Month: July 2008

I haven’t been able to read Jane Mayer’s new book yet. But the reports, news stories and reviews confirm much of what this blog has followed obsessively for the past seven years – and adds new, dreadful detail. Needed post-9/11 adjustments to our surveillance and intelligence policies could always have been made with the cooperation of the Congress and the courts, in line with existing or revised law and treaty obligations. Democracies can adjust to new threats and retain their balance – if their leaders want to do so. But a new war and security regime was instead enforced by executive diktat, as a deliberate, conscious attempt to use 9/11 to establish Schmittian precedents for an extra-legal executive branch. It was so far out there even executive enthusiasts like Jack Goldsmith drew a line. Warrantless wire-tapping was part of it – only recently brought under the law – and Greenwald rightly vents about the precedents again here. (Larison is worth reading on this as well.) But at least the intelligence procured by this illegality might have been useful and reliable. What was procured through torture is definitionally unreliable, and capable of creating an Imaginationland feedback loop in which tortured false confessions raise threat levels which justify more torture – all with no capacity for self-correction. As Frank Rich reminds us today, the al Qaeda-Saddam connection and WMD threat was itself a false casus belli procured through torture. Here’s Scott Horton’s rough and ready summary of the key points of Mayer’s book:

– The ICRC report on CIA interrogation techniques concluded categorically that they were "torture"–not "tantamount to torture" as previously reported–and issued an explicit warning to the U.S. Administration that the use of these techniques was a war crime which might subject U.S. leaders to criminal prosecution.  This is the real potential headline maker from the book.

 

– She provides a number of grueling examples of the application of the techniques including the brutal murder of Manadel al-Jamadi, the placement of prisoners in closed coffins for prolonged periods, and one instance in which a below-the-knee amputee with a prosthesis who had his prosthesis taken away and was forced to stand for hours on one foot, hanging from a rail.

 

– She traces the development of the torture techniques to the work of two contractors, Mitchell and Jessen, and disclosed the specific techniques they developed.  She notes that the techniques rely heavily on a theory called "Learned Helplessness" developed by a Penn psychologist Martin Seligman, who assisted them in the process.  All of this was done under the thin pretext of being a part of the SERE program.  Seligman is a former president of the American Psychological Association.  This helps explain why the APA alone among professional healthcare provider organizations failed to unequivocally condemn torture and mandate that its members not associate themselves with the Bush Administration techniques.

 

– She describes an internal CIA investigation by IG Helgerson which concluded that the program violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. criminal law.  Vice President Cheney intervened directly, calling Helgerson directly into his office and speaking with him, after which the CIA report was stopped in its tracks.

 

 

– Steven Bradbury at DOJ was asked to resolve this by crafting opinions that gave CIA full latitude to torture, with no restraints–setting aside the opinions crafted by Dan Levin which authorized techniques only within narrow constraints.  After Bradbury rendered opinions exactly as solicited on his "probation," Bush personally expressed his pleasure with Bradbury’s performance and nominated him to head OLC.

 

– According to James Comey, AG Gonzales repeatedly told him that he fully appreciated that the CIA program was torture and was criminal but he couldn’t oppose or block it because "Cheney wants it."

 

– The role of the torture lawyers in crafting the system is far more intimate than they have acknowledged.  John Yoo, Michael Chertoff and Alice Fisher reviewed specific techniques which clearly amounted to torture and blessed them as fine to use, and then lied publicly and to Congress about their involvement.  Yoo is said to have given his legal blessing to torture techniques and their application by DOD operatives on the squash court as he played rounds with Jim Haynes.

 

– A staff attorney at DOJ names Jessica Radack was fired and then hounded by Chertoff and Fisher after she dispensed correct advice to the effect that John Walker Lindh could not be interviewed by the FBI without being Mirandized and having his attorney present.  This advice was overridden by Alberto Gonzales and Jim Haynes, who then had DOJ files purged  to remove any evidence that the correct advice had ever been rendered.  The purging of the files was carried out by Alice Fisher, who went on to head the Criminal Division.  When a district court judge demanded to see the DOJ’s internal communication on the matter, he was told that there were no records–Mayer believes that there was criminal obstruction, carried out by the head of the Department’s Criminal Division.

 

– Mayer portrays Cheney as the man who introduced and pushed torture from the beginning and David Addington as his "fixer."  According to her, they never lost a battle.  When meetings were held and the decision came out  against them, they simply persevered and implemented their viewpoint anyway.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

This is excruciating from this morning on CNN.

My column this week is a pretty positive one about some of the ideas in Ross’ and Reihan’s new book. I’ll have some tarter observations, fitting the more cut-and-thrust context of the blog, this week. Not that I’m totally uncritical in the column:

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. It smacks a little too much of social engineering and the forces it is supposed to counter – the past few decades’ cultural shifts regarding sexuality, marriage and family and the economic pressures of an increasingly globalised world – are almost certainly too powerful to be held back.

On the other hand, if the policy is designed merely to mitigate some of the ways in which socially crucial behaviour – such as good child-rearing – are discouraged, it may be worth trying…

If a tax credit can help one parent devote more time to children, the long-term ripple effects on the next generation could be profound. It’s a tricky balance – between clumsy government intervention and a helpful government nudge– but one perhaps worth putting on the table.  

Conservatism, after all, has always been a strange mixture of dismay at social loss and pragmatism in helping to ameliorate it. It is not an ideology; it’s a flexible, pragmatic, modest approach to the necessary evil of government. In one era, big tax cuts, deregulation and a much smaller state may be appropriate. In another time, a different emphasis may be more fitting. This is the Tory genius – and it’s encouraging to see conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic grope gradually towards reinvention.  

It’s hard not to be cheered, as I was this morning, by news of possibly accelerated withdrawals from Iraq. It’s equally hard not to fear that we may be re-branding rather than actually changing anything:

Maliki, who last week publicly insisted on a withdrawal timeline, wants to frame the agreement as outlining the terms for "Americans leaving Iraq" rather than the conditions under which they will stay, said the U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because U.S.-Iraqi negotiations are ongoing. The idea, he said, is to "take the heat off [Maliki] a little bit, to rebrand the thing and counter the narrative that he’s negotiating for a permanent military presence in Iraq."

Even though he is. So we may get a temporary deal:

"What we’re doing now is more . . . a bridge to have the authority in place so we don’t turn into a pumpkin on December 31," the official said. Neither country wants an extension of the U.N. mandate. Iraq has rejected its explicit limits on sovereignty, and the administration believes that a limited extension would only postpone the need for a bilateral accord and potentially leave U.S. troops with "our backs against the wall."

According to U.S. officials, Maliki also hopes that a temporary protocol would circumvent the full parliamentary review and two-thirds vote he has promised for a status-of-forces agreement. "He is trying to figure out, just as we did, how you can set up an agreement between the two and have it be legally binding," one official said, "but not go through the legislative body."

Bush never had much sympathy for legislative bodies in the US when it comes to foreign policy. So why would he bend to the Iraqi legislature? Nonetheless, the post-Bush future of Iraq will clearly be determined by the looming US and Iraq  elections. Do we want to stay indefinitely and use our forces there to contain or attack Iran? Or do we want to leave as soon as possible with a minimal footprint in the short and medium term? Or some kind of mush in the middle? Do the Iraqis want us out? Or will their elites find a way, as ours are, to keep us enmeshed?

Occupations are like government programs. Once instituted, it seems they can never be abolished. And so government grows and grows and grows. And its costs rise and rise and rise. And the problems many programs or occupations were supposed to solve disappear, and the programs and occupations find new reasons to stay in existence.

(Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty.)

"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree," – Bill Burton’s response to the new New Yorker cover.

I thought it was quite funny myself. This was obviously intended ironically, and it’s not exactly Parade magazine.

Dale Carpenter:

It’s a terrible, thoughtless quote. Emphasis on thoughtless, because I don’t think McCain has given even a moment of thought to the subtleties of talking about this. The second half of the quote is a non sequitur. Adoption is necessarily a context in which "both parents" are unavailable, so it makes no sense to cite the superiority of biological parents as a reason to prohibit adoption by gay individuals or same-sex couples.

"The final aspect of truth is pragmatic: that which is true is that which ‘works’ for us, in the broadest possible sense of the word. In the case of certain beliefs which are not accessible to empirical testing – for example, religious beliefs or secular ideologies – ‘truth’ is almost entirely assimilated to what the William James called pragmatic ‘cash value’, and which evolutionary theorists would call ‘survival value’. We cannot, however, reduce the difference between all truths and all falsehoods simply to the difference between what works and what doesn’t. If we did, we would still have to explain why some things do and some things don’t work. While beliefs may feel true because they ‘work’, ultimately, most of our beliefs that work do so because they are true," – Raymond Tallis.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

From the archives, rules of thumb for the neck:

I know that bow-tie people tend to appear cocksure of themselves–people like Professor I. B. Cohen, of Harvard; Archibald Cox, of the Watergate hearings; Louis Farrakhan. They are also often short men, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Senator Paul Simon. Mike at the time told me to be careful of short men who are cocksure of themselves. Luckily, I suppose, they often wear bow ties–the dead giveaway.

Charles Arthur says TV isn’t in trouble:

…there’s a recurring myth that people are watching less TV and therefore fewer TV ads. TV has its fair share of challenges, no argument there, but fewer people watching it and its ads is not one of them. The facts clearly show otherwise but the myth exists.

Good magazine provides a graphic on modern human trafficking. From Benjamin Skinner’s article:

Slavery exists today on an unprecedented scale. In Africa, tens of thousands are chattel slaves, seized in war or tucked away for generations. Across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, traffickers have forced as many as 2 million into prostitution or labor. In South Asia, which has the highest concentration of slaves on the planet, nearly 10 million languish in bondage, unable to leave their captors until they pay off “debts,” legal fictions that in many cases are generations old.

Few in the developed world have a grasp of the enormity of modern-day slavery. Fewer still are doing anything to combat it.