Month: April 2009

A doozy on the swine flu.

Fallows and Democracy in America agree that last night's presser was a bit dull, but Greg Sargent points to the most interesting answer of the night – Obama's response to a question about waterboarding:

"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent.

If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism,'" – Barry Goldwater, Congressional Record, September 16, 1981.

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture… The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture," – Condi Rice.

Isn't it telling that the first person to ask her this question this directly in public was not a professional journalist? One of these days, those guys' jobs could be in jeopardy … oh, wait!

[Re-posted] The West has been attacked many times before by barbarians. As someone who grew up in Southern England between London and the Channel, this was perhaps more obvious to me than to some Americans. In the countryside around my home, there were still occasional concrete constructions designed to impede Nazi tanks left rotting in the woods. My high-school playground retained its air-raid shelters (we stored our dirty books there). My great aunt was blind in one eye from a bomb blast in the blitz; my grandfather lived with a brain injury when he was a prison guard in the war and was attacked by a prison inmate during an air-raid; my mother was knocked over by the impact of a rocket at the end of the war; my parents and aunts and uncles were evacuated. Most ordinary people lived through the Blitz, a random 9/11 a week, from an army poised to invade, and turn England's democratic heritage into a footnote in a Nazi empire.

As all that was happening, and as intelligence was vital, the British captured over 500 enemy spies operating in Britain and elsewhere. Most went through Camp 020, a Victorian pile crammed with interrogators. As Britain's very survival hung in the balance, as women and children were being killed on a daily basis and London turned into rubble, Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting. The chief interrogator at Camp 020 was someone out of the movies:

Colonel Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens was the commander of the wartime spy prison and interrogation centre codenamed Camp 020, an ugly Victorian mansion surrounded by barbed wire on the edge of Ham Common. In the course of the war, some 500 enemy spies from 44 countries passed through Camp 020; most were interrogated, at some point, by Stephens; all but a tiny handful crumbled.

Stephens was a bristling, xenophobic martinet; in appearance, with his glinting monocle and cigarette holder, he looked exactly like the caricature Gestapo interrogator who has “vays of making you talk”.

Stephens had ways of making anyone talk. In a top secret report, recently declassified by MI5 and now in the Public Records Office, he listed the tactics needed to break down a suspect: “A breaker is born and not made . . . pressure is attained by personality, tone, and rapidity of questions, a driving attack in the nature of a blast which will scare a man out of his wits.”

The terrifying commandant of Camp 020 refined psychological intimidation to an art form.

Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling. An inspired amateur psychologist, Stephens used every trick, lie and bullying tactic to get what he needed; he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence. “Figuratively,” he said, “a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.” But only ever figuratively. As one colleague wrote: “The Commandant obtained results without recourse to assault and battery. It was the very basis of Camp 020 procedure that nobody raised a hand against a prisoner.”

Stephens did not eschew torture out of mercy. This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only 16 spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. “Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.”…

Torture is the weapon of cowards and bullies and monsters. Cheney is all three. Prosecute him.

The question of how many times it is necessary to subject a human being to torture is not a new one in human history. We've covered this ground some more in the systematic and repeated brutal torture of Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed along with countless others. One of the more (pathetic? chilling? disturbing? absurd?) stories of the last news cycle was Fox News' insistence that Zubaydah was not actually strapped to the waterboard 83 times, but suffered only 83 "pours." Michael Goldfarb jumped on this story with his customary aplomb:

Yes, this man was the spokesman for torture survivor John McCain in the last campaign. (Every now and again, I remember that and wonder what happened to the universe.) But we shouldn't be surprised that this kind of casuistry is not new in human history. Thanks to an ex-Jesuit reader, I came across the following phrase:

I still have some Latin but the following context helps explain Fox News' insistence and is a critical historical precedent for the Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury memos:

Those who know no history are condemned to repeat it. But America? And the Inquisition?

A reader writes:

Readers are hereby invited to submit classic movie scenes depicting Dick Cheney. We'll try to post the most amusing or accurate.

Kristen Soltis runs the numbers: