Month: April 2009

Reihan finds a video. It’s very Reihan:

A helpfully concise summary in a helpfully modest post from Manzi:

I am looking to tradition, settled practice and the wisdom of our forebears for guidance in a difficult situation. Among other things, this strikes me as the obviously conservative approach.

Personally, I prefer Roosevelt and Churchill to Yoo and Bybee.

We know that civilized countries have resisted the very torture techniques Dick Cheney was so eager to grasp and wield. What many do not know is that even evil regimes understand the flaws of torture as a form of actionable intelligence and have used it primarily as a tool to get propagandistic false confessions (as, increasingly, it seems, Cheney was intent on as well). Here is part of the Wiki profile of Hanns Scharff, Hitler's chief intelligence interrogator. He had more disdain for torture than Dick Cheney:

Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff (December 16, 1907 – September 10, 1992) was a German Luftwaffe interrogator during the Second World War. He has been called the "Master Interrogator" of the Luftwaffe and possibly all of Nazi Germany; he has also been praised for his contribution in shaping U.S. interrogation techniques after the war.

Merely an Obergefreiter (the equivalent of a senior lance corporal), he was charged with interrogating every German-captured American fighter pilot during the war after his becoming an interrogation officer in 1943. He is highly praised for the success of his techniques, especially considering he never used physical means to obtain the required information. No evidence exists he even raised his voice in the presence of a prisoner of war (POW)….

Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners with the intent to obtain information. Taught on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe's approved list of techniques which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner's greatest advocate while in captivity.

Scharff’s interrogation techniques were so effective that he was often called upon to assist other German interrogators in their questioning of bomber pilots and aircrews, including those crews and fighter pilots from countries other than the United States. Additionally, Scharff was charged with questioning V.I.P.s (Very Important Prisoners) that funneled through the interrogation center, namely senior officers and world-famous fighter aces.

After the end of WWII, Scharff was invited by the United States Air Force to give lectures on his interrogation techniques and first-hand experiences. The U.S. military later incorporated Scharff’s methods into its curriculum at its interrogation schools. Scharff's methods are still taught in US Army interrogation schools…

A roll call.

The English language can fight back in the unlikeliest of places:

"Last week, they released these memos outlining torture techniques. That was clearly a political decision and ignored the advice of their Director of National Intelligence and their CIA director," – House Minority Leader John Boehner, at a press conference in the Capitol.

More accurate than the New York Times.

Pirates!

Today's op-ed by Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator of Zubaydah, gives us critical, first-hand evidence of how the torture regime was put into place. Soufan notes that torture was applied to Zubaydah even though he had provided a great deal of actionable and accurate intelligence from traditional Western interrogation techniques. But he adds a critical detail: CIA officers were in the room during the traditional interrogation tactics. They knew he was cooperative. They did not want to start torturing him. Someone higher up ordered them. And yet the premise of the Bybee memo's authorization of the torture of Zubaydah states as fact:

The interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. Specifically, he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United Stares or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.

As the invaluable emptywheel notes (more valuable than most of the journalists at the NYT and WaPo), Soufan is proving that the CIA's premise to Bybee was false. It appears that all the FBI interrogators and several CIA interrogators believed Zubayhdah had nothing more to tell. And here is Bybee's caveat:

We also understand that you do not have any facts in your possession contrary to the facts outlined here, and this opinion is limited to these facts. If these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.

If someone withheld information, or someone ignored that information in providing the factual basis for Bybee's torture green light, then we have very clear proof that someone high up wanted to torture Zubaydah regardless. We also know that some have testified this was designed to prove a Saddam-Qaeda link (which did not exist). To put this in plain English: We had a president determined to torture a prisoner to get false evidence on which to justify a war.

Keep walking, Peggy. Keep walking.

Brisbane, Australia, 4.31 pm

A column she wrote four years ago:

The president looked into the audience and singled out Jeremiah Denton, an American pilot shot down by North Vietnamese troops and imprisoned for eight brutal years. He was beaten, starved and thrown into solitary confinement.

In 1966, during a televised propaganda interview with a pro-Commie journalist arranged by his captors, Denton was pressured to condemn American wartime "atrocities." Instead, Denton stood by his country: "(W)hatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, I support it, and I will support it as long as I live." Denton pretended the camera lighting bothered his eyes. With his clueless jailers surrounding him, Denton looked into the lens, blinked his eyes in Morse Code, and covertly broadcast the truth to the world — Jane Fonda be damned — by spelling out "T-O-R-T-U-R-E."

The torture Denton endured was very similar to that used against John McCain. He was not waterboarded, and not 183 times. He was forced into stress positions, thrown into solitary, isolated, beaten and had his diet manipulated – all things authorized by George W. Bush. For me, the most telling moment was when president Bush gave his convention speech by satellite for John McCain. Bush had to avoid using the word "torture" to describe what the Vietnamese had once done to McCain. Because if the Vietnamese were torturers, so was Bush.

A reader writes:

The idea that individual actions, like recycling, are not sufficient to solve our environmental problems is neither new nor revelatory.  I recall that President Obama has been quoted as saying he wanted to tell Brian Williams that we can't solve our problems by changing light bulbs.  J. Baird Callicott, in his book Beyond the Land Ethic, writes of the moment he realized that living an extremely eco-friendly lifestyle wasn't enough – and this was in the 70s or 80s.

 So, yes, we have to look "up stream" at how things are produced.  I do not agree, however, that no one is doing this.  Makower writes: "Ecolabels, activist watchdogs, and governmental regulatory schemes can't tell us. They focus on what is in the product, but not on the upstream activities involved in producing it."  This isn't quite true, while many labels and government programs do not look at production, Germany's recycling program for major household appliances is clearly directed at the production, and not just the disposal, of these items.  Additionally,  the concept of virtual water relates to the amount of water used in the production of a given consumer good, for example, a one liter bottle of water uses three liters of water in production.  Its not that no one is looking up stream, its just that the popular eco-media hasn't caught up.