Month: December 2008

My own view is that the American conservative movement’s embrace or defense of torture was the moment its intellectual collapse became irrecoverable. When conservatism abandoned core values of American decency in favor of pure force, exemplified by torture techniques designed by Communists and Nazis, then it ceased to be conservative in the sense that Burke or Hayek or Oakeshott or Kirk would begin to understand. And watching the intellectual dishonesty of the right on this issue in the last few years has been a watershed for me. It has been, in my judgment, one long, awful surrender of truth to power. Take a moment with me to review what one leading light of the Republican blogosphere wrote when the Abu Ghraib scandal first hit the news in the spring of 2004. Here’s Glenn Reynolds:

Of course, it’s not the same as Saddam’s torture — which was a matter of top-down policy, not the result of assholes who deserve jail or execution, and will probably get one or both. As with other reported misbehavior, it should be dealt with very, very harshly. But those who would — as Senator Kerry did after Vietnam — make such behavior emblematic of our effort, instead of recognizing it as an abandonment of our principles — are mere opportunists.

But what if the perpetrators of those acts actually were the president and vice-president, men whom Reynolds chose to endorse in 2004? What if, in Reynolds’ terms, the torture at Abu Ghraib was indeed "top-down policy"? This is now factually indisputable, according to the bipartisan Senate report issued last week.

So why are those responsible not subject to "jail or execution" or both? Why, since the evidence of Bush’s authorization of these war crimes, has Reynolds abandoned his view that such behavior should be "dealt with very, very harshly"?

Perhaps Reynolds has discovered something since Abu Ghraib that has led him to change his mind and now allows him to endorse the very methods he once denounced. We can all change our minds in the face of new data. But doesn’t he owe his readers an explanation for why what he once found worthy of the death penalty is now something he actually favors? It couldn’t be that he changed his mind as soon as he realized president Bush authorized it, could it? If the president does it, it’s not illegal?

(Photo: a prisoner in US custody smeared with his own excrement at Abu Ghraib, under the command of president George W. Bush.)

Scott Horton tackles the newly released torture report:

The Levin-McCain Report, when fully declassified and circulated, will tell Americans a good deal about our history. It will help define what will become known as the “torture presidency” of George W. Bush. But it is also a remarkably incomplete document, testimony to the Bush Administration’s conscious policy of obfuscation, misdirection and deceit—its mockery of Congressional oversight, and its corruption of our Constitution and system of government. It gives us a clear lesson. As John McCain stated: “This must never be repeated. Never.”

The torture and abuse techniques authorized by the president of the United States were drawn from methods designed by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions from broken human beings (although many of the torture methods – from hypothermia to sleep deprivation – had been pioneered by the Gestapo using George Tenet’s precise phrase "enhanced interrogation". The historical proof of this is here – and Americans tried and executed those responsible for the same techniques now used by the president of the United States.)

The more you think about this, the more disturbing it is. The United States fought and won the Cold War only to import some of the worst abuses of Communist totalitarians into the American constitution – and no one at the highest reaches of the Bush administration countered. Moreover, the techniques had nothing to do with gaining any sort of reliable intelligence. They were devised from the beginning to produce falsehoods for propaganda. More evidence from the Senate Report:

Exemplifying the disturbing nature and substance of the training, the SERE instructors explained “Biderman’s Principles” – which were based on coercive methods used by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to elicit false confessions from U.S. POWs during the Korean War –  and left with GTMO personnel a chart of those coercive techniques…

These techniques were personally and explicitly authorized against prisoners by the president and subsequently the Pentagon:

While key documents relating to the interrogation remain classified, published accounts indicate that military working dogs had been used against Khatani.  He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks.  In a June 3, 2004 press briefing, SOUTHCOM Commander General James Hill traced the source of techniques used on Khatani back to SERE, stating: “The staff at Guantanamo working with behavioral scientists, having gone up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques which our lawyers decided and looked at, said were OK.”  General Hill said “we began to use a few of those techniques … on this individual…”

So Khatani was a guinea pig – monitored by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld among others, for what we later saw at Abu Ghraib. The road from Rumsfeld to Afghanistan and then Iraq is a clear one:

According to the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG), at the beginning of the Iraq war, special mission unit forces in Iraq “used a January 2003 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which had been developed for operations in Afghanistan.” According to the DoD IG, the Afghanistan SOP had been:

[I]nfluenced by the counterresistance memorandum that the Secretary of Defense approved on December 2, 2002 and incorporated techniques designed for detainees who were identified as unlawful combatants.  Subsequent battlefield interrogation SOPs included techniques such as yelling, loud music, and light control, environmental manipulation, sleep deprivation/adjustment, stress positions, 20-hour interrogations, and controlled fear (muzzled dogs)…

Interrogation techniques used by the Special Mission Unit Task Force eventually made their way into Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) issued for all U.S. forces in Iraq.

So when the defense secretary authorizes and condones abuse and torture, it spreads. Who would have guessed? And a war which was supposed to be conducted under Geneva guidelines became the first war prosecuted by the US in which torture and abuse of prisoners was a central part of the policy. These people have yet to be held accountable by the Congress or the courts.

Dan Froomkin does a great job of rounding up the statements of president Bush with respect to the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Senate bipartisan committee has just definitively proved that the abuse was authorized by president Bush at least as early as his January 2002 memo authorizing abuse and torture of prisoners in US custody, including many of the specific SERE abuses later photographed at Abu Ghraib. And yet this is what the president said about it:

Bush, on May 24, 2004, described what happened at Abu Ghraib as "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."

On June 1, 2004, he told a reporter: "Obviously, it was a shameful moment when we saw on our TV screens that soldiers took it upon themselves to humiliate Iraqi prisoners — because it doesn’t reflect the nature of the American people, or the nature of the men and women in our uniform."

It simply reflected the policy of the United States under the command of George W. Bush.

With this president, it is actually hard to know for sure whether he is capable of understanding what he did. I have no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld understood very well that they were crossing a legal and moral Rubicon; they knew they were authorizing war crimes and made every effort to give themselves phony legal cover and a theory of dictatorial presidential power that would have made King George III blush.

With Bush, however, his levels of denial are so strong he may simply be unable to accept that he has committed an absolute moral evil.

This Christianist president has a hard time with actual Christianity. He is of the fundamentalist psyche that holds that since he is on the side of the angels, he cannot do evil. And so even when presented with indisputable evidence of his own acts, his own memos, his own staff’s decisions, he cannot own the consequences. He asked for memos from apparatchiks saying it wasn’t torture, as if this guaranteed it wasn’t torture. He reacted to the tangible consequences of his own decisions as if someone else had been president, or someone else’s signature was on those memos, or someone else’s vice-president had publicly embraced torture as a "no-brainer."

This is immaterial for objective legal or moral culpability, of course. Bush will rightly go down in history as the president who authorized the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody. But whether he has any self-awareness in this regard is worth asking. I wonder sometimes just how deep the crisis in American government was these past eight years. The entire system, in the end, rested on a man who wasn’t there.

(Photo: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty.)

An Iraqi journalist didn’t like the shoe throwing. The rest of his office, however?:

Most of the guys were happy and they were talking about the bravery of the journalist who threw his shoes at the American president. When I tried to explain my opinion, I was trying to tell the guys that I don’t agree with the way the journalist behaved, but I was attacked by everyone. One of them said "come on Laith, Bush destroyed Iraq". Another said "he deserves more" while a third one said "he is an occupier." I tried to tell to tell they guys that this is an inslut for Maliki.

Actually, Hakim is Maliki’s inslut. Riyadh Muhammad, meanwhile, interviews the brother of the journalist in question. And the real culprits fess up.

He gets it now.

Marathonpacks explains:

[Kanye]’s using stardom as practice, writing songs in the manner of conversation fragments and flustered, late-night voicemail messages. He’s an untouchable global pop-star, no doubt with a cadre of professional advisors, but is still running the risk of embarassing himself on a regular basis: simultaneously untouchable and resoundingly, publicly fallible. So, yes: “Love Lockdown” is a terrifying song in many regards, but it’s made infinitely more uncomfortable by Kanye’s grotesque performance of prolix, technologized amateurism.

But the worst that West could do to us was sing; Palin nearly got actual power.

Michael Totten finds many non-Islamists. And nary a burka in sight. Islam is a very varied and complex religion. Indonesia shows the potential for a moderate Islam. What we’re fighting is a toxic mix from the Arab and Persian and South Asian Muslim heartland. The Persians one has hopes for. The Arabs? Not so much. The Pakistani nutters? God help us.

Last week, we reached some closure on a burning and controversial question that has occupied many for many years now. That is the simple question of who was responsible for the abuse, torture, rape and murder of prisoners in American custody in the war on terror, most indelibly captured by the photographic images of Abu Ghraib. The Senate’s bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.  Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Let’s be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves. The man who authorized the technique shown below is the president of the United States:

The report itself is not that long and I highly recommend reading it all closely. It is the most sobering indictment of high government officials in the U.S. since Watergate. And, in the gravity of crimes, it is a far more profound violation of the law and the constitution and the security of the United States than Watergate ever was.  Bush’s crimes are far greater than Nixon’s – because war crimes are far graver than burglaries. And there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.