Torture concern has a longer half-life than expected

Now some of it was undoubtedly brought on by Nancy Pelosi's clumsy evasiveness about what she knew and when she knew it about torture techniques, and some is driven by a desire in many quarters to punish Bush administration figures, which may or may not be necessary in my view. For whatever reasons, however, the debate over torture is still alive, and I think in the long run that's good for the country. Here's my most recent column for Antiwar.com on the subject. The short-term desire to embarrass Nancy Pelosi may just drive some congressional Republicans to support a more thoroughgoing investigation into what happened and who knew.

At the same time, I'm fascinated by how many conservatives and Republicans, despite the temptation to jump on the anti-torture bandwagon now that it can be used to bash Pelosi, are eager to be seen as ongoing defenders of torture. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many seem convinced that torture "works" in the sense that it provided reliable intelligence -- even though no specific instance that stands up to scrutiny has been offered, and you know if there was one it would have been leaked long ago. I suspect there's more than a bit of desire to punish bad guys severely verging on borderline sadism regardless of whether it is really effective at producing information or not involved here.

Have any considered whether embracing the stance of the Party of Torture is a good political move, let alone considered the moral implications?

Blast from the past -- into the present

Some days are more interesting than others, and yesterday was definitely one of the more interesting ones.

I talk from time to time with Mike Burnaugh, a fraternity brother from UCLA days, and see him when we visit my brother-in-law in the Atlanta area. He called last week to double-check on my address so he could send me a CD of a chorus he's in singing the Mozart Requiem -- one of the works I have never sung but would like to, so I was mildly jealous. Anyway, we got to talking about other old friends and he mentioned that Lee Gunn was one of the few people he had known who had done just what he wanted to do. He always wanted to be a Naval officer, so he enlisted right after college and had recently retired, Mike told me, as a two-star Admiral.

My curiosity aroused, I Googled him and discovered he is still quite active, in the DC area, as a board member of several organizations (American Security Project) and as president of the Institute for Public Research at a non-profit called CNA, which mostly does work for the military. The other thing I discovered was that he is one of the retired military people actively campaigning against the use of torture.What a gratifying thing to discover! (Of course I also found a blog referring to such folks as an example of the "wussification" of the military. Hmmmpph! Meet me in a dark alley.)

So I decided to call him and yesterday we had a brief (he had a meeting, of course) but very pleasant conversation. He told me there were about 45 former generals and flag officers going around to college campuses and other places emphasizing the importance to the country and the military of abdandoning the use of torture or anything like it, under the aegis of Human Rights First, of which he spoke most highly. Those who have actually served and held military responsibility (Lee was in charge of the fleet evacuating Americans from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident) seem to understand this much better than the neocon sofa samurai whose idea of reality seems to be formed by "24."

Lee was in the Oval Office when Barack Obama signed the executive order de-authorizing the use of torture and setting a timetable to close Guantanamo. He said it's vital to close the prison camp there, although it will be complicated in part because opening it was improvised and most of the obvious candidates have already been released. I'll probably use him as a source on such issues.

Anyway, it's nice to know somebody you liked and admired as a rather young man turned out to have such success and to be thinking soundly now.

Rotting from the head

Maybe it's because the Bush administration is so thoroughly discredited and such a short-timer that it doesn't have carrots or sticks sufficient to keep Republican senators in line. But the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report earlier this week on "aggressive interrogation" (much of it plain and simple torture. It concluded rather specifically that far from Abu Ghraib being the work of a few "bad apples," that the impulse to torture came right from the top. Many committee reports include minority reports, but not a single Republican senator dissented from these conclusions. The report fingers Don Rumsfeld as being most directly responsible, but there are plenty of people responsible who have not been held to account(and most likely never will be). Still, it's nice to know that the cynics/skeptics about the administration cover story were right all along. Here's my Antiwar.com column on the subject.

Reverse-engineering a torture program

Those who have paid much attention have for some time held the general opinion that the U.S. came up with its torture regimen -- "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism, developed because the perpetrators knew it was really torture but knew the term wouldn't fly -- by studying old military manuals and programs designed to help U.S. servicemen and spooks resist communist torture, or at least have an idea of what was coming. Now the NYT has found something of a smoking gun. An old article (1957) on communist torture techniques used by the North Koreans during the Korean war contained charts. One of the manuals sent to train interrogators at Guantanamo contained exactly the same chart, showing sleep deprivation, stress positions and other techniques, with the title removed. So the U.S. essentially copied communist techniques of torture. I can't wait to hear the wave of apologies from conservative and neoconservative bloggers and writers who have defended U.S. policies or claimed it wasn't really torture. They must be chagrined to be defending communist practices all this time.

Maybe I better turn my hearing aid up.

Toward monarchical/dictatorial power

The most interesting and potentially troubling news yesterday was the release of former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo's March 2003 memorandum on the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, including measures that any civilized person would define as torture by the military during the ill-defined and malleable "war on terror." Here's the Register's editorial on the subject. The most alarming aspect of the memo is that Yoo (now a professor at UC Berkeley) posits a concept of presidential power during wartime that is virtually unlimited and capable of overriding or ignoring both U.S. law and international treaties.

As I have noted about previous memos from various Justice Dept. lawyers during the reign of Bush, this one reads like something a consigliere to a Mafia Don might put together to let the Godfather do whatever foul thing he wanted while skating right up to the edge of the law (at least as it would be presented by an aggressive defense attorney). It seems obvious now that the Bushies were fascinated with the idea of using torture and wanted to do it, especially when some of the al-Qaida detainees at Guantanamo resisted more ordinary interrogation techniques.

Two things, and I'll throw in links to other peoples' takes. This memo and others like it suggest that the Bushies were moving aggressively, and still are, to enhance executive power (something that has been an obsession of Cheney's since Watergate) way beyond the proper constitutional scope in anything resembling a republic. One commentator suggested that if they had their way the president would be like a pre-Magna Carta king. The treaties and laws that this memo says can be ignored in wartime were written specifically to apply during wartime. This issue of expanded executive authority should be an issue in the general election campaign. Typically, presidents are more than happy to exercise whatever expanded authority previous presidents have arrogated to themselves, though they might use them for different purposes. Barack and Hillary (I suspect McCain is hopeless, but he should be asked anyway) should be asked whether they will roll back the executive power Bush has seized.

Second, the evidence, based on what we know of techniques at Guantanamo, is that torture doesn't work to get reliable intelligence. The CIA says Khalid Sheikh Muhammad gave reliable information, and it might be so, but generally detainees under torture give what they think the interrogator wants to hear to make it stop, which may or may not be reliable, especially if they're trained. And Detainee 063 at Guantanamo, whose resistance to "normal" interrogation was a factor ig the government wanting to move toward torture, according to this invaluable Vanity Fair piece, still refused to offer anything useful after being tortured for seven months.

All right, one more thing. It's becoming clear that the most likely hypothesis (not yet utterly proven and we may never know) that the impetus for torture came from the top down rather than arising from pleas from those running prisons or being the work entirely of "rogue" military people at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. It makes me weep for my country.

Glenn Greenwald's response was invaluable. He's right that John Yoo should be shunned by decent people rather than treated as respectable. Here's Scott Horton arguing that the memo should never have been kept secret, and certainly not for five years. The AP studied the footnotes and found evidence of other memos. This is only the tip of the iceberg of the Bushies' systematic assault on civil liberties.

And here's the memo itself, in PDF format. It's 81 pages. Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. Decide for yourself.

McCain embraces torture

John McCain has now abandoned one of the few aspects of his stand on issues that was reasonably attractive and laudable. I have been reading Matt Welch's excellent book, "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick," which documents numerous shifts in position accompanied by declarations that he has never shifted positions, and prevarications accompanied by promises never to lie, so I shouldn't have been surprised. Nonetheless, this shift is particularly dispiriting. I had allowed myself to believe that this was one position on which he was likely to stand, given that he had already taken whatever grief was coming to him for this particular deviation from what seems to be (sadly) the new Republican orthodoxy, and his life story was compelling enough that it trumped any serious criticism.

The occasion was Bush's veto of a bill designed to prohibit U.S. agents from using "waterboarding" and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. McCain announced he would support the veto. Thus another betrayal of whatever traces remain of his better self.

The saddest aspect is that in the wake of Bush-Cheney tortured justifications for torture seem to have become an article of faith for the misguided band who remain unaccountably loyal to this terrible president. The justification here is that the CIA has better-trained interrogators and is likely to be dealing with rougher characters than the military so it shouldn't be bound by the Army Field Manual on interrogation. It also seems to be an expression of Bush-Cheney's drive to enhance the power of the presidency as an unaccountable repository of power vis-a-vis the other branches of government. In fact that may be the issue that persuaded McCain, who is also an unabashed advocate of a Rooseveltian (TR and FDR both) view of untrammeled executive power.

It might also be another way of pandering to what is laughingly called the Republican "base." which is said to be enamored of constant war and torture.

I refuse to believe that all is lost, but this is a sad day for America

Need answers on CIA tape destruction

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on the Justice Department's decision to convert the inquiry into the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects into a criminal inquiry. That doesn't necessarily mean indictments will be forthcoming, but at least they brought a purportedly independent federal prosecutor from Connectict into the case rather than leaving it to the Northern Virginia prosecutors who deal with other CIA-related cases. I hope Congress continues to investigate the situation aggressively (though the fact the Justice Department is doing so also could create complications). I suspect strongly that the CIA destroyed the tapes because it didn't want such tangible evidence of torture, which suggests a guilty conscience, but we may never know for sure. The important thing is for us to learn as much as possible about what the government is doing with our money and in our name.

Destroyed CIA tapes

We'll probably never know for sure what was on those tapes of interrogations of two suspected al-Qaida members that were destroyed by the CIA. It seems likely they show torture or treatment tantamount to torture, but I'm not prepared to declare it so without something a lot more substantial than what we have seen so far. Nonetheless, it's a good idea to investigate the circumstances under which they were destroyed -- and not just to have the CIA itself and the Justice Department do it. The administration's attempt to block congressional and judicial inquiries into the matter are simply unconscionable. The excuse that to let Congress and the judiciary have at it before the executive departments have completed their investigations sounds just like that -- an excuse. This may be the most secretive administration ever, and especially dangerous in that it seems to see secretiveness as a primary principle of good governance. Good for the government, maybe, but not good for the people it is supposed to be -- ha ha -- serving.

Here's the Register's editorial on the subject.