Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I must confess that I simply do not have the foggiest idea as to what you think should be done about Iran. You say things like "the threat is real" and "we have to fight and not accomodate" and "negotiating with fascists is a mug’s game"…

When has the policy of refusing to negotiate, or even talk, to someone you strongly disagree with ever actually worked? Cuba? North Korea?

Do you really think that Osama and Ahmadinejad are playing the same game? Osama is the real deal, and has attacked us, and should be tracked down and destroyed.  There is no disagreement anywhere with that (just the strange lack of action on the part of the Bush administration).

But Iran has a street address. It’s a real place with real power players and real people that want to hold on to what they have. Of course, Ahmadinejad runs at the mouth. He’s playing his game at home and in the region. I really don’t see his talk as that much different from "axis of evil" and "Islamo-fascism" talk from our leaders (also playing to the home folks). Why are you so convinced that Ahmadinejad wants to commit suicide?

And if you were in charge of Iran, wouldn’t you want nuclear weapons? Pakistan is next door … Israel is down the street … the Bush people clearly want to get rid of you. And you have two clear examples … Iraq and North Korea. Which approach do you follow? And why should you give up your key negotiating position (no nukes) before starting to talk?

I don’t buy the idea that everyone is so different from each other, at least not in basic motives. Comfort, power, meaning, respect … these are things everyone cherishes the world over. Why assume that these are not key to Iran’s leaders as well.

What do you want to do? Go bomb Iran? That doesn’t seem like it will play out very well, now does it? Attack it with troops? Please. Put sanctions in place?  They are already there almost as much as they will be, and China and Russia just aren’t going to play along.

The ONLY thing to do is to shut up and start the hard and very complicated set of negotiations with these people. It would have been a lot easier before all the noise making, but we are where we are, so you do what you can.

I take the reader’s point. Our Iraq policy was, I thought, the best Iran policy. But the Iraq policy has become a fiasco. A military attack on Iran in the near future strikes me as extremely risky and potentially devastating. But negotiation with Savonarolas is equally insane. Maybe aggressive containment is all we have left for now. Practically speaking, I’d pour many more troops into Iraq, especially Baghdad, ratchet up the diplomatic isolation of Iran, encourage the domestic unrest in that country, and wait till we have a functioning executive branch in Washington. What other sane options do we have?

You’ve also managed to destroy your best ally, Tony Blair. My own conservative friends in London – those most inclined to be pro-American – report an intense distancing from the U.S. among Tories, let alone the other more liberal parties. Perhaps more significant in terms of our progress in the battle for moderate Muslims is that this administration (along with a clumsy EU) seems to have managed to push the Turks into moving away from the U.S. as well. When you’ve lost Britain and Turkey, things are not looking so good.

(Photo: Empics/Landov.)

Jack Balkin writes about a scenario in which president Bush’s proposed definition of torture is adopted by al Qaeda. It’s a classic.

Here’s the key to the current GOP base:

"There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord," Tomanio said. "I don’t care how he governs, I will support him. I’m a Republican through and through."

For the first time, one of the major parties is, at its core, a religious organization.

Who ya gonna believe? Bush or the military? Here’s the president yesterday:

I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks — here in the United States and across the world. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the examples provided by our intelligence community of how this program has saved lives; why it remains vital to the security of the United States, and our friends and allies; and why it deserves the support of the United States Congress and the American people.

And here’s Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, also yesterday:

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the past five years, hard years, tells us that." He argued that "any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility." And Kimmons conceded that bad P.R. about abuse could work against the United States in the war on terror. "It would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used," Kimmons said. "We can’t afford to go there."

The military JAGs are united in believing that the military justice system can easily cope with al Qaeda. Moreover, the fairness of the system will ensure that al Qaeda’s worst will be publicly tried and the world will trust the process. If they are tried under Bush’s rules, no one will trust the trial, we will forgo a massive propaganda victory in the war, and the p.r. coup goes to the enemy. How much will this president sacrifice in this war to save his own disgraced face?

The speech was crammed with them – easily refuted. Spencer Ackerman homes in on another one: Bush’s false narrative of the cases of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al Shibh. More on the insane man, Zubaydah, here.

I’ve written at length about the bait-and-switch in the administration’s proposed war-crimes bill – banning torture and abuse from the military, but allowing it for the CIA; claiming the White House is revising its war tribunals to conform with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Geneva, while actually asking the Congress to reinstate the original tribunals and say thay are consistent with Geneva, the insistence that the CIA still be authorized to torture and be backed by legislative permission, etc. But the silver lining, at least, is the military itself will no longer be an instrument of torture, and the new field manual is quite specific in the techniques it bans. Among the techniques now banned, previously allowed:

"forcing a detainee to be naked or perform sexual acts; using beatings and other forms of causing pain, including electric shocks; placing hoods over prisoners’ heads or tape on their eyes; mock executions; withholding food, water or medical care; using dogs against detainees; and waterboarding."

Frat-hazing, huh? Again this is good news. But notice how it also makes mincemeat of the president’s lie yesterday when he said

I cannot describe the specific methods used – I think you understand why – if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

Huh? His own administration just listed them. The only reason the president won’t mention these methods is that he doesn’t want himself saying the words "waterboarding" or "electric shocks" – both of which have been documented as used against terror detainees. That would connect him too closely to the policy he supports. And that’s why the press has been completely delinquent in not pressing him to answer specifics on these techniques. Bush must be publicly asked if he approves of "waterboarding" and whether he has ever authorized it.

Dana Priest says today that

In the past year, the CIA has studied more closely the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques that it and other agencies have used and concluded that some of those were worth discarding. CIA officials have eliminated some of those techniques and, within the past two months, have begun to consult for the first time with the full Senate and House intelligence committees about creating a new list of techniques. . . . The administration will ask the intelligence committees to give it guidance to draw up a separate, shorter list of harsh techniques it might still employee under certain circumstances.

It seems to me that that list of techniques must be included in the war crimes bill, so we can have a clear, public debate about what is and is not permitted for the elite torture squad the president has set up. Some isolation techniques, non-coercive psychological pressure, and other well-established techniques could then be authorized, and barbarisms like "waterboarding" explicitly ruled out of bounds. Marty Lederman, as ever, has an acute analysis here.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

It’s right there in the president’s speech yesterday: once again, baldly stated, as if saying it more categorically makes it true:

I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it – and I will not authorize it.

There is no other way to say it. On one of the gravest moral matters before the country, this president is knowingly stating an untruth. The lie is sustained by this evasion:

I cannot describe the specific methods used – I think you understand why – if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

But we know – and the enemy knows – what the techniques are. They’ve been listed and documented and debated. We also know what was done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the case cited specifically by the president in his speech yesterday – because Bush officials told us. The New York Times reported the following:

"Senior officials have said Mr. Mohammed was ‘waterboarded,’ a technique in which his head was pushed under water and he was made to believe that he might drown."

In another case of a detainee, Mohammed al-Qhatani, we actually have a log of what was done to him. He was deprived of sleep for 55 days, subjected to the KGB-perfected "cold cell" hypothermia treatment, and terrorized by unmuzzled dogs. Medics had to administer three bags of medical saline to Qhatani, while he was strapped to a chair, and aggressively treat him for hypothermia in hospital, before returning him to a torture cell. These facts are not disputed. Far, far worse has been done to detainees in less closely monitored "interrogations" in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the secret sites (now admitted) in Eastern Europe. (Yes, Dana, you deserve your Pulitzer.) Dozens of corpses are the result of the president’s "safe and lawful" interrogation methods.

If the president wants to argue that all this is necessary, that we need to breach the Geneva Conventions in order to protect the public, then he should say so. He should make the argument, and persuade Americans that torture should now be official policy, and seek explicit legislation amounting to a breach of the Geneva Conventions. That would be an honest position. He would gain the support of much of the Republican base, a large swathe of the conservative intelligentsia, and the contempt of the civilized world. We could then debate this honestly, including the torture techniques he has authorized and supports. Instead he lies.

Am I splitting semantic hairs here with the word "torture"? The definition of the word, in the U.N. declaration to which the U.S. is a signatory is as follows:

"[A]ny act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession … when such pain or suffering is inflicted at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."

In the cases the president cites, he authorized torture as plainly stated in U.S. law and common English. Moreover, he says he has set up an elite group trained specifically for torture, the kind of elite torture-squads once dear to South American dictators. They have, he reassures us, 250 extra hours of torture-training over regular CIA interrogators. The president is asking the Congress to establish this in law. Yes, this is America. It just no longer seems like it.

Then there is the president’s second untruth about who actually has been detained at Gitmo and elsewhere:

It’s important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo. These aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield – we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo.

Again, as has been exhaustively documented, this is false. Dozens of Gitmo detainees have been released with no charges brought against them, just as the U.S. concedes that up to 90 percent of those jailed at Abu Ghraib were innocent. Read this op-ed about just one man detained for four years at Gitmo, even though the administration conceded he was innocent. Earlier this year, to cite another investigation, the National Journal examined court documents relating to 132 "enemy combatants" at Gitmo, or about a quarter of the detainees there. Money quote:

National Journal undertook a detailed review of the unclassified files to develop profiles of the 132 men. NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314 prisoners who pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information provides a picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in the war on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S. military prison on an island belonging to one of America’s bitterest enemies …

The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans – nor were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by American troops at all. Most are from Arab countries, and most were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.

Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are … not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners … Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan. The government’s documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.

Here’s another little detail worth remembering, also uncovered by National Journal:

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that’s more than 10 percent of Guantanamo’s entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner’s accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he’d attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani’s denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers – not lawyers – who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani’s enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man – the aforementioned accuser – had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

That’s the "rigorous process" the president spoke of yesterday. It doesn’t exist – and never has.

Cape Cod Bay, tonight.