This, and then that's enough on torture

The only lingering possible justification for torture -- the so-called "ticking bomb" rationale -- has, I think, been dealt its death blow by increasing statements from key people that it is not effective. Those, like Dick Cheney, who claim that it was, have not offered specific examples. Those, like Karl Rove, who cite the "west coast attack," are distorting the role of torture in stopping that attack. It was stopped by conventional intelligence methods.

Against that lack of supporting evidence, we have this, from McClatchy news service:

"The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos."

[Inspector General John] "Helgerson also concluded that waterboarding was riskier than officials claimed and reported that the CIA's Office of Medical Services thought that the risk to the health of some prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit, according to the memos."

"Even some of those in the military who developed the techniques warned that the information they produced was "less reliable" than that gained by traditional psychological measures, and that using them would produce an "intolerable public and political backlash when discovered," according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report released on Tuesday."

"Last December, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine that he didn't believe that intelligence gleaned from abusive interrogation techniques had disrupted any attacks on America."

I think that about sums up the case. Dick Cheney and FOXNews will continue to claim otherwise, but that doesn't make it so.

For me, that's enough about the torture question.

Ralph

Exposing the lies

Apologists for the bush administration and torture claim that it produced important information that has kept us safe from another attack. We're still waiting for the examples. Karl Rove claims to offer one, but it is a bogus claim.

Rove says that torture works because we got information from using the enhanced techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the one who was waterboarded 183 times in one month) about a plot for a major attack on the west coast. Implying that the info stopped the plot.

Karl is wrong. Here's the story. In 2002 conventional intelligence intercepted plans for a major attack on the west coast. They were able to stop the plotters, but we didn't know what exactly their plan was.

It was only in 2005 that KSM told us that it was to fly a plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles. We don't even know for sure that he was telling the truth, but information obtained from him under torture did not PREVENT the attack, because he was not even in our custody in 2002.

So Karl is conflating 'finding out what the plot had been' with 'stopping the plot.'

He cannot claim that this was an example where torture prevented an attack.

But Rove and his ilk don't worry about such fine points of truth. It's just whether they can make a useful story to support their position. We're still waiting for a valid example of where torture could even conceivably be justified because it stopped a major attack.

Ralph

Cheney & Rummie pushed for it

Friends -- anyone who is tired of my ranting about our torture program might want to come back later. It just won't go away, and I think it needs to be thoroughly exposed.

I can see Obama's point about an investigation being a distraction and perhaps preventing passage of his major agenda. He has to make that call for his administration, considering everything. But we can still push for full exposure. If the DoJ won't do it, and if he leans on Congress not to do it, then a lot can still be done by investigative journalists. There are a few left, and some of the independent internet bloggers are filling in the gaps quite nicely, thank you.

And there is still the McClatchy news service, which has provided some of the best coverage of issues that don't get much attention from the main stream media. Here are some excerpts from an important article from them written by Jonathan Landay:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

This was corraborated by a former Army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney, who told Army investigators in 2006

that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/v-print/story/66622.html

I think this speaks for itself. It is consistent with everything we know about Cheney's and Rummie's persistent harassment to get info to back up what they already have decided. And it helps explain Cheney's desperate attempt to create a PR fog by criticizing Obama's handling of the whole issue.

Ralph

FBI director says no

We have known that the FBI stopped participating with the CIA interrogations when they began using torture. FBI Director since 2001, Robert Mueller was quoted in a Dec. 2008 interview:

Robert Mueller, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 and remains FBI director under Obama, delivered that assessment at the end of this December 2008 article in Vanity Fair on torture:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

And there was Mary Cheney on TV today defending her father's assertions that very useful information was obtained. Mary also trotted out that silly claim that, because our troops are waterboarded as part of their resistance training, it can't be so bad.

Here's the sticking point, Mary. If they do in fact do the same thing to our troops that they do to prisoners (which I contend they don't; it's not the same -- but she's claiming it is), then how in hell do you suppose it makes prisoners talk?

If it's not too bad to do to our troops, then how does it work on hardened Al Kaeda fighters? Could it be the difference in a few seconds of water-pouring by your own people to show you what's it's like -- and 183 rounds of it for up to 40 seconds done by brutal interrogators who have you completely in their power?

I think you really just can't put those two things together and make it work. But the genuises who ran things for the last 8 years can't seem to figure that out. Or else they think we're stupid and gullible.

Ralph

Listen to Meghan McCain

John and Cindy McCain's daughter, Meghan, is making a lot of sense these days and beginning to sound like a new voice for the Republican party. During her father's campaign, she wrote a campaign diary that was mostly human interest trivia and gossip. But since then, she is moving into a new realm and beginning to make a lot of sense.

While still claiming to love the Republican Party, she is taking on some of its stalwarts. She has tangled in public statements with Ann Coulter. Now she's taking on Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

Today, as a guest co-host on The View, as reported on HuffingtonPost:

Meghan McCain, serving as a co-host of "The View" today, wasted little time before getting in a shot at former Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. McCain, who had previously written about how she found Karl Rove following her on Twitter "creepy," complained that Cheney and Rove are still trying to be seen as the face of the Republican Party. Last week McCain observed that the GOP leadership "is scared shitless" of the changing political landscape.

McCain mentioned disapprovingly Cheney's repeated public criticisms of Obama--which he voiced again on Fox News this week--and referred to the DNC ad released this week portraying Cheney, Rove and Gingrich as the 'new face of the GOP.' She pointed out that it's "very unprecedented for someone like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to be criticizing the President." Her advice to them: "Go away."

Meghan, you tell 'em, girl. And don't let that nasty Ann put you down with catty comments about your appearance.

Ralph

Is it torture?

Now we know that our torture methods originated with the Communists in the Korean War and were adapted by our military for training purposes to teach our military how to resist torture. They were given a "sample" under carefully controlled conditions, which they knew were simulated and could be stopped. Further, they were told it was being done to build up their resistance to torture, in case they were ever captured by the enemy.

Many of those who were in charge want to claim it's not torture, based on the fact that we used it on our own troops. I can agree that, under these conditions, it is not torture. But those are not the conditions we are talking about.

The Geneva Conventions and the International Red Cross say waterboarding is torture. The 9/11 Commission found that it was torture and that it didn't work. We have prosecuted others for waterboarding, even leading to the execution of some Japanese for war crimes -- and we called it torture then.

Dick Cheney and others have claimed that we got lots of invaluable intelligence from using it but have not given examples, claiming they are classified. (In the bush/cheney world, "classified" often means "we're covering our ass.")

Probably the most useful bit of information obtained from the Al Qaeda prisoner who was waterboarded 183 times was the name of one of the chief recruiters for Al Qaeda. That may have been useful information, but it hardly seems to justify compromising our own moral and legal standards and tarnishing our image in the world. One of the supporters of these "enhanced techniques" even said about this that he's not sure the same information couldn't have been obtained by other methods.

And we now know from reports coming out that one of the reasons they were so persistent with this prisoner was orders from Cheney and Rumsfeld to try to get information out of him to back up their claim of a connection between Al Qaeda and Sadaam Hussein. Apparently they wouldn't accept that he had no such info to give, and they just kept torturing him trying to make him break. Perhaps they didn't even care if it was true -- just something they could use to back up their false claims.

It's almost suggests a caricature of a movie in which the evil torturer rubs his hands with glee as he turns up the rack another notch, saying "you veel tell me vat I vant to know."

Others more intimately involved in the use of torture have said that it does not work, that it leads most often to false information or minimally useful information.

On balance, there seems no doubt that our use of torture has done us far more harm than good; and rational, as well as moral, values should prevail. But many people are persuaded by the "time bomb set to go off in Times Square, and you have captured the person who knows where it is hidden" scenario. That's good for action movies and for selling torture to the average, scared citizen; but it is hugely unlikely to occur in real life.

Ralph

The tangled web unravels

Following last week's release of the torture-justifying memos, two reports out today shed more light on how this came to be and raise even more troubling questions.

Senator Carl Levin says of his Senate Armed Services Committee report:

In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse . . . to low ranking soldiers.

The truth is that, early on, it was senior civilian leaders who set the tone. On September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that the United States turn to the "dark side" in our response to 9/11. Not long after that, after White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Conventions "quaint," President Bush determined that provisions of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to certain detainees.

And yet, when the shocking photos from Abu Graib were made public, the administration dismissed it as the work of "a few bad apples."

This congressional report is supplemented by an article in The New York Times that thoroughly traces how the torture techniques came to be adopted by the president and his highest cabinet officers, with very little understanding of the history of the techniques and no heed paid to the warnings from top military and civilian advisers. It's worth reading in full:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned. . . . they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
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The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II . . . They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective.
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Bush administration officials say it is easy to second-guess the decisions of 2002, when they feared that a new attack from Al Qaeda could come any moment.If they shunned interrogation methods some thought might work, and an undetected bomb or bioweapon cost thousands of lives, where would the moral compass point today?

The debate rages, and I do not believe it will just go away.

Ralph

Here's how things work in Washington

Back in 2006, when Nancy Pelosi did NOT appoint Rep. Jane Harman to chair the House Intelligence Committee, I thought it was probably some personal animosity between these two powerful women. Now we know there was more to the story.

Here are excerpts from the Jeff Stein's article in CQ Politics:

Rep, Jane Harman, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

It’s true that allegations of pro-Israel lobbyists trying to help Harman get the chairmanship of the intelligence panel by lobbying and raising money for Pelosi aren’t new.

They were widely reported in 2006, along with allegations that the FBI launched an investigation of Harman that was eventually dropped for a “lack of evidence.”

What is new is that Harman is said to have been picked up on a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington.

And that, contrary to reports that the Harman investigation was dropped for “lack of evidence,” it was Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s top counsel and then attorney general, who intervened to stop the Harman probe.

Why? Because, according to three top former national security officials, Gonzales wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times and engulf the White House.

And what came of it?

Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

The Justice Department did not back away from charging AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman for trafficking in classified information.

Gonzales was engulfed by the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal.

And Jane Harman was relegated to chairing a House Homeland Security subcommittee.

Is this what Obama had in mind when he said he wanted to change the way Washington works? Of course, in any system where such power is wielded, there are going to be allies and enemies and favors and reciprocation. But this comes close to blackmail, it seems to me, or at least corruption of the political process.

A powerful congresswoman, thought by many to be in line to chair the Intelligence Committee, is caught on tape plotting with spies, and then charges against her are dropped by the Attorney General because he wants her help to defend his illegal spy activities.

And here's an extra, a choice tidbit that the tape also picked up. When asked to lobby the Justice Department, Harman responded that Gonzales would be a difficult task, because he “just follows White House orders.”

Ralph

New York Times editorial

April 19, 2009

Editorial

The Torturers’ Manifesto

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

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Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

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In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.

After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.

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And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

"Rush said . . ."

For years, I have avoided listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio diatribes. I find him sickening, and I just stay angry. It's bad for my blood pressure.

Lately, he's been impossible to avoid. Just not dialing into his radio station no longer works. He's all over the news, strutting the power he seems to have over Republicans. Is he, or is he not, the real leader of the Republicans?

It's become a pattern now, repeated again and again, from GA Congressman Phil Gingery all the way up to GOP Chairman Steele: a Repub says something critical of him, and within days has to fall all over himself apologizing to Rush, usually on his show.

Rush's latest, which is making the headlines: Proof that torture works. By his own confession, the North Vietnamese "broke" John McCain when he was a POW, and he talked.

Rush needs to learn to read whole sentences. McCain very clearly says in his book that he was tortured and that eventually he "broke" --- and gave them FALSE information. How is that working?

Further, Rush needs to learn to hold on to two pieces of information and put them together: John McCain, hardly a lily-livered dove himself, is strongly opposed to our using torture.

Of course, none of these pesky facts matters to Rush's crowd. They just love the sound bites. And Rush just loves the cash that comes from his show biz empire. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Ralph