatings, electric shock, burns, or similar forms of physical pain; “waterboarding”; using military working dogs; inducing hypothermia or heat injury; conducting mock executions; and depriving the detainee of adequate food, water or medical care.

It is not known as to whether the White House would allow such legislation to go forward.

Bond, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, outlined his proposal in nonbinding language accompanying a bill that sets out the intelligence community's policies, programs and spending for 2009. An unclassified summary was released Thursday.

Like the 2008 version of the authorization bill — which President Bush vetoed — the 2009 bill restricts the CIA to using only the 19 interrogation techniques approved by the military in the Army Field Manual. Bond said he would seek to attach his proposed compromise to this or other legislation.

Bond's change of heart on the seriousness of the technique of "waterboarding" is all the more evident by comparing his most recent efforts to a statement made on PBS in December, 2007:

SEN. KIT BOND: First, let me go back and take issue with some of the things that have just been said. Number one, what the CIA is doing is not torture. It conforms to the Detainee Treatment Act, the Geneva Convention, the Convention against Torture. None of these things that are being used, by any stretch of the imagination, could be described as torture.

Now, I think it was a terribly bad idea that in the intelligence authorization bill there was a ban imposed on the CIA using any techniques other than those in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual is meant to advise junior officers in the field who are questioning the people picked up in the field who perhaps have tactical knowledge.

The information in those field manuals are included in all of the al-Qaida training, and they know how to resist those. If we are to get any information from high-value detainees, such as the ones on whose these enhanced techniques were used, then there have to be different techniques.

And I think, as a side note, I think it was absolutely outrageous that a former CIA agent would discuss these kinds of things, because once you describe what techniques are being used, and they are far less serious and threatening than techniques we use on Marines and pilots who go through our training, then the high-value detainees will never speak to us. That's why they used....

GWEN IFILL: I just would like to -- but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used.

There are some who say that, in extreme circumstances, if there is threat of an imminent major attack on the United States, it might be used, but I certainly would not favor it in any circumstance..

The Shadow Government

Vice-Presidential Duties:

The framers also devoted scant attention to the vice president's duties, providing only that he "shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be evenly divided" (Article I, section 3). In practice, the number of times vice presidents have exercised this right has varied greatly. More than half the total number of 233 tie-breaking votes occurred before 1850, with John Adams holding the record at 29 votes, followed closely by John C. Calhoun with 28. Since the 1870s, no vice president has cast as many as 10 tie-breaking votes. While vice presidents have used their votes chiefly on legislative issues, they have also broken ties on the election of Senate officers, as well as on the appointment of committees in 1881 when the parties were evenly represented in the Senate.

The vice president's other constitutionally mandated duty was to receive from the states the tally of electoral ballots cast for president and vice president and to open the certificates "in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives," so that the total votes could be counted (Article II, section 1). Only a few happy vice presidents — John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George Bush — had the pleasure of announcing their own election as president. Many more were chagrined to announce the choice of some rival for the office.

Several framers ultimately refused to sign the Constitution, in part because they viewed the vice president's legislative role as a violation of the separation of powers doctrine. Elbridge Gerry, who would later serve as vice president, declared that the framers "might as well put the President himself as head of the legislature." Others thought the office unnecessary but agreed with Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman that "if the vice-President were not to be President of the Senate, he would be without employment, and some member [of the Senate, acting as presiding officer] must be deprived of his vote."

Now, contrast that understanding of the duties of the Vice President with this development:

(CBS/AP) Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al Qaeda detainees, the former official said.

Note that the chain of custody starts with our very own Fourth Branch of government. It does not start at the top--it starts with the office that the Framers intended to be, well, something we no longer recognize.

Ladies and Gentlement, welcome to the Shadow Government, led by "Fourth Branch."

On the same day that the CIA announced it will soon release hundreds of pages of once-classified documents that detail some of the agency's most closely guarded — and controversial — secrets of old, it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting even his own Executive Branch's efforts to find out what kind of secret material his office has been stashing away over the last four years.

Cheney's office, according to a story first reported by the Chicago Tribune, has resisted attempts by a tiny federal agency to compile information — in accordance with an executive order signed by George Bush himself — on the classified documents being held by the Vice President's operation. Cheney's office argued that the Vice President's office, because it has both executive and legislative branch duties, is exempt from the order.

Cheney's dustup with the normally non-controversial National Archives and Records Administration is the latest reminder that Cheney believes he can play by his own rules. And it probably secures for Cheney a place alongside Richard Nixon in the Washington pantheon of secret-keepers.

It is useful to tally up the ironies that are piling up outside the Veep's door. Cheney was chosen by Bush as a running mate in 2000 not because he had any visible political assets but because he had no political liabilities. He was believed to be just what Bush needed: a chief operating officer who would give great advice, based on his years of experience, and who, because he had no ambitions for his boss's job, wouldn't have his own agenda. But as it turned out, a lot of his advice, delivered privately, has been poor — and some of it (Iraq) was calamitous. His political antennae are usually furled and not very sensitive. And so rather than proving to be an asset with no liabilities, he has turned out to be a liability with hard-to-identify assets.

Just so we're clear--the day has arrived.

You know, the day.

The day when you woke up and realized you were living in a military dictatorship. The day when you realized everything HAD gone to hell in a handbasket. The day when everything ALREADY WAS well past any point of understanding. It passed like any other day, without anyone noticing. It could have been six months ago, heck, it could have been six years ago.

But the day has passed. We ARE under martial law, we ARE being watched and we ARE being led astray. Yep. It's as bad as we feared.

Torturing Logic, Condoning Torture

Gonzales is gone, but his specter still haunts the nation. His tortured logic and amoral interpretation of the law will take at least a decade to root out.

In 2004, the Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General John Ashcroft made public the declaration that torture was “abhorrent” in a legal opinion rendered in December of that year.

Ashcroft would depart Justice right after the inauguration, and Alberto “Torture Boy” Gonzales would be ensconced in the Justice Department, and like Dean Wormser’s “Double Secret Probation” he quickly and quietly issued another opinion, and it was a very different document indeed. It was an expansive endorsement of the harshest, most vigorous interrogation techniques ever employed by the CIA.

Officials who were briefed on the new protocols said that for the first time, explicit authorization to inundate suspects with a medley of painful physical tactics, such as stress positions and head slaps; as well as temperature extremes, waterboarding, and psychological trauma were allowed.

Aggressive dope-slapping became official American policy.

Torture boy gleefully endorsed the barbarism of what came to be known as the Gonzales-Yoo Torture Doctine over the objections of Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Mr. Comey, who had been loyal to AG John Ashcroft and the Constitution was leaving his job after battling the White House over what he considered out-of-bounds legal reasoning. Befpre he left, speaking about the Gonzales opinion, Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

But it didn’t stop there.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Over the last two years, congress and the Supreme Court have time after time imposed limits on interrogations, and the administration responded by dropping the most extreme techniques – but the 2005 Gonzales opinions remained in effect – in fact, they are still in effect to this day.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

Over two dozen current and former counterterrorism officials were interviewed over the past three months about the torture doctrine and the official documents. Officils would only speak on condition of anonymity, but overall what emerged was a portrait of Gonzales in yellow. A craven, ineffectual coward, unable to differentiate between his role as the President’s counsel and his role as Attorney General. A spineless, simpering sycophant, unable to resist pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney or his henchman David Addington.

It isn’t as though we need more evidence of the perfidy and mendacity of the most corrupt, inept and criminal presidency in the history of the nation, but there it is. It was utterly foolish for Nancy Pelosi to proclaim a year ago that “impeachment was off the table.” It is cowardly of my congressman to imploringly tell me that “history will impeach this administration.” Well that’s all well and good, but these fuckers are thugs and criminals – war criminals – and they deserve to be held accountable now, not in the pages of history. They need to answer to us, now, not to be a footnote in our grandchildrens history texts fifty years from now.

Making the case to abandon the Gonzalez-Yoo Torture Doctrine

In today’s Washington Post, two retired Marine Four-Stars make an airtight case against torture and Tenet, and by extension Gonzalez and Yoo.

We must abandon any call to do “whatever is necessary” because there is no slope to slide down…with the very first act, you have stepped off a cliff.

But these men, a former CENTCOM Commander and a former Commandant of the Marine Corps, say it better than I can. I do not often reproduce an entire column on this blog. I should hope that the fact it is being posted in it’s entirety speaks to it’s import.

Fear can be a strong motivator. It led Franklin Roosevelt to intern tens of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens during World War II; it led to Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt, which ruined the lives of hundreds of Americans. And it led the United States to adopt a policy at the highest levels that condoned and even authorized torture of prisoners in our custody.

Fear is the justification offered for this policy by former CIA director George Tenet as he promotes his new book. Tenet oversaw the secret CIA interrogation program in which torture techniques euphemistically called "waterboarding," "sensory deprivation," "sleep deprivation" and "stress positions" -- conduct we used to call war crimes -- were used. In defending these abuses, Tenet revealed: "Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: the palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know."

We have served in combat; we understand the reality of fear and the havoc it can wreak if left unchecked or fostered. Fear breeds panic, and it can lead people and nations to act in ways inconsistent with their character.

The American people are understandably fearful about another attack like the one we sustained on Sept. 11, 2001. But it is the duty of the commander in chief to lead the country away from the grip of fear, not into its grasp. Regrettably, at Tuesday night's presidential debate in South Carolina, several Republican candidates revealed a stunning failure to understand this most basic obligation. Indeed, among the candidates, only John McCain demonstrated that he understands the close connection between our security and our values as a nation.

Tenet insists that the CIA program disrupted terrorist plots and saved lives. It is difficult to refute this claim -- not because it is self-evidently true, but because any evidence that might support it remains classified and unknown to all but those who defend the program.

These assertions that "torture works" may reassure a fearful public, but it is a false security. We don't know what's been gained through this fear-driven program. But we do know the consequences.

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military's mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations. This underscores what we know as military professionals: Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

This has had disastrous consequences. Revelations of abuse feed what the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, which was drafted under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, calls the "recuperative power" of the terrorist enemy.

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its "recuperative power."

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

It is time for us to remember who we are and approach this enemy with energy, judgment and confidence that we will prevail. That is the path to security, and back to ourselves.

Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.

As the Senate deliberates the fitness of the Attorney General next week in advance of the scheduled “No Confidence” vote – send an email to both of your senators, denouncing the doctrine of torture that Alberto Gonzales orchestrated.

It violates the very ideals that make us America.

Remind them that you remember.

[Cross-posted from the blog you should be reading, Watching Those We Chose]