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There are wingnut columnists published by our local newspapers who continue their false claims that torture led to Osama bin Laden. Their twisted minds have this sick fantasy about people being tortured and they want others to accept their version of a false reality so that they will feel their love of torture is acceptable.
Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain, himself tortured as a prisoner by the North Vietnamese, responds to these falsehoods about torture from people on his side of the political aisle:
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, noncoercive means.
I doubt if McCain's words will sway any on the right who have made the support of torture a fundamental plank of their ideology. Facts interfere with their radical views.
McCain writes:
Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.
Moral people do not torture so appealing to the morality of those who support it is meaningless.
One of the other wrong-headed arguments I've seen is that the killing of Osama bin Laden should not be used as a partisan issue mostly from people on the Republican side who immediately turned the Sept. 11th attacks into a partisan issue and used the fear of terrorism (thereby helping the terrorists achieve their goal of spreading fear) as a cudgel.
One of their reasons for not wanting to make the killing of bin Laden a partisan issue is to deny President Obama his full credit. They want President George W. Bush to receive credit to, even though six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said:
I don't know where he is. I really just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.
As early as October 2001, according to Gen. Tommy Franks, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were diverting resources to prepare for the Iraq war. In November 2001, bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in Afghanistan. Bush even disbanded the team searching for bin Laden in 2006.
What many of their Republicans and their apologists are seeking to do here is to ignore that reality and replace it with one more beneficial to them.
I saw several known idiots commenting on other sites that torture or "rough interrogations," as one euphemistically and childishly called it, played a role in the death of Osama bin Laden.
That defies logic of course since if it was successful as a tool for gathering information, President Bush wouldn't have ordered the stopping of it near the end of his term and if it had produced useful information he wouldn't have disbanded the team formed to hunt for bin Laden in 2006.
But when facts don't fit in the false reality the rightwingers and their apologists want to create, they make up their own facts.
"The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful," the AP wrote. "Former president George W. Bush authorized the CIA to use the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. President Barack Obama closed the prison system."
There's just one problem. The key bit of intel wasn't acquired via torture, according to a more fleshed out version of the same report.
But the myth provided a brief opening. Thus have Republicans constructed a version of events by which they -- and Bush in particular -- deserve some of credit for bin Laden's death.
snip
But then the AP updated the story yet again, adding this crucial detail.
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
Thus, a big chunk of the rationale for giving the Bush credit for bin Laden's death falls apart. It took officials until Obama's presidency to locate this courier, and well into Obama's second year in office before they found the compound. Only then was the raid itself designed and, on Sunday, implemented.
At some point, can we just admit that these torture advocates simply want to beat people for their own sick pleasure and it has nothing to do with "intelligence gathering?" They're mentally sick people and their efforts to justify their torture fetish are really a cry for help.
Excellent story in Esquire on how an Israeli-supporting, Jewish corporate lawyer who voted for President George W. Bush and supported the war came to defend an accused terrorist at Gitmo:
He knew the CCR's reputation for liberal activism, and he didn't want any part of that. But as the president he supported prosecuted the war on terror that he also supported, something tectonic shifted in my father. American justice is based on first principles, he said. And among these is that we treat prisoners - people in a position of powerlessness - humanely. And that they can question their imprisonment. And that we don't presume guilt. As an American, the pictures from Abu Ghraib made my father ill. As a lawyer, they made him ashamed. He told the CCR he'd do it. And that's how he got to be here in this room, with this prisoner.
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones posted an article Sunday on a report by Physicians for Human Rights indicating that the Bush administration collected data on the effects of torture on the subjects of said torture, and used that data to inform decisions about their torture policies and procedures.
Baumann is overly generous in stating that the "PHR report doesn't produce a smoking gun." In fact, the circumstances here cannot be more clear. Scientists and medical students in the US undergo explicit training in the ethical use of human subjects in research. If data collected in medical monitoring of a subject is analyzed for any purpose other than the direct treatment of the subject, that activity is unequivocally a research activity and is subject to extensive and quite restrictive regulations, some governed by international treaty.
The Tuskeeee experiment was only one in a number of appallingly unethical and immoral cases in which the suffering of an individual was considered secondary to some greater scientific good. In the case of the Bush administration, the greater good seems to have involved developing legal justifications and cover for the administration's policies regarding torture.
Considering the PHR report in light of previous reports that the Bush administration knew that some of their terror detainees were innocent one might consider the chilling possibility that the collection of data on the effectiveness of torture techniques provided a motive for holding and torturing subjects of known innocence.
I call on Senator Rockefeller to use his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to bring this matter into the full light of day with a formal Senate inquiry.
She may be out of the military and out of prison, but West Virginia's Lynndie England gets to continue to serve as America's scapegoat:
More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal spends most of her days confined to the four walls of her home.
Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn't landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.
She doesn't like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, "That's her!"
In fact, she doesn't leave the house much at all, limiting her outings mostly to grocery runs.
"I don't have a social life," she says. " ... I sit at home all day."
Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice makes a point the AP doesn't have the balls to make:
We may never be allowed to call Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, or any of their prosperous fellows to account for their crimes during the ginning up and prosecution of our latest War Against the Iraqis. But, by the Christianists' God, we can at least ensure that the face of America's nightmare behavior there will be ostracized from Appalachia's fast-food emporiums and public housing
A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush joins the jump up and down club for torture accountability:
In 2002, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo recommending that Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in the wake of 9/11 and held on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, be classified as an enemy combatant. Yoo also wrote memos arguing that American law does not prevent the president from ordering such enemy combatants tortured. This January, after enduring years of abuse in prison, Padilla sued Yoo for violating his constitutional rights.
And a week ago, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that Padilla's allegations were plausible enough to justify denying Yoo's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. White was appointed by George W. Bush the year Yoo was writing his memos.
White's decision is the first of its kind: Until now, although other lawsuits have been brought, no government official has faced personal liability for his role in the torture or deaths of detainees. But it probably won't be the last. These cases are just beginning to address the fraught questions of justice that have emerged in the aftermath of the Bush era-what atrocities were committed in the name of national security, who bears responsibility, and how should they be punished? Although neither the Obama administration nor most members of Congress want to deal with these questions directly, they're even more opposed to letting judges (and juries) take a crack at them. Padilla v. Yoo is an example of a surprising development: a conservative judge putting pressure on the Democrats in Washington to create some system of accountability for the Bush administration. It could help spawn more such rulings.
That was the short email to family, both here and abroad. Dan Froomkin is gone. Must have been more White House Watching than Mr. Hiatt could stand. And Dan was not letting go of some topics from the past.
I'm also deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site devoted to encouraging watchdog and accountability journalism from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
The SCOTUS employee brother-in-law was the one who suggested we make Dan a regular read online. With former Washington Post paper boys in the extended family, we were loyal, even as the price of getting the print edition out here in the Eastern Panhandle kept going up and up. The media market is fractured for West Virginia as we here know.
Michael Gerson. Charles Krauthammer. George Will. Robert Kagan. Robert Samuelson. Jim Hoagland. Richard Cohen. David Broder. Howie Kurtz. Ramesh Ponnuru. Sally Quinn. Kathleen Parker. And now they employ William Kristol. I guess Washington was just not big enough to keep a critic of Obama from the left.Katie, bar the door.
Retired colonel and former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2006:
Documents and memos that have already made their way into the public domain make it clear that the Office of the Vice President bears responsibility for creating an environment conducive to the acts of torture and murder committed by U.S. forces in the war on terror.
There is, in my view, insufficient evidence to walk into an American courtroom and win a legal case (though an international courtroom for war crimes might feel differently). But there is enough evidence for a soldier of long service -- someone like me with 31 years in the Army -- to know that what started with John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes at the Pentagon, and several others, all under the watchful and willing eye of the Vice President, went down through the Secretary of Defense to the commanders in the field, and created two separate pressures that resulted in the violation of longstanding practice and law.
These two pressures were, on the one hand, the understandable pressure to produce intelligence as rapidly as possible, and on the other hand, the creation of an environment best described as "the gloves coming off" -- or better, the gloves ARE off.
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
snip
Maj Gen Taguba's internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses."
Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: "I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid's ***.... and the female soldier was taking pictures."
Do the ends justify the means as at least one person here claimed? The reason Dick Cheney is every where trying to justify torture is he's trying to pre-empt the criminal investigations here and internationally.
As this analysis shows, Cheney's defensive efforts are crumbling.
From day 1, the Bush cabal has relied upon the defense of legal advice of counsel to avoid prosecution. Step 1 was to obtain a legal opinion from OLC to "authorize" torture because its ops carry the force of law within the executive branch. Bush officials then maintained that torture was "authorized". Step 2 was enacting a law that advice of legal counsel was a defense to torture charges. But, what happens if the OLC memos do not constitute legal advice of counsel because Bush Team and the torture lawyers rigged the OLC process to render fraudulent opinions? Then the main defense from torture prosecutions is bye bye.
snip
[ Cheney ] may be a little panicked because Obama plans to release the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report this summer, maybe even next month. If the cumulative findings of misconduct in this report show that the torture lawyers acted as advocates rather than advisers, then the memos did not constitute appropriate OLC legal advice.
Thus, the Lizzie/Dickie campaign may be their preemptive strike to make their case before the OPR report is publicly released. The stakes are high for Dickie because if the legal advice defense is eliminated, then he will have the impossible burden of proving that the prisoners were not tortured unless he has a Plan B defense.
We have already seen hints of Plan B: Bush was the Unilateral Decider and I just followed orders in my subordinate role! Cheney and Rice have already shifted gears, pointing fingers at Bush and the "administration", respectively, as having authorized the torture rather than relying on the torture memos as "authority" provided by advice of counsel.
The release of the photos, blocked by President Barack Obama, will occur eventually. The best way to protect the troops is to show that those behind the policies that encouraged such illegal actions are accountable to our nation's laws.
It is impossible to defend the indefensible, however.
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.
The gears of Justice often grind slow, but they do grind on. Once the report is out that I suspect will show the OLC attorneys twisted the law and acted outside of their professional responsibilities, then any pretense of a defense is gone from Cheney - and George W. Bush - for their share of responsibility for these horrendous crimes.
Cheney and Bush were quick to throw the soldiers like West Virginia's own Lynndie England out to serve as the scape goats for their part of the crimes.
But when Cheney said the "gloves are coming off" he forgot that also meant he left his fingerprints at the crime scene.
In an appearance on Radio Free Europe Sunday, the man hailed by conservatives as the preeminent military figure of his generation left little room for doubt about where he stands on some of Obama's most contentious policies.
"I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.
"With respect to Guantanamo," Petraeus added, "I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees."
But torture and waterboarding - but I repeat myself - are important to national security. Dick Cheney and his spawn were on my TV telling me so.
I thought it was only the far left bloggers opposed to torture and for closing Gitmo. Do you know what this must mean? Petraeus must be one of those far left bloggers!
Update
Andrew Sullivan highlights this section of Dick Cheney's torture speech last week and compares it to the Senate Armed Services Committee report:
Perhaps the most remarkable passage in (Cheney's) speech to AEI last week was the following:
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
There are two options in trying to understand this passage: a) It reveals a profound and disturbing level of denial about his own record; or b) It is one of the Biggest of Big Lies ever told by a vice-president of the United States. Perhaps the easiest way to show this is to cite the final and definitive "Conclusion 19" of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report:
The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
There is no factual dispute as to the real origin of what Cheney calls the "disgraces" of Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney via Don Rumsfeld.
Cheney wants to scape goat the low ranking soldiers like Lynddie England to take the fall for his actions.
Feature article on torture and accountability from Executive Director, Frank Crabtree
Profile of ACLU of WV member and otherwise tireless advocate Julie Archer of Citizen Action Group
We take a great deal of pride in producing our newsletters, and it comes out in the final product. Feel free to print as many copies as you like.
Have a great Memorial Day weekend, and please take a moment to honor those individuals who have fallen in the name of defending our Country and Constitution.
As a Justice Department attorney,* I would like to comment on Obama's speech with regard to the issue of prosecutions over torture and the establishment of a Truth Commission, issues that have been the subject of much debate and discussion here. I know that there has been a fair amount of consternation based on the premise that the President has all but ruled out investigations or examinations into possible violations of the law concerning torture. Jesselyn Radack has presented one skeptical view, and others have agreed. Such skepticism is fueled, I think, by the President's few statements about this issue.
This was an opportunity for the President to address the issue of torture prosecutions and truth commissions more clearly. Indeed, I suspect that the expressed dissatisfaction from some progressives and discussions on sites like DailyKos raised the issue to a level where it had to be addressed today.
snip
But here's the point: although Obama's speech was powerful enough that he could have declared that there will be no further investigation or examination of the legality or illegality of the use of torture, and even though he did declare set positions on several key issues, I did not hear such foreclosure with regard to possible prosecutions.
Key passage:
I know that these debates lead directly to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an Independent Commission.
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.
That passage packs a significant amount of punch. A significant amount.
That statement, that language quoted above, was reviewed and approved by more than Obama and Rahm and Jon Favreau. You can rest assured that the language of that speech was vetted within the White House and by the Attorney General, by State and DOD, CIA and NSA. Presidents do not give a speech of such importance without serious review of what will be said. Okay, maybe the last one didn't. But I assure you this one does.
Emphasis and italics in the original.
Closing Gitmo and letting the Justice Department do its job is what those of us in the Jump Up and Down Hysterically Club have wanted.
Update
For a man who is supposed to be on vacation, Andrew Sullivan is on fire:
A simple note having now read the former vice-president's despicable and disgraceful speech. It confirms the very worst of him, and reveals just how callow, just how arrogant, and just how reckless and unrepentant this man is and has long been. There was not a whisper of regret or reflection; there was a series of lies and distortions, a reckless attack on a graceful successor, inheriting a world of intractable problems, and a reminder that while serious men and women will indeed move on, Cheney never will. He remains a threat to this country's constitution as he remains a stain on its honor and moral standing. I never believed I would hear a vice-president of the United States not simply defend torture but insist on pride in it, insist on its honor. But that is what he said, with that sly grin insisting that fear always beats reason, that violence always beats dialogue, and that torture is always an American value.
Update 2
Jesselyn Radack, a former attorney with DoJ and one of the skeptics mentioned above, agrees with the assessment about what Obama's speech today means to those who want investigations of torture.
I agree with his analysis of President Obama's speech (and appreciate him crediting me and other Kossacks with forcing the issue of torture prosecutions).
Radack, who was fired after being a whistleblower, does disagree with Lars about the DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, but that's a separate issue.
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