harikari.com

The New York Daily News reported last week that former President George W. Bush said:

Sure, we waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former President George W. Bush reportedly said on Tuesday.

And he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush and his military advisors adhered to the morally misguided “intelligence at any cost” school of thinking.  Bush was too stubborn and dumb to realize that the costs of obtaining intelligence through torture was too high. 

There’s a very well researched article in Military Review by Major Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, that examines the Bush way and the more dominant American tradition of the “shining city on the hill” way. 

The article includes a summary of email exchanges between military officers who approved of torture and those who opposed it.  The ethical side was represented by Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote:

We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought—that is part of the very nature of war.  We also inflict casualties, generally many more than we take.  That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.   We have NEVER considered our enemies justified in doing such things to us.  Casualties are part of war—if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war.  Period.  BOTTOM LINE: We are American Soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.

Pryer writes that  those who say that the use of torture saved lives (as Bush stated last week) are wrong:

Tragically, interrogators at Abu Ghraib, in the 3ACR, and at FOB Iron Horse had HUMINT leaders who felt morally justified in sanctioning enhanced interrogation techniques, and this belief led their interrogators to use techniques that slipped into truly serious abuse at Abu Ghraib and in the 3ACR.  Furthermore, due to personalities unique to Abu Ghraib, abuse descended further still into the sadistic, sexualized violence that shamed our Nation and nearly led to our defeat in Iraq.  In retrospect, it is ironic that, while these leaders had meant to save lives via enhanced interrogation techniques, their actions helped to destabilize Iraq.  This destabilization, in turn, created thousands more casualties than these leaders could ever have prevented through tactical methods.

Andrew Sullivan was on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday, and he observed that most former presidents advocate human rights, but this one advocates torture, proving he is truly a monster.

Malcom Nance recently published the book, An End to al-Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden’s Jihad and Restoring America’s Honor.  He is a combat veteran and counter terrorism expert with twenty-eight years of experience.  Scott Horton of Harper’s asked him six questions, and I recommend you read the whole article, but I especially liked the fifth Q&A:

5.  …He insists that it absolutely is not torture, and he insists that it’s different from the technique used by the Khmer Rouge.  Does Thiessen know what he’s talking about?

I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the subject.  Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding.

…

Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in Cambodia.  Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training program.  Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies.

…

We have prosecuted and convicted men for using these techniques in the past, and we were right to do so.

This suggests to me that, while he may cite Thomas Aquinas, Thiessen has no sense of honor and no moral compass.  I give him credit for his loyalty to the Cheneys, but he’s blind to their errors in judgment.

…

Thiessen and his boss want us to embrace the tactics we used in that program–taken from the Russians, the Communist Chinese, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge–as our own.  He claims that these techniques are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact.  Really? I challenge him to put up or shut up.  I offer to put him through just one hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the Bush Administration’s OLC memos–including the CIA-approved variant of waterboarding.  If at the end he still believes this is not torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint.  But not until then. By the way, I can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of falsehoods.  He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the torture.

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.

We at harikari.com have been ranting about our country’s illegal policies for detention and torture since the blog was launched in 2005.  Continuing investigations have uncovered evidence supporting claims that many of the several hundreds of prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay and who knows where else have been tortured, beaten, and even killed by agents of the U.S. Government.  Subsequent releases of hundreds of detainees that were held without the right to habeus corpus proved that the overwhelming majority of prisoners were not in fact “the worst of the worst.” 

This week’s edition of This Modern World puts it all in perspective. 

Be sure to click on the image for a link to the whole comic.

America has sold its soul to the devil, and won’t even bother to stop and take a look at what it has become.

Monsters indeed…

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.

The New York Times reports:

Under fire from Republicans for what she knew about harsh questioning of terror detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday asserted that the C.I.A. had misled Congress about its techniques, even as she acknowledged that she had learned in 2003 that the agency had subjected suspects to waterboarding.

At a tense press conference, Ms. Pelosi said for the first time that a staff member alerted her in February 2003 that top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee had been briefed on the use of tough interrogation methods on terror suspects.

…

“I am saying that the C.I.A. was misleading the Congress and at the same the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction,” Ms. Pelosi said.

…

Republicans took sharp issue with the speaker’s remarks.

“The speaker’s comments continue to raise more questions than provide answers,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican minority leader. “It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

A couple days ago The Daily Show show had a great segment about Pelosi’s tap dance around the inquiry into what and when she knew about the torture program.  Watch it here.

What she should have done is gone on the record as having objected to the “enhanced interrogation” techniques even though she was not cleared to say anything about about the program.  She didn’t do that and then went on to oppose the program as the details gradually became known to the public.  It’s true that she did not implement the program, but she in effect was an enabler before she publicly opposed it.

The Pelosi story is quite a sideshow that distracts us from the real issue:  Who are the parties responsible for implementing a prisoner interrogation program that violates the Geneva Conventions?  On the previous night’s Daily Show, Stewart showed a clip of Dick Cheney pointing his finger directly at George W. Bush.

So the more we learn, the more we know that torture was directed from the very top, and that orders were issued down to the soldiers manning the prisons, and the soldiers who did not object to using torture took the fall for following their orders.  It’s probably only those who were directly involved with those caught on film at Abu Ghraib.  I am quite certain there were many more that did the same things but were careful not to be photographed.

Pelosi’s problem is political.  Let’s deal with the real problem.  We The People will not be able to but this disgusting bit of history behind us until our government conducts thorough investigations, and those responsible for committing crimes are held to account.

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.

Via Harper’s, watch Condi respond to questions from Stanford students about the legality of waterboarding.

At about 3:50 into the video she says “And we didn’t torture anybody here either,” to which the student responds, “We tortured them in Guantanamo Bay.”  Obviously agitated, she responds with “No dear, you’re wrong.”  A minute later she tells the student to do his homework first, even though she’s the one who appears to have blown off all her assignments in Constitutional Law.

Here’s how she responds to a question from the next student:

“The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture.  So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything.  I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency that they had policy authorizations subject to the Justice Department’s clearance.”

That’s a lot of words for, “It’s not my fault. I was just doing what I was told.”

And about the authority of the president?  You’ve got to love this Nixonian response:

“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture.”

Harper’s dissects her responses and points out how she implicated herself in conspiracy to torture.  Read it.

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.