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.

How much mendacity are we expected to just....take???

I honestly don't know how many more things like this I am expected to absorb and still retain my sanity.

In December of 2002, when military trainers arrived at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp to train interrogators, they built their entire class around a chart that spelled out the effects of "coercive management techniques" and how those "techniques" might be employed against prisoners at the camp. The torture methods detailed on the chart included exposure to extreme temperatures, prolonged constraint, and sleep deprivation.

What the trainers did not tell the budding Torquemadas sitting in rapt attention was where that chart originated - and what disgraceful company Americans would all to soon be keeping.

Perhaps they were unaware - and if so that is a deplorable commentary in and of itself. But that chart they now used as a training tool had a nefarious, infamous origin. It was compiled by communist China as a how-to template for breaking United States Air Force personnel captured in Korea, designed to secure confessions, whether they be real or imagined.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No, we sure don't. False intelligence gets us, among other things, a never-ending war in Iraq. The chart was verbatim to the half-century old template save one word...The original was titled "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance." The version used at Guantanamo wisely dropped the word "Communist" from the header.

A spokesman for the Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder, refused to speculate on the etiology of the chart, but also seemed to be trying to put some distance between the Gates Pentagon and the Rumsfeld Pentagram. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The current occupant of the oval office has insisted that the use of torture has saved American lives and prevented terrorist attacks against this country, but that amounts to asserting facts not in evidence, or as they call it in the common vernacular "just making shit up." That is what your president does, America. He is a thug, a punk and a low-class cretin, and he has dragged you down with him when you didn't protest his perfidy and his propensity for being a lying sack of shit.

His bloodlust and thuggery, and willingness to play fast and loose with the rules has led to the dismissal of charges against one of those so-called worst-of-the-worst who might actually be a bloodthirsty, murderous terrorist!. The harshest interrogation inflicted at Guantánamo was reserved for Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Terror charges against Qahtani were dropped suddenly and unexpectedly about six weeks ago. Officials at the time said the charges might be refiled at a later date, but declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.

Another detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an alleged member of al Qaeda who stands accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes two days ago. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he only falsely confessed to being involved with the bombing because he was tortured.

A few years ago I said in a fit of pique that I did not spend my entire fucking life fighting the cold war, only to pave the way for a worse brand of authoritarianism and thuggery to take over here at home - and I was dismissed as being melodramatic and histrionic. Well, I was right. And I was not only not being melodramatic nor histrionic - I might actually have been understating the case.

"...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

I think I have officially taken up residence on the other side of the looking glass

That is the only explanation when the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee asks a witness if the president of the United States has the authority to order a suspect be buried alive...and the answer isn't a swift and reverberating "NO!"

~~BG

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

MG Taguba accuses administration officials of war crimes

The General who investigated Abu Ghraib has openly accused the bu$h administration of complicity in war crimes and called for those responsible to be held accountable. The remarks come in a new report compiled by the group Physicians for Human Rights is the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.

It is also chilling, infuriating, maddening, embarrassing, humiliating, and a whole lot more negative emotions.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The medial evidence supports the claims made by detainees, and puts the lie to aWol bu$h's insistence that "we don't torture." None of the torture victims the report addresses were ever charged with any crime. But they were detained for years, tortured, threatened, beaten, sexually humiliated and in at least one case, forced to drink urine.

Taguba, who conducted the 2004 investigation that documented and brought to light the abuses at Abu Ghraib is, to the best of my knowledge, the highest ranking military officer to have accused the administration of war crimes "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.


Experts from Physicians for Human Rights, who have long experience studying the effects of torture, spent two days with each of the eleven former captives assessed, and conducted intensive exams and interviews. Tests were administered to detect exaggeration. In two of the cases, medical records were available for review by the physicians.

The report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," concurs with a five-part McClatchy investigation of Guantanamo published this week. Among its findings were that abuses occurred — primarily at prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were held en route to Guantanamo — and that many of the prisoners were wrongly detained.

Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld didn't specifically approve of the worst abuses, but neither he nor the White House enforced strict limits on how detainees would be treated.

There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.

Leonard Rubenstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, said there was a direct connection between the Pentagon decisions and the abuses his group uncovered. "The result was a horrific stew of pain, degradation and ... suffering," he said.

MG Taguba is one flag-rank officer for whom we both have deep and abiding respect - as do our military veteran spouses. He was one of the very first to stand up and do the right thing, even though it cost him a third star and sent him to base operations to do his retirement packet before he intended to.

We need his voice, along with the voices of Generals Batiste, Eaton, Zinni and Clark. These are men who wore stars on their shoulders and who don't flinch from a fight and who don't buckle under to pressure from a draft-dodging punk, nor a warmongering fuck.

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.

The CIA, torture, and the banality of evil

For those sickened by what our country has become in eight short years, yesterday was a really bad day. Those who give a damn about the rule of law and the ideals that define America took a beating yesterday as every time we turned around more devastating information came to light about just how far these bastards have gone toward destroying everything this country is supposed to stand for.

"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong"

In late 2002, a top CIA lawyer gave a torture workshop to Pentagon officials intended to advise them on how far they could take their "harsh interrogation techniques" when interrogating detainees. According to the minutes of the 02 October 2002 meeting, CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at Guantanamo that torture is basically "subject to perception." It was in that meeting that he so blithely set the parameters at life and death. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."


In that document released yesterday by a Senate panel that is investigating how torture became a sanctioned practice suggests that CIA spooks were far more involved than has been previously known. By the time the meeting took place, the CIA had already used waterboarding, in which a prisoner is subjected to controlled drowning, with the blessing of buA$h administration lawyers.

The new evidence, along with hours of questioning of former Pentagon officials at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, shed light on efforts by top aides to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to research and reverse-engineer techniques used by military survival schools to prepare U.S. service members for possible capture by hostile forces. The techniques -- sensory deprivation, forced nudity, stress positions and exploitation of phobias, such as fear of dogs -- would eventually be approved for use at Guantanamo Bay and would spread to U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison. Nearly all were later rescinded.

The newly released documents show that in the summer of 2002, Pentagon officials compiled lists of aggressive techniques, soliciting opinions from the CIA and others, and ultimately implementing the practices over opposition from military lawyers who argued that the proposed tactics were probably illegal and could harm U.S. troops.

The memos and other evidence evoked intense bipartisan condemnation from members of the Armed Services Committee who spent nearly eight hours grilling some of the former and current officials involved with the decisions.

"The guidance that was provided during this period of time, I think, will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: "How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?"

In what is probably the most incendiary memo of all those released, Fredman and ten DoD officials and attorneys discussed torture with a banality befitting a standing lunch order. In that meeting, Fredman, whose agency had already received permission from the administration to torture suspected terrorists laid out the key considerations to establishing a similar program pogrom at the Cuban gulag. He discussed the advantages and disadvantages of recording the torture on video, enthusiastically touted waterboarding, and calmly discussed methods to keep those meddling do-gooders from the International Committee of the Red Cross from interfering with the good time that stood to be had by all. "If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of the cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental," he was quoted as saying.

A CIA spokesman refused to comment on the remarks by Fredman and instead attempted to sidestep the issue of responsibility and shift that to Yoo, Addison, Gonzales et al, while still maintaining - without one iota of evidence - that torture had saved lives. "The far more important point is the fact that CIA's terrorist interrogation program has operated on the basis of measured, detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice," he said. "The agency program, which has been carefully reviewed within our government, has disrupted terrorist plots and saved innocent lives."

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Tony Fratto spit in the face of logic, reason and truth and insisted that "abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government."

In spite of all evidence to the contrary - that torture not only doesn't work, but is actually detrimental to gathering usable, reliable intel, Fredman's advocacy struck a courd with a lot of Pentagon officers who need to be cashiered out as e1s. In the following weeks, these disgraces to their uniforms goosestepped toward fascism and fell in line behind some of the worst humanity has offered throughout history, including the Nazis, Hirohitos army and the perpetrator of the Spanish Inquisition.

Among those questioned yesterday about decisions was William J. "Jim" Haynes II, a former Defense Department general counsel who acknowledged pressing for more aggressive techniques but said the decisions were driven by the administration's fear of more terrorist strikes.

"What I remember about the summer of 2002 was a government-wide concern about the possibility of another terrorist attack as the anniversary of September 11" approached, Haynes said. He also cited "widespread frustration" among Pentagon officials that summer about the slow progress on obtaining information from Guantanamo Bay detainees.

At the time, Pentagon officials acknowledged that the proposed methods faced opposition from experts specializing in international and military law. One of those objecting was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force. In mid-October 2002, Fallon sent a prescient email to his Penatagon colleagues in which he warned that the techniques that were being pursued would cause a backlash when what was going on would inevitably come out, and America and the world would recoil in horror at what was transpiring. "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of," Fallon wrote. "Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this."

Would that they had heeded his warning. But no one did, and now look where we are. Standing nose to nose and attempting to retrieve our nation from the banality of evil that has been allowed to run roughshod over everything we were raised to believe America stood for.

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

They violated international law, they employed torture, and Condoleezza Rice is complicit

An audit by the Inspector General for the Department of Justice was released yesterday and what is detailed in the 370-page report is enough to turn the stomach of decent people. It is horrifying. It is sick. It is perverse. And FBI Agents were complaining about the detainee treatment they witnessed that was perpetrated by military interrogators and CIA agents at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and other detention centers.

And it was all done in your name. You had to be made safe, you know, even at the expense of the moral high ground that we liked to consider we occupied. That illusion should be over by now, in the face of what we know has transpired.

Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released yesterday.

Reports that Guantanamo detainees were being subjected to extreme temperatures, religious abuses and nude interrogation were conveyed at White House meetings of senior officials in 2003, yet these questionable tactics remained in use, a lengthy report by the Justice Department's inspector general concluded.

In one instance, colleagues of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft reported that he personally aired concerns about Defense Department strategy toward a particular detainee with Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, while other Justice managers shared similar fears with the council's legal adviser in November 2003, the report said.

Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by investigators, so it remains uncertain how aggressively he pressed the issue, according to the report. Other senior Justice officials told investigators that no changes were made in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay even after these and other complaints filtered up to the National Security Council.

Nearly half of the 450 FBI agents who worked at Guantanamo reported that they had observed or heard about military interrogators using a variety of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, with the most common being sleep deprivation and short-shackling -- or locking a detainee's hands and feet together to prevent comfortable sitting or standing -- for long periods of time.

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law, the report said. They also continued to use "stress positions" and other such techniques well after they were prohibited by Defense Department policy in January 2003, the report said.

The 370-page report draws heavily on e-mail messages and contemporaneous memos to provide the clearest and most definitive account to date of the key tactics used by the government against suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It describes, for example, a "frequent flyer program" meant to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, twisting of thumbs backward, and exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.

Detainees in Iraq had water poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.

Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was angry. "Some have suggested that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own. The report released today by the Department of Justice Inspector General is proof that that is simply not true. The IG found that scores of FBI agents observed the use of harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay."

Aren't you just bursting with pride?

We can not abide this as a nation. We know the Congress can't impeach Bush and Cheney because there is not the political will to make it stick. If anyone got a blow job the woman who knew about it and could prove it is conveniently dead..so...no impeachment for them...

But Condi Rice is another story. Can't we impeach her for her complicity in desecrating our country and allowing us to become a nation of gulags and torture and Kafkaesque process?

UPDATE I / Warren Street / 11:51 AM

The government kept meticulous records of everything it did, also in our name, by the way. TPM's document collection has more

This is just for IRAQ:




What kind of horrific bureaucracy keeps track of how many times it threatens to harm someone's family? I just want to know. Because I don't care what anyone says--THAT'S un-American. Period.

"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..

Another day, another detainee sues, alleging torture

Attorneys representing Binyam Mohammed, held without charge at Guantanamo since 2002 and accused of being a suspected al Qaeda co-conspirator, have filed suit against the British government. The suit charges that the British government would violate its own foreign policy by permitting a former resident to face war crimes trial here with evidence allegedly obtained via torture.

Pentagon officials have not yet charged Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohammed, 29, with war crimes. In the last, aborted U.S. effort to stage military commissions, he was accused of planning to explode a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in New York City.

The suit seeks to extract from the British government any secret intelligence that the two war on terror allies may have exchanged in the case in a bid to prove any trial would be tainted by torture.

Pakistani security forces arrested Mohammed at the Karachi airport in April 2002. From there, his lawyers claim, he disappeared into a secret network of U.S. supported prisons -- including 18 months in Morocco between 2002 and 2004.

There, according to an affidavit his London lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, he confessed under torture to crimes he never committed.

''The torture included shackling, being suspended from walls and ceilings, brutal beatings and being cut all over his body with a scalpel, including his genitals,'' according to the 21-page petition filed Tuesday at the British High Court of Justice.

"Unsurprisingly, the claimant co-operated to avoid further torture.''

The squatter occupying the oval insists, of course, that the United States does not engage in torture. We use enhanced interrogation techniques, but those are not torture...(Yes, this is definite hair splitting, but what are you? A commie terrorist lover? Nine-Eleven changed everything!)

Under the laws regulating military commissions, evidence obtained via coercion might be admissible, if the judge hearing the case deems it necessary, but evidence gathered by using torture is not, because torture violates United States and international law. The responsibility for determining where that line lays will be up to each individual judge hearing cases once the tribunals get underway.

Tribunals like the ones the Bush administration has set up have not been used by this country since the end of WW II, and other nations, including our closest ally Britain, have called the commissions "kangaroo courts." Last year, the Brits specifically requested the release of Mohammed from captivity in Guantanamo, but their subject remains confined. Now, his attorneys are convinced that he will finally be charged as the Pentagon prosecutor revisits old cases that were earlier halted by the Supreme Court.

Man detained at Abu Ghraib files suit against two American military contractors

An Iraqi man who claims he was tortured while being held for ten months in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison has sued two U.S. military contractors for damages.

Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003.

Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as "Big Steve." The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics.

Phone messages left for Arlington, Va.-based CACI and New York City-based L-3 Communications, formerly Titan Corp., were not immediately returned Monday. There was no phone number listed for Stefanowicz at his Los Angeles address.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles because Stefanowicz lives there, seeks unspecified monetary damages.

The companies named provided interrogators and interpreters to assist the U.S. military at the notorious prison. When photos came out that showed horrific scenes of prisoner abuse and humiliation, the whole world reacted with horror. (The military promptly got down to business and scapegoated some low-level, undertrained and inexperienced reservists, and effectively ended to career of a female one-star, then "move along, nothing to see here" kicked in, and the idiots of the press complied.)

The investigation undertaken by the military determined that the abuse took place in 2003, and that timeline puts interrogators from both L-3 and CACI on site during that time.

Interviewed by the AP on Monday in Istanbul, al-Janabi said he hopes that he hopes the lawsuit serves to bring to light what happened to him and many others who were detained at the prison. "God willing the righteousness will emerge and God willing the criminal will receive his punishment," al-Janabi said. Al-Janabi, 43, said he was detained by U.S. troops during a late-night raid in which he and his family were beaten by their captors. He said he was taken to a military base where he was stripped naked, a hood was placed on his head and his hands and legs were chained.

"They (U.S. troops) did not tell me what was the reason behind my arrest ... during the interrogation, the American soldier told me I was a terrorist ... and I was preparing for an attack against the U.S. forces," said al-Janabi, who denied the accusation and claims he was forced to give confessions under "savage" intimidation.

The lawsuit also claims the contractors conspired in a cover-up by destroying documents and other information, hid prisoners during periodic checks by the International Red Cross and misled military and government officials about what was happening at Abu Ghraib.

Al-Janabi was released in July 2004 and wasn't charged with any crime, according to the lawsuit. He also was forced to form a human pyramid in the nude with other prisoners, according to the lawsuit, but his Philadelphia-based attorney Susan Burke said it wasn't known if he was in the infamous photo that became public.

"Most of this conduct was repeated on more than one occasion," Burke said.

At one point after passing out, al-Janabi said, he was told by an L-3 translator "welcome to Guantanamo." He said he even asked a cellmate whether he could see the ocean from a window.

"I lost the sense of time after the prolonged hours of abusive interrogation and thought that I was transported to Guantanamo," al-Janabi told the AP.The dehumanizing treatment these people were subjected to is a stain on our national honor, and the photos that emerged destroyed any chance we had of winning hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Senate Tells Justice Department Not to Investigate Torture

I picked this up off of TPM Muckraker, and it seems to have slipped my notice yesterday...

There are literally dozens of these types of stories--you never want for material when you're blogging about the state of American political discourse and policy here in the last year of the Bush Administration. No sector of our government has suffered more than the small, elite sector of "inspector generals" or IGs. These people were supposed to be fair, tough, independent and unassailable. And yes, every time you turn around, the Congress or the Executive is finding a new and creative way to stymie or block these people from doing their jobs:

From the National Law Journal:

Congress is close to enacting the most significant boost in three decades in the independence of the cadre of government watchdogs -- federal inspectors general -- but the lawmakers have retreated from a key change involving the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Senate on April 23 approved, by unanimous consent, S. 2324, the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008. But the bill passed only after the lawmakers agreed to an amendment by Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., which, among other items, deleted a provision giving the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) jurisdiction to investigate misconduct allegations against department attorneys, including its most senior officials.

Unlike all other OIGs who can investigate misconduct within their entire agency, Justice's OIG must refer allegations against department attorneys to the department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). The latter office, unlike the OIG, is not statutorily independent and reports directly to the attorney general and the deputy attorney general....

President Bush had threatened to veto the House bill for a variety of reasons. The Kyl amendment to the Senate bill was seen by many as a vehicle for the White House's objections.

OPR, which reports to the attorney general, is currently conducting a variety of very sensitive investigations for the administration. The office is probing the Department's approval of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. And recently it announced that it is investigating the Department's legal memos authorizing the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture by CIA and military interrogators.

It is conducting those probes because Inspector General Glenn Fine cannot. The bill which passed the House would have changed that, as Fine himself pointed out in a letter (pdf) to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) back in February, when he told them that he could not investigate the Department's authorization of torture because "under current law, the OIG does not have jurisdiction to review the actions of DOJ attorneys acting in their capacity to provide legal advice." Fine added: "Legislation that would remove this limitation has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, but at this point the OIG does not have jurisdiction to undertake the review you request."

Now, I don't know about you, but at some point, the Republicans are going to be screaming to put that provision of investigating "senior officials" back into effect once they lose control of the Executive Branch. This kind of thing is extremely damaging to the credibility of Attorney General Michael Mukasey--is he presiding over the most corrupt Justice Department ever, as a kind of traitorous caretaker, ordered to run out the clock?

One would think he'd at least try, right? Pretend to be acting as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America? Instead, he's running cover like a thug, barely able to keep up with the latest outrage, and willfully ignorant to this day of what it must have been like for our enemies to be waterboarded.

A bit of redemption for Richard Myers?

I have never been a fan of Richard "GodBoy" Myers. I have a problem with all the GodBoys evengelizing in the Air Force, and have had since about 1983 and a run-in in the desert with a creepy then-Captain derisively called "Airman Skippy Llewen" by his men. That set the tone for me for all the events and times that have followed. But it isn't just me. Myers has embarrassed a lot of folks who have served in the Air Force and would like to be proud of that fact again.

But at least he wasn't complicit in torturing detainees.

Myers, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005, believed that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees and protected them from abuse and torture. And the administration deliberately and systematically duped him about what was really going on.

Myers believed that the techniques being employed were taken from the Army Field Manual, and now he believes that he was a "victim of intrigue" perpetuated by top attorneys at the Justice Department, acting in accordance with the office of the Vice President and staffers loyal to then-SecDef Donald Rumsfeld.

Behind Myers' back, these civilians, who were for the most part political appointees (Feith, Gonzales, Addington) were pushing through authorization for previously outlawed techniques, and manipulating inexperienced military personnel who found themselves in totally uncharted waters.

And the guys at the Administration level, making the decisions to torture and abuse, were literally taking their cues from the fictional television series "24."

Larry Wilkerson, a former Army officer who served as Chief of Staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Guardian that Myers was manipulated, and had the job because he was weak and ineffectual and at could be manipulated by Rumsfeld. "I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralized the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways," Wilkerson told the Guardian in an interview. "The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans," he said. "At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job".

Go read the entire article in this months Vanity Fair. But brace yourself first. You will tremble with rage at what has become of our country. And when you finish reading you will agree with Wilkerson who says "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

But it is a big deal

I am still kinda in shock, trying to get my head around not just the glib dismissal of torture by this president in an interview on ABC last Friday. Torture was pre-authorized like a god-damned elective medical procedure, before the legal opinions were fixed to fit the policy.

"So?" doesn't shock me, not coming from this criminal gang. The collective yawn from the American people, on the other hand, breaks my fucking heart.

The Kansas City Star editorial board writes: "It's shameful that the United States has become, under the Bush administration, a country that tortures prisoners. This is a dark stain on our country's honor and ideals.

"And it was disturbing, although not surprising, to learn this week that top White House officials, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, were deeply involved in shaping and approving a torture policy -- including giving assent to specific harsh techniques such as waterboarding, according to Associated Press. . . .

"ABC News, which broke the story Wednesday, reported that some of the principals understood the moral swamp into which they were wading.

"'Why are we talking about this in the White House?' Ashcroft is quoted as saying at one meeting. 'History will not judge this kindly.'

"Nor will history judge the American people kindly if we look the other way."

I agree with the Star's Editorial Board.

This is a big deal. This is a huge deal. It cuts to the heart of what defines America.

It was not so long ago that I lived every single day of my life on the front lines of the Cold War, frequently I lived atop hundreds of megatons of instant death and destruction, and sent my husband to work on those doomsday machines every singe day.

We won that one, and the reason we won was we had the more attractive guiding principles. We didn't torture. We didn't send people to gulags. We didn't rig elections. We didn't pledge fealty to authoritarianism in a quest to quiet our irrational fears.

In short, we were just flat out better people. Or at least we fancied ourselves as such, and we thought the white hats looked quite fetching.

I want to be proud again.

I want to be right again. Not me personally. I have been all along, and I have the archives to prove it.

I mean I want America to be right again, as in morally correct.

They worked backwards

They decided to adopt a policy that allowed torture first.

They justified it afterward, purely as a CYA measure.

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-Qaida detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

...

"With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along."

The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of "principals" fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

"No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about," said a second former senior intelligence official. "People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command."

I find it wholly intolerable that none of these people are likely to stand trial or be otherwise held accountable for deliberate actions that have betrayed this country and undermined the rule of law. I maintain that impeachment remains the only avenue to assure justice has a chance of being served. Unless this president is impeached, he retains the power to pardon, and can do so preemptively.

I am not happy at the prospect of an American administration being charged in international courts with crimes against humanity like they are so many tin-pot dictators and bloated, ineffective, slobs; never quite far enough removed from the leisure suits and the comb-overs to be comfortable in their own skins in the outclassed world they floundered and failed in. What a humiliating embarrassment these inept idiots be.

(h/t Cernig)

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.