Tag Archives: torture

Iraq War 10 years later – it’s still hard to believe it happened.

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It’s been a decade since we invaded Iraq in what may rank as the most calamitous foreign policy decision ever by this country. A few thoughts.

The selling of a war: The administration of George W Bush skillfully exploited the fear and insecurity engendered by 9/11 to push an attack on Iraq that, in normal circumstances, the country would never have countenanced. Obsessed with removing Saddam Hussein, the administration concocted a case for war from cherry-picked intelligence and worst-case scenarios; they then launched a sales campaign replete with dire warnings that conjured visions of mushroom clouds and poison gas that ultimately succeeded in bamboozling congress, the media and most Americans into acquiescence. Absent was even a minimally serious deliberative process within the administration to weigh the evidence, balance the risks and seriously consider opposing views to determine the right course, even assuming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (which they did not). That the nation fell for it despite the gaping holes in the administration’s case still boggles the mind.

The media aids and abets: With some honorable exceptions (such as McClatchy Newspapers whose solid reporting exposed the thin gruel constituting the administration’s justification, and the editorial pages of The New York Times) the media failed to challenge the administration’s case for war. There was certainly enough credible evidence and intelligence to cast serious doubt on the notion that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed WMD, or represented a genuine threat even if it did, that the media had a duty to forcefully question the administration’s rationales. It was also blindingly clear that the administration had given little thought to the aftermath of an invasion. Yet the so-called liberal media such as The Washington Post failed to hold the administration’s case up to the probing scrutiny that was critical and even suppressed contrary opinions and indicators.

An unprepared military that proved adaptable: Opponents of the war understood that the easy part would be the defeat of the Iraqi forces in the initial assault, a fact not fully grasped by the commanding general of the invasion force, General Tommy Franks, when he retired some months after the fall of Baghdad and the regime. He left behind a nascent insurgency for which the US military was completely unprepared. The eventual cost was appalling: more than 4,500 American servicemen and women killed and over 30,000 wounded. The vast majority of these casualties were incurred fighting the insurgency. In contrast to their leaders the volunteer military itself performed magnificently throughout the Iraq conflict, and continues to do so in Afghanistan. Even during the darkest days of the insurgency when salvaging anything resembling a victory seemed unlikely, the soldiers, sailors and marines never faltered. They are the heroes of the Iraq story.

Political hacks as administrators: The Provisional Coalition Authority under former ambassador Paul Bremer (now a painter) was established as an interim governing body following the invasion. The PCA was staffed primarily with GOP loyalists whose qualifications didn’t extend beyond knowing the right answer to whether Roe v Wade was a good decision. These ignorant bozos whose knowledge of Iraq could fit on a postage stamp then tried to micromanage the country by trying to graft ideologically driven public policy solutions onto a country that had just been administratively beheaded. They failed to see to the most basic needs of the people such as restoring the flow of electricity and clean water. Bremer himself committed the single biggest blunder by disbanding the Iraqi army and barring even mid-level Ba’ath Party members from government positions, a decision that inflamed and fueled the budding insurgency that soon was to devastate Iraq.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were really bad news: The combination of Dick Cheney as Vice-President and his old pal Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense was touted by the media as a Bush administration foreign policy and national security powerhouse of expertise. In reality, Rumsfeld’s tenure was marked by equal measures and copious amounts of bombast, bullying and bullshit. Competence on the other hand was largely absent and when Iraq descended into murderous chaos, Rumsfeld simply appeared befuddled and out of his depth. Only when Robert Gates became Defense Secretary did we see real competence come to that portfolio. Cheney was the driving force in the push for war and was also the instigator of employing torture as national policy. Ironically, the invasion of Iraq enabled al-Qaida’s establishment in Iraq and strengthened Iran as the primary regional power, outcomes very much against our national security interests. Cheney and Rumsfeld really were national disasters.

General Petraeus and the surge: In fact this was simply the adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy, the heart of which was to protect the civilian population in urban centers while deploying special operations forces to kill or capture key insurgents and their leaders. It was a welcome change but its effectiveness was greatly enhanced by the concurrent Sunni Awakening, in which tribes stopped fighting the Americans and turned on al-Qaida-in-Iraq’s murderous barbarism. This took out 70% of the most effective Sunni insurgents and turned them against the terrorists. In the end the US military pulled out a well-deserved victory of sorts but the cost was prohibitive.

Conclusions:

Iraq today is a nascent but fragile and divided democracy. Majority Shiites hold most of the levers of power with ever more wary Sunni and Kurd minorities viewing the authoritarian government of Nouri al-Maliki with deepening suspicion and fear. While levels of violence are down from the war years, Iraq is still an extremely violent country. It is a work in progress and nobody can say for sure how it will turn out; whether it will become a thriving democracy, a beacon for the Middle East as war proponents once envisaged, or descend once again into strife and chaos as different factions vie for power. Maybe in another decade we’ll have a better idea. One thing we do know is that the price of the war for Iraqis was truly horrendous: at least 100,000 dead and many times that number injured.

For Americans I think the essential questions remain: How did we as a strong democracy with a free and unfettered media, ever allow our country to invade another with so little justification? And how can we avoid making the same mistake again? Even to this day I don’t believe we yet have the answers.

Obama As Drone Warrior Irks Krauthammer

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I usually don’t read Charles Krauthammer. His columns about President Obama in particular are too often marked by high levels of vitriol and meanness, not to mention wrongheadedness, which simply make them distasteful.

A column published on May 31 in The Washington Post titled: ‘Barak Obama: Drone Warrior’ is fairly typical. Presumably with the aim of undermining Obama’s sterling record on the war against al-Qaida, he manages to find a way to sully and trash Obama’s role in finding and killing Osama bin Laden. He also has a problem with Obama’s direction of the drone strikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. It’s not that Krauthammer has a problem with these drone strikes; no, his problem is that Obama doesn’t have a problem with them.

Krauthammer, you see, scorns the fact that Obama stopped the torturing of terrorist suspects in detention following his criticism of George W Bush for doing so, yet personally orders drone strikes that will assassinate terrorists in the field. His reasoning is that this represents a muddled morality on Obama’s part. How is one any better or more moral or legal than the other? He also is critical of the reliance on drones to kill rather than capture terrorists, thereby foregoing the opportunity to seize terrorists and wring from them valuable intelligence.

However, I think it’s Krauthammer who, as usual, is muddled.

The use of armed drones was, as we all know, initiated by the Bush administration. Obama simply took an effective tool and put it on steroids. The strategy has enabled the United States and NATO to eviscerate al-Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan and to deal serious blows to the Taliban as well other terrorists groups or al-Qaida branches (such as in Yemen).

What do all the countries in which drone strikes occur have in common (you can probably add Somalia to the list)? In none of them does the government exercise full control of the whole country; and in those bits they don’t control, terrorists offer armed resistance against the host government whilst plotting against western countries in general and the United States in particular. For example, strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan would be unnecessary if the government controlled them.

The drone strikes are a rationale and reasonable response to the threat of al-Qaida et al. In an unconventional war in which the enemy is a trans-border terrorist group rather than a specific country, using armed drones to strike at them makes perfect sense. And whilst civilian casualties cannot be entirely avoided, great pains are taken to minimize them, certainly compared with most previous wars (including Iraq where civilian deaths and injuries as a result of our invasion were horrific). The ungoverned areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are both the battlefields and the bases of the terrorists. It was the right-wing who insisted that we elevate al-Qaida to the level of warriors. Obama is simply doing what any Commander-in-Chief would do, namely directing the killing of unconventional enemies by whatever reasonable means we are able.

Torturing those in our power who can no longer do us harm is an entirely different kettle of fish and Obama is right to make the distinction. Killing our enemies in their havens is both moral and legal; torturing them in our prisons is neither, no matter how Krauthammer tries to cut it.

Regarding the supposed intelligence windfall Obama is foregoing by killing rather than capturing terrorist leaders (as argued by others on the right, including the CIA officer who ordered the destruction of the tapes which showed waterboarding of key al-Qaida detainees) this argument is equally spurious.

Most of the targets are deep in hostile areas of foreign countries. Is Krauthammer really suggesting that American Special Forces regularly violate Pakistan sovereignty, for example, to snatch them? We did it once to kill OBL and the stink caused by that raid was enough to almost destroy the US-Pakistan relationship. Not to mention the danger to our forces if anything went wrong. Capture by ground forces, no matter how skilled, in most cases is simply not a viable option either in terms of the potential collateral damage or the risk.

President Obama’s has waged a stellar campaign against al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. And nobody can take that away from him, no matter how much it sticks in Krauthammer’s craw.

Bidding for the Blood of Ronald Reagan

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What you see there is described on the British auction website, PFCAuctions.com as:

The 5” glass vial with a half inch diameter has a green rubber stopper. Dried blood residue from President Reagan (1911-2004) can be seen clearly in the vial with a quarter-inch ring of blood residue at the end of the inserted rubber stopper.

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Also included in this lot is a letter of provenance which reads:

“These articles have actually been in my family’s possession since 03/30/1981, the day that President Reagan was shot in Washington D.C. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, my mother worked for Bio Science Laboratories in Columbia, Maryland. Her laboratory was the laboratory contracted by Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well as the George Washington University Hospital to handle blood testing as well as other types of testing. Her lab did the blood work and testing for President Reagan.

And here’s a bit more of the seller’s back story:

“About 3 to 4 months ago, I contacted the Reagan National Library and spoke to the head of the library, a Federal Agent. I told him what I had, how I came across it and so on.

…he felt the family would be interested in it being returned to them and if I was interested in doing so to contact him and he would make all of the arrangements. I told him that I didn’t think that was something that I was going to consider, since I had served under Pres. Reagan when he was my Commander in Chief when I was in the ARMY from ’87-’91 and that I was a real fan of Reaganomics and felt that Pres. Reagan himself would rather see me sell it rather than donating it.”

I don’t doubt the King of unfettered capitalism would prefer his blood be sold to the highest bidder rather than donated to some public museum or library. As of now the highest bid in the online auction that ends tomorrow is £9,181 ($14,410).

What will the buyer do with this vial of dried presidential Type-O blood? Will it be worn as a talisman that wields the magical powers of the free market and makes the wearer extremely wealthy and subject to little or no taxes? Or will it project the darker aspects of Reagan’s nature by empowering the wearer to make deals with torturing thugs that undermine democracy?

Buyer beware.

UPDATE:

The bidding for Ronald Reagan’s blood went as high as $30,086 before it was pulled from auction. The anonymous consignor, after realizing “the importance of this historical artefact (sic)” has donated Ronald Reagan’s blood to the Ronald Reagan Foundation.

The foundation’s Executive Director John Heubusch, who had called the sale a “craven act” released the following statement:

We are very pleased with this outcome and wish to thank the consignor and PFC Auctions for their assistance in this matter. While we contend that the removal of the vial from the hospital laboratory and the US auction sale in February 2012 were not legal acts in our opinion, we are grateful to the current custodian of the vial for this generous donation to the Foundation Ensuring President Reagan’s blood remains out of public hands.

I feel much safer now.

John McCain says Torture had Nothing to do with Finding Osama bin Laden

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John McCain had something to say in his May 11th Washington Post column about the claim that the Bush Administration’s use “enhanced interrogation” techniques provided the key information leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden:

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden … began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, non-coercive means.

And regarding the morality of torture and the ideals Americans claim to uphold, he said this:

Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.

I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves. Through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss, we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.

I agree with his statements that torture is wrong and that waterboarding, ”which is a mock execution and thus an exquisite form of torture,” must never be used by Americans under any circumstances.  I’ve always argued, like McCain did in his column, that torture is a moral issue and that it is never – under any circumstances – the right thing to do.

If you read the first few paragraphs of his column you will find that he thinks the military personnel who authorized or carried out orders to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, should not be prosecuted.  I disagree with him on that point.  Why shouldn’t they be prosecuted?   What is to stop anybody in the U.S. armed forces from torturing again if those who are known to have done it and those who are known to have approved and ordered the torture of captives are never held to account for their heinous crimes?

I say prosecute them all, but start at the top not the bottom.  You know which guys I’m talking about:  Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, and anyone else in the “Justice” Department who wrote twisted interpretations of US and international law to justify the crimes committed by the Bush Administration.

Cheney et al Will Not Sully Obama’s Victorious Blow to al Qaeda

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Locating and killing the world’s most infamous terrorist is a huge victory for America. That is beyond doubt. It was achieved by the tireless work of our intelligence community and by the skill, daring and courage of our special operations forces. And it could not have happened had President Barack Hussein Obama not made one of the gutsiest calls ever by any president. He made it following careful deliberation and after weighing the pros and cons from advisors with, what we know now were, differing opinions; and in the knowledge that, despite the risks, there was no better than an 80% chance that Osama bin Laden was even in the compound in the Pakistan military garrison town of Abbottabad. It’s a victory over al-Qaeda that we should all celebrate both because it has struck a serious blow against the terrorist organization, and because justice has been served to the thousands of innocents who have been killed on bin Laden’s orders.

No matter how distasteful, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, however, to be treated to the spectacle of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other apologists from the last administration emerging from the woodwork to link this singular achievement to the torture of detainees during the Bush years. As Maureen Dowd said in a recent piece, these efforts are torture in themselves.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Tom Donilon why it was okay to shoot an unarmed Osama bin Laden but not to torture (of course this was Fox News so Wallace never used the word “torture”) suspected terrorist detainees.  It says much about the state of mind of so many on the right in this country that Wallace would even ask such a question.

The short answer is that the rules of war (and the right is constantly reminding us that we are at war) allows us to kill our enemies, but to take them prisoner if they are manifestly trying to surrender. They do not allow us to torture our enemies under any circumstances. The final account we have of the mission is that OBL made no effort to surrender and he was therefore fair game to kill.

Tracking OBL down was a years-long effort that required painstaking work from our intelligence professionals, and by all accounts no single piece of information from the Bush years enabled us to track him down no matter how strenuously Cheney and others assert otherwise. And even if some information obtained from torture in the Bush years was a part of the mosaic that finally led to OBL’s lair, it in no way justifies employing torture as a tool of American national security policy.

The secret CIA prisons were an abomination as was the torturing of suspected terrorists, including the waterboarding 183 times of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Bush administration surrendered to fear and weakness in resorting to such tactics and in doing so dragged the whole country with them into the muck.

The lesson of those years is that even in the darkest of times, we need presidential leadership that continues to expect the very best of what we are and then leads by example.  Obama has met that standard. Alas George W Bush did not.

Ronald Reagan’s 100th Birthday Hype-Fest

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President Ronald Reagan was born February 6, 1911 and was elected president on November 4, 1980 at the age of 69.  Were he alive today, he would be 100 years old.  Were he alive today, he wouldn’t remember much of anything after around 1986.  That was the year he appeared before the Tower Commission and couldn’t recall much of anything about the Iran-Contra Affair.

In spite of presiding over one of the biggest scandals in American history today, in between  conservatives will be celebrating his birthday and their version of his legacy.

They will celebrate is crusade against big government even though during his term he increased federal spending by 2.5% per year and increased the government payroll from 2.8 million jobs to 3 million jobs.

They will celebrate his conservative fiscal policy of cutting taxes even though it resulted in a quadrupling the national debt.

They probably won’t mention that “in 1988, Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which stated that torture could be used under ‘no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever,’” because that would reflect poorly on his dimwitted protégé that brags about using torture today.

They will celebrate his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech and give him credit for winning the cold war even though shortly after the wall fell, an overwhelming majority of Americans gave credit to Mikhail Gorbachev.

So all you conservatives out there, go ahead and raise a toast to your patron saint of conservatism.  I hear there’s even going to be some special commemoration just prior to kickoff of today’s Super Bowl.   I will raise a glass too, but it won’t be for Ronald Reagan, it will be for Bob Marley, also born on February 6th in year of 1945. (Listen to Bob Marley’s 1980 album, Uprising, today.

George W. Bush Cancels Trip to Switzerland for Fear of Arrest for Torture

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George W. Bush’s plans to speak in Switzerland at a Keren Hayesod-UIA charity event on February 12th were abruptly cancelled. He was going there to speak about freedom and his time as president.

However, since he has admitted to authorizing torture, human rights groups around the world have organized and filed petitions for his arrest. The Miami Herald reports:

The New York based Center for Constitutional Rights said Saturday that European human rights groups had compiled a 2,500-page Convention Against Torture complaint against Bush, seeking to trigger it once he set foot onto Swiss soil.

CCR, a law firm led by New York civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner, has for years filed a series of mixed-result lawsuits against Bush administration policies, alleging civil liberties and human rights abuses in its detention, rendition and warrantless wiretapping policies.

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“The message from civil society is clear,” it said in a statement. “If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It’s a slow process for accountability, but we keep going.”

And Yahoo! reports:

The rights group World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) this week called on Swiss authorities to open an investigation into Bush as former commander-in-chief of US forces if he sets foot on Swiss soil.

The Geneva-based OMCT on Thursday released a letter it sent to Swiss President and Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey to underline Switzerland’s obligations under domestic law and the UN Convention Against Torture.

It said that “all information suggests” that Bush “authorised, knew and acquiesced into the practices that constitute the crime of torture.”

The United States government will never hold Bush accountable for his crimes, but maybe if he’s not careful, a country with respect for international laws against torture will arrest him and hold him accountable.

George W. Bush, Advocate of Torture

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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 to Marc Thiessen: Put up or Shut Up

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Why Does Marc Thiessen Hate America So Much?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive – Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Health Care Reform

 

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.