harikari.com

Everybody who doesn’t know already wants to know if waterboarding is torture.  They simply aren’t satisfied with what our own courts have decided or what Jesse Ventura said on the Larry King show not long ago:

Larry King: You were a Navy S.E.A.L.

Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know…It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Nope.  They have to figure it out for themselves.

Today was Mancow’s turn.  He agreed to subject himself to waterboarding thinking he could tell all his listeners that it’s really no big deal.  Some water on the face… a little up the nose… no big deal.  Well, here’s how it went down:

Listeners had the chance to decide whether Mancow himself or his co-host, Chicago radio personality Pat Cassidy, would undergo the interrogation method during the broadcast.  The voters ultimately decided Mancow would be the one donning the soaked towel and shackles, and at about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio that was compared to a “dungeon” by Cassidy.

“The average person can take this for 14 seconds,” Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, “  He’s going to wiggle, he’s going to scream, he’s going to wish he never did this.”
 
With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand,  Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.  
 
Turns out the stunt wasn’t so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop.  He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.
 
“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child.  “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.“

Okay then… another convert.  WATERBOARDING IS TORTURE! 

Oh but they say it’s not if it’s not for very long.  How long is that?  Six or seven seconds and Mancow saw the light.  Watch the video on The Huffington Post.

Next up?  I nominate Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney (although he is not human, so it would not affect him like it did Mancow), Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, and Stephen Bradbury.  Line them up in their orange jumpsuits.  There’s plenty of water to go around and there are Marine seargents ready and waiting to torture the assholes that authorized it.

GQ Magazine has posted about a dozen cover sheets for Department of Defense briefings that were published during the Iraq War.  The briefings depict U.S. soldiers as Christian crusaders fighting a Holy War against Muslims. 

The A.P. reports:

For a period in 2003, at least, the daily reports prepared for President George W. Bush carried quotes from the books of Psalms, and Ephesians and Peter. At the time, the reports focused largely on the war in Iraq.

The Bible quotes apparently aimed to support Bush at a time when soldiers’ deaths in Iraq were on the rise, according to the June issue of GQ magazine. But they offended at least one Muslim analyst at the Pentagon and worried other employees that the passages were inappropriate.

This is exactly the kind of response that bin Laden hoped to get from the U.S. so that he could claim we are fighting a Holy War against Muslims.  And he got it…  six years later.  He’s most likely seen these by now and is no doubt preparing a response and a call to arms for his Muslim crusaders.  “Bring ‘em On!”

Rumsfeld and his staff had to have known that this stuff would eventually see the light of day.  It always does, so it’s really amazing and scary that top officials in our government can be so audaciously rigtheous and stupid.

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.

You gotta love the French. Not only to they make the best damn bubbly wine in the world, they also know a war criminal when they see one.

Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. secretary of defense, is facing criminal charges in France for ordering the torture of prisoners in Iraq and at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Last week, some of the world’s leading human rights law groups filed a complaint before a French court charging Rumsfeld with authorizing and ordering torture.

The complaint was registered at the office of the prosecutor of the Court of First Instance in Paris when Rumsfeld was in the city for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine.

“We will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in torture are brought to justice,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit human rights law firm in the United States.

“We will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in torture are brought to justice,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit human rights law firm in the United States.

…

Ratner and his colleagues in France’s legal community contend that Rumsfeld and other top U.S. officials are subject to criminal trial because there is sufficient evidence to prove that they had authorized the torture of prisoners held on suspicion of involvement in terrorist acts.

“France is under the obligation to investigate and prosecute Rumsfeld,” said FIDH president Souhayr Belhassen. “It has no choice but to open an investigation.”

Okay, so it was an American in France that registered the complaint, but the French government agreed to investigate.  That’s a whole lot more than what we’re getting from our government.

Well maybe not.  Maybe the French are two busy with their wine and cheese to seek justice.  This update from the Center for Constitutional Rights website:

Despite the fact that the plaintiffs’ attorney in Paris personally informed the Prosecutor in charge of the case a day in advance of Rumsfeld’s presence in Paris on Friday morning, no action was taken by the Prosecutor to serve Rumsfeld with a witness warrant or to prevent him from leaving the territory.

Now what do we do about Rumsfeld?

There are several problems with the last gasp proposal of military historian Frederick Kagan, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq.  The biggest, however, is that it comes three and a half years too late.  It cannot succeed.

Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank.  His brother, Robert Kagan, is one of those neo-conservatives who loudly advocated and then applauded the invasion of Iraq.  He and other neo-cons such as William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, David Brooks of The New York Times, joined inexplicably by Senator John McCain, refuse to acknowledge that the removal of Saddam Hussein through invasion has resulted in perhaps the worst foreign policy debacle in American history.  They would have us believe that there was nothing wrong with the idea itself; no, it was the incompetent execution by Donald Rumsfeld that has mired us in this mess.  An insufficient number of troops combined with an incomprehensible failure to plan for the invasion’s aftermath – that is why we have failed.

With those points, of course, it’s impossible to argue.  Their mistake is in believing that by belatedly increasing troop levels now we can overcome the consequences of those colossal blunders. 

The plan calls for a “surge” of up to 50,000 more soldiers and marines, thereby raising the ground force level to between 175,000 and 190,000.  The extra troops would be deployed primarily in Baghdad, to quell sectarian violence and pacify the city’s neighbourhoods block by block, and in Anbar province to once and for all defeat the Sunni insurgency there.   The provision of security for the people would be followed by infrastructure repair and economic development. The premise is that no political solution in Iraq is possible until the security situation is under some semblance of control and people see the reality of improvement in their day-to-day lives.  The premise is fine; the timing is way off. 

This is nothing more than the counterinsurgency strategy that the United States forces should have planned, prepared for and implemented from day one of the occupation.  It should have been combined with seizure and control of all Iraqi army ammunition and arms depots; the imposition immediately of law and order on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere; a plan for keeping as many Iraqis employed as possible; and the force that accomplished this should have been sufficient in size to suppress any attempt to organize resistance – say, several hundred thousand troops to use the estimate of then Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki.  All of this should have been done; none of it was.

With the toothpaste already out of the tube, Kagan, former Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army Jack Keane and the neo-cons seek to mount an effort to stuff it back in again.  And with a force that is probably half what was needed even at the beginning of this folly of an invasion and occupation.

The icing on the cake is that the man who will be in charge in Iraq soon will be Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno who commanded the 4^th Infantry Division during the initial phase of operations in Iraq.  Anyone who has read the outstanding book Fiasco by Thomas Ricks, defence correspondent for the Washington Post, will recognize Odierno’s unit as having done more to stoke than extinguish the nascent flames of the insurgency by rounding up thousands of young Iraqi men and shipping them off, unscreened, to Abu Ghraib prison.  His heavy-handed use of military force at a time when winning the trust and support of the population was of paramount importance was the antithesis of sound counter-insurgency warfare.  And this is the guy who will be in charge and who the army hopes will turn things around?  Good luck with that.

The sectarian militias, the Sunni insurgents and the al-Qaida terrorists are too well established, too well armed and financed, and have proved themselves to be far too adaptable to enable us to secure the country with a surge of just 50,000 troops for a year or two.  In fact, the plan implicitly requires a commitment of troops at this higher level for considerably more than two years, not to mention of financial resources that are already being expended at the rate of $2 billion a week, with little assurance of ultimate success.

This is folly writ large.  Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and the neo-cons have set our country up for a humiliating defeat but stubbornly refuse to adopt a sane strategy that will cut our losses in Iraq, restore our armed forces to their former state of efficiency and effectiveness, and reinforce our military commitment to Afghanistan to confront and defeat our true enemies – the Taliban and al-Qaida.

On at least one occasion, the White House mouthpiece, Tony Snow, ridiculed Democrats and other opponents of the Iraq mess as defeatists and asked how it would have been if Americans at home had clamoured for an end to World War II in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge.  The analogy was beyond fatuous but, since he mentioned it, the 1944 Ardennes offensive is a reminder of the desperate lengths to which leaders will go to avoid having to face the reality of defeat. The offensive was Hitler’s desperate last ditch effort, against the advice of his senior generals it should be noted, to turn the tables on the Allies as they closed in on Germany from the west and east by employing his panzer reserve against the American forces spread thinly in the Ardennes forest – the scene of a German triumph against a different opponent in 1940.  The later battle ended in a crushing defeat for the Wehrmacht and the loss of 100,000 men and perhaps a 1000 tanks; arguably, it hastened Germany’s defeat in the war.

The stakes for America are not quite that high as Bush contemplates his own desperate gamble in Iraq, against the better judgement of most of his senior generals, the Congress and the majority of the American people. 

Still, the expenditure of lives limbs and resources that a long-term continuation of the war at an even higher level of intensity will entail, promises to be awful enough.

And stuff has kept happening for 3-1/2 years now, and all that stuff adds up to a civil war.  Rumsfeld said it would never happen.  His plan was to go into Iraq, topple Saddam’s regime, establish an order that would allow the people of Iraq to govern themselves, and then the U.S. would leave. 

Well…  Like General Shinseki said in the months leading up to the war, several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq and keep the peace.  Rumsfeld laughed it off.

Ha ha ha…

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld may be leaving under a cloud of criticism over his handling of the Iraq war, but his invasion plan — emphasizing speed over massive troop numbers — has consistently been held up as a resounding success.

Yet with Iraq near chaos 3 1/2 years later, a key Army manual now is being rewritten in a way that rejects the Rumsfeld doctrine and counsels against using it again.

The draft version of the Army’s Full Spectrum Operations field manual argues that in addition to defeating the enemy, military units must focus on providing security for the population — even during major combat.

“The big idea here is that stability tasks have to be a consideration at every level and every operation,” said Clinton J. Ancker III, head of the Army’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate and an author of the guide.

Officers use the field manual, the authoritative guidebook on how to conduct ground operations, to develop tactics for military endeavors including war, counterinsurgency and peacekeeping. When completed, the manual will be taught to officers at all levels.

Before the war, Rumsfeld prodded Gen. Tommy Franks and other officers to design an invasion plan to fit his beliefs about how modern militaries should fight. When Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed and Baghdad seemed to fall in just 21 days, Rumsfeld and his emphasis on speed over mass got the credit.

But after the initial military success, the Pentagon was criticized for not doing enough to plan for postwar stability. And Rumsfeld drew objections for his dismissive attitude toward the disorder and looting in Iraq, particularly when he said, just days after the fall of Baghdad, that “stuff happens” in democracies.

The old manual emphasized that stability operations usually follow combat. The draft version of the 2007 ground operations manual instructs commanders that they cannot wait for offensive operations to end before providing security and services for the population, and stresses a combination of offense, defense and stability operations.

Bush’s blind loyalty to his advisors prevented him from dumping Rumsfeld two years ago when it was pretty clear that Rumsfeld’s strategy failed to achieve Bush’s goal of establishing a peaceful, democratic government.  

Now it’s too late.