There’s an important new piece in the Scottish Sunday Herald. It’s important because it has two on-the-record sources: the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who set up the rendition program for alleged terrorists under Clinton and saw its evolution under Bush; and Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who saw the rendition program first-hand in one of its more notorious locations. Two points are absolutely clear. The United States under president Bush has a pro-torture policy. The U.S. now uses torture – both by its own officials and out-sourced to grotesque dictatorships like that in Uzbekistan. Money quote from Scheuer:
“You’d think I’m an ass if I said nobody was tortured. There was more of a willingness in the White House to turn a blind eye to the legal niceties than within the CIA. The Agency always knew it would be left holding the baby for this one.”
The reason for the original White House memos, redefining torture into meaninglessness, was precisely CIA resistance to White House pressure to torture captives. The CIA torturers wanted legal and political cover. They got it. The second point is that torture was invariably useless as an intelligence extracter. As Scheuer confides, “[W]e never expected to get anything from interrogations. Al-Qaeda are trained to fight the jihad from their jail cells, they are masters of counter-interrogation. They’ll give you old information or false information. The CIA never felt it would help to torture these people.” The decision to allow torture was not a rational one; it was irrational. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan outlines what went on:
“In Uzbekistan, it works like this. Person X is tortured and signs a statement saying he’s going to crash planes into buildings, or that he’s linked to Osama bin Laden. He’s also asked if he knows persons X, Y and Z in the UK who are involved in terrorism. He’ll be tortured until he agrees, though he’s never met them.”
The confession is sent to the CIA where, according to Murray, it is ‘sanitised’. Before sanitisation the report “will have the guy’s name on it, the date of the interrogation, where it took place – and might still be bloodstained. The CIA then issues a debriefing document, which does not name the individual. It does not say he was tortured. It only says that it is a detainee debriefing from a friendly overseas security service. This will set out the brief facts, such as ‘we now know person X in London is in Islamic Jihad and plans to blow up Canary Wharf’. This goes to MI6 – the British and Americans share everything – and then it goes to MI6’s customers: the Prime Minister, the defence secretary, the home secretary, the foreign secretary, and other key ministers and officials. I was one of these customers too because I was the ambassador to Tashkent. I’d look at these reports and, to be frank, I realised they were bollocks. One talked about terror camps in the hills near Samarkand. I knew the precise location being talked about and it wasn’t true.”
We sold our soul for nothing. Nat Hentoff has more to say here.
HECHT VERSUS HECHT: The man closest to Harriet Miers has different views, depending on whether he’s talking in private to fellow conservatives or in public. Quote One:
“What followed, according to the notes, was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he had never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, “Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?”
“Absolutely,” said Judge Kinkeade.
“I agree with that,” said Justice Hecht. “I concur.”
Justice Hecht also said he couldn’t predict how Ms. Miers might vote on a challenge to Roe v. Wade.
“If you’re asking, ‘Is she going vote to overrule Roe v. Wade, or Lawrence v. Texas [a 2003 decision striking down Texas’ law against same-sex sodomy], I don’t know that you can ask anyone that because you don’t know until you are there.”
So which is it? Time to ask Mr Hecht again, no? (Hat tip: Info-theory.)
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller. I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.” – former NYT contract reporter, Craig Pyes, in a 2000 memo to NYT editors, after working with Miller in Iraq on a story about WMDs.
The Dish 