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Marc Thiessen is out doing talk shows to promote his book, Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.  It’s a book about how if our country stops torturing its war prisoners, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!

Thiessen, who when asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour if he’d submit himself to waterboarding, said:    ”No because it’s terribly unpleasant and I’m not a terrorist.  heh heh heh…”  (link)

Yes… “terribly unpleasant.”  More like “brutally excruciating” according to a review of recently released internal CIA documents describing the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques.  Read all about it in the “Waterboarding for Dummies” article by Mark Benjamin over on Salon.com.

Thiessen will appear on The Daily Show tonight.

Here’s an excerpt from a review of his most un-American book written by a former senior military Interrogator:

First, Thiessen promulgates a theory that Islamic extremists are uniquely deserving of torture because they are doctrinally obligated to resist cooperating, after which they may disclose information. Of course this isn’t unique to Islamic extremists.  The U.S. military’s own Code of Conduct and the resistance training given American soldiers impose the exact same requirements. Article V, pertaining to interrogations states:  I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.

…

Thiessen also argues that we will never know what other information we would have gotten out of KSM had we not used torture and abuse. … Serious interrogators have little doubt that we would have gotten better information from KSM, and sooner, had the interrogations been conducted by professional interrogators using noncoercive techniques.

…

Thiessen never bothers to cite military doctrine in his research.  Had he read the Army Field Manual’s instructions, he would have to answer for the fact that it cautions: “Revelation of use of torture by US personnel will bring discredit upon the US and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort.  It may also place US and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors.” Torture makes Americans less safe, not more so.

…

Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare.  He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit information without resorting to medieval abuses. The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security.  It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty.  It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or “detained persons”).  America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights.  Yet, in Courting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights).  Thiessen’s ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.

I am looking forward to watching Jon Stewart pick this guy apart.

Update:  Here’s Jon Stewart’s interview of Thiessen on The Daily Show. 

If you thought Thiessen was a total dick before seeing this, well you’ll think even worse of him after watcthing it.  He truly is about as un-American as one can get.  As for Jon, he gets hot in this interview and gets accused by Thiessen of not letting him say his piece.  Note to Thiessen:  You weren’t invited on the show to give a speech.  It’s SUPPOSED to be a discussion.  And furthermore, when you place yourself in front of someone who truly believes in freedom and the rule of law, and you go off on how Liz Cheney is right to call those in the Justice Dept that represented Guantanamo detainees “the Al Qaeda 7” and question their loyalty, AND  you come on to promote your book that defends the military’s use of torture, you have to expect to be involved in a heated conversation like this.  So be a man and deal with it.

Well it’s easy enough to pull the trigger on a sniper rifle, drop a bomb from an airplane, or even launch artillery into a house full of Iraqi insurgents, but it’s not so easy to live with what you see when you enter the house to survey the results and find out you’ve made a terrible mistake.  So writes Army lieutenant Shannon Meehan for The New York Times:

I thought we had struck enemy fighters, but I was wrong. A father, mother and their children had been huddled inside.

The feelings of disbelief that initially filled me quickly transformed into feelings of rage and self-loathing.  The following weeks, months and years would prove that my life was forever changed.

In fact, it’s been nearly three years, and I still cannot remove from my mind the image of that family gathered together in the final moments of their lives.  I can’t shake it.  It simply lingers.

While reading this column today, I was thinking about the conversation I had with my ten-year-old son during a battle scene in The Sand Pebbles.  The movie stars  Steve McQueen who plays Jake Holman, a Navy engineer assigned to a gunboat cruising China’s Yangtze River in 1926 as the Nationalist revolution led by Chiang Kai-shek  breaks out.  The battle scene takes place near the end of the film when the Navy boat must get past a blockade of junks set up by the Chinese revolutionaries.  After much shooting and hand-to-hand combat to clear the center junk, Holman uses an axe to the cut the thick ropes that string the boats together.  While he’s chopping at the ropes, a Chinese fighter sneaks up on him with a machete and raises it for the killing blow.  Holman catches a glimpse of  him approaching and moves just in time for the machete weilder to miss his mark.  The blade hits Holman’s helmet and glances away from him.  He then swings his axe head right into the gut of the Chinese man who doubles over and dies.  

Holman stands there with his axe hanging by his side staring at the dying man while his boat, just a few yards behind him, begins to advance past the blockade.  At that point, my son said, “What’s he doing?  Why is he just standing there?”  All I could say was something like, “Well, it’s not easy to kill a man.  It’s a terrible thing to take another man’s life.  That’s what he’s feeling, and it doesn’t feel good to him.”  As I’m saying this, Holman shake his head, shoulders his axe, and gets on board the gun boat.

Meehan wrote about that feeling in his column. 

Killing enemy combatants comes with its own emotional costs.  On the surface, we feel as soldiers that killing the enemy should not affect us — it is our job, after all.  But it is still killing, and on a subconscious level, it changes you.  You’ve killed.  You’ve taken life. What I found, though, is that you feel the shock and weight of it only when you kill an enemy for the first time, when you move from zero to one.  Once you’ve crossed that line, there is little difference in killing 10 or 20 or 30 more after that.

…The deaths that I caused also killed any regard I had for my own life.  I felt that I did not deserve something that I had taken from them. I fell into a downward spiral, doubting if I even deserved to be alive.  The value, or regard, I once had for my own life dissipated.

My son plays a series of computer war games that are mostly based on historical events.  In these games, he builds villages and farms to supply them with food and materials, and he must also build armies to protect them from enemies that want to take what he’s built.  Battles ensue, and one side or the other ultimately wins.  The games do teach a bit of history, but they doesn’t delve into the morality of war and allow for contemplation about the victims.

I’ll share this piece with him and hope that it makes him think a little about what might be going on in the minds of the tiny little warriors on his computer screen.

Here’s another section of Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech that reveals a little something about Obama’s thoughts on another war he inherited.

To begin with, I believe that all nations – strong and weak alike – must adhere to standards that govern the use of force.  I – like any head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.  Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates – and weakens – those who don’t.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.  Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait – a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves.  For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention – no matter how justified.

This becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.  More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.

Notice how he singles out the war to take back Kuwait, but makes no mention of the Iraq War that’s been going on since 2003.  That war is not one that adheres to “standards that govern the use of force.”  It was a war of choice (a very poor choice), not a war of necessity.

I searched the entire text of the speech and the word “Iraq” was never mentioned.  I guess it’s kind of like “Voldemort” to him.  If only we could make it go away for real with such ease.

Oh, and another phrase I did not find is “War on Terror.”  This guy is way different than the fool that started these wars he has to finish.  I was not to thrilled about his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, but if he abides by the moral code he outlined in his speech today and he does not waiver in his role as the leader of the free world, we might actually not just win the battle, but also the war of ideas that is key to defeating the religious fanatics that seek to undermine centuries of human progress and freedom.

This is disappointing:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.

Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

But President Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress.

The Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday night that “the administration would rely on authority already provided by Congress” under the use of force resolution. “The administration is not currently seeking additional authorization,” the statement said.

The department pointed out that courts would continue to review the cases of those held without charges through habeas corpus hearings. The Washington Post first reported the decision.

…

Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study about closing Guantánamo, said forgoing legislation was “overall a good step” because it prevented Congress from making things worse. “We don’t know if it closes the door definitively on efforts to institutionalize detention without charge,” she added, “since the White House might seek to do this by itself.”

That’s two steps back maybe one step forward.

A fear-mongering, power-grabbing president created the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without explicit congressional backing, so an emboldened, pragmatic president ought to be able to undo it in the same way.  It looks like Obama has backed away from being that president.

As far as the ridiculous politically charged fears of holding terrorists on American soil – it’s completely irrational.  We have hundreds, maybe even thousands of very despicable American people incarcerated in maximum security prisons on our soil already.  Are you scared?  I’m not, and I wouldn’t be scared if our government tried and convicted some despicable Middle Eastern people and held them in maximum security prisons on our soil.

Obama is a constitutional lawyer.  He knows the right thing to do, and he spoke about it last May.

There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.

… It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.

… In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Obama should just forget about the fickle congress and do what he said back in May:  Close Guantanamo, move the remaining prisoners to maximum security prisons on American soil, try those we can prove committed crimes, and develop a system consistent with our constitution and values that deals with those who are truly at war with us.

UPDATE:  A few hours after posting this, I read this column on Salon.com by Glenn Greewald, who is very thorough as always.  He is glad that Congress has been taken out of the loop.

…nothing good — and plenty of bad — could come from having Congress write a new detention law.  As bad as the Obama administration is on detention issues, the Congress is far worse.  Any time the words “Terrorism” or “Al Qaeda” are uttered, they leap to the most extreme and authoritarian measures.  Congress is intended to be a check on presidential powers, but each time Terrorism is the issue, the ironic opposite occurs:  when the Obama administration and Congress are at odds, it is Congress demanding greater powers of executive detention (as happened when Congress blocked Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.).

In the 30 years I’ve lived in this country, I have never witnessed a more shameful and cowardly performance than that of Congress denying the Obama administration funds to move Guantanamo detainees to high security prisons  in the United States.

It’s not like the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) concept is alien to me; it’s just that I never thought I would see such irrational fear and illogic displayed to the world in a way that was so utterly brainless, gutless and weak-kneed.

America’s prisons house serial killers, rapists, sociopaths and psychopaths and other evil doers to compare with any country in the world. Yet our representatives and senators, not to mention their constituents, are scared shitless at the thought of having some of the prisoners at Guantanamo incarcerated even in US military prisons. It’s hard to know whether their fear is of the detainees escaping en masse to wreak havoc in their communities or the thought that al-Qaida might launch an invasion of, say, Fort Leavenworth to free them.

The city council of Hardin, Montana, hoping to boost a sagging economy, has stepped up to the plate by offering to house some of the detainees in a newly built prison that the state now says it no longer needs. “Over my dead health-care plan” says Senator Max Baucus (or words to that effect anyway), ever the study in political courage.

And then there’s the issue of where to put those detainees who have been determined not to be enemy combatants. These are the people whom we scooped up in the Bush administration’s panic-ridden response to 9/11, held for several years in conditions that most of us don’t want to know about, only to find that they were no threat to us after all. Many of them can’t go home because they would likely be imprisoned, tortured and killed by their own governments.

We had an opportunity to release one such group, Muslim Chinese called Uighurs, into the US. These have no axe to grind against the US but oppose the Chinese government’s policies towards the Muslim population. There are Uighurs in the US already, including a community in the Washington DC area. Had we been willing to bring them to the US we might have had more luck convincing European governments to take other detainees.

But no, jittery politicians and a frightened electorate don’t want to hear about it.  The gutsier souls of Bermuda and Palau have put us to shame and agreed to take in some of the Uighurs.

So my question is this: how is it that a country capable of fielding such valiant and dedicated men and women in its armed forces who serve their country so bravely, can be otherwise so bereft of courage?

Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, May 10, 2009:

The group that’s left, the 245 or so, these are the worst of the worst. This is the hard core. You’d have a recidivism rate out of this group of maybe 50 or 60 percent. They want to get out because they want to kill more Americans. And you’re just going to find it very difficult to send them any place. Now, as I say, there has been some talk on the part of the administration about putting them in the United States.

So are they really the “worst of the worst?”

Hardly…

ST. GEORGE, Bermuda — Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

…

The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled, apparently unarmed, when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here, like 13 other Uighurs still at Guantánamo but expected to depart soon to other destinations, had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism.

But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate. On Sunday, these four expressed a surprising lack of bitterness toward the United States, saying — as they had during interrogations years ago in Guantánamo — that they had never been anti-American and just wanted to get on with their lives.

…

From the men’s own statements, it is clear that their presence in Afghanistan was linked to their animosity toward China. Whatever they might have wished in 2001, there is no evidence they sought to become part of a global jihad.

Now, over Chinese objections, the men are being released to third countries.

Around a dozen of the Uighurs will be going to Palau, an island nation of about 20,000 people just east of The Phillipines.  A New Zealand paper reports:

Palau is one of a handful of countries that does not recognise China and maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

President Johnson Toribiong said Palau was accepting the detainees “as a humanitarian gesture” intended to help them restart their lives.

And today’s Los Angeles Times quotes President Toribiong, a former defense attorney who earned his law degree at the University of Washington:

“These people are not monsters,” said Toribiong, who, with graying hair and glasses, looks pensive, even professorial. “They should be presumed innocent because no one has proven them guilty.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone with basic knowledge of Western laws and the concept of habeus corpus, but it sounds crazy to people like Dick Cheney who think the Executive Office has the power to detain and torture suspects indefinitely without ever even charging or convicting them of crimes.

Just last week Cheney said the only other option besides imprisoning “combatants” at Guantánamo was ”to kill them, and we don’t operate that way.”

Worst of the worst?  That would be Dick Cheney and his gang.

UPDATE:  or more like “backdate”  on this story…  N.J. Barnes wrote about the plight of the imprisoned Uighurs way back in 2007.  This post is about some of them being released to Albania.

From The New York Times:

President Obama is seeking to block the release of photographs depicting American military personnel abusing captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, an administration official said Wednesday.

The president’s decision marks a sharp reversal from a decision made last month by the Pentagon, which reached a deal with the American Civil Liberties Union to release photographs showing incidents at Abu Ghraib and a half-dozen other prisons.

…

“The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces,” the official said, “and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said of the nation’s top military generals: “Odierno and McKiernan and Petraeus have all voiced real concern about this. Particularly in Afghanistan, this is the last thing they need.”

…

The photographs were set to be released on May 28. But as that date approached, a growing sense of unease among military officials was expressed to the White House.
Many also recalled the Abu Ghraib photographs, showing prisoners naked or in degrading positions, sometimes with Americans posing smugly nearby, caused an uproar in the Arab world and concerns within the military that the actions of a relatively few service members had tainted the entire forces.

In this more recent case, the A.C.L.U. argued that disclosing the pictures was “critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse,” said Amrit Singh, who argued the case on behalf of the group before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.

The world already has easy access to some very disturbing torture photos.  Are the new ones sought by the ACLU really so much worse than these that they would put our soldiers at more risk than they already are? 

I agree with the ACLU that the photos should be released.  If these photos confirm that torture took place in many places besides Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, they would support the allegations that prisoner abuse and torture was not carried out by just “a relatively few service members,” but that it was directed by high ranking officials in the Bush Administration. 

We need to see what, where, and when the abuses occurred so that we can investigate and find out who was ultimately responsible for the violations.  They need to be held accountable for their crimes. 

Someday we will see the photos, so we might as well see them now.  The sooner we get through this nasty episode in our history, the sooner we can atone for it and put it behind us.

Uh oh… Here I go thinking about torture again.  Yes its a topic that’s been on my mind for weeks, months, years since we first learned that America tortured its prisoners.  Try as the media might to distract me this week with fears of a swine flu pandemic, it’s torture that that has my undivided attention. 

This week started off a comic from This Modern World: (click to read the whole thing.)

That comic was followed by a spirited debate between Jon Stewart and Cliff May, President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that pits a defender of Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques against a humanitarian that is really worth watching, so watch all three parts.

The Daily Show debate was followed by a contemplative article by Pauline W. Chen, M.D., a surgeon who says people become “habituated” to torture just like surgeons get habituated to cutting into their patients.  It’s not natural.  It’s not comfortable, but if you do it enough times, you can get used to it.  She writes:

After years of training, cutting began to feel second nature to me, the scalpel merely an extension of my fingers. So when a friend earlier this week told me that she could never imagine cutting into another person and wondered how young doctors learn to do so, I had to stop and think before I could respond to her.

“Habituation,” I finally said. “You get used it.”

That response, and the idea of becoming habituated, has been haunting me ever since. Is it possible for all of us to become habituated to the horrific?

And finally there was Obama responding to a question during his 100 days news conference about whether he believed the Bush Administration sanctioned torture:

What I’ve said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values.  I do believe that it is torture.  I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic.  And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

And — and so I strongly believed that the steps that we’ve taken to prevent these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques will make us stronger over the long term and make us safer over the long term because it will put us in a — in a position where we can still get information.

In some cases, it may be harder, but part of what makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.

…

So this is a decision that I’m very comfortable with. And I think the American people over time will recognize that it is better for us to stick to who we are, even when we’re taking on an unscrupulous enemy.

Obama gets it.

Torture is WRONG!  We should not do it.  We’re better than that. 

Which brings me to this:  When I look at the meter that tracks how many people read this blog and how they get here, I often see that they land on these torture posts by searching for “is torture immoral” and “torture morality” and “why is torture immoral.”  You get the idea.  My first instinct is to follow the search engine to other sites they may have visited, but then I stop and think:  Why do you need some website to give you an answer to that question? 

Slamming people’s heads into a wall, beating them, subjecting them to cold temperatures, keeping them awake for ten days, almost drowning them, stacking them naked into human pyramids.  Those are all terrible things to do to people that cause great physical and/or mental suffering.

What really gets me is how so many Republicans, the party of the Religious Right who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, try and justify these acts.  Like Jesus would shame men by making them stand naked with women’s underwear on their heads in awkward positions for hours.  Like Jesus would hook wires to a man’s testicles, make him stand hooded and caped on a box for hours, and tell him he wold be electrocuted if he fell.   Really?  They can justify that kind of treatment?   It’s a wonder their heads don’t explode.

So if you landed here because you searched for “is torture immoral,” I will make it simple for you.  YES!  Torture is immoral.  All you have to do is think about it.  And as many religions, including Christianity, teach us; put yourself in the prisoner’s position.  Think about someone torturing you.  Think about fearing for your life as you are nearly drowned.  Think about how it would feel to be deprived of sleep for ten days.  Think about sitting naked on a concrete floor for a day or two.  Can you trick yourself into thinking that you can withstand that kind of treatment so it’s not torture?  Think again.

There are other more humane ways to get information from people that are proven to be more effective and more reliable.  There are ways to befriend captives and make them think it’s in their best interest to divulge information. 

For example, if anyone wanted me to confess to something, all they would have to do is sit down in a bar with me and buy me several shots of single-barrel bourbon - I’d end up telling them everything!   I’d tell so much they wouldn’t even feel bad about giving me megadoses of Advil so I don’t suffer through the whisky hangover the next day.

Okay, I think I’ve gotten a lot off my mind with this one.  I’ll try and find a new topic now.

If you want to read more, read this column by Serge Schmemann that ends with a quote:

“Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.”  – Aharon Barak, President of the Israeli Supreme Court

On April 28, 2004 we first saw this photograph taken by a member of the U.S. Military stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq.

Thank you George W. Bush.
Thank you Dick Cheney.
Thank you Donald Rumsfeld.
Thank you Jay Bybee.
Thank you John Yoo.
Thank you Stephen Bradbury.

Thank you.  Thank you all for this sensational icon of American insolence.

Torture has been the lead story in the papers and the most talked about subject in the opinion columns for over a week now.  What we’ve learned from all the reports is that the use of torture by our military men and CIA operatives was a policy conceived and approved by high ranking government officials and passed down through the ranks to the “bad apples.”

Pierre Tristam quotes a passage from the book The Dark Side in his column about why and how the Bush Administration instituted its policy of torture:

“The Bush administration invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. President (George W.) Bush, Vice President (Dick) Cheney and a small handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals’ liberties that had been prohibited since the country’s founding.”

The New York Times reported on a Senate investigation’s findings that the policy was based on an old military program called “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” (SERE ) “to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans,” and that they rushed in to implementing the SERE program as their own interrogation program without doing any research:

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce. 

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Another NYT article reports that:

“The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots,” Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. “This report, in great detail, shows a paper trail going from that authorization” by Mr. Rumsfeld “to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq,” Mr. Levin said.

And in yet another article about whether the use of torture garnered any useful information, a memo from Admiral Dennis Blair was quoted:

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

And in a NYT opinion piece this week, former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan confirmed what Blair said:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions – all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

…

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security. 

McClatchy News reported on how Cheney and Rumsfeld rushed into using torture in their efforts to tie al Qaeda to Iraq so that they could justify their invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly – Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 – according to a newly released Justice Department document.

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

…

Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

So there you have it.  The United States government hastily instituted a policy of torturing prisoners, tortured its prisoners, extradited its prisoners for torture in foreign countries, and lied about it all along the way.

So should we do something about it or should we just put it behind us and move ahead as Obama suggests?  (Check out Mr. Fish’s comic about Obama’s stance.)

Paul Krugman answers the question in today’s column:

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

…

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.