Where does the truth lie with regard to the use of torture on detainees at Gitmo and other sites around the world?
Is it really as widespread as many people claim? Who is responsible for it? Are the techniques being used on prisoners really torture? Is it legal? If it isn’t, should we prosecute everyone – on up to the president – who could be held legally responsible?
For myself, most of those questions have already been answered. Yes, torture has been used on many hundreds and probably thousands of detainees in our custody. Yes, orders to inflict torture on the detainees came from the highest levels of our government. Yes, by any definition, both domestic law and international law was violated when torture was carried out. And yes, the techniques used by interrogators would be considered “torture” under both domestic and international law.
You can argue that it was “justified” from here until doomsday and it won’t change any of the facts given above. It’s not a question of operating in a “gray” area. The techniques went far beyond water boarding and “stress” techniques and included beatings, electric shock, and other barbaric practices. And the beating heart of this monstrous policy was not the president or Secretary of Defense but rather Dick Cheney and a small group of like minded government enthusiasts who can only be termed torture fanatics and who despite evidence that torture didn’t work, continued to order it meted out to detainees.
Later, these same torture cabalists sought to hide their activities – even going so far as refusing to release innocent detainees for fear that they would talk and perhaps lead to their own day in front of a judge.
Much of this information is available through the Freedom of Information Act, ferreted out by journalists and rights groups. Much more of it has been reported by many of the top national security reporters in the business. Another reporter, Jane Mayer who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, has written a book that details the who, the how, and the why in our government responsible for this black stain on our history.
Called THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, Mayer has culled reports from responsible journalists as well as FOIA documents to come up with what is nothing less than an indictment of officials at the highest levels of our government for crimes related to the torture of prisoners in our custody.
While I have not read the book yet, I have read several excerpts at Shaun Mullen’s blog as he has been serializing parts of the narrative. Rarely have I been so devastated. The book is meticulously researched and footnoted (as are several other anti-Administration books on the Iraq War that my fellow conservatives dismissed at the time as “hit pieces” or products of “liberal media bias” but are now generally accepted as accurate historical references to the bumbling stupidity of the Bushies) and takes a raw, unflinching look at the entire, rotten mess; Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition, and the war between the Cheneyites and a few brave lawyers and aides who thought what was going on was wrong.
The New York Times book review, written by liberal historian Alan Brinkley, highlights the role of Dick Cheney and how his aides and sycophants rode roughshod over the law, the government, and those who opposed them. I have been a Dick Cheney defender in the past – especially since I believe his major critique that the executive branch was hurt badly by the Congressional power grab following Viet Nam and Watergate is basically correct. However, even before reading excerpts of this book I had come to the conclusion that Cheney went far beyond trying to redress the Constitutional balance and was engaged in a little kingdom building himself.
At the same time, I reject the view of Cheney (or any of the others involved in the torture regime) as being dark lords of the underworld. They were, in their minds, patriots out to protect the country from a very real threat (something with which both Brinkley in his review and Mayer in her book agree). But good intentions don’t excuse immoral and criminal actions. Nor do they obviate the need to air out the truth of what has gone on in the dark places where just because no one hears the screaming it doesn’t mean the law breaking didn’t take place.
Brinkley’s review – overly and unnecessarily dramatic at times – nevertheless traces the beginnings of torture from the aftermath of 9/11:
But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.
At times, it seems almost as if by recklessly and mindlessly defending actions that clearly violated the law, Cheney and his acolytes seemed unable to face what they had brought into being; that by continuing to order the torture of detainees, they might have to face the monstrously upsetting fact that they were wrong all along.
What is perhaps most disturbing is that not only are some of the people we are currently holding almost assuredly innocent of any wrongdoing, it is that no one has any idea of the numbers of people who are in our custody:
No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.
Then there is the age old argument about torture. Is it really an effective means of getting information from suspects? Or is it self defeating and will prisoners give false information just to stop the torture?
This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled — including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information. That many of the interrogations were conducted by American servicemen and -women with scant training made the likelihood of success even lower. (Some of the interrogators had no qualms about what they were doing and welcomed being unconstrained by any laws or rules. “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” one officer later told a journalist. “We didn’t have to mess with others and it was fun.” Others were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result.)
If common sense were applied to the matter, one would think that there is at least some efficacy to torture else it would not have been a regular part of interrogating prisoners for thousands of years. But one can see with such mixed results why even the argument that torture was “necessary” in order to get vital information falls flat. And even more telling was that even after being told that torture wasn’t working any better – or worse – than legal interrogation methods, the torture crowd continued to order it performed on detainees while defending the practice against a determined group of Administration insiders – including many conservatives I am happy to say – who wanted it stopped:
From the very beginning, there was strong resistance to the regime of torture. Those who challenged it included journalists like The New York Times’s James Risen and Scott Shane, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Ron Suskind (the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”), The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mayer herself (who scrupulously credits the work of her many colleagues). Other opponents were officials in the State Department, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., members of Congress of both parties and many career military officers, including former chiefs of staff. But as Mayer notes, few of them “had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies.” Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration — conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted “an abomination.” All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.
So what is to be done? The torture continues to this day even though there are indications that the Cheneyites are nervously looking over their shoulders in anticipation that some legal jeopardy will be attached to their actions. Dare we trust the Democrats to hold impartial hearings on the matter? The joke answers itself. How about a “bi-partisan” commission a la the 9/11 group? Better idea but the personnel would all have to be painfully apolitical – if there is such an animal. Even then, it would be impossible to keep politics out of the investigation.
There are no easy answers nor should their be. Some on the left would love to hand the entire crew over to the International Criminal Court which would be an abominable surrender of sovereignty. Rather, I think if ever a situation cried out for a special prosecutor, this would be it. Forget a Congressional select committee or any blue ribbon commission. Law breaking demands a prosecutor given broad leeway to look into the dark recesses of government to ferret out the truth, no matter where it leads.
I’m used to being on the opposite side of my conservative friends on this issue. Why this is so pains me a great deal. Reading the excerpts from Mayer’s book, I was heartened by the opposition to torture from some conservatives in the Administration, reassuring me that I was not completely nuts. But on the internet, it is at least 5 to 1 in favor of torture thus making me a persona non grata among most of the right on this issue.
What’s my main justification for opposing this horror? An FBI Agent told his CIA counterpart in withdrawing from the program, ““We don’t do that. It’s what our enemies do!”
And that sums it up. Anyone who believes in American exceptionalism must accept that torture makes us much less than that as I pointed out in this post l a few months ago:
It vexes me that conservatives believe such nonsense – believe it and use it as a justification for the violation of international and domestic law not to mention destroying our long standing and proud tradition of simply being better than that. Why this aspect of American exceptionalism escapes my friends on the right who don’t hesitate to use the argument that we are a different nation than all others when it comes to rightly boasting about our vast freedoms and brilliantly constructed Constitution is beyond me.But for me and many others on the right, the issue of torture defines America in a way that does not weigh comfortably on our consciences or on our self image as citizens of this country. I am saddened beyond words to be associated with a country that willingly gives up its traditions and adherence to the rule of law for the easy way, the short cut around the law, while giving in to the basest instincts we posses because we are afraid.
All the excuses mustered over the years by conservatives fall flat in the face of cold hard reality itemized and catalogued by Mayer in Dark Side. Parsing what is or is not torture doesn’t cut it. Defending the unilateral abrogation of the Geneva Convention doesn’t hold water. Saying “They deserve it” or “They deserve worse” or “It really doesn’t hurt that much” are laughable sophistries that reveal a dead spot in the conscience of the person uttering them. Attacking the source won’t work either; the evidence is just too overwhelming to deny.
I am beyond hoping I can convince any of my fellow conservatives that these horrendous practices must be stopped and the perpetrators exposed, our dirty laundry aired for the world to see. But perhaps some of you might open your minds to the possibility that something very bad has been carried out in our name these last few years. And to have it done by supposed conservatives besmirches them and the rest of us who expect much more from people who identify themselves as men and women of the right.
5:18 pm
“But perhaps some of you might open your minds to the possibility that something very bad has been carried out in our name these last few years. ”
Lot of spinning there..lets see…”possibility”...PROOF? and you know what when the jihadi’s stop plotting my and my families demise we can get back to the niceties….until then this government can “torture” (I personally don’t see it as torture)....in my NAME! but I think you will find some agreement with “some” others….I just wouldn’t call them conservatives.
6:09 pm
Rick, althought you and I differ on this issue, I really have to wonder about your view that this “dirty laundry” should be aired for the world to see.
America is a “family”. There are things that we, as one family, should keep within our family. This is like saying that if a man cheats on his wife that infidelity should be told to the whole town. What good purpose does that serve? And while you may think that seeking absolution is good for the collective soul, this will do nothing but fuel the flames of radical Islam which already has a “them against us” attitude. It is your purpose to give radical Islam even more reason to hate us?
6:23 pm
Oh, and the part about us turning these caught on the battlefield over to other nations? What nations would that be? Their own? And you are shocked that we return terrorists to their nation of origin and then don’t know if, or if not, they are tortured by those nations?
So no one knows how many have been sent to other nations, or have died, but let’s just throw that magical “thousands” number out there and see if it sticks? Sorry, this reads more like something I would find over at DailyKos.
This is like the Iraq Body count people who include in Iraqi deaths those killed by fellow Muslims so they can make it sound like our evil military are just murdering thousand.
6:30 pm
All right, here’s my brief take on this. 9/11 changed things, changed them more then I think even most of us on the right realized. Let’s talk about England and the IRA. The IRA waged a terror campaign against civilians, bombed randomly, and carried out assassinations. In response, the British government got dirty. The SAS was given a hunting license and no bag limit, and the rules went out the window. Many in the United States at the time were horrified that a civilized Western government would do the things that the British were doing in Ireland. It wasn’t cricket. At the same time, the French DGSE had a whole network of black ops types and petty thugs who had a very wide latitude to deal with sedition and subversion. Since it was very hands off, French citizens were tortured and killed. When this came to light, many people were again disturbed that a civilized modern country could so easily take the gloves off. Israel has throughout its entire existence been at war with enemies both inside and outside its borders. Again, the intelligence and security agencies of the state operate on a wartime footing, and the military is quick to level whole blocks because of the mortar fire coming from one house.
Especially in America it was easy to criticize, easy to talk about high morality. Sure, there was Pearl Harbor, but wars don’t really happen anymore. War is something you see on CNN, it’s night vision explosions, talking heads, and animated maps. Certainly war can never come here, not again. Secure in that knowledge, Americans felt free to judge the actions of country’s who were indeed at war. Then Tuesday morning happened, and everything changed in an instant. The left retreated into the useful intellectual cocoon of “it’s all America’s fault” and the equally comfortable security blanket of “war is not the answer”. Meanwhile, the right had to make some decisions, and they were made. Hastily, not very well thought out, laden with the seeds of a thousand unintended consequences, but made. The Patriot Act, “enhanced interrogation”, the Department of Homeland Security, all sprang up overnight even as the relics of the Cold War dropped laser guided bombs on the Taliban. It all happened so fast, and yes, there was more then a little resemblance to cattle stampeding. The problem lies in the fact that there was, and is, a legitimate threat to the lives of American citizens. It is all well and good to talk about the morality of torture, but thanks to Gitmo at least one major terror plot involving the New York City subway system and the Brooklyn Bridge was foiled before it began. Is it too much of a reach to say they have provided other crucial intelligence? How many American lives have been saved because some nameless GS-12 wired Abdul for sound with a field generator? The issue is that this is not an abstraction, there are real pros and cons. There are issues where one side is clearly right, and the other clearly wrong. This is not one of them. It is all well and good to speak of American moral authority, but the fact is that Gitmo, as distasteful as it is, saves American lives. The WTC, in my mind, was the base of the ivory tower. Now we’re down in the mud with the rest of the nations in the world who are fighting a war, and the moral landscape, the pitfalls and the sinkholes, aren’t as clear from the ground level as they were from way up there.
The thing I fear most is, to quote Admiral Yamamoto, the “terrible resolve” our country brings to the battlefield when aroused. I want the GWOT to stay low intensity, because if those seventh century psychos get a hold of a nuke and detonate in an American city I fear what my people will do in response. I don’t want my country to be the one to exterminate an entire region (or religion) in righteous anger. The stakes are too high to play by the rules sometime. Ask Churchill. In the early days of WWII his only offensive option was the night bombing of German cities. This would be indiscriminate terror bombing. It would not be pinpoint bombing of military or industrial targets, it would be bombing of homes and apartments and hospitals and everything else in a city. So he waited until a German bomber made a mistake and released its payload over London. Then he started leveling German cities, indiscriminately. I don’t want to go to that stage. If the torture of one can save millions of Americans from death, and if that in turns means hundreds of millions of others will not die, then isn’t that one guy’s comfort worth it?
That’s not an unreasonable scenario at all. That’s the danger. Sure, we could have tortured German POWs in the Bulge to find out where Skorzeny’s American uniformed special troops were up to, but that wasn’t necessary or proper. In the kind of war we’re in now, one man’s silence could mean the death of thousands or millions of innocent civilians. Add in the fact that the relevant international law does not protect Al-Qaeda terrorists from any rough treatment or summary execution by their captors, and you find that legally they have no rights. Which, in my mind, is how it should be. Terrorists are hostilis humanis generis, like the pirates of old, suitable only for interrogation and disposal. Those who kill civilians to make a political point are the lowest of the low, and they should not be given a tribunal or counsel.
I’ve sort of wandered on a bit, but basically my take is that Gitmo is one of those regrettable necessities of war. They can’t all be fought with shining knights on white stallions. “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the
sooner it will be over.” General Sherman said that, and I think he was right. Even the wars we think of as good wars are nasty, brutal things. Why is it that we can incinerate 50,000 innocent civilians in the blink of an eye but wring our hands over holding one murderer’s head under water? I just reread Victor David Hanson’s “Carnage and Culture” over again, and it’s the question he raises, but never answers in the book. Why is it that we have such peculiar rules? Why is that when the B-29s deliberately create a firestorm in Tokyo we applaud the skill of our aviators, and are shocked and revolted by the Japanese beheading bomber pilots on landing? Why is it that an attack on a military target angers us to the core because there was no note delivered beforehand to the Secretary of State declaring the intent to do so? VDH argues it is cultural, that the slaughter of thousands in open battle, even if they are civilians, is preferable to the death of dozens in a suicide bombing.
This is far from finished, but I really can’t do anything but keep rambling, so I’m just going to end it right here.
8:06 pm
When your wife or child is at stake, what will you do?
8:21 pm
“...thus making me a persona non grata among most of the right on this issue.”
Perhaps on this issue, to a degree Rick, but I don’t think any rational people would consider you so in general. I think, indeed, that most would respect your right to disagree if they believed in the basis for same.
I do think though, that you weave/believe a lot of input into your thoughts from sources you would not usually take for granted into your position on this issue. I happen to think you do that to great a degree because of what you’ve decided is torture from the get go (and I disagree with your characterization of what is torture at that).
But keep putting your thoughts forth, you’ll never lose me as a reader because of the few times we disagree; nor even if we happened to oft disagree—you present your thoughts well and always have.
9:53 pm
I have been shocked by conservative support for torture. I thought that at very least there were a few things upon which liberals and conservatives could agree, certain limits, certain core beliefs. In fact as an American I rely on conservatives to balance and restrain our statist tendencies.
I never expected that American conservatives would demonstrate this utter moral vacuity. It is shameful. This is love of country? What country?
11:11 pm
“They were, in their minds, patriots out to protect the country from a very real threat…”
The same can be said of Himmler, Eichmann, and the Einsatzgruppen.
“But good intentions don’t excuse immoral and criminal actions.”
Agreed. So if someone wants to hang Cheney, even though I’m against the death penalty, I say go right ahead.
A
11:50 pm
As I read this I kept having the visual of American heads being lopped off for the world to see. Do I care what happens to this prisoners of war? Not so much.
12:31 am
Civility in warfare was introduced, in part, after the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in Germany. Of course that intent went down in WWI and surely in WWII. However, the prospect of relatively benign treatment by the Americans and Brits made the prospect of surrender for the average German soldier much more attractive then being sent to Siberia. BTW, the Germans also didn’t torture the American POWs. That short excursion into history was meant to illustrate that respect for the dignity of individuals and nations has served the Western World well and shouldn’t be given up, period. What is to be gained? Al Quaida are just a bunch of criminals that don’t really pose a serious threat. I mean who cares what these morons think. More importantly, how can anyone justify torture if you believe in Western values as I hope Conservatives do? Torture and Western values don’t go together and that is the end of the story!
5:48 am
Sorry, Rick, but your sourcing is awful. You claim incredible things and link only to a single blog and a single NY Times book reviewer you admit is a liberal. Then you say things like this:
“(as are several other anti-Administration books on the Iraq War that my fellow conservatives dismissed at the time as “hit pieces” or products of “liberal media bias” but are now generally accepted as accurate historical references to the bumbling stupidity of the Bushies)”
Actually, I’m pretty damn sure just about all conservatives still dismiss them as “hit pieces” and products of “liberal media bias”. To claim they are “now generally accepted as accurate” without any evidence is the oldest liberal trick in the book (“the debate regarding global warming is over!”), but it seems you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Are you that gullible? Or have you just accepted Andrew Sullivan as your personal guru?
You’re doing a good job, though. You’ve already got several conservative commenters believing you and trying to justify what needs no justification because it never happened (or happened MUCH MUCH MUCH less often than you claim). Your jedi mind-tricks are strong, and you display much potential as a modern MSM journalist.
You seem to place a profound amount of trust in liberal claims, as if they would never, you know, lie. As if they haven’t been caught lying and making stuff up out of thin air about this exact subject a thousand times before. What I find amazing is how you can have such trust in liberal sources and
everhave been a conservative. Simply looking at things from that perspective, and seeing how practiced and casual liberals are at wildly distorting the truth to serve their political ends, should make it amazingly clear to anyone to treat their claims with at leastsomeskepticism, but you appear to accept their accusations against conservatives unquestioningly. It doesn’t make much sense, which leads me to guess that there’s someone – or many someones – on that side of the political divide that you’re very eager to impress. Well, I have to give it to you, putting out hyperbolic heart-wrenching Sullivanesque rants like this will almost certainly get you invited to all the cool parties where the easy women hang out. Have fun.Qwinn
5:53 am
Gotta agree with Truman here Rick.
I also can’t get the image of American heads being chopped off and God knows what they do our guys they have captured.
7:49 am
What is your purpose in this rant? You call for a special prosecutor to investigate the “crimes” but you are convinced and state that “crimes” have been committed.
So, do you want someone imprisoned and possibly executed for his “crimes”.
Do you want the president to be impeached?
Or are you making this plea so that jihadists won’t torture there next victims or that the islamic extemeists won’t keep hating Jews once they see how compassionate we are?
Or are you making this plea so that when we have WWIII someone like the Russians won’t torture our troops if captuerd?
Please give specifics.
8:17 am
Stunningly naive.
“We don’t do that. It’s what our enemies do!” Yeah, right. We do it now, we did it last year, we’ve done it throughout the history of our country, and as illegal and immoral as you believe it to be, it has probably saved your life, or or the life of somebody you love.
9:00 am
Ahh, for the simplicity of the time when you could simply say “Torturing people, innocent or guilty, is wrong so we shouldn’t do it” and that would be the end of it.
That was, what, about 7 or so years ago, wasn’t it?
Try a decade – or more. Extraordinary rendition began under Clinton. So unless you think they were serving tea and crumpits to the prisoners, I would advise you to amend your typically shallow and useless analysis.
ed.
9:46 am
“Try a decade – or more. Extraordinary rendition began under Clinton. So unless you think they were serving tea and crumpits to the prisoners, I would advise you to amend your typically shallow and useless analysis.”
I love it, one person on the entire thread agrees with you and he’s the one you dispute. You a funny guy!
I don’t remember people having open discussions about how much torture was OK back then, but then I was a lot younger, maybe I just forgot the masses of Op-Eds supporting water torture, the stories of detainees being beaten to death, or being found manacled in “Stress positions”, etc.
If you notice, I didn’t ask when people started torturing, it was when it became so easy to be in support of torture publicly. Just look at this thread. Such a thread would have been regarded as insane only a few years ago. “Should America torture people” used to have a simple answer.
Of course you didn’t hear of rendition during CLinton years. It was a secret. And by God, even though the same CIA agents who leaked like a sieve about torture during the Bush Administration because it was immoral were there during Clinton’s rendition period, that was different.
I leave it to your imagination to discover what the difference between Bush and Clinton might be.
ed.
10:22 am
Rick,
This piece is brilliant. It highlights a rift in the Republican world that I think people are scared of. This piece ties in perfectly (for me anyway) with your previous writings on patriotism.
This is why I have such a hard time with patriotism. I love my country, but outward displays of said love are marred – for me anyway – because I can’t help thinking about stuff like this.
And to everyone with the ticking time bomb scenarios, and the scary 24 plot lines, you know that that is almost never the case. Ever. Instead, think about the lives that have been lost and the time and money wasted by our soldiers and intelligence agents from chasing all the bad intel gathered from torture. What of that?
“We don’t do that. It’s what our enemies do!”
11:56 am
Rick,
Thank you for a beautiful post that highlights my fears.
What troubles me most about what the Administration has done is its serial attempts to hide and obfuscate, rather than allow an open discussion about how to deal with a real problem. I am even more furious that the Congress has completely abdicated its responsibilities of oversight and law-making.
As (I hope) an honest man who tries to let facts determine positions, the possibility of torture doesn’t particularly bother me. I have to allow that extreme circumstances might exist and that we wouldn’t have a five thousand year history of torture if it weren’t at least somewhat useful. (There are times I really don’t like where logic can lead, but there you have it.)
At the same time, my comfort level is largely determined by how often it happens and by who makes the decisions. If five suspects have been tortured over the last seven years, I won’t lose any sleep. If the number goes over fifty, I want the prosecution—now. Similarly, I don’t want a GS-12—or worse, an E3—making the decision. I’d want a full-bore Presidential warrant, signed by the Congressional leadership—and I’d limit it to the first 36 hours after someone were captured.
And I’m in a similar boat with the indefinite detention. I can cope with holding combatants captured on a battlefield. Persons turned over by “friendly states” or “allied warlords” are a different matter. I’d also want to see some sort of independent review—kind of like how the law already permits the condemnation of a pirate in an Admiralty Court. (And yes, all US District Courts are authorized to hear admiralty cases—though they follow different rules of evidence and procedure.)
The war on terror (or the long war against Islamism) doesn’t need to be fought under Marquis of Queensbury rules. But duels have their own rules, too.
1:28 pm
2 Dutch climbers rescued from K-2…
A helicopter plucked two frostbitten Dutch climbers from the world?s second-highest mountain Monday …
3:53 pm
Good post, sadly conservatives care more about their ideology than the credibility of the USA and how we are perceived around the world. They are told to believe how we are perceived is not important because we have the biggest bombs. We are supposed to hate the French the Germans the Canadians etc etc, what a sad little world conservatives live in. Too bad they are dragging the rest of us off the cliff with them.
Today’s right is conditioned by decades of Rush misinformation, and if he calls it club gitmo, his cult following will think as they are conditioned to do.
Even the hypocrite McCain wouldn’t try to stop Bush from making us a torture state.
You know Rush has been conditioning his followers for three hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year for 20 years. That is longer than Koresh conditioned his cult.
Conservtaives are simply intellectually dishonest. Don’t believe me? List the top five things Bush has done from lying us into a his plan-free war to spying without a warrant. List them and then tell me had Clinton done the exact same thing you would not be screaming for his head.
4:01 pm
Jane Mayer was on Moyer’s a week or so ago. Like you said, well documented info she has.
I suggest you all watch the show, if you can get your conservative handlers to give you permission.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07252008/profile.html
4:09 pm
America is a “family”. There are things that we, as one family, should keep within our family.
That’s about as sad a view of the way things should be as I have ever seen. Everyone just shut the F up and it will all go away. You ever wonder why liberals think conservatives believe they can tap their feet together and reality will not exist? This is like the O’Reily, “once we go to war everyone should shut up!” foolishness. Doesn’t matter that every one of our founding fathers would say to NOT speak up is the opposite of patriotism.
Conservatives really don’t know what patriotism is though, do they? They think it is lapel pins and rooting for more war.
6:25 pm
@Quinn:
“Sorry, Rick, but your sourcing is awful. You claim incredible things and link only to a single blog and a single NY Times book reviewer you admit is a liberal.”
I’ve posted these links (and others) in these threads before . . . the usual response is to ignore them, but if you’d like sources that you might find less objectionable philosophically, would you at least consider:
Malcolm Nance, a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy SERE facility in CA. The SERE training officer who was in charge of using waterboarding on our specialist trainees? Most of the “support” for waterboarding I hear from people echoes some version of “we do it to our troops, so it can’t be too bad.” This conservative military officer, who has waterboarded more people (all Americans) than probably any other American is imho a credible source as to what it is:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
As to the argument that “everybody in Gitmo is a battlefield-captured, shooting at Americans, hardended terrorist”, Here are the freedom of information releases of the transcripts for “classification” hearings held there. Military transcripts. Hundreds of pages. If you click on the link, you’ll see the site is hosted by the Department of Defense. Hardly liberal. certainly not second-hand. Case after case of the “battlefield conditions” the majority of these prisoners were captured under (such as the very first one . . . cooking dinner if I remember correctly).
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/index.html
Article from the Natinal Journal. Even if you consider the organization Left or Liberal (I don’t that that’s a reasonable view, but to each their own), the reporting is pretty detailed, cite-specific, and relies on military, FBI and government employees.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0203nj4.htm
I’m sure you’ll decry this next link—as you can see from the link, it leads to the ACLU site. However, the page linked is a collection of FOIA documents. Skip all the “leftie propaganda” if you like—the collection of .pdf files is straight military and government; autopsy reports of prisoners beaten to death, acknowledgement of renditions and abuse, details (lots of details) of what has happened. If you discredit the site, again I disagree but understand. But do consider the documents prepared by the military politically biased against themselves?
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/logs.html
There are, sadly, more. Lots more. This information isn’t hard to get your hands on if you look.
You refer to the allegations as “incredible”. I agree. You want to see more impartial, more substantial proof than “it was in a book” or “the reviewer said the liberal said”. I can respect that.
Here is proof. First hand evidence. One click away. Military specialists, official military records, transcripts. Thousands of pages. No “someone said that these incredible allegations are supported”—view them with your own eyes and make up your own mind.
7:59 pm
I looked through your links. Thank you for making the effort. However, I don’t think they prove anything like what you claim they prove.
I was specifically looking for evidence to back up your claim that “Yes, torture has been used on many hundreds and probably thousands of detainees in our custody.”. I found none. There certainly wasn’t any evidence, or even a claim, of that in the first three links you provided, which leaves only the ACLU link. I’ll get to that link in a moment.
I also found no evidence, or even the claim, in the first three links that “The techniques went far beyond water boarding and “stress” techniques and included beatings, electric shock, and other barbaric practices.” So, again, we are left only with the ACLU link.
So it appears that your most sensational claims are backed up only by your ACLU link, and my God, what a mountain of BS is contained therein. I was particularly amused by the very first links I saw – “New Evidence that Government Knew Abuse was Widespread Before Abu Ghraib Photos”. ZOMG NO RLY?
Um, I actually remember, seeing with my own eyes, a press release from the DoD and Rumsfeld himself, about 4 months before the Abu Ghraib thing got covered on the front page of the NY Times 31 days in a row, wherein they voluntarily released to the press the information that abuses at Abu Ghraib had occurred and were under investigation. No one paid attention at the time. It didn’t make the news. That doesn’t change the fact that they voluntarily gave the press that information 4 months before the media turned it into a circus, and it at least went out far enough that a simple blog-reading guy like me noted it. The breathless cries about how THE GOVERNMENT KNEW, as if the media themselves “broke” the story amid a massive government conspiracy to never let anyone know about it, is precisely the sort of bullshit you need to learn to watch out for. Is the information that “the government knew!” accurate? Sure. And you read it and say “Wow, this is a great source”, and you believe it, but what you don’t think about is the assumptions that are required in order to make that
matter, that assumption being that the government wasn’t forthcoming about it. They were. They voluntarily released it in a press statement, long before the press “broke” the story. This makes the dozens of links at that site talking about coverups at Abu Ghraib completely nonsensical.The problems with the rest of the links are in a similar vein. Not all are accurate though, many relying on flimsy information – what you don’t realize is that government agencies have to note stuff down if someone even makes an allegation. The fact that someone from the government made note of an allegation (often made by the prisoners themselves, and we have the Al Qaeda training manual that specifically instructs their members to allege torture whether it occurs or not) doesn’t give it any sort of credibility. At all.
The link also repeatedly describes things like “sensory deprivation” and “dogs” (not actually letting dogs attack prisoners, just scaring them with dogs) as “torture”. I’m sorry, but if that’s considered torture, then you’re devaluing the term into meaninglessness. I remember lefties going absolutely hysterical over a memo written by Rumsfeld that supposedly “authorized torture”, but the single statement quoted by any media from that memo was, paraphrased, “I stand for eight hours a day every day, why do we have rules saying these guys can’t be made to stand for four?” That was the most sensational quote “authorizing torture” that they could come up with in this supposedly devastating memo? It’s absurd, and you really gotta stop looking at headlines and thinking, zomg, US is teh ebil. You’re being conned. They’re
tryingto con you. It’s deliberate. It’s propaganda. And you’re falling for it, hook, line, and sinker.Qwinn
8:12 pm
I’d like to add that after further review of the ACLU links, I still haven’t found one that even alleges that “hundreds if not thousands” have been abused, etc. I did find one report that claims that eight people died, across all of Afghanistan and Iraq, supposedly as a result of abuse, over a period of 3 years after the war. And the documents make absolutely no claim that the ones listed as homicides were at the hand of guards. From what you can tell from the actual documents, there’s no reason to believe that they weren’t killed at the hand of fellow detainees. You
have to make the deliberate assumptionthat every death in a camp was at the hand of the US military. Do you believe that every single person who dies in US prisons every year dies at the hand of the guards, rather than fellow inmates? Do you think even a majority or even a significant fraction are? Where does such an assumption come from? These ACLU guys are taking partial information that doesn’t prove anything, but feeding it to you with “analysis” that fills in all the gaps with totally baseless assumptions, assumptions that always, always, always assume the worst about the US military. Wake up and smell the propaganda, man.Qwinn
7:32 am
Busboy 33 has linked to a whole lota info. So I click on the DOD FOIA pdf files and open the first one. Busboy mentioned a guy captured while cooking dinner. Are we to infer that anyone cooking dinner must be innocent? This Kazackastani in the first pdf file went with his whole family (which was comprised of 3 siblings and a mother, I believe, to Afghanistan because he heard they would get free food. WTF? At some point they take a PLANE? The Government of Afghanistan then gave him a house and he proceeded to do absolutely nothing but grow vegetables in his little garden. You gotta read it to get the feel for his obtuseness and deceit.
Isn’t it the case that of the Gitmo detainees released so far about 33% have been re-engaged in acts on and off the battlefield?
These innocent po folk ain’t stupid. They know how to play us.
I certainly don’t believe in mass torture (Saddam Hussein style) either. The term must be defined before I even know what exactly the discussion is about. I also believe, however, that certain situations and individuals require an all rules are off attitude. We are at war and I will not judge those fighting on our behalf.
4:22 pm
@Quinn:
I appreciate you taking the time to look through the links.
The quotes that you refer to in your later comments are from Rick . . . not me. Those links were the first few I was able to get my hands on, and wer’nt specifically designed to address his claim about “hundreds, if not thousands” of torture victims. The only link of the 4 that was intended to directly relate to the issue of torture was the waterboarding link (the first one), and I don’t think anybody is allegingthat waterboarding was used hundreds or thousands of times on prisoners.
Due to some time-sensitive pressures at my job, I’m limited in the ammoutn of time I can assign to finding torture-specific links. I will certianly see what I can find, and I’ll put links to it when I do. As I said before, I respect 100% skepticism without evidence, so your (and others’) doubt about the facts is laudable. I also understand the suspicion of “Liberal” or “Leftie” or other biased sites. Unfortunately, before digging too much farther I can virtually guarantee that most of the information detaling with these issues will be found on sources like these, if for no other reason than they are the ones focused on getting and presenting the information. The DOD site didn’t provide the information on their site by choice, nor would I expect them to. Again, I’ll try to find sources as “non-leaning” as possible, but the topic is going to limit that to some degree.
Without speaking for Mr. Moran, I think his “hundreds/thousands” assertions are based on a combination of factors. First, we did torture prisoners—at least the 3 acknowledged waterboarders, as well as multiple allegations of other torture (chaining up prisoners to the ceiling, extended,prolonged cold, beating, etc.) on many other prisoners. Second, there were/are thousands of prisoners in situations where the torture occured. Third, the Administration’s handling of the questions regarding these situations (reditions, “ghost prisons”, etc.) has been at best less than informative, which as a general principle usually suggests some level of concealment . . . which usually implies something to conceal. Do these three points “prove”, like a mathematical equation, thousands of examples of torture? Of course not. But they certainly do make that answer for more likely than “Its all a complete fabrication of the hippies”, and with each new piece of onformation that gets out the situation looks worse.
I get the impression that, based on all that has come out, and how it all came out, Mr. Moran has ultimately decided that the collective evidence makes the widespread torture scenario the believable one, and that to come to another conclusion is unsupported. Much like any court case, at a certain point Occam’s Razor needs to be applied. Sure, all the evidence didn’t “prove” OJ Simpson killed two people—it is possible to explain everything away, but with the evidence presented, the simplest explanation is that he’s a murderer.
Again, I’ll see what specific evidence I can find re: torture of prisoners.
2:19 am
Oh for the good old days when the Clinton administration occupied the moral high ground and would not stoop to such deeds! So they failed to prevent 9-11 and cost over 3,000 their lifes, thats a small price to maintain such a wonderful position. The fact that no nation doesn’t use such methods and our own military had to revise its military code of conduct in recognition of the fact that torture does work, well lets not ever face reality.
Let us instead rationalize the wonderful world that could be rather than the worold that is. It is after all so much easier to excuse the deaths of thousands of Americans than resort to such shameful methods to protect citizens.