Outsourcing Torture

The CIA’s tight relationship with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department has meant that 12 individuals have been "interrogated" at the CIA’s behest by the Jordanians under the Bush administration. The interrogators are torturers, according to the State Department and every other reliable source. And torturers of the most barbaric kind:

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

In a report released in January 2007, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator for torture, found that "the practice of torture is routine" at GID headquarters and concluded "that there is total impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the country."

Hence the Bush administration’s reliance on them, I suppose. Hat tip: Jeb Koogler.

Fabulisms Update

I don’t think TNR comes out of the Beauchamp affair looking good. Beauchamp, from a distance, seems like a major douche whose reliability is weak. The anecdotes in question, however, are pretty trivial when compared to things that happen in every war, and can be viewed on Youtube if you look, as soldiers goof off. That’s why I’ve never quite grasped why this story was so maddening to the Bush right. But when you read a usually mild-mannered Pete Wehner accusing TNR of hating the troops and wanting to smear them, you realize how deep the nuttiness has gone. Here’s Wehner this morning:

The magazine had turned against the war, and this piece would help turn people against those serving in the war. What has happened instead is that the situation in Iraq is turning around — and the TNR piece has utterly collapsed.

Poisonous poppycock. There is all the difference in the world between turning on the war – which Wehner’s former bosses criminally bungled and he recklessly spun through years of failure – and turning on the soldiers. I know most of the editors at TNR. I don’t think any of them has a scintilla of dislike for any soldier put in harm’s way by this president. They are hawkish Democrats with a very long record of support and respect for the military. I cannot speak for Frank Foer but it seems to me that the obvious motive behind the Beauchamp piece was to get some vivid first-person war-reporting in the magazine, to convey what it’s actually like to be a soldier. They picked the wrong soldier; and they were too defensive in trying to figure out what happened (which is still unclear to me); and they should never have assigned his wife as his fact-checker. But to ascribe a treasonous or anti-troop motive to them is beyond the pale. The legitimate factual questions, moreover, either happened or didn’t. The fate of the broader war is utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Similarly, the NRO story is obviously not one of bad motives on the part of Kathryn-Jean Lopez. She didn’t want to run anything fallacious.

But she dilly-dallied, on her own account, for over a week before coming clean with the issue. She even waited a week after being contacted by Tom Edsall. Her stated reason for not immediately airing the issue is the following:

I also had a sense of collegial respect for Edsall, i.e. to let him tell his story.

Oh, please. When a reporter contacts you with questions about whether a blogger on your site has been fabricating easily disproved stories, you don’t wait for that reporter to publish out of "collegial respect." And Lopez still has not said whether she received emails over six weeks ago alerting her to the question, as Mitch Prothero says. Did she? And what basis does she have for continuing to trust Smith’s reporting and continuing to publish his blog?

A “New Testament Conservative”

An interesting formulation from Mike Huckabee’s potential adviser as the Republican nominee, Dick Morris:

"He puts all of the Bible into play. It’s not just ‘thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not,’ but it’s the positive aspects of his religion, too — which is ‘love thy neighbor,’ and ‘when I was naked you clothed me,’ and a sense of helping poor people."

Or a spend-like-Jesus Republican. My take on Huckabee in the Sunday Times here.

Quote For The Day

"Competence, courage, and conviction are enormously important for our next President to possess. No one has a better understanding of U.S. interests and dangers right now than does McCain. He was right on the mistakes made by the Bush administration in prosecuting the Islamic terrorist war in Iraq and he is being proved right on the way forward both there and worldwide. McCain is pro-life. Always has been. He fights against special-interest and pork-barrel spending, and high spending in general, which ticks off liberals and many in the GOP who have wallowed at the public trough. Yet he also has the proven ability, unique among the contenders, to work across the political divide that has led our government into petty bickering when important problems need to be solved," – the Manchester Union Leader endorsing John McCain in New Hampshire.

My only qualm with this assessment is the notion that the best way ahead in Iraq is an indefinite continuation of the occupation. But on this, I still trust McCain’s judgment more than I do Romney’s or, God help us, Giuliani’s. And he was right in predicting tactical success for the surge, and I was too pessimistic. I’ll be interviewing the senator tomorrow. A reader seconds:

I’d been leaning McCain for a few days now, but the debate the other night clinched it for this disenchanted Republican who voted Democrat in ’06.

Rudy came across as the small and petty man that he is.  His attacks on Romney were immature and sleazy, just like the man himself, as we now know from his use of taxpayer dollars and government property to tend to Judith Nathan.  Romney, meanwhile, continues to be the most cynical candidate around, parroting lines that he thinks conservatives want to hear, even though everyone can see through them.  Fred Thompson is good but pointless.  He clearly doesn’t want to be in this race.  His wife must really want to be First Lady.  Paul is hopeless.  Huckabee is at least sincere, but I just feel that nominating him is tantamount to giving away the store.  He’s a big-government liberal with the compassion of Jimmy Carter and a nanny-state busybody of the highest order.  I’d rather have the Bitch.  At least she’d balance the budget.  You know, like her husband did.

But McCain is a man of honor who is reasonably conservative and who would move the Republican Party forward in lots of important ways.  Finally we would have a president that agrees that it’s not okay to torture or wiretap without a warrant or suspend habeas corpus.  Finally we would have a president who agrees that climate change is real and who wants to do something about it.  Finally we would have a president who believes in science.  And all of this without giving in to a big-government liberal agenda with Huckabee or Obama.  McCain wouldn’t raise taxes, would cut spending, and would be able to tackle immigration and entitlements in a bipartisan way.  He was right about the surge and he could finish the job in Iraq with honor.  Sure, McCain has pissed me off over the years on this or on that, but he remains the least imperfect choice in a highly imperfect field of candidates on both sides.

As such, I’ve made my decision.  I’m backing McCain.  Further, I hope that Obama takes down Hillary and clinches the Democratic nomination.  A McCain/Obama race would be one about policy, not personalities, and would be a unifying event, not a polarizing one.

Rogue America

Under the Bush administration, the United States’ relentless abandonment of many basic norms of international behavior is now driving a wedge between two close allies. Canada first:

Yesterday, the Canadian Federal Court issued an opinion in the case Canadian Council for Refugees, Canadian Council of Churches, Amnesty International, and John Doe v. Her Majesty The Queen. This case challenges the “Safe Third Country Agreement” between Canada and the United States that came into force in December 2004. This agreement provides that, with limited exceptions, individuals who first enter either Canada or the United States and then attempt to cross a land border into the other country in order to lodge an asylum claim must be returned to claim asylum in the first country they entered. In assessing the constitutionality of the agreement, the Canadian Court found that the United States does not comply adequately with Article 33 of the UN Refugee Convention, which prohibits return to persecution, or Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits return to torture — specifically naming the Maher Arar case as an example of the United States’ failure to protect.

And so torture slowly begins to destroy critical alliances. Scott Horton comments here. Then this:

America has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.

America desperately needs a new president who can re-connect the US to the norms of the civilized world.