The American soul takes the "water cure"

In THE most Orwellian terms I can think of … and illustrative of the condition our condition is in … George Walker Bush, the man who answers every question about torture with a pat, belligerant smirk and a rote, practiced “The United States don’t torture,” [sic, sic, and sick!] has threatened to veto a House ban on waterboarding should it come before him.

Actually, he doesn’t need the veto — he’ll just issue a signing statement, like one of the 1000 he has already put in place during his reign.

If you reach out into Dubby’s energy, you get what every parent fears their kid will find in their Halloween bag — a loose, amorphous substance appearing benign and maliable as silly putty, toxic to the touch and shot through with shards of glass.

In the last weeks, attending his “legacy,” he’s put a good deal of attention on trying to enhance his diplomatic chops and establish a happy international face, encouraging the Israeli/Palestinian talks and even breaking precedent by writing a personal letter to the guy he called a “pygmy” in Pyongyang, Lil Kim of the [former] Axis of Evil. He also sent out the most blatantly religious Christmas card any US President has released in memory.

And behind that false front, he’s also vetoed another child health bill, bullied through more billions for the debacle in Iraq, began plans for another Uber-agency that will help the economy by hiring private contractors to dig into your personal affairs, launched HUD’s assault on the poor in New Orleans [there's a Cyril Neville song link here] and that just scratches the surface of his busy work — no matter what kind of “happy face” you put on this guy it’s still a death skull peeking though, ain’t it. His years in power have left a legacy of deprivation, torture and death and nothing he can do will change the condemnation of history.

I would love to be writing about something else today, move on to another topic and Lord knows there are gazillions out there [although they're all variations on the theme of dwindling democracy] but torture … waterboarding, specifically … has become the pimple … nay, boil … no, tumorous growth … on the collective heart of America as she faces her ugly truths, fractured government and mangled mythology.

I’ve collected the most interesting and informative articles on this topic: Andrew Sullivan connects the comments by the CIA whistleblower to Bush, his own self, ordering up torture. Thirty retired military Muckety’s urge the Dems to blow off Bush’s veto threat, read the letter below. Chris Hitchens declares war on the CIA. There’s analysis by Ray McGovern, Naomi Wolfe and John Dean. You’ll find an excellent piece on the “mythology” of torture, which president [rightfully] had a tizzy fit when he found out Americans were waterboarding, and a savvy blogger comment on the situation with Abu Zubaydah [who was, IMHO, a nutcake ... and which among those accused has NOT been? Here's an update on the poor dipsticks from Miami that Homeland Security found suspect.]

There’s a Will Durst rant toward the end, to release some steam — and at the bottom, you’ll find commentary from two of my own state prime wingnuts … Sen. Kit Bond, who likens waterboarding to “swimming, freestyle, backstroke,” and former AG John Ashcroft, who says he’d be willing to experience it just to put the topic to rest. [I think we should take both of them up on it ... and sell tickets. We could give the proceeds to the collapsing food bank.] And if you want to know what our most outspoken past president, Jimmy Carter, had to say about Mr. Bush’s gulags, go here.

We’re expected a big dump of snow in the next few hours, perhaps you are too — these will be your weekend reads, then; not nearly as cozy as a cup of cocoa and an afghan-draped easy chair, cat at your feet … but there can be no surgery to cut out a malignancy the size of torture from the heart of this Republic until its been looked at and learned from … lest it grow again. When our collective unconscious chose George Bush to lead us into a new century, it selected Death … until we clearly see what that is, and how we got here, we will not implement the solutions that will lead us to choose more wisely.

Jude

House Votes to Ban Harsh CIA Methods
PAMELA HESS, AP
December 13, 2007

The Witnessing Of American Torture
Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic
11 Dec 2007

The Brian Ross interview with former CIA interrogator, John Kiriakou, who tortured Abu Zubaydah, is well worth reading in full. You can download the transcript here and here. Among the things I learned:

- According to Kiriakou, everything was very closely monitored and approved up the chain of command. The president absolutely knew and approved of the waterboarding. President Bush personally authorized the torture of a prisoner, via the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA. This was not free-lancing:

BRIAN ROSS: And did you know the CIA officers feel without a doubt you had the legal right to do what you were doing?

JOHN: Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember - I remember being told when - the President signed the - the authorities that they had been approved - not just by the National Security Counsel, but by the - but by the Justice Department as well, I remember people being surprised that the authorities were granted.

- Waterboarding was not the only torture technique. Sleep deprivation was integral to Zubaydah’s interrogation. And Kiriakou, like any other interrogator who has used sleep deprivation, and unlike Rudy Giuliani, understands that this is torture:

JOHN: You know, you may not think about it, but– but exhaustion is– is a very difficult thing to handle. It’s one thing to be tired. It’s another thing to be so tired that you begin to hallucinate. And after a while some people just can’t take it anymore. And they’ll tell you if– “Just give me an hour. Give me two hours of sleep, I’ll tell you anything you wanna know.”

BRIAN ROSS: Really?

JOHN: Uh-huh (AFFIRM)

BRIAN ROSS: And that’s after how long generally?

JOHN: I recall the handful of times it was used on people it was usually 40 hours plus. They just simply couldn’t take it anymore.

- Kiriakou, in contrast with Ron Suskind’s reporting, says that the information Zubayhdah gave was legit and confirmed from other sources. But it is interesting to me at least that Zubaydah ascribed his decision to cooperate to a dream where Allah gave him permission to talk. I have no doubt it was related to the breakdown caused by waterboarding, but with religious fanatics, a religious sanction is also necessary. Torture alone was not enough.

- The nature of the attacks that Kiriakou says the CIA foiled because of torture was not cataclysmic. It was not the nuclear ticking time-bomb. It was more operational information, and in so far as some attacks were, according to Kiriakou, foiled,

–To the best of my recollection, no, they weren’t on US soil. They were overseas.

If we are to have a serious debate about what to do about torture, all these facts need to be taken into consideration. The facts are these: the president of the United States directly broke the law and the Geneva Conventions by authorizing the torture of a prisoner; he did so in the absence of any actual knowledge of any actual, dire threat to the United States; the evidence of the torture has been destroyed.

The Zubaydah torture does not fit the category laid out by Charles Krauthammer as the criterion for legalized torture. It was done not because we knew something and needed to nail it down. It was done because we knew nothing and needed to find out more. The attacks it allegedly foiled were not catastrophic and not on the mainland of the United States. It was accompanied and monitored by medical professionals to ensure that the victim did not die. Those medical professionals need to be identified and stripped of their licences.

More important, the direct authorization of torture techniques by the president was not contained. Instead, incidents of torture and abuse were subsequently documented throughout the theater of war. We have evidence of over a hundred deaths in interrogation, of which less than a score have been acknowledged by the Pentagon a examples of torturing-to-death. Whatever moral decision we come to with respect to the torture of Abu Zubaydah, it is essential to understand that no authorized act of torture stands alone. By sending a clear signal that the United States has crossed the Rubicon of torture, the commander-in-chief told the entire military and intelligence world that the gloves are off.

There is a direct line from the president’s authorization of torture to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Bush is responsible for Abu Ghraib.

Military Leaders: Ignore Bush Veto Threat, Ban Waterboarding
Thirty retired admirals and generals have penned a letter to key Democrats, urging them to defy President Bush’s veto threats and pass legislation requiring U.S intelligence agents to follow strict standards for detainee treatment.
[snipped from] Sam Stein, HuffPo
December 13, 2007 01:20 PM

December 12, 2007

The Honorable John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman
The United States Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence
Washington, DC 20510
The Honorable Silvestre Reyes, Chairman
The United States House of Representatives
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Reyes and Chairman Rockefeller:

As retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces, we write to express our strong support for Section 327 of the Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, H.R. 2082. Section 327 would require intelligence agents of the U.S. government to adhere to the standards of prisoner treatment and interrogation contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Human Collector Operations (the Army Field Manual).

We believe it is vital to the safety of our men and women in uniform that the United States not sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted by the enemy against captured Americans. That principle, embedded in the Army Field Manual, has guided generations of American military personnel in combat.

The current situation, in which the military operates under one set of interrogation rules that are public and the CIA operates under a separate, secret set of rules, is unwise and impractical. In order to ensure adherence across the government to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions and to maintain the integrity of the humane treatment standards on which our own troops rely, we believe that all U.S. personnel - military and civilian - should be held to a single standard of humane treatment reflected in the Army Field Manual.

The Field Manual is the product of decades of practical experience and was updated last year to reflect lessons learned from the current conflict. Interrogation methods authorized by the Field Manual have proven effective in eliciting vital intelligence from dangerous enemy prisoners. Some have argued that the Field Manual rules are too simplistic for civilian interrogators. We reject that argument. Interrogation methods authorized in the Field Manual are sophisticated and flexible. And the principles reflected in the Field Manual are values that no U.S. agency should violate.

General David Petraeus underscored this point in an open letter to the troops in May in which he cautioned against the use of interrogation techniques not authorized by the Field Manual:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight. . . . is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect…. Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone “talk;” however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual ( 2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.

Employing interrogation methods that violate the Field Manual is not only unnecessary, but poses enormous risks. These methods generate information of dubious value, reliance upon which can lead to disastrous consequences. Moreover, revelation of the use of such techniques does immense damage to the reputation and moral authority of the United States essential to our efforts to combat terrorism.

This is a defining issue for America. We urge you to support the adoption of Section 327 of the Conference Report and thereby send a clear message - to U.S. personnel and to the world - that the United States will not engage in or condone the abuse of prisoners and will honor its commitments to uphold the Geneva Conventions.

Sincerely,

General Joseph Hoar, USMC (Ret.)
General Paul J. Kern, USA (Ret.)
General Charles Krulak, USMC (Ret.)
General David M. Maddox, USA (Ret.)
General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (Ret.)
Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Albert H. Konetzni Jr., USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Charles Otstott, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, USA (Ret.)
Major General Paul Eaton, USA (Ret.)
Major General Eugene Fox, USA (Ret.)
Major General John L. Fugh, USA (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Don Guter, USN (Ret.)
Major General Fred E. Haynes, USMC (Ret.)
Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, USN (Ret.)
Major General Melvyn Montano, ANG (Ret.)
Major General Gerald T. Sajer, USA (Ret.)
Major General Antonio ‘Tony’ M. Taguba, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David M. Brahms, USMC (Ret.)
Brigadier General James P. Cullen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Evelyn P. Foote, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General John H. Johns, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Richard O’Meara, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Murray G. Sagsveen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Anthony Verrengia, USAF (Ret.)
Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, USA (Ret.)

Former intel chair: CIA tape affair part of ‘an ongoing pattern’ of Bush administration cover-up
David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, Raw Story
Thursday December 13, 2007

The former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says he was kept in the dark about severe interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists taped by the CIA, and calls the episode just another example of the Bush administration’s “covering up” of unwanted revelations.

Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2001 to 2003 — the period during which the CIA has admitted to implementing waterboarding and other severe methods on two high-level detainees — says he was never told by the agency that such tactics were being employed.

Appearing on CNN’s American Morning, Graham was asked about a recent story in the Washington Post which cited officials claiming that four members of Congress, including now-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, had been thoroughly briefed about the techniques being used.

But if that briefing did occur, it didn’t include him — and it certainly should have, said the former intelligence chairman.

“I was briefed on a number of other activities that were going on after 9/11, but not on this issue of the use of torture to gain information from detainees,” said Graham. “Not only should I have been briefed, but the entire committee [should have] been briefed.”

As described by the Post, most of the briefings heard by the so-called “gang of four,” which consists of the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

“The only basis for what they called these covert gang of four briefings is where the president has indicated there’s an action that’s being undertaken for which the United States wants to have deniability,” said Graham. “It’s not a blanket for every subject that the intelligence community might be involved with. My judgment, this was not a covert operation, and should have been briefed to the entire intelligence committee.”

Graham went on to describe the confining structure of the classified briefing process.

“You can’t take any notes. You can’t bring anyone with you and after the meeting, you cannot discuss what you’ve heard,” he said. “So that if, for instance, there’s an issue about ‘is this legal under the Geneva Conventions,’ you can’t go to someone who is an expert on that subject and get their opinion. It is a very limiting situation.”

The whole affair involving the CIA’s intel gathering tactics — and subsequent decision to destroy tapes of its interrogations — were part of an ongoing attempt by the Bush administration to obfuscate the truth, he said.

“Let me say, this is not an isolated episode,” said the former chairman. “This administration has had a practice of covering up, disclosing, what they were doing in a variety of matters. This is just one example of an ongoing pattern.”

It’s not the first time Graham has accused the Bush administration of a cover-up, having previously alleged that the White House had hidden evidence exposing Saudi Arabia’s links to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In his book ‘Intelligence Matters,’ Mr. Graham writes that the administration prohibited a Congressional inquiry’s interview of the landlord of two of the 9/11 hijackers, who he said could help prove the connection. Graham called a letter to that effect “a smoking gun,” telling reporters that the “reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.”

[Open link for a] video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast on December 13, 2007.

Abolish the CIA
Destroying the interrogation tapes amounts to mutiny and treason.
Christopher Hitchens, Slate
Monday, Dec. 10, 2007

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the truth. After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-Proliferation Treaty. (Given that the examination of the immense Libyan stockpile also disclosed the fingerprints that led back to the exposure of the A.Q. Khan nuke-mart in Pakistan, the removal of Saddam from the chessboard has had more effect in curbing the outlaw WMD business than it is normally given credit for.)

Nobody seems entirely sure what caused our intelligence agencies to reverse their opinion, but it seems rather likely that the defection and/or abduction of Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, Iran’s former deputy minister of defense, in February of this year, has something to do with it. Asgari’s ostensibly principal job had been that of liaison with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but his debriefing could also have helped confirm pre-existing surmises about Iran’s reining-in of its nuclear ambitions.

Which is the most that can be said about those ambitions. It is completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted “estimate,” that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the fatuously named nuclear “club.” It has the desire to acquire the weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has energetically persisted in the implicit aspects—most notably the installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference between a “civilian” and a “military” dimension of the same program. The acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.

The briefing that I was given by the British Embassy in Tehran in 2005, showing the howlingly glaring discrepancy between what Iran claims and what Iran does, is not in the least challenged by the most recent conclusions. To say that Iran has “stopped” rather than paused its program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding. (For more on this, see the excellent article by Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin in the Dec. 6 New York Times, and also Jonathan Schell’s Dec. 9 piece on the Guardian’s Web site.) The mullahs are steadily amassing the uranium and plutonium ingredients of a weapon and will indeed soon be able to pause, along with other countries, like Japan, at the point where only a brief interlude and a swift spurt of effort would put them in full possession of the bomb.

Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime, which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as clinically dead. A fine day’s work by those who claim to guard us while we sleep.

One explanation is that, like Mark Twain’s cat, which having sat on a hot stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a policy of caution to make up for its “slam-dunk” embarrassment over Iraq. This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact that for most of the duration of the Iraq debate, the CIA was all but openly hostile to any argument for regime-change in Baghdad. This hostility extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the agency’s “referral” of Robert Novak’s disclosure to the Department of Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has been to this one.

And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it’s a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.

UN Rights Envoy Suspects CIA of Guantanamo Torture
Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters
Friday, December 14, 2007

GENEVA - A United Nations investigator said on Thursday he strongly suspected the CIA of using torture on terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, suggesting many were not being prosecuted to keep the abuse from emerging at trial.

On a visit to the U.S. detention centre in Cuba last week, Martin Scheinin, U.N. special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism, attended a pre-trial hearing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver.

Scheinin said U.S. officials had told him that of the roughly 300 detainees currently held at Guantanamo, 80 were expected to face military trials for suspected crimes. Another 80 inmates had been cleared for release, he said.

No decision had been made to either prosecute or release the remaining 150, including many so-called “high value” detainees, he said. Some have been held six years without trial.

“There is not enough evidence that could be presented, even to a military commission chaired by a military judge. Partly there may not be evidence and partly the risk of issues of torture being raised is too high,” Sheinin told a news briefing.

“Bringing them to court would bring to the court’s attention the method through which the evidence, including the confessions, were obtained. So this is one further affirmation of the conclusion that the CIA or others have been involved in methods of interrogation that are incompatible with international law,” he said.

U.S. President George W. Bush insists that the United States does not engage in torture but has refused to disclose what interrogation methods are used at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

In all, 800 people have been held at the Guantanamo prison since it opened in January 2002, Scheinin said. The White House contends the naval base is outside U.S. territory so constitutional protections do not apply.

Scheinin told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Wednesday that his Guantanamo visit had stoked his concerns about the fairness of trials conducted there. The U.S. delegation rejected his remarks as partly “misleading” and rehashing old criticisms.

INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES

Hamdan’s hearing was held to determine whether he is an enemy combatant who can be tried on war crimes charges in a U.S. military tribunal. He has acknowledged working for bin Laden but denies being a member of al Qaeda or taking part in attacks, including the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Military prosecutors denied a request by his defence lawyers to call senior al Qaeda suspects as witnesses to testify on Hamdan’s role, according to Scheinin.

“This is illustrative of the tightness of the regime in which the high value detainees are held, which of course gives further suspicion to the inference that they have in their possession information concerning the interrogation techniques used upon them, which must not come into daylight,” he said.

“And therefore their prosecution even before the military commissions is excluded for the time being,” Scheinin added.

The Finnish law professor also voiced concern at the recent revelation that the CIA had destroyed videotapes in 2005 that recorded al Qaeda suspects undergoing waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, which he said amounted to torture.

“The destruction of video tapes on CIA interrogations is one more argument that supports the contention that the CIA has been involved and continues to be involved in the use of interrogation techniques that violate the absolute prohibition against torture,” he said.

Editing by Laura MacInnis

A strong U.S. president rejects torture
TALBOT D’ALEMBERTE, Miami Herald
Wed, Dec. 12, 2007

The cable reads:

THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS . . . FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN . . . NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY . . . THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.

This message from the president of the United States was sent not to members of the American military dealing with insurgents in Iraq but to an earlier Army dealing with insurgents in the Philippines approximately a century ago. Even without the characteristic capitalization of cablegrams sent during President Theodore Roosevelt’s time, the strong statement of outrage over torture and high regard for American values comes through. Today there is no similar message, either from the president or from the new attorney general. This is sad.

Teddy Roosevelt had to deal with the mistreatment of civilians by U.S. troops who were fighting an insurgency. American soldiers, who occupied the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, learned a technique of punishment and interrogation from the Spanish that they called ”the water cure.” Along with other violence toward civilians, the U.S. soldiers used the technique liberally. Edmund Morris’ biography Theodore Rex quotes the official report’s description of that “cure”:

“A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rife barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin . . . is simply thrust into his jaws . . . and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose . . . until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious. . . . His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.”

This may be the first use by American soldiers of what we now call “waterboarding,” which has surfaced in so many different places and come under so much scrutiny. It has been widely reported that some U.S. troops and ”other government agencies” have used this technique, as well as other inhumane and degrading practices that run counter to international law principles prohibiting inhumane treatment of detainees. Even in the face of evidence of such abuse, the Bush administration has given us repeated assurances that U.S. personnel do not torture. We are also told they do not rape and kill innocent people, and yet rapes and killings have taken place without a condemnation that matches the force of Roosevelt’s.

At Roosevelt’s insistence, military men implicated in torture and abuse, including even those of high rank, were prosecuted and sanctioned.

The dispatch of a strong presidential message and the follow-through with appropriate investigation and sanctions would do much to restore our place in world opinion and integrity in our dealings with detainees in Iraq and elsewhere. Instead of providing leadership, the administration has tried to block real investigation, preferring to construe out of existence congressional measures that would restrict the use of ”torture or inhuman conduct.” This has been done with the complicity of the Department of Justice, which is now under new leadership.

Perhaps new U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey can provide leadership and the will to fully investigate. Given the position he took in his confirmation hearings, he is under at least a moral obligation to look into this issue. During the hearings, he indicated that he needed more information to decide whether waterboarding and other brutal practices were torture. Now in office, he will have the security clearance to learn what most of us can find out by reading the material available from human rights organizations and international tribunals.

We need leadership of the type demonstrated by Teddy Roosevelt and a sense of outrage. Someone should turn this issue around, and it ought not be necessary to have an election before that happens.

After all, as Lord Goldsmith, then the attorney general of England and Wales, told the American Bar Association in August 2006, the United States’ positions on human rights issues seem curious because they are so “un-American.”

Talbot D’Alemberte is president emeritus of Florida State University and a past president of the American Bar Association.

Are Americans ‘Better Than That’?
Ray McGovern, Consortium News
December 12, 2007

A boyish, inquisitive face with an innocent look peered out from the Washington Post’s lead story on torture. It was well groomed, pink-shirted John Kiriakou, a CIA interrogator who could just as easily pass for the local youth minister.

The Dec. 11 report by the Post’s Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, which describes Kiriakou’s experience in interrogating suspected terrorists, raises in an unusually direct way an abiding question: Should the United States of America be using forms of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition?

Nowhere is the mood of that infamous period better portrayed than in the famous Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky was unusually gifted at plumbing the human heart.

While it has been 127 years since he wrote Brothers Karamazov, he nonetheless captures the trap into which so many Americans have fallen in forfeiting freedom through fear.

His portrayal of Inquisition reality brings us to the brink of the moral precipice on which our country teeters today. It is as though he knew what would be in store for us as fear was artificially stoked after the attacks of 9/11.

In the story, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (the Cardinal of Seville) ridicules Christ for imposing on humans the heavy burden of freedom of conscience, and explains how it is far better, for all concerned, to dull that conscience and to rule by deceit, violence, and fear:

“Didst thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?…We teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their hearts, but mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience…. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet [and] become obedient…We shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name…. we shall be forced to lie…. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated if it is done with our permission.”

~The Grand Inquisitor, in Brothers Karamazov

Abu Zubayda: Poster Child

Kiriakou was one of the first interrogators to interview suspected terrorist Abu Zubayda in a Pakistani military hospital, where Zubayda was recovering from wounds suffered during his capture in early 2002.

When he refused to provide information about al-Qaeda’s infrastructure, he was flown to a secret CIA prison where, according to Kiriakou, the interrogation team strapped Abu Zubayda to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane, and forced water into his throat.

In just 35 seconds, viola! Abu Zubayda starting talking. That is called waterboarding.

The 15th & 16th century Spanish inquisitors were not squeamish, and had little need for circumlocutions or euphemisms like “alternative set of procedures” that are part of President George W. Bush’s lexicon.

The Spanish called this procedure, quite plainly, “tortura del agua.”

Lacking cellophane, they inserted a cloth into the victim’s mouth, forcing the victim to ingest water spilled from a jar starting the drowning process. Four centuries later, the Gestapo put out several technically improved releases of this operating system of torture, so to speak.

Quick; someone please tell newly confirmed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who told reporters on Dec. 11 that he still cannot decide whether waterboarding is torture.

The information from John Kiriakou confirms what has long been a no-brainer but not definitively established before; namely, that President George W. Bush’s “alternative set of procedures” for interrogation by C.I.A. includes waterboarding.

Zubayda was given pride of place in George W. Bush’s remarkable speech of Sept. 6, 2006, in which he bragged about the effectiveness of such procedures and appealed successfully for passage of the Military Commissions Act.

That law allows a president to define what set of interrogation procedures can be used by the C.I.A. This is Bush on Sept. 6, 2006:

“We believe that Zubayda was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden…[and that] he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained…

“We knew that Zubayda had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking…And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures…The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful…. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

“Zubayda was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th.

“For example, Zubayda identified one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks — a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubayda provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Saving Lives?

Bush claimed that his interrogation program had saved lives, and Kiriakou says the use of waterboarding “probably saved lives.” We cannot know for sure if this is true.

Off-the-record interviews with intelligence officials strongly suggest that there is much prevarication and exaggeration in the president’s claims about lives saved and operations disrupted, and that his assertions merit no more credulity than other claims—for example, that Iran’s nuclear weapons program poses a threat to the U.S., even though it has been stopped for four years.

Other U.S. intelligence officials take issue with the C.I.A.’s version of the questioning of Zubayda. Some say that initially he was cooperating with F.B.I. interrogators using a non-confrontational approach, when C.I.A. assumed control and opted for more aggressive tactics.

After that experience, the F.B.I. reportedly warned its agents to avoid interrogation sessions at which harsh methods were used.

As for credibility, never has a U.S. president’s word been so cheapened as it is today.

In late July 2007, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity joined with Justin Frank, MD, psychiatrist, professor at George Washington University Hospital, and author of “Bush on the Couch,” to search for insight on how President Bush thinks. See “Dangers of a Cornered Bush,” from which we excerpt the following:

“His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth…He lies—not just to us, but to himself as well…What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt—for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him…. So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.”

This Is Oversight?

The past few weeks have witnessed an unseemly square dance in Congress, highlighting conflicting claims about what those who are supposed to be overseeing the intelligence community knew and when they knew it—about torture, about Iran, about many things.

It is nothing short of an insult to the Founders that members of the House and Senate can find nothing more useful to do than wring their hands over their largely self-inflicted powerlessness.

Lawmakers have been so thoroughly intimidated by the White House that I get physically ill watching the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Bob Graham and Jay Rockefeller moan about how secretive and nasty the Bush administration has been.

Harman complained recently that when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, some of the material (on interrogations) was so highly classified that she had to take a “second oath” to protect it.

What about the solemn oath they all take to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic? Should not that oath transcend and govern others that an administration might require for access to secret materials?

Senator Dick Durbin of the Senate Intelligence Committee has complained that he was aware that classified information did not justify the conclusion in 2002 that Iraq had unconventional weapons, but he could not say anything because it was classified! Durbin explained:

“We’re duty-bound once we enter that room to respect classified information. Everything you hear is supposed to stay in the room…I certainly had enough to know that the statements that were made about mushroom clouds were not the conclusions of someone in the administration who was really being honest about the full debate. But you really know, walking in the room, what the rules of the game will be.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Bush and Cheney took office.

One key unanswered question is this: Was she told that within days of their taking office—that is, seven months before 9/11, the National Security Agency’s electronic vacuum cleaner had already begun to suck up information on Americans—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not to mention the Constitution, be damned?

In a Washington Post op-ed of Jan. 15, 2006, Pelosi proudly advertised her uniquely long tenure on the Intelligence Committee and acknowledged that she was one of the privileged handful of lawmakers who were briefed.

“This is how I came to be informed of President Bush’s authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of surveillance,” she wrote. Pelosi then proceeded to demonstrate the bowing and scraping characteristic of her subservient attitude toward the Executive Branch:

“But when the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other members of the intelligence committees. As a result, only a few members of Congress were aware of the president’s surveillance program, and they were constrained from discussing it more widely.”

And so too, may we assume, with respect to torture? This is oversight?

Neutered Watchdogs

What can we expect from the current Senate and House oversight chairmen regarding the recently disclosed, deliberate destruction of two tapes of harsh interrogations of Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri? (Al-Nashiri is thought to have played a role in the attack on the USS Cole.)

On the Senate side, expect nothing of Mr. Milquetoast Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who, it is said, is so afraid of his own shadow that he only ventures outdoors at night or in bad weather.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes has a different kind of problem, and should recuse himself. He has been fawning all over José Rodriguez, the former CIA Deputy Director of Operations who ordered the tapes destroyed.

On August 16, 2007, Congressman Reyes told a conference in El Paso he considered Rodriguez “an American hero,” proudly adding that, “with a few liberties that Hollywood takes, the exploits of José Rodriguez are documented in the FOX TV series ‘24.’”

I am told that almost every episode of “24″ includes at least one scene glorifying torture, usually with lead man Jack Bauer playing a main role. Reyes made it clear he is a big fan of Bauer and “24.”

Were that not enough, after Rodriguez’s role in destroying the interrogation tapes became public, Reyes immediately cautioned against allowing investigations to find just one “scapegoat” (no secret to whom he was referring).

And so, unless Reyes does recuse himself, look for a “complete and thorough” investigation of the kind favored by the Nixon White House. (Just when you may have thought it could not get any worse!)

On Sept. 6, 2006, the very day Bush bragged about his “alternative set of procedures for interrogation” and appealed for legislation allowing the C.I.A. to continue using them, the head of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, took a very different tack.

Conducting a Pentagon briefing shortly before the president gave his own speech, Kimmons underscored the fact that the revised Army manual for interrogation is in sync with the Geneva treaties. Then, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes,” Kimmons updated something I learned 45 years ago as a second lieutenant in Army intelligence:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Grabbing the headlines the following day was Bush’s admission that the CIA has taken “high-value” captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using “tough” techniques prohibited by the revised Army field manual—and by Geneva, for that matter.

Gen. Kimmons displayed uncommon courage in facing into that wind.

Because It’s Wrong?

Have you noticed the shameful silence of our institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques?

True, on occasion a professor of moral theology will speak out.

Professor William Schweiker of the Chicago Divinity School, for example, has heaped scorn on the scenario of the lone knower of the facts whose torture is thought to be able to save millions of lives. He notes that such is “the stuff of bad spy movies and bad exam questions in ethics courses.” Schweiker warns Christians, in particular:

“Not to fall prey to fear and questionable reasoning and thus continue to support an unjust and vile practice that demeans the nation’s highest political and moral ideals, even as it desecrates one of the most important practices and symbols (Baptism) of the Christian faith.”

And, to its credit, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from left to right on the political spectrum, issued a strong call for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of the videotapes of harsh interrogation techniques.

NRCAT’s founder, Princeton Theological Seminary professor George Hunsinger told the press that “to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east,” adding:

“All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable. Clearly a joint probe by the Justice Department and the CIA — agencies that are both seriously compromised — is not enough. A special counsel is an essential first step.”

But where are the official voices of the institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country. In effect, they are ordaining Jack Bauer with their silence.

This Happened Before

With very few exceptions, the institutional churches in Nazi Germany kept a shameful silence, denying believers the moral authority and leadership so needed to stand up to Gestapo torturers. Indeed, many of the bishops—like military leaders, and jurists—swore a personal oath to Hitler.

For his part, the Nazi leader moved quite quickly to ensure that there was a pastor—whether Evangelical or Catholic—in every parish in Germany. He saw this as a source of support and stability for his regime. And, sadly, it was.

While the Nazis were systematically torturing and even murdering defenseless victims, they kept repeating assurances that not a single hair of anyone’s head would be harmed. (Shades of the familiar refrain “we do not torture.”)

And the propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels made a fine art of what President Bush calls the need to “catapult the propaganda.”

Sebastian Haffner, a young German lawyer in Berlin during the Thirties, kept a journal that his children subsequently published in book form as “Defying Hitler.” His fascinating account of Germany in the Thirties provides many thoughtful insights into prevailing attitudes and the lack of moral leadership.

Haffner’s journal depicted the kind of ambiance in which the approach of the Grand Inquisitor would, and did, flourish—”in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet [and] become obedient:”

Haffner wrote:

“The weather in March 1933 was glorious. Was it not wonderful to…merge with festive crowds and listen to speeches about freedom and homeland? (It was certainly better than having one’s belly pumped up with a water hose in some hidden secret police cellar.)”

Haffner closes his chapter on 1933 with observations that, in my view, apply much too aptly to America today:

“The sequence of events is, as you see, not so unnatural. It is wholly within the normal range of psychology, and it helps to explain the almost inexplicable. The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding.’

“This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in Germans.

“As a nation we are soft, unreliable, and without backbone. That was shown in March 1933. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.”

C.I.A.’s John Kiriakou says he is now convinced that waterboarding is torture and he is against it. He adds, “Americans are better than that.”

Are We Better Than That?

Sadly, that remains to be seen. With virtually all religious institutions, politicians, and educators squandering what moral authority they have left, the Jack Bauer culture threatens to win out in the end. We cannot let that happen.

The upcoming duel on the missing interrogation tapes will again bring the issue of torture front and center. And, strangely, waterboarding and other Jack Bauer tradecraft tools still enjoy a strong constituency.

Here’s where we come in; for we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. As one of my intelligence alumni colleagues noted recently, this is about our country losing its soul.

Let’s rise to the occasion and stop unconscionable policies like torture. True patriotism goes well beyond a flag-on-the-lapel.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “Sometimes you have to put your body into it.”

Besides, we need to keep the water hose from pumping up our bellies and those of our loved ones. I only wish that were as remote a possibility as it was before President Bush and his associates came up with their “alternative set of procedures.”

What Is Probably in the Missing Tapes
Naomi Wolf, HuffPo
December 13, 2007

To judge from firsthand documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA lawsuit, we can guess what is probably on the missing CIA interrogation tapes — as well as understand why those implicated are spinning so hard to pretend the tapes do not document a series of evident crimes. According to the little-noticed but extraordinarily important book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret documents - FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator “wish lists,” raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various US-held prisons — the typical “harsh interrogation” of a suspect in US custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem.

More is still being hidden as of this writing — as those in Congress now considering whether a special prosecutor is needed in this case should be urgently aware: “Through the FOIA lawsuit,” write the authors, “we learned of the existence of multiple records relating to prisoner abuse that still have not been released by the administration; credible media reports identify others. As this book goes to print, the Bush administration is still withholding, among many other records, a September 2001 presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up secret detention centers overseas; an August 2002 Justice Department memorandum advising the CIA about the lawfulness of waterboarding [Italics mine; nota bene, Mr. Mukasey] and other aggressive interrogation methods; documents describing interrogation methods used by special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; investigative files concerning the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody; and numerous photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at detention facilities other than Abu Ghraib.’

What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the “confessions” of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members (”I am going to find your mother and I am going to fuck her” is one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced “confessions” upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped “war on terror” rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes); shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves — right up to the office of the Vice President and the President if that is where the investigations would lead.

By the way:

“The prohibition against torture [in the law] is considered to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it under any circumstances.”

This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites that “we don’t torture” and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:

Late 2002 — the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into place by the Defense Department in its “special interrogation plan” to use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.

Dec 2, 2002 — Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing, and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.

Dec 3, 2002 — at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner “by shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and contusions on the prisoner’s face, head, neck, arms and legs and determines that the death was a “homicide” caused by “blunt force injuries.”

April 16, 2003 — Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive interrogation.

This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators’ arsenal many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, "not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques [italics mine: in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war crimes]…but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes.” In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real intelligence. [Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.]

Oct 22 2003 — Final autopsy report relating to death of “52 y/o Iraqi Male, Civilian Detainee” held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Prisoner was found to have “died as a result of asphyxia…due to strangulation.”

November 14, 2003 — a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp Red, Baghdad, states that “I saw what I think were war crimes” and that “the chain of command….allowed them to happen.”

May 13, 2004 — a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion recounts an incident in which “interrogators abused 17-year-old son of prisoner in order to ‘break’ the prisoner.”

May 18, 2004 — a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes that prisoners had been forced to stand “naked with a bag over their head, standing on MRE boxes and their hand[s] spread out…holding a bottle in each hand.”

May 24, 2004 — Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile prisoners.

June 16, 2004 — Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between September 2001 and June 2004, including “substantiated” incidents in which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another’s hands on fire.

Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.

Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room, observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US interrogators.

The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on the one hand — the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was sent to “Gitmo-ize” other prisons — and the honorable JAG military lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that time. [Lt. Gen. Schmidt advised MG Miller of his rights under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at that time -- in other words, those involved know something serious is at stake, p. a-16].

The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt’s own words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.

The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:

“An Inspector General” notes the document, “is an impartial fact-finder for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their official duties. [italics mine]. In some cases, disclosure to other persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by proper authority.” As in the case, clearly, here — though the immense implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated fully yet in a public forum: “I thought the Secretary of Defense in good faith was approving techniques,” testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. “In good faith after talking to him twice. I know that — and these weren’t interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were [sic] we sat in there and had these discussions with him.” [Testimony of Lt. Gen. Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit].

So what should Congress know as it decides what is to be done?

We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top; those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they think we want to hear — including implicate themselves falsely, as many reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify to — to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that faked or coerced unverifiable “intelligence” to buttress its wholesale assault on our liberties.

As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture “saved lives” — while conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of the detainees — we should bear in mind that the decades of research on torture summarized in the magisterial survey “The Question of Torture” show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will indeed “say anything.” When American prisoners were tortured by the North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.

We should note too — as the White House tries to muddy the waters by pretending that there has ever been a “debate” about such acts as these — that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.

We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately crafted its memos and laws — such as the Bybee/Gonzales “torture memo” and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — with a keen eye to seeking indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben — who relied on Auschwitz slave labor — and with whom Prescott Bush had collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)

Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed — which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in advance of the commission — is the only consequence the Bush team seems to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the rule of law. This is why the nation’s grassroots call for a truly independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation.

Mr. Mukasey could look up his own department’s files and understand that waterboarding is a war crime; not only that, the US Military prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime itself in 1902 — it had been used against prisoners in the Phillipines — and those Americans who had committed it received convictions from the military. It is hopeless to rely on the Justice Department.

An independent special prosecutor must be appointed. The people who are found guilty, in America, must face justice.

Let the investigations begin.

… and blogged to the above piece, by “outnow”

In the One Percent Doctrine, author Ron Suskind gives the narrative of what the Bush administration failed as one of the major victories in the war on terror the capture and torture of Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as the “chief of al Qaeda’s operations” by President Bush, forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad and shipped him to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line - Zubaydah was mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure the Bush administration claimed he was nor his captors and interrogators supposed him to be.

The CIA and the FBI soon found out that the man had a split personality, as verified by a decade of his diaries wherein he spoke as three separate personalities, according to Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al Qaeda analyst, as related to a senior bureau official. “This guy is insane, certifiably, split personality,” according to Suskind’s book.

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations, rather, he was al Qaeda’s go-to guy for travel arrangements for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at top of the CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet, in a speech delivered two weeks later President Bush potrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

Mr. Zubaydah was the first test to be subject for harsh interrogation. Interviews with intelligence officers by Suskind found them baffled by White House statements. “Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?” one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah.

Suskind goes on to assert that Bush asked director Tenet, “You’re not going to make a liar out of me are you?” “No, Sir, Mr. President!” replied Mr. Tenet, according to Suskind’s book.

Says former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill “their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it.”

5 Myths About Torture
Darius Rejali, WaPo
Sunday, December 16, 2007

So the CIA did indeed torture Abu Zubaida, the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded. So says John Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of “high-value” al-Qaeda detainees to speak publicly. He minced no words last week in calling the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” what they are.

But did they work? Torture’s defenders, including the wannabe tough guys who write Fox’s “24,” insist that the rough stuff gets results. “It was like flipping a switch,” said Kiriakou about Abu Zubaida’s response to being waterboarded. But the al-Qaeda operative’s confessions — descriptions of fantastic plots from a man whom journalist Ron Suskind has reported was mentally ill — probably didn’t give the CIA any actionable intelligence. Of course, we may never know the whole truth, since the CIA destroyed the videotapes of Abu Zubaida’s interrogation. But here are some other myths that are bound to come up as the debate over torture rages on.

1 Torture worked for the Gestapo.

Actually, no. Even Hitler’s notorious secret police got most of its information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Russia and the concentration camps.
Yes, the Gestapo did torture people for intelligence, especially in its later years. But this reflected not torture’s efficacy but the loss of many seasoned professionals to World War II, increasingly desperate competition for intelligence among Gestapo units and an influx of less disciplined younger members. (Why do serious, tedious police work when you have a uniform and a whip?) It’s surprising how unsuccessful the Gestapo’s brutal efforts were. They failed to break senior leaders of the French, Danish, Polish and German resistance. I’ve spent more than a decade collecting all the cases of Gestapo torture “successes” in multiple languages; the number is small and the results pathetic, especially compared with the devastating effects of public cooperation and informers.

2 Everyone talks sooner or later under torture.

Actually, it’s surprisingly hard to get anything under torture, true or false. For example, between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.

And such examples could be multiplied. The Japanese fascists, no strangers to torture, said it best in their field manual, which was found in Burma during World War II: They described torture as the clumsiest possible method for gathering intelligence. Like most sensible torturers, they preferred using torture for intimidation, not information.

3 People will say anything under torture.

Well, no, although this is a favorite chestnut of torture’s foes. Think about it: Sure, someone would lie under torture, but wouldn’t they also lie if they were being interrogated without coercion?

In fact, the problem of torture does not stem from the prisoner who has information; it stems from the prisoner who doesn’t. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. The torture of the informed may generate no more lies than normal interrogation, but the torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information. In these cases, nothing is indeed preferable to anything. Anything needs to be verified, and the CIA’s own 1963 interrogation manual explains that “a time-consuming delay results” — hardly useful when every moment matters.

Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this problem. When police officers torture, they know what the crime is, and all they want is the confession. When intelligence officers torture, they must gather information about what they don’t know.

4 Most people can tell when someone is lying under torture.

Actually, no — and we know quite a bit about this. For about 40 years, psychologists have been testing police officers as well as normal people to see if they can spot lies, and the results aren’t encouraging. Ordinary folk have an accuracy rate of about 57 percent, which is pretty poor considering that 50 percent is the flip of a coin. Likewise, the cops’ accuracy rates fall between 45 percent and 65 percent — that is, sometimes less accurate than a coin toss.

Why does this matter? Because even if a torturer breaks a person, the torturer has to recognize it, and most of the time they can’t. Torturers assume too much and reject what doesn’t fit their assumptions. For instance, Sheila Cassidy, a British physician, cracked under electric-shock torture by the Chilean secret service in the 1970s and identified priests who had helped the country’s socialist opposition. But her devout interrogators couldn’t believe that priests would ever help the socialists, so they tortured her for another week until they finally became convinced. By that time, she was so damaged that she couldn’t remember the location of the safe house.

In fact, most torturers are nowhere near as well trained for interrogation as police are. Torturers are usually chosen because they’ve endured hardship and pain, fought with courage, kept secrets, held the right beliefs and earned a reputation as trustworthy and loyal. They often rely on folklore about what lying behavior looks like — shifty eyes, sweaty palms and so on. And, not surprisingly, they make a lot of mistakes.

5 You can train people to resist torture.

Supposedly, this is why we can’t know what the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” are: If Washington admits that it waterboards suspected terrorists, al-Qaeda will set up “waterboarding-resistance camps” across the world. Be that as it may, the truth is that no training will help the bad guys.

Simply put, nothing predicts the outcome of one’s resistance to pain better than one’s own personality. Against some personalities, nothing works; against others, practically anything does. Studies of hundreds of detainees who broke under Soviet and Chinese torture, including Army-funded studies of U.S. prisoners of war, conclude that during, before and after torture, each prisoner displayed strengths and weaknesses dependent on his or her own character. The CIA’s own “Human Resources Exploitation Manual” from 1983 and its so-called Kubark manual from 1963 agree. In all matters relating to pain, says Kubark, the “individual remains the determinant.”

The thing that’s most clear from torture-victim studies is that you can’t train for the ordeal. There is no secret knowledge out there about how to resist torture. Yes, there are manuals, such as the IRA’s “Green Book,” the anti-Soviet “Manual for Psychiatry for Dissidents” and “Torture and the Interrogation Experience,” an Iranian guerrilla manual from the 1970s. But none of these volumes contains specific techniques of resistance, just general encouragement to hang tough. Even al-Qaeda’s vaunted terrorist-training manual offers no tips about how to resist torture, and al-Qaeda was no stranger to the brutal methods of the Saudi police.
And yet these myths persist. “The larger problem here, I think,” one active CIA officer observed in 2005, “is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn’t work.”

Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. He is the author of the recently published “Torture and Democracy.”

The Investigations of the Destruction of CIA Torture Tapes
How An ACLU Lawsuit Might Force the Bush Administration To Reveal What Actually Happened
John W. Dean, FindLaw via Smiking Chimp
Dec 14 2007

By my count, there appear to be no less than ten preliminary investigations underway, following the revelation that the CIA destroyed at least two sets of videotapes (containing hundreds of hours of footage) of “advanced interrogation” techniques being employed in terrorism investigations. In fact, every branch of government is now involved.

Within the Executive Branch, according to news reports, the CIA’s General Counsel and Inspector General are investigating. The Department of Justice is investigating. On Capitol Hill, both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are investigating. In addition, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is inquiring as to whether the Federal Records Act has been violated. And Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, has made preliminary inquiries as well.

The Bush Administration has shown that it is not very good at investigating itself, so no one should hold their breath for the outcome of either the CIA or Justice Department investigation. And Attorney General Mukasey has dismissed an independent special counsel inquiry as very premature. The Democratic-controlled Congress could get to the bottom of all this, but one should bear in mind that our elected representatives have yet to get to the bottom of the political firing of U.S. Attorneys (although, to be fair, they did get former Attorney General Gonzales to resign). Today, Congress suffers from a degenerative spinal malady, and while they can bark, they appear unable to bite.

There are three court orders that may have been violated, but one in particular strikes me as a very serious problem for the CIA. Accordingly, we may well be in the unique situation in which a pending civil lawsuit might flush out some answers, and the federal judiciary might thus embarrass the other branches into actually taking meaningful action. I say “might” because the Bush Administration thinks nothing of stiffing federal court judges who seek information, and they probably figure they can tap-dance for the federal judiciary - along with all the other inquiries — until they are out of Washington on January 20, 2009.

Nevertheless, the situation in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union, could well force the Bush Administration’s hand. An order holding the CIA in contempt of court might get the Administration’s attention.

The ACLU’s Lawsuit, and the Order that the CIA Produce Documents

When word of mistreatment of detainees surfaced, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request targeting the CIA and others on October 7, 2003 and May 25, 2004, seeking records concerning the treatment of all detainees apprehended after September 11, 2001 and held in U.S. custody abroad. This, of course, would mean not only in Guantanamo but in the secret prisons in Eastern Europe operated by the CIA.

Not surprisingly, the government stiffed the request, so the ACLU filed a lawsuit in June 2004 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The case ended up in the courtroom of Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. On September 15, 2004, Judge Hellerstein ordered the CIA and other government departments to “produce or identify” all responsive documents by October 15, 2004.

The CIA claimed that some of the relevant documents were the subject of an inquiry by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, so its attorneys requested a stay of the judge’s order and an extension of time to comply with the request for other documents. In February 2005, Judge Hellerstein denied the CIA’s request for a stay, but he did not enforce the stay immediately when the CIA moved for the judge to reconsider his ruling based on additional evidence from the CIA’s Director - as the CIA entered a full-court press to prevent the ACLU from getting anything.

This stalling action had been playing out, when news of the destruction of the tapes became public. Now, in the action before Judge Hellerstein, he ACLU has moved to hold the CIA in contempt of court, based on the Judge’s September 15, 2004 ruling. It is difficult to see why the CIA is, in fact, not in contempt, given the nature of the FOIA request and the judge’s order.

Motion to Hold the CIA In Contempt

On December 6, The New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed two videotapes of CIA detainees who were being subjected to “aggressive interrogation techniques” - more commonly called torture. The Washington Post soon reported that the destruction of the tapes had occurred in November 2005. CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly acknowledged that destruction, and soon confirmed this statement under oath in testimony to the House and Senate, saying that the destruction had occurred before he became Director.

Passing over who did what and why to focus on the situation in Judge Hellerstein’s courtroom, on December 12, of this year the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt of court. The ACLU makes a powerful case that the CIA violated Judge Hellerstein’s order of September 15, 2005 - issued before the CIA’s apparent destruction of the tapes.

The Court’s Order required the CIA to “produce or identify all responsive documents.” Those not produced had to be identified. Classified documents were to be “identified in camera [that is, only to the court] on a log produced to the court.” Recall, too, that the FOIA request sought information on the handling of all but a few detainees, who were within the United States.

It is well- and long-established law that a court order of this nature requires that the party preserve all information possessed that is responsive to the request. Thus, the CIA was obligated to preserve the tapes even if they were hell-bent on fighting in court to deny them to the ACLU. And as this litigation proceeded, Judge Hellerstein’s later orders only served to reinforce that obligation, as a string of precedents makes clear.

What Is Next?

In addition to holding the CIA in contempt for destroying tapes that were subject to an FOIA request that surely reached these videos, the ACLU has also requested that the CIA provide some public disclosure of the facts surrounding the destruction of this material. In addition, the ACLU has requested permission to take depositions of those involved, under oath, and has requested that the court issue a further order barring the CIA from destroying, removing, or tampering with other records that are the subject of the ACLU’s FOIA request. Finally, the ACLU is seeking costs for its expenses and such other relief as the Court may deem appropriate.

How this is resolved depends on one factor: Judge Hellerstein. Doubtless, the CIA will respond with papers proclaiming its innocence, and no doubt denying that it was aware of the destruction. However, this is where the Judge himself - if he does not give the ACLU discovery powers - may demand that the CIA tell him what they have been up to, given his clear prior orders.

As I have written before, judges appointed by Republican presidents tend to throw cases that might embarrass Republican presidents out of their court, as quickly as they can figure out how to do so. Federal judges appointed by Democratic presidents, fortunately, do not tend to cower when either Republican or Democratic presidents are involved. A judge ends up with a case like this through a random selection procedure; in this case, the CIA happened to draw a Judge it cannot intimidate, which makes it interesting.

More on Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, Who Issued the Videotapes Order

Judge Hellerstein was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998. An editor of the Columbia Law Review during his law school years, he started his legal career in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps of the Army in 1959-1960. An experienced litigator with a prestigious New York City law firm, he is a highly-respected judge. He works hard, is fair, and is savvy.

He is also a nightmare for the CIA in a case like this, because on June 3, 2005 he ordered the release of four videos from Abu Ghraib, along with dozens of photographs - not withstanding an effort of the government to suppress this material from ever becoming public.

Judge Hellerstein appears to have no tolerance for torture. Unlike his former colleague and now-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who still is not clear that waterboarding is torture, one does not have the sense that Judge Hellerstein suffers from such confusion. While Judge Hellerstein is going to appropriately protect the sources and methods of the CIA, if any judge is going to get to the bottom of this destruction of these records quickly, this is the judge.

If I Were a Journalist I Would Pimp-Slap Condoleezza Rice
Will Durst, 236
December 13, 2007

It’s probably a good thing that I’m not a big time journalist. Back in the ’70s, I attended college (state school) as a journalism/theater/film major, and since then, I’ve always kind of harbored a stealthy dream that I could have had a career in journalism.

FADE IN: Cut my teeth as a field reporter in an exotic locale like Bakersfield. Morph into one of those people who actually use the word “locale.” Spend some time as a beat reporter covering electoral politics for a large Midwestern daily. Finally graduate to something prestigious like NPR correspondent to an important Cabinet Department. FADE OUT.

But I realize I was just deluding myself, because I undoubtedly would have lasted one day (tops) before I flipped out. Before I threw a monkey wrench at or into something. Before I dropped my little notebook or tape recorder and walked over and pimp-slapped somebody for continually lying to my face. For example: when asked to comment on Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian whom our country kidnapped, sent to Syria as blindfolded baggage and then tortured for ten months, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the matter was “not handled as it should have been.” See, there’s your problem, because if I had been the reporter who asked about this guy and got that as a response, I would have rejoined, “Are you fucking kidding me? The matter was not handled as it should have been? That’s your fucking answer? A Canadian citizen was kidnapped, sent to another country and tortured? Exactly how do you think your answer would differ if an army of small brained aliens came to earth and focused on terrorizing people with large foreheads and abducted you and sent you to Jupiter and kept you awake for weeks at a time and made you feel like you were drowning in methane gas for almost a year? Do you think that your opinion would be that the matter was not handled as it should have been, you stupid fucking cow?”

And that’s why it’s probably a good thing that I’m not a big time journalist.

GOP Senator Says Waterboarding Torture Technique Is Like “Swimming”
Conservatives have repeatedly tried to dismiss the seriousness of waterboarding, referring to it as a “swim lesson.”
Amanda Terkel, Think Progress via Alternet
December 12, 2007

Yesterday on PBS’s Newshour, host Gwen Ifill asked Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) whether waterboarding constitutes torture. Bond replied that the technique is actually more like “swimming”:

GWEN IFILL: Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that’s beside the point. It’s not being used.

Conservatives have repeatedly tried to dismiss the seriousness of waterboarding, referring to it as a “swim lesson.”

There’s no doubt that waterboarding is torture. There’s also no question that it’s been carried out on detainees. Former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou came out this week and confirmed that in 2002, al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded on orders from the White House.

John Ashcroft: I’m Willing To Be Waterboarded
ThinkProgress
11/28/07

Last night, former Attorney General John Ashcroft delivered an address on national security at the University of Colorado. The event was marked by heated protests. About 20 student protesters wearing “shirts with ’shame’ written on the backs and wearing American flags over their faces, welcomed Ashcroft to the stage by standing up and turning their backs to him.”

During the speech, Ashcroft caused an uproar when he declared Guantanamo Bay was a “good place” for detainees. In addition, he defended the torture tactic of waterboarding:

Ashcroft also responded to questions from the audience. The first question came from a woman who asked if Ashcroft would be willing to be subjected to waterboarding.

“The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do,” he said.

Ashcroft apparently believes that torture should be allowed as long as it doesn’t kill him.

Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and William Delahunt (D-MA) have introduced the “American Anti-Torture Act of 2007″ to make clear no U.S. government agency feels it can apply the Ashcroft standard while interrogating detainees. They write:

Waterboarding is not “simulated drowning.” It is drowning. It involves restraining a detainee — usually by strapping him or her to a board — with the head placed lower than the feet. The face or mouth is often covered or stuffed with rags and water is poured over the face to force inhalation. The victim’s lungs fill with water until the procedure is stopped or the victim dies. Waterboarding has been considered torture — even by our own government — until recently. Indeed, we prosecuted Japanese officers for subjecting prisoners to waterboarding in World War II.

Jessica Evans, a student who protested during Ashcroft’s speech, “said the angry outbursts from the audience was evidence that the Bush administration did not give enough voice to the concerns of the public.” Indeed, as John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales go around the country defending torture, they are being forced to confront the public disapproval that they did not heed while in office.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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