The Dish

An emailer thinks I am under-estimating the horrors of the technique backed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Wall Street Journal:

If anything, the now standard description of water-boarding understates the cruelty of the method. Those who were subjected to this method by South American security forces report that “they had been held under water until they had in fact begun to drown and lost consciousness, only to be revived by their torturers and submerged again. It is one of their worst memories” (Jennifer Harbury, ‘Truth, Torture, and the American Way,” pp. 15-16). As you note, the French used it in Algeria (there is a vivid depiction in the movie “The Battle of Algiers”). The United States used it heavily in the Philippines a hundred years ago; they called it “the water cure.” The person who probably knows the most about this is Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College and author of a new history of torture, soon to be published by Princeton University Press.

Marty Lederman discusses the depraved, Orwellian editorial at the Wall Street Journal here. We do, in fact, have a documented case of the tactic. I discussed it earlier this year in reviewing the Schmidt Report. That Pentagon report confirmed that at Gitmo, one detainee was subjected to the following:

He was kept awake for 18 – 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 consecutive days, he was forced to wear bras and thongs on his head, he was prevented from praying, he was forced to crawl around on a dog leash to perform dog tricks, he was told his mother and sister were whores, he was subjected to extensive “cavity searches” (after 160 days in solitary confinement) and then “on seventeen ocasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject.”

The latter is a polite word for “water-boarding.” Later in the report, we are informed that this technique was deployed “regularly” as a “control measure.” All this was “legally permissible under the existing guidance.” Medical doctors were on hand to ensure that the victim didn’t die. Water-boarding, in other words, is a specific technique directly authorized by Rumsfeld, described in the Schmidt Report, under the John Yoo rules, as legally permissible even for POWs under the Geneva Conventions. The Schmidt Report described this treatment as “humane.” It is very important to focus on the specifics of what this president has authorized. When he says “We do not torture,” he means that this technique is not “torture”. A technique used by South American dictators is fine by Bush. This from a president who had the chutzpah to respond to Abu Ghraib by saying that the abuses did not reflect America’s values. He was right. They reflect his administration’s.

The father of a marine stationed in Iraq wrote me an email about his son’s impressions. It’s complicated and credible. But I found this part the most interesting:

The Iraqis are a mixed bag. Some fight well, others aren’t worth a shit. Most do okay with American support. Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. It is widely viewed that Zarqawis use of suicide bombers, en masse, against the civilian population was a serious tactical mistake. Many Iraqis were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Iraqis are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians. The Kurds are solidly pro-American and fearless fighters.

According to [my son,] Jordan, morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see shit like Are we losing in Iraq on TV and the print media. For the most part, they are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership. Bottom line though, and they all say this, there are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren’t enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just cant stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally (with, of course, permanent US bases there).

I’ve brought up sealing the border directly with “senior administration officials.” They all say it cannot be done. I say: it can. We have the troops and technology to stop the insurgent influx from Syria. Why are we not stopping it? More troops on the border wouldn’t alienate the Iraqi population. It would be a sign we are finally protecting them. So why not more troops and equipment for that vital mission?

POTUS keeps sliding down. Worse: there’s a 68 percent “wrong track” number during a period of economic growth. 29 percent believe that Cheney is honest and ethical.

Here’s an astonishing sentence from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, a group whose support for cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of military detainees is persistent, unalloyed and enthusiastic. Notice this language:

As for “torture,” it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to “torture.” The “stress positions” that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.

Notice that the gold-standard for American conduct is now set by Saddam Hussein! And “water-boarding” is merely a “psychological technique” that “induces a feeling of suffocation.” No physical coercion at all – unless you mean being tied to a plank and near-drowned. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of the tactic as currently used:

The most-current practice of waterboarding involves tieing the victim to a board with their head lower than their feet so that they are unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over their face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in imminent fear of death by asphyxiation; however, it is relatively difficult to aspirate a large amount of water since the lungs are higher than the mouth, and the victim is unlikely to actually expire if this is done by skilled torturers. This is the technique demonstrated on U.S. military personnel, by U.S. military personnel, when they are being taught to resist enemy interrogations in the event of capture (see SERE). It is this technique the U.S. military and CIA interrogators are suspected of using.

The WSJ doesn’t think this is torture. The technique was widely used in Algeria by the French and dates back to interrogation techniques developed in the sixteenth century religious wars. Here’s an image:

Remember: the Wall Street Journal disagrees with the notion that this is “anything close to torture.” (In this, their sixteenth century forefathers disagreed. They called this technique torture, as the engraving shows.) The Journal editors want water-boarding to be a legal interrogation technique. Well, at least we now know exactly what they believe – about torture and about America.

I’m sympathetic to the president’s case that he was not the only one who supported war against Saddam because of the threat of WMDs. The consensus at the time – and it was shared by opponents and supporters of the war – was so overwhelming that Saddam’s WMDs were a premise of everyone’s case, pro and con. Maybe Scott Ritter and Baghdad Bob get a pass on this. But not many others. Nevertheless, all the rest of us were wrong. Were we lied to? I see no reason yet to believe we were – in the strong sense that deliberate untruths were consciously uttered. Was the post-9/11 atmosphere sufficient to blind many people to the possibility that they might be wrong about this premise? Certainly, that’s the case for me. I wasn’t skeptical enough. I followed the groupthink. I shouldn’t have. It’s also true, I think, that in the effort to ensure that the CIA was doing its job, some around the veep’s office and elsewhere may have seized on materials of dubious, if not discredited, validity. In retrospect, they were not skeptical enough either – and they have a much higher responsibility in this respect than bloggers or even Democrats who do not have full access to the full intelligence.

HIS NO-WIN BOTTOM LINE: But what I’m describing here is a failing, not a sin. It may deserve criticism on the grounds of incompetence, but not, I think, moral condemnation on the grounds of duplicity. The “Bush Lied!” screams are as cheap as they are very hard to substantiate. Moreover, it’s easy to get lulled into the fact after four years of no further atrocities on the mainland that we do not face grave dangers. After 9/11, I give government officials a pass on over-estimating threats to the country. Moreover, I don’t doubt the sincerity of Bush and Cheney in making their case for war on the WMD grounds (although, again, it’s baloney to say that that was the only ground they based their argument on). I’m open to debate on the Niger stuff and the aluminum tubes, but these are not central to the broad WMD case. I’m also open to the argument that the administration could have been more careful in their rhetoric. Talk of mushroom clouds was not exactly conducive to calm debate. But my bottom line is: These guys made a hard call in perilous times for good reasons. It turns out they were also wrong in one critical respect. That’s the judgment we have to grapple with – and it’s not very emotionally satisfying for either side. Above all, it’s not good for the president. In this debate, Bush has to choose between being called a liar or someone who made a profound, if forgivable, misjudgment in the gravest decision a president ever has to make. That’s no-win. “Hey, guys, I’m not a liar. I just got the intelligence completely wrong, and waged a pre-emptive war partly on the basis of that mistake. Sorry.” Not exactly a strong position. Oddly enough, I think Bush would have been more easily forgiven by the public if he’d been less defensive about it at the moment the WMD argument collapsed after the invasion. But he refused to acknowledge the obvious, dismissed the embarrassment, tried to change the subject and then just went silent. Once again, he mistook brittleness for strength. These many small decisions not to trust the American people with the full, embarrassing truths about the war has, in the end, undermined trust in the president and therefore support for the war. For that lack of candor, the president is paying dearly. So is the war in Iraq.

(for unhinged right-wing hyperbole): “Today, when most of the country thinks of who controls Massachusetts, I think the modern-day KKK comes to mind, the Kennedy-Kerry Klan,” – Federalist Society member Gerald Walpin, introducing Mitt Romney in a speech yesterday.

It’s a great editorial.

Here’s a link to a podcast of a former marine’s harrowing account of what he witnessed in Fallujah. On this Veterans’ Day, an account of the courage that is defending us is worth listening to. And being grateful for.

The latest study from San Francisco indicates that 10 percent of gay and bisexual men have used crystal meth in the last year. A year ago, that number was 18 percent. The sample size is 4,000. So the decline seems real. It’s a tribute to the common sense of most gay men. But somehow the news that they’re controlling this drug epidemic will never get the same exposure as claims that they’re hooked for good.

“…If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead,” – Bill O’Reilly, unplugged. I think we should be able to discuss divisive issues without urging al Qaeda to target anywhere in America, don’t you?