Month: May 2009

Indianapolis, Indiana, 12.54 pm

What can one say about the Philadelphia Inquirer's decision to hire a war criminal whose legal work was so awful in government that the Justice Department Office Of Professional Responsibility had to conduct a deep and apparently damning investigation of it. Well: over to a columnist whose work is published on the same press:

As an American citizens, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our government tortured people in my name. As a journalist, the fact that my byline and John Yoo's are now rolling off the same printing press is adding insult to injury.

One key thing to understand about torture is that it almost never occurs when the torturers know nothing and need to find out something. That's why seeing it as an interrogation tool, properly understood, is actually oxymoronic. What torture is about is forcing a victim to tell you something you already think you know but want confirmed – either to prevent an attack or use as propaganda or deploy against another suspect. And, as one recalls, there are many things that Dick Cheney simply knows – even though the CIA, the State  Department, and much of the professional machinery of government might disagree. In fact, disagreement by State and CIA actually only tends to confirm Cheney's view, in his mind, that he is always, always right.

So what were the two things of which Cheney was completely sure after 9/11, regardless of the objective evidence? He was sure that there was an operational connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, and sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In Cheney's defense, these were judgments based on completely legitimate fears – and any president or vice-president would be duty bound to figure them out. After 9/11, the possibility of al Qaeda with WMDs was terrifying, and Cheney had already been responsible for the worst attack on American soil in US history. By his reading of his oath of office, he had already broken it. So he finds two potential Qaeda suspects and they are interrogated … but although they tell him a lot about al Qaeda, they don't tell him what he wants to know and believes is true. And what he believes is true could, in his mind, threaten the US and thousands of American lives. He wasn't alone in this fear. I was right there along with him, as most of us were. But, from all we now know, he went one step further in this quest than any American elected official had ever done in history before.

From much of what we can glean, it was only after the suspects had given up lots of info, but not the info Cheney wanted, that the torture started, as it usually does in history. It starts with someone empowered with torture to get from a victim the words that will confirm what the torturer already believes. This evidence can then be publicly cited as proof that Cheney is right … and justify further torture and even, in this case, partly justify an entire war that killed tens of thousands and cost trillions of dollars and still has almost the entire US military locked down with no way out in the middle of the Middle East. Moreover, the result of torture – it worked! you can almost hear Cheney exult – proves that other potential torture victims could also be forced to tell us the same thing. And so the temptation to torture deepens with every session – as you believe you are nearing the truth, even as, in reality, you are entering a dark hole from which there is no escaping.

And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway? Take that, Valerie Plame!

Now you see the temptation to use Zubaydah for the same purpose.

He'd been interrogated successfully, given up huge amounts of information when being treated humanely, even kindly, in hospital and after – but not enough for Cheney. Cheney wanted Zubaydah to tell him what Cheney already knew: the Saddam-Qaeda connection. That would sure foil those pantywaist liberals in the State Department, the Congress and the press who kept asking for proof – as if proof were needed in such an emergency. And so Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard to force a fake casus belli out of him. Here is the relevant section from the Bybee memo:

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 States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.

But those in the "interrogation team" had no such certainty, according to Ali Soufan, who was part of it. And David Rose subsequently discovered what Bush and Cheney got out of the torture session, once the professional interrogators had been ushered out:

Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: “Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” That analyst did not then know that the evidence was procured through torture. “As soon as I learnt that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the analyst says.

We still have memos and a bureaucratic paper trail. But we don't have the tapes of those torture sessions which were destroyed – yes this is a Hollywood movie – by the CIA. And as for al-Libi, a man who could also flesh out the details of his torture and what Cheney forced him to say … well, for a long time, he simply went missing:

"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."

Yesterday, he was found dead in a Libyan jail, an apparent "suicide".

Andrew Exum's take on the changing of the guard:

This tells me that President Obama, Secretary Gates, and Gen. Petraeus are as serious as a heart attack about a shift in strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was ruthless, and they were not about to do the George Casey thing whereby a commander is left in the theater long after he is considered to have grown ineffective.

The sad truth of the matter is that people have been calling for McKiernan's head for some time now. Many of the people with whom I have spoken do not think that McKiernan "gets" the war in Afghanistan — or counterinsurgency warfare in general. There was very little confidence that — with McKiernan in charge in Afghanistan — we the United States had the varsity squad on the field.

That all changed today. I do not know if the war in Afghanistan is winnable. But I do know that Stan McChrystal is an automatic starter in anyone's line-up.

Joe Klein weighs in:

"The recent release of the unredacted OLC memos has opened many eyes, mine included. The legal “analysis” in the redacted memoranda earlier released did not give graphic detail of the techniques. As a then-law school dean in Washington, DC, I became privy to Bush White House briefings encouraging all those in attendance to defend the president in public commentary. Trustingly, I did, but now greatly resent that the most pertinent details were withheld. Reading my own commentary leaves me grievously embarrassed in light of the recent disclosures. I find what I was told and then repeated absurdly indefensible. Mea culpa…

In the 1950s the great French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain … wrote: 

“I do not say that [Americans] always act according to the dictates of conscience–what nation does? I say that they feel miserable, they endure terrible discomfort when they have a guilty conscience. The very fact alone of nursing a doubt as to whether their conduct was or was not ethically irreproachable causes them pain. The result is sometimes unexpected, as the wave of fondness for the Japanese people which developed after Hiroshima. Let us say that hiring the devil for help will never be agreeable even to [American] politicians.” 

Well, at least not acceptable to the American people.  We now know the devil is in the details," – Doug Kmiec.

A reader writes:

I get why a libertarian-leaning conservative like yourself would be against hate crime legislation. I really do. But I've often found myself questioning whether or not you and/or folks of your ilk would be against any kinds of legal distinction under the law. For example, should aggravated sexual assault simply be considered a violent crime, rather than a specific crime having to do with non-rape violence of a sexual nature? Or perhaps, from the same viewpoint, all crimes of a sexual nature ought to be considered sex crimes. In that case, should there be a distinction between aggravated rape, coerced statutory rape, consensual statutory rape, and child molestation?

The reason I bring these to your attention is because motivation does indeed factor into all of these. If a 25-year-old man has sex with a willing girl, only to find out after the fact that she was sixteen at the time, that's still statutory rape in many states; but the guy likely won't get tried as a child molester, nor will he be tried for criminal sexual assault if there was no actual assault going on. On the flip side, an angry, sexually frustrated guy who beats up and forces sex on a woman is going to be tried differently for his different motivation.

I guess it boils down to how you see the law. I personally am not one who believes that all people are equal under the law; I believe that equal people are equal under the law. Two child molesters who touch little kids because of some psychopathology should be tried the same; but a child molester and a consensual statutory rapist shouldn't be. Same with hate crimes, in my view: You have to take into account motivation.

Does this mean that everything currently classed as a hate crime actually is one? No. I think often the definition of hate crime has gone too far in an authoritarian direction as an attempt to criminalize thought rather than showing by example why those thoughts are wrong. But there are societal implications, too. When four white guys beat on a black guy because he's black, or vice-versa, that actually adversely affects our society in a worse way than if they were just robbing him or beating him up because he was a guy they didn't like.

He senses the mood:

We have to deal with what we’re stuck with. Just because there is a right-wing government in Israel does not mean that we should chuck in the towel. There are a lot of American Jews and Israelis who tell me that it takes a right-wing Israeli government to do it. I said, I hope so! Netanyahu has a lot on his shoulders as he goes to Washington. I think the international atmosphere is not going to be in favour of wasting time; it is going to be very much “we are getting sick and tired of this”.

Here is one final opportunity. If the only player in this equation between the West, the Arabs and the Muslims that is not being helpful and is against peace is Israel, then let’s call it for what it is. Let Israel understand that the world sees Israeli policy for what it is.

David Horovitz writes about the current gap between Jersualem and Washington.

Michael Ledeen argues money was exchanged:

I don't know, but I do worry that this kind of certainty and broad generalization about "the mullahs" sound very much like the rhetoric that talked us all (well, not all) into believing in Saddam's WMDs. Just because some of them are assholes and kleptocrats doesn't mean they could not also be adjusting to the Obama era a little. If only for self-preservation.