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#ReadTheReport

Every Dishhead with a Twitter account should RT this tweet from Senator Feinstein:

Let’s spread #ReadTheReport far and wide (and blow #IHateCartmanBrah out of the water). Read all of DiFi’s tweets thus far, in chronological order, below:

Follow Feinstein here.

The CIA’s Sense Of Fairness

Former director Michael Hayden feels that he and his colleagues have been wronged:

It’s as if we were tried and convicted in absentia. We were not given an opportunity to mount a defense. And there was no discovery process by which alleged evidence could be revealed and challenged.

Friedersdorf puts this in its appropriate context:

So imprisoning Muslims without charges or trial is morally defensible, as Hayden sees it, as is killing without due process, even when scores of children predictably die as “collateral damage,” and even when U.S. citizens are targeted in secret. The no-fly list? Also just fine, no interviews required. But criticizing Hayden in a Senate report that was researched for years, based on CIA documents, and given to the current CIA director to review before publication? Criticizing him in a report that results in no penalties whatsoever without due process? That’s an outrage to him. Why, a man’s reputation is at stake!

Why Should Colleges Adjudicate Rape Cases?

As several commentators noted when the UVA rape story broke (and before it unraveled), the campus rape reporting system mandated under Title IX clearly isn’t working properly, as universities tend to prioritize covering their own asses over ensuring that charges are handled justly. As UVA is hardly the first university to make a mess of this process, it seems like a no-brainer that these cases should be investigated by the police, not college administrators. Libby Nelson, however, argues that colleges should have at least some role in responding to rape allegations:

Imagine a college sexual assault case that is reported to authorities — both to local police and to campus officials. On campus, the investigation takes around 60 days, according to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. In the local justice system, it can drag on even longer. In the meantime, the student who filed the complaint might have to sit next to the student she accused in class or run into him in the dining hall. A victim of sexual assault might fail a class or want to take part of the semester off.

Police departments can’t do anything about any of this. But colleges can. They can shift students’ housing assignments, campus jobs, or class schedules. They can offer free counseling services. They can give students who say they were assaulted a break from a midterm exam, or let them retake classes that they failed because they were emotionally upset in the aftermath of an assault. And they can do these things immediately, before a hearing or even an investigation is concluded. That’s one reason why colleges have a role to play when sexual assault happens on campus. Colleges can, and are supposed to, take those actions even if the police are already investigating.

It’s one thing to shuffle housing assignments and class schedules, and quite another to expel accused rapists without solid evidence of wrongdoing. The problem arises when universities are called upon to render what are essentially criminal verdicts and punishments, which only the justice system can do. But Max Ehrenfreund suggests that forcing universities to report rapes to the cops might not be such a great solution:

At the University of Virginia, the key problem appears to have been unresponsive school officials — not unresponsive cops. The victims described in the Rolling Stone account could have sought the police’s help if they wanted it, but they did not.

Now, many are saying that police should be involved in every alleged case of sexual violence. But some advocates for victims suggest that mandatory reporting to police could have unintended consequences — while ignoring the real issues of college administrators not doing enough to stop sexual assault. It could make campuses even more dangerous, they say, by discouraging students from reporting sexual assault and preventing administrators from getting the information they need to keep students safe.

Some victims of rape say they would not have notified their university if the school officials had been required to report the incident to police. Victims, some say, might not want the attention and scrutiny that comes from a criminal investigation. Others may be uncomfortable with the idea of repeatedly describing in detail what happened to them to law enforcement officers.

Alexandra Brodsky and Elizabeth Deutsch make another case for why universities need to also be involved in handling sexual assault cases, looking back at the case that established this requirement back in the 1970s:

What Alexander [v. Yale] helped to establish … is that campus rape is not just a crime but also an impediment to a continued education—and to subsequent success in the workplace and public life. That means that Title IX’s protections are necessary for an individual student’s learning opportunities and for gender equality throughout American life. If sexual violence goes unaddressed at universities, women will face unconscionable obstacles to education, professional success and full citizenship. …

Many of those who say criminal law is the single best way to handle campus sexual assault believe that bringing in the cops is the only way to put a stop to gender-based violence at colleges. Yet the gravity of these harms cannot be understood through the lens of criminal law alone. If we are truly to take sexual violence seriously, we must, as Title IX does, acknowledge that rape and harassment serve to maintain a regime of inequality in which, decades into widespread coeducation, women still cannot learn and thrive as equals to their male classmates. Yes, rape is a horrible crime. But it is also part of systemic inequality in education that we still need to fight.

Darkness Visible: The View From Abroad

Ugh. On top of its illegality, moral bankruptcy, and utter uselessness, the torture program under the Cheney administration was a disaster for US foreign policy, providing grade-A propaganda fodder to our enemies and rivals, infecting our allies, and making it difficult for the US to be taken seriously as an advocate of human rights. The reactions to the Senate report from around the world make these depressing facts even more obvious. Here’s China, thumbing its nose at us:

State news agency Xinhua’s website dedicated a special page to coverage of the Senate report, titled: “How long can the US pretend to be a human rights champion?” A commentary carried by several mainland news portals, originally from the Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao, said that while the excessive use of torture by the CIA had been widely known, the report showed some of the methods were “almost medieval”. Turning to the question of how its release would damage the social and constitutional values the US prides itself on, and whether it would cause the country’s moral high ground to erode more rapidly, the author said that in any case “so-called ‘human rights’ were merely a veil and the excuse to put pressure on others”. The report was a heavy blow to the credibility and global image of the US, it added.

Russia joins in:

“The information that has been publicized is yet another confirmation of gross and systemic human rights violations on the part of the American authorities. Despite the fact that this Inquisition-style torture was carried out by CIA agents outside U.S. territory, this does not exempt them from principal responsibility for such deliberate actions. Simultaneously, the question arises about the involvement in these crimes of the governments of those countries (their names have been prudently erased from the report) that agreed to host the secret prisons,”[said Konstantin Dolgov, Foreign Ministry Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law].

And jihadists are having a field day:

“Read [the Senate report] my brother and stick your shoe in the mouth of those who say that the Islamic State distorts Islam,” one Isis supporter tweeted. Another, a Syrian, wrote: “Getting beheaded is 100 times more humane, more dignified than what these filthy scumbags do to Muslims.” Hani al-Sibaei, a prominent radical Islamist scholar, commented: “American politicians consider CIA report on torture of Muslim detainees a disgrace to America! Damn you! Your entire history is a stain on the face of humanity.” Nabil Naim, a former Egyptian jihadi leader, announced that he was ready to raise a 10,000 strong force of suicide bombers to attack America. Isis itself issued no official response.

The torture apologists will spin this as proof that Dianne Feinstein is somehow giving aid and comfort to our enemies, but the fallacy at work here is so transparent as to barely merit a response. It was the architects of this program, not the people who brought its horrors to light, who handed this talking point to our enemies.

Then there’s the reaction from our allies and clients. Hanna Kozlowska reports on how officials in Poland, which hosted one of the CIA’s black sites, is responding to the news of just how dirty their hands are:

The report, which US president Barack Obama and Polish prime minister Ewa Kopacz discussed ahead of its release, put Poland’s involvement back in the spotlight. At yesterday’s press conference, former president [Aleksander] Kwaśniewski conceded that the US had asked for a “quiet site” where they could “obtain information” from cooperative suspects. But neither he nor then-prime minister Leszek Miller, also at the press conference, said they were aware of the harshness of the interrogations. …

Among the new, alarming details revealed by the report is that the US offered Poland payment for its role in the CIA program after the detention site was up and running. According to the report, the CIA offered Poland an undisclosed sum and refused to sign an agreement with Poland outlining the CIA’s role and responsibilities at the site. Polish officials said at yesterday’s press conference that the memorandum included demands to guarantee humane treatment of the prisoners. “What country will respect us if it turns out that our authorities will agree to anything for several million dollars, even if it is against the Polish constitution?” Polish member of parliament Łukasz Gibała wrote on his Facebook page.

Poland was not the only European country complicit in the torture regime. Natalie Nougayrède wonders whether these countries will own up to it:

European countries failed to conduct effective investigations into the agencies and officials who facilitated the CIA’s work. Sweden is the only country to have paid compensation to victims of extraordinary renditions. Italy is the only country where officials have been convicted by a national court for their involvement in the CIA programme.

 

According to information compiled by Open Society Foundations, at least 54 governments cooperated with these CIA activities. Twenty-one of those are European, of which 17 were at the time members – or soon to become members – of the European Union. In addition to the countries above, the list of European states that were complicit in CIA rendition flights and other unlawful activities includes Lithuania (there are strong indications that this country also had a “black site”), the UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania.

While Canada’s Stephen Harper bragged that his country had nothing to do with the torture program, some Canadian intel experts say otherwise:

“It gives us a good conscience” to be able to deny participation in torture, but “it doesn’t take away the fact that we’re as guilty as them,” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former senior intelligence officer with CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. As Juneau-Katsuya sees it, Canada’s spy agencies have a tremendously close relationship with the CIA and probably had a pretty good idea how the intelligence was generated. Adds security expert Wesley Wark, “When Prime Minister Harper says it’s an American problem with an American issue with no Canadian ramifications, that’s not really accurate – or oversimplified on any number of fronts. We tapped that intelligence. We relied on that.”

In Afghanistan, where our abuse of detainees is coming under additional scrutiny from the ICC, President Ashraf Ghani didn’t mince words:

“This is a vicious cycle. When a person is tortured in an inhumane way, the reaction will be inhumane,” Ghani told a specially convened news conference in Kabul. “There can be no justification for these kinds of actions and inhumane torture in today’s world.” His announcement was a reminder of how the impact of a programme that was shut down in 2008 is still felt in Afghanistan – and how news of abusive detention still fuels anger. In part this is because it spawned a wider culture of abuse among other US security forces stationed in the country, human rights activists say, with reports of torture and extrajudicial killings by special forces as recently as last year.

Egypt’s government has remained tight-lipped, but the official line is leaking out:

Those who did react said the report highlighted the hypocrisy of the US, who have often condemned Egypt’s recent human rights abuses. “America cannot demand human rights reports from other countries when this proves they know nothing about human rights,” said a pro-regime television host, Tamer Amin, on his show.

However, not everyone was quick to denounce the torture program. The French far-right superstar and Putin admirer Marine Le Pen had this to say:

The rising leader of the Front National (FN) party said that she “did not condemn” the use of torture when questioning terror suspects, in an interview with BFMTV. “Of course [torture] can be used,” she said. “It’s been used throughout history.”

“I believe that the people responsible for getting information out of terror suspects that can save civilian lives do a responsible job,” she added. “There are times, such as if a bomb is about to go off, when it is useful to get a suspect to talk…by any means.” However, she later backtracked saying on Twitter that her words had been “misinterpreted”[.]

Unlikely that endorsement will be appearing in the CIA’s PR packet anytime soon.

From Donor To Dad

Alana Semuels explains “why more single women are trying to find a sperm donor who is also involved in a child’s life”:

Being a single-parent is financially and emotionally taxing. Studies show that single-parents are more likely to live in poverty, and that mothers earn and learn less, since they have to pay for child care and take more time off from work to care for a child. That may be why more single women are trying to find a sperm donor who is also involved in a child’s life. Sites like Modamily.com, PollenTree.com and Familybydesign.com serve as places for people to meet potential co-parents: They’re kind of like a Match.com for people who want to have kids without having sex. …

It’s not just single women looking for involved parenting partners, either. Increasingly, lesbian couples who want to have children are turning to men they know for genetic material, and are sometimes asking him to share some parenting responsibilities. It’s possible that gay men who use a surrogate to have a child are involving the mother in the child’s life too—at least if you believe the premise of the failed 2012 NBC comedy The New Normal.

Can The CIA Be Controlled?

David Corn is unsure:

One reasonable reading of the report is that the CIA cannot be relied upon to share accurate information about controversial practices with its overseers in Congress and the executive branch. That would mean effective oversight is not possible. And if a congressional inquiry of CIA practices triggers a full-scale battle between the agency and the committee, that, too, would indicate the CIA might be too tough to monitor. Moreover, if the agency and the lawmakers tasked with scrutinizing CIA actions cannot agree on basic realities, that also does not bode well for oversight.

The torture—as far as we know—is over. But the CIA’s secret war against Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremists continues, as does a host of other covert actions conducted by US intelligence agencies and military services. The Senate intelligence committee’s torture report and the conflict surrounding its investigation call into question the basic rules that are supposed to ensure accountability when American spies and soldiers have to toil in the shadows. This is a matter for President Obama and Congress to come to terms with—though there seems to be little appetite for such follow-up to the Senate torture report. The report is not merely an accounting of a dark past that can now be permitted to slip away; it is a warning sign of an alarming and fundamental problem: Secret government is not working—and it might not be workable.

The UVA Story Unravels, Ctd

Mollie Hemingway reacts to the revelations we noted earlier today:

Yes, the latest shocking revelations about Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone’s journalism are stunning. They really, really messed up. Even more than we previously realized. They should receive every bit of oppobrium coming their way.

Margaret Hartmann takes stock of everything we know about the unraveling mess so far. Robby Soave keeps his focus on the real offenders – Rolling Stone, not Jackie:

The friends quoted in the latest article still say Jackie’s changed behavior that first semester is evidence of some trauma she sustained. That may be true, although it is difficult to say what, exactly, that might have entailed. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest such a trauma bears any resemblance to the incredible story told by Rolling Stone.

Lest anyone think that this debacle is solely the fault of someone who falsely claimed rape, keep in mind that these fraudulent charges were put forth by a national magazine that made no effort to verify them, and ignored every red flag in its haste to publish the story of the century—even when Jackie refused to name her attackers and attempted to withdraw her story. Whatever the truth is—whatever the excellent reporters at WaPost manage to uncover next—the fact remains that Rolling Stone and Erdely should have known better.

Meanwhile, Max Ehrenfreund and Elahe Izadi dig into research on false rape reports:

Much of the research into false allegations examines police cases. A 2010 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Violence Against Women reviews the scholarship to date, while assessing the flaws in existing studies. The authors estimate the prevalence of false allegations of rape is 2 to 10 percent of cases reported to police. The researchers also examined 136 rape cases at a major university in the northeast that had been filed between 1998 and 2007. The process took about two years, said lead author David Lisak. They classified complaints as false if there was “a thorough investigation” that resulted in evidence showing the assault never occurred — such as video evidence. Of the 136 cases on that college campus, eight were deemed false, or a rate of 5.9 percent.

Marcotte attempts some myth-busting on fabricated rapes:

Not only do people overestimate how many false rape reports there are, they often don’t even have the right idea of what happens when false rape reports do happen. Many people believe that false reports happen when a woman, angry about not getting a phone call after a one-night stand or ashamed of having had drunken sex, decides to accuse her consensual sex partner of raping her. This belief is rooted in long-standing misogynist stereotypes of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The reality is a little different, according to a report for the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women, which is part of the National District Attorneys Association. “Despite the stereotype, false reports of sexual assault are not typically filed by women trying to ‘get back at a boyfriend’ or cover up a pregnancy, affair, or other misbehavior,” authors Kimberly Lonsway, David Lisak, and Joanne Archambault write. Instead, “the vast majority are actually filed by people with serious psychological and emotional problems” who lie for “the attention and sympathy that they receive.”

Back to the subject of real and credible rapes, Susan Dominus works through her own experience with sexual assault, pondering why some victims don’t resist their attackers the “right” way and are made to feel shame for that:

In 1993, one year after I graduated from college, Katie Roiphe published an incendiary op-ed in The New York Times called “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” in which she suggested that the issue of sexual assault on campus was overblown, that some feminists were casting women as passive victims in need of protection. She offered one way I could look at what happened to me that evening: “There is a gray area in which one person’s rape may be another’s bad night,” she wrote. I was no ingénue, and had had “bad nights”; and yet the night of the red cup stood out as something significantly more troubling than that.

The language we use for a given experience inevitably defines how we feel about it. I could not land on language that felt right — to me —about that encounter. I still cannot. Struggling to find language to define that experience after the fact left me longing for more words that could have been used in the moment. What I wish I had had that night was a linguistic rip cord, something without the mundane familiarity of “no” or the intensity demanded in “Get off or I’ll scream.” … What if every kid on every college campus was given new language — a phrase whose meaning could not be mistaken, that signaled peril for both sides, that might be more easily uttered?

Dish readers share their own experience with rape and sexual assault here and here. Update from a reader, who misreads our earlier post‘s comparison of Erdely to TNR editors, not to Glass:

I have to dissent from the comparison of Sabrina Rubin Erdely to Stephen Glass and your and others’ assertion that the “real offenders” are “Rolling Stone, not Jackie.” The comparison to Glass is very specious. Glass fabricated stories himself. He was a liar. Erdely may have been sloppy and unprofessional. She should have interviewed Jackie’s friends and the accused men. She should have considered not printing the story after Jackie asked her not to do so. But the lie at the center of the story is not Erdely’s, it’s Jackie’s.

Jackie has told multiple versions of this lie to several people over the last two years, and continued to tell the lie as recently as last week (to the Washington Post), when the story was already beginning to unravel. She has defamed innocent men. The men were defamed to Erdely, to Jackie’s friends, to campus anti-rape activists, to the university administration, and ultimately to the world, now that the real names of at least some of the men have been published online.

I find it maddening that the media want to treat this sorry series of events as a story about bad journalism. This is a story about a young woman who fabricated a rape allegation, first to induce empathy from a boy she liked, and later (I guess) to fit in with or be a star among other anti-rape activists.

Jackie had several opportunities to shut all of this down. She could have avoided repeating the lie to her roommate two years ago. She could have declined to repeat the even more embellished lie to campus activists. She could have told the truth when Erdely initially approached her. She could have told the truth when she asked Erdely to not print the story. And finally, she could have told the truth when she was interviewed by the Post. But she just kept lying.

Contra Marcotte, whatever the nature of “vast majority” false reports of rape, I find it very difficult to believe that Jackie suffers from “serious psychological and emotional problems.” She lied with motive and purpose, repeatedly over the course of two years, and then stuck with the lie to save face.  She lied without any regard to the way she was hurting other people.

When Erdely went to Charlottesville she did uncover an important story that goes something like this: Women on college campuses are sometimes raped. Colleges often do a very bad job of investigating alleged rapes and need to do better. But some of the rape allegations are false, which is why any investigation needs to be done professionally and with fairness to both the alleged victim and the alleged perpetrator.  That is not the story Erdely told, and it is not the story being told in the media even now.

We still don’t know exactly what happened, despite Jackie’s dropping credibility. She very well could have been raped. According to one of her three key former friends, even now:

“She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” Randall said. “I had never seen anybody acting like she was on that night before, and I really hope I never have to again. . . . If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar.”

Let’s see what else the WaPo reports and how the rewrite of the Rolling Stone piece pans out before making any final judgments.

Dissents Of The Day

Hijacked Planes Hit World Trade Center

A reader writes:

I’m a Republican subscriber to the Dish and a frequent yeller at my computer screen as a result – and I’ll stay an enthusiastic subscriber because you’ve got passion and smarts and personality, and that’ll more than do. But honestly, not one reference, throughout your ongoing commentary about the Senate torture report, to the 2,996 victims of the 9/11 attacks? They went to work that morning and died in horror and never knew why – surely there’s some mitigating context that deserves at least a mention alongside the allegations (and yes, ugly truths) about America’s security efforts in the wake of that attack.

Another quotes me:

All I want you to do is imagine if you were witnessing this scene in a movie. The interrogators would be Nazis, wouldn’t they? And now they are us.

No, they would not have be Nazis.  They could be Jack Bauer from 24, a critically acclaimed show that millions loved to watch for nearly 200 episodes.  Maybe you think that proves your point?  I say the opposite of course – that war is hell, that in every war bad things are done that MUST be done, and that the vast majority of decent Americans understand this as well, despite you’re preachy moralism on the Dish to the contrary. We do not, unfortunately, live in world where we get to decide between two ideals, but often we only get to decide between actions, and outcomes, that are “really bad” and “even worse”, and even then reasonable people will disagree on what should have been done. Thus some still call Truman a monster for dropping the bombs.     

Another criticizes us at length:

Dish reporting on the Senate report is not unlike Amanda Marcotte et al’s take on campus sexual assault: everything bad ever said about the CIA/Bush/Cheney is uncritically taken as true, any dissent or contradiction is dismissed/vilified out of hand.  All up, not the Dish’s finest hour. To clear up a couple of things:

1) Water boarding is torture.

2) Not all torture is the same.  Hot irons are not the same as slapping someone or verbal threats of physical punishment.  Plain and simple.  Loud music and cold-water immersion are not the same as wrenching off toe nails.  We aren’t talking nuance; we are talking intellectual honesty and reasoned examination.  It may be ugly, and it make be torture, but there levels, degrees, etc of abuse and pretending otherwise is effective only when preaching to the choir.

At least three glaring errors in the Dish’s side of this argument:

1) “Michael Hayden Unravels” – Ok, I watched it. He didn’t unravel. He did unravel the allegations in the Senate report.  This is an editing error, at best, or indicative of a very lax standard for criticizing the opposition.  You might say that Hayden was unresponsive in some respects.  That would be fair.  But that he unraveled?  No way.

2) You quote Larison, as follows, with approval: “Torture is absolutely wrong and absolutely useless, and demonstrating the truth of both statements will make clear how completely bankrupt its defenders’ arguments really are.”  The first part might be true, but the second part is debatable and by no means objectively established.  Repeatedly asserted but not objectively established.

More to the point, how does one establish that torture is “absolutely useless” without actually using torture on a systematic basis and finding out whether, in fact, it works (which itself is a subject analysis).  Because a Senate report says so?  Because others say so?  Crap.  We get that all the time, where there is some asserted, final word on some topic that turns out to be crap.  What is really at play here is a very desperate need by the Dish and its side to establish this “fact” as beyond question.  Why?  Because if torture, in some applications, does work, the absolutist argument becomes less compelling if innocent lives are in the balance and if the torture subject is shown to be in possession of valid intelligence.

I realize this is an unlikely and somewhat contrived scenario, but I am not the one making blanket statements.  If a blanket statement is universally true, then there shouldn’t be any demonstrable exceptions.  But regardless, the assertion that torture doesn’t work seems outright stupid to me.  It might not work on some people, but it will absolutely work on others.  For example, threaten my wife or my children and watch me puke up whatever you might want to know.  Truthfully, it would take less effort than that.  The fact that spies are created by blackmail indicates that relatively low levels of coercion are effective on some people.  For a different spin, imagine Peter King being able to maintain his position that water boarding isn’t torture after spending five minutes under the bucket.

3) Here’s another good one, from someone like me yet not like me: “You can be for torture, but you can’t be for torture and then claim that it’s somehow inappropriately barbaric for ISIS to crucify the innocent.”  Seriously?  So, if the only people being water boarded are known associates of ISIS John the Beheader and the sole purpose of the water boarding is to locate and neutralized ISIS John, that is really no different than randomly rounding up innocent bystanders and lopping off their heads?  Brilliant.

This isn’t a debate.  It isn’t a discussion.  It’s an echo chamber.

For the record, I think torture is wrong in almost nearly every application (and that, if used in exceptional circumstances, the law, not people, should say when and if some specified means of coercion may be applied – we don’t do any of that).  The process of asking for forgiveness in hindsight rather than permission in advance is wrong.  I think allowing one exception makes it easier to allow the next and easier still to allow the one after that.  I think the whole thing is a hellish conundrum and would rather debate marginal tax rates.

But what I don’t think is that it is as straight up clear cut as your howling would have it.  Like I said, not the Dish’s finest hour.

(Photo: A man falls to his death from the World Trade Center after two planes hit the twin towers September 11, 2001. By Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images)

Imaginationland Revisited

1204061padilla2

One aspect in the Senate Report that hasn’t gotten enough attention is its exposure of the actual “threats” that, we have been told, were so great that the US had to leave the civilized world and commit war crimes to defend itself. This threat would therefore have to be greater than the Nazis or the Japanese, because in the Second World War, the US never violated its core values as it did after 9/11.

So what exactly were these threats, according to the CIA? I mentioned the “Second Wave” plot earlier today. It was never operational – and in fact, one version of it had been canceled in December 2001. The other version of it never got a stage where it could even clearly be called “disruptive.” Now let’s go to the alleged “Dirty Bomb” plot – which permitted the government to seize and brutally torture an American citizen, Jose Padilla, with no due process at all. The NYT summarizes the CIA’s own findings:

For all the publicity the Bush administration gave Mr. Padilla, the committee revealed that the government never took his dirty bomb plot seriously. It was based on a satirical Internet article titled “How to Make an H-Bomb,” and the plot involved swinging a bucket full of uranium over one’s head for 45 minutes. One internal C.I.A. email declared that such a plot would most likely kill Mr. Padilla but “would definitely not result in a nuclear explosive device.” Another called Mr. Padilla “a petty criminal” and described the dirty bomb plot as “lore.”

We tortured a petty criminal to the point of his complete psychological and physical breakdown … because of a satirical Internet article? Adam Taylor provides more:

According to the CIA report, Padilla and Mohammed later told investigators that the dirty bomb plot was a ruse to get out of Pakistan and avoid fighting in Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem to have been taken seriously by al-Qaeda at any point.

Then there is the case of the alleged attempt to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge:

KSM said that he had once tasked Mr. Faris with finding tools to loosen the bolts of American suspension bridges, but that Mr. Faris had been unable to do so. The F.B.I. had already been following Mr. Faris at that point, and when agents approached him, he talked voluntarily, the report showed. Separately, C.I.A. officials played down the likelihood of the bridge attack. “We risk making ourselves look silly if the best we can do is the Brooklyn Bridge,” one official wrote in 2005.

The plot to attack Canary Wharf and Heathrow in London? Another dud:

The plot was labeled “not imminent” because Al Qaeda had not identified pilots for the mission.

Do you see a pattern here? Everything we were told about the imminence of terrifying terror attacks after 9/11 was a huge exaggeration of the actual risks we faced. Which means that the torture program was set up to prevent a fantasy built on fear and panic – not on real threats to the homeland, let alone thousands of American lives. What you get from this report is a clear sense that on 9/11, thanks in part to incompetence at the CIA, the Jihadists got lucky. That’s all. It was not the beginning of a wave of terror; it did not reveal the existence of a massive clandestine plot to attack the US with WMDs or flocks of suicide bombers. We were fighting a menace that was a pathetic shadow of what we actually believed. And the people who are supposed to have an adult assessment of the risks, the men in charge of the US government, threw out any skepticism, trashed any contrary analysis, and went head-first into this astonishing campaign of torture, bombing and invasion in what history will surely judge was the most grotesque over-reaction to a threat in American history.

Douthat also concludes that the threats against America were exaggerated:

I’ve read enough to be confident that torture is often ineffective, but also to doubt the (frankly, convenient) certainty with which that ineffectiveness is touted. But my point here is that whether those tactics gained us something or not, the absence of a single successful domestic attack in the years when they were employed is still a strong indicator that the decision to use extraordinary measures, at least one of them intrinsically torturous and some of them likely to be abused in ways that made them torturous in fact, was based on an overestimation of the threat we faced — and an even stronger indicator is the absence of a successful domestic attack in all the long years (eleven or ten or nine, depending on how you count) since they’ve been discontinued. …

Yes, maybe our intelligence agencies are miraculously maintaining a perfect record, relying on intelligence cleaned exclusively in a narrow window, against a genuinely fearsome foe. But the preponderance of the evidence, plus everything we know about American government, suggests that this perfection has to reflect our enemy’s weakness-cum-incompetence more than any extraordinary effectiveness on our part, and that whatever tactics we allow ourselves to use against him, our foe is just not so fearsome after all.

But the key thing about a torture program is that, once you have crossed the Rubicon into barbarism, it’s psychologically impossible to believe it was to defuse … basically nothing. So what happens is that you have leading figures simply denying reality. This is a function of the denialism all too common among torturers of all kinds. Froomkin:

A fascinating footnote to the Padilla case involves the CIA’s refusal to admit its error, even years later. In 2008, the Intelligence Committee sent the CIA a question: “Why was this information [related to Padilla], which was not obtained through the use of EITs, included in the ‘Effectiveness Memo’?”

Committee investigators found that one CIA official drafted a response admitting that the agency had “simply inadvertently reported this wrong. Abu Zubaydah provided information on Jose Padilla while being interrogated by the FBI.”

But someone higher up on the foodchain had that draft killed. The truth was simply too much of a threat.

Too much of a threat to the cognitive dissonance required to defend the indefensible. Seven years ago, trying to make sense of what we then knew, I wrote:

It is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime – combined with panic and paranoia – created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination. And once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth. You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.

I’ve had occasion on this blog to note the many times I have been wrong about something. But on this, I was clearly right. And the CIA’s internal documents now prove it.

This is therefore an astonishing moment in American history. The rationale of an entire war has been debunked. There were no threats even close to existential, and none that were imminent. We invaded two countries, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, killed nearly 5,000 American servicemembers and maimed countless more, destroyed our moral standing in the world, and wrecked our alliances .. to prevent a few unrealised, often-amateur Jihadist plots. I struggle to think of any fuck-up in American history that rivals this. And none on this scale in which no one is held accountable.

(Photo: a rare glimpse of the total sensory deprivation inflicted on an American citizen Jose Padilla, a man tortured until his body and soul were broken because of a satirical Internet article.)

What Did Bush Know And When Did He Know It?

For me, the question remains a fascinating one. The revelation that the first briefing that Bush got on waterboarding was in 2006 is a staggering finding. His own book contradicts this. But the CIA has no records of briefings other than that. And their internal response to his 2006 speech showed how distant they were. When he indicated that no inhumane practices were being used, the CIA wondered if their program had been suspended without their knowledge!

But Fred Kaplan doesn’t buy the claim that Bush didn’t know what was going on:

[L]et’s take a close look at the committee’s claim that Bush wasn’t briefed on the program until it had nearly run its course: “According to CIA records,” the report states, “no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006.”

I’ve italicized two words in this passage, for emphasis. The second word is key: Bush wasn’t briefed on the “specific” techniques till 2006. Under the well-known rules of plausible deniability, he would not have wanted to know too much about these specifics. As indicated in the station chief’s presentation, it’s not that the CIA didn’t tell the president certain details; it’s that the president didn’t want the CIA to tell him.

I think that’s easily the best explanation. Bush was briefed the way we all were about “enhanced interrogation” in language designed to obscure the reality. “Long-time-standing,” for example, sounds relatively mild. It does not fully convey the fact that prisoners with broken legs and feet were put in stress positions – the kind of torture you’d expect from ISIS. But there was surely also a desire not to know, not to have direct and explicit knowledge of what was actually being done, because of the immense gravity of the crimes. Who protected him? Almost certainly Alberto Gonzales. Maybe Condi.

Here’s my best guess after puzzling about this for a decade. Bush made the fateful decision to waive core Geneva protections from prisoners suspected of terrorism early on. That was his signal. He told everyone in the CIA (and beyond) in a moment of extreme emotion that you could do anything to these prisoners you wanted. In that sense, Bush is completely and personally responsible for every act of torture on his watch. He is as responsible as the men who decided to waterboard a prisoner until hardened operatives choked up and walked away.

But he then disappears in the CIA records – and Obama refused to give the Senate Committee the White House records that could have cleared it up (another instance of Obama covering up evidence of war crimes). Cheney presumably handles it all – with Addington doing clean-up – giving Bush the reassurances that a) the torture was giving up vital information saving lives (a lie) and b) that it was all legal (only by making an ass of the law in memos that were subsequently rebuked and rescinded). I suspect that this was all Bush decided he wanted to know: it works and it’s legal. And the famously incurious president didn’t want to know any more. I remember in 2005 asking a very senior administration official if we were torturing prisoners. The carefully parsed response, after looking down and away from me: “The president doesn’t believe we’re torturing people.” They were crafting a way to insulate him from war crimes done in his name.

Serwer likewise finds it “hard to believe that the Bush administration couldn’t have had any clue about what was really going on at the CIA”:

Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed an order allowing the CIA to detain and interrogate terror suspects, and in February 2002, he signed “a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention,” according to a 2008 Senate Armed Services’ Committee investigation.

So: Mere months after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was already rewriting the law to make it easy to torture detainees in U.S. custody. You don’t start declaring exceptions to the Geneva Convention if all you’re planning to do is play a competitive game of spades.

Hayden insists that the president was well aware of what was going on:

The president personally approved the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah [in 2002]. It’s in his book! What happened here is that the White House refused to give them [the Senate Intelligence Committee] White House documents based upon the separation of powers and executive privilege.

The question is whether this is actually true or whether Bush decided that, in his book, he had a duty to provide cover for the people who worked for him. I suspect the latter. But the only way to know is to get Obama to release the White House records. Tim Weiner finds a metaphor that sums it up:

The CIA is not “a rogue elephant,” in the deathless phrase of Senator Frank Church, who ran the pioneering congressional investigation of the agency four decades ago. If the beast tramples people, it’s the mahout, the elephant driver, who is to blame. There was clearly one person driving this program, whether he knew what the elephant was doing in his name or not.

The mahout in the Senate report is the president of the United States.

And he stands accused of war crimes in front of the whole world.