Month: April 2009

Cheney Lies Again

CHENEYWESTPOINTStephenChernin:Getty

This is vital, because it reveals just how bad a card Cheney has to play in protecting himself from being prosecuted as a war criminal. The CIA inspector general's report found no evidence that torture had given any information that would not have been found using legal and moral means. Even one of the legal architects of the torture program, Steven Bradbury, had to concede that much:

"It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.

"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.

More salient for future war crime prosecutions will be the fact that the actual waterboarding did not even follow the absurd attempts to make it non-torture:

Contrary to Bush administration's insistence that waterboarding carried few risks and that medical concerns were a priority, the CIA didn't initially seek the help of medical professionals in setting up or carrying out the procedure.

"OMS (the CIA's Office of Medical Services) was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of (enhanced interrogation techniques)," Bradbury wrote in his May 10, 2005, memo, quoting from the IG's report… Quoting from the IG report, Bradbury wrote, "The waterboard technique . . . was different from the technique described in the DOJ opinion and used in the SERE training . . . At the SERE school . . . the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator . . . applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose."

Bradbury said the inspector general reported: "OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant."

Then the final internal coup de grace: they tortured people they weren't sure knew anything that could be gotten from torture:

"According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have information," Bradbury wrote in his May 30, 2005, memo. "On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques.

The case for a war crime prosecution is at this point overwhelming.

(Photo: Stephen Chernin/Getty.)

Orwell’s Arsenal

Packer, a hardcore Orwell buff, reviews the Englishman's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London:

His literary beginnings were full of failures and wrong turns. He was far from a natural at the kind of work he really wanted to do, which was fiction-writing. But recording experience without flinching or sentimentalizing or self-aggrandizement or self-laceration—this is what Orwell seems to have known how to do from the start, and it’s what makes “Down and Out” a classic early work. It shows all the strengths of the nonfiction writing to come, in books like “Wigan Pier” and “Homage to Catalonia,” and also in his essays. (Compare “Down and Out” to an essay he wrote fifteen years later, but about the same period of his life, “How the Poor Die,” or to “Such, Such Were the Joys,” one of his final essays, about his school days. The power of portraiture and description, the casual directness of the voice, the assertions and overstatements, the zeroing in on difficult truths: the whole arsenal of the Orwell style is already apparent from the very start.)

“Overzealousness”

Frum warns:

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush drew a curtain of oblivion against all the errors and mistakes that had led up to the attacks. There was accusation and counter-accusation in the media, but at the official level there was no recrimination against president Clinton's decision not to kill bin Laden when he had the chance, no action against those who had failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers from entering the country.

If Obama proceeds to take legal action against those who did what they thought was right to defend the country, all that will change. Prosecutions launched by Obama will not stop when Obama declares "game over." If overzealousness under Bush becomes a crime under Obama, underzealousness under Obama will become a crime under the next Republican president.

This isn't about "overzealousness": it's about enforcing the law. Clinton not killing bin Laden wasn't against the law. And there is a difference between good faith mistakes and a criminal conspiracy to violate and make a mockery of the rule of law. That's why a real investigation of all of it – including the alleged results – needs to take place and take its time. Give it two years to report, to allow emotions and tempers to cool. Then and only then make a decision on prosecution, so that there is no scintilla of haste or heat.

One more suggestion: ask Patrick Fitzgerald to run it.

The Weed Cortex

Science Daily reports on U.S. and Brazilian scientists’ discovery that the brain manufactures proteins that act like marijuana at specific receptors in the brain:

“The War on Drugs has hit very close to home,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Last year, scientists found that our skin makes its own marijuana-like substance. Now, we see that our brain has been making proteins that act directly on the marijuana receptors in our head. The next step is for scientists to come up with new medicines that eliminate the nasty side of pot—a better joint, so to speak.”

Quote For The Day

"As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save," – former senior military interrogator Matthew Alexander.

Judge Bybee Regrets

It's second hand, but at least it shows that some who played a part in turning America into a torturing nation do not retain Cheney levels of shamelessness:

"I've heard him express regret at the contents of the memo," said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while offering remarks that might appear as "piling on." "I've heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I've heard him express regret at the lack of context — of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety."

The question is what actually constituted the "enormous pressure." And whence it came. But there is one thing he could do to prove exactly how he feels: resign. Be the first person to express real remorse for the crimes committed. And then explain in great detail what he was instructed to do.

The Friday Wrap

For those catching up, Friday on the Dish we discovered that torture photos are forthcoming, Bush interrogators used religion as a weapon, and the US once executed soldiers for committing the same crimes advanced by Cheney. The media elite will not rock the boat, lest they implicate their pals in government or disrupt their false "balance" on the torture issue. Among the apologists of the day, Rove tweeted his dark thoughts, Goldfarb prepared his stand-up routine, James Taranto jumped the Orwellian shark, and Cliff May shocked even me (though I did eat crow for Ed Whelan). Among the helpful punditry, DailyKos made a torture timeline, Maggie made a measured stand against her colleagues, Ta-Nehisi tackled Peggy, and A.L. showed the apologist bar to be impossibly high. In marriage news, Connecticut continued the march towards equality. We also aired the confessions of pot addicts, the premonitory powers of the Ghostbusters, and sneeze porn.

Why Torture Doesn’t “Work”

This point in Philip Zelikow's op-ed yesterday in the NYT is essential:

What the committee may well find, after all the sifting, is that the reports were a critical part of the intelligence flow, but rarely — if ever — affected a “ticking bomb” situation. Yet the main rationale for using extreme methods is to save time. To the extent that the methods are more than just a way of debasing an enemy, their added value is in breaking people quickly, with the downsides including unreliability.

That is one reason the methods of torment do not stack up well against proved alternatives that rely on patience and skill.

As is Daphne Aviatar's rejoinder:

After you’ve tortured and humiliated someone, how can you possibly know what he would have told you if you’d gained his confidence instead?