Yoo, Hu and the gang: “History will not judge this kindly.”

April 11th, 2008

[Yes, pun intended.] The Chinese are claiming a positively Bushian terrorist threat against their games — Muslims and Tibetans and Al Qaida, oh my … Toto, too, me’ thinks. A nice tidy justification for more repression; an attempt to save face. Another Yu, this one a Chinese spokeswoman, complained that Pelosi’s support of Tibet is “confusing black with white and is vicious-minded.” Ahhhh, yes — black/white. Ms. Yu has only learned the ends of the color spectrum, all the gray in between eludes her.

Might there be actual terrorism? Of course. But we’ll never know for sure [and should something happen during the games, the Chinese will be censoring what is broadcast on TV; if there is an actual event we will get the doctored version.] The Chinese are entwined in our lives due to finance and corporatism, but they’re still a Communist totalitarian country … and still, in some respects, cold war-hawks; they spy on us in ways that would make McCarthy salivate, they posture, repress and torture. And since we do too, we have no moral underpinnings to bitch about it.

The weekend reads are a collection on torture, now that the whole “bad apple” conversation has gone south; the bad apples were at the top of the tree as we presumed, planning victory through brutal coercion. Uncle Dick leading the pack is a no-brainer, even Tenet and Condi … but I’m sorry to see Colin Powell’s name in the mix.

Here are reads on the wrinkles — some on John Yoo, who is in trouble with Congress, the legal profession [and, likely, God/dess.] You’ll find an interesting read from Amy Goodman on the psychologists, who have ‘helped out’ in torture; Richard Reeves cites historical similarities to Napoleon; the last link and article are about torture in Gitmo … it is to weep.

There is talk of War Crime — obvious to more of us, now — but that seems unlikely to be pursued, due to the protections these canny brutes put into place and the will of the American people/politicians, who will probably have to make a pragmatic choice of attending to the chaos left behind by the Bushies rather than making an example of them. But never underestimate the amount of rage that is yet to awaken … somewhere down the line what is practical may dissolve in the face of what is emotionally required of a country betrayed.

So, here are your reads; make a good weekend for yourself, and I hope your weather is better than mine — I’m building an ark to navigate the spring floods [from the heaps of fallen tree branches that cracked during the winter ice storms and structures that collapsed under the pounding of mini-tornado’s.] Makes me wonder what summer will bring, besides mosquitoes as big as catchers mitts.

Jude

Cheney, others OK’d harsh questioning
USA Today
4/10/08

WASHINGTON (AP) - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaeda detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The White House, Justice and State departments and the CIA refused comment Thursday, as did a spokesman for Tenet. A message for Ashcroft was not immediately returned.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as “yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture.”

“Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?” Kennedy said in a statement. “Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration’s renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights.”

The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate.

“With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House,” ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. “This is what we suspected all along.”

The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA’s interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of “principals” fully understood what the al-Qaeda detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

“No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,” said a second former senior intelligence official. “People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command.”

The Office of Legal Counsel issued at least two opinions on interrogation methods.

In one, dated Aug. 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee defined torture as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. A second, dated March 14, 2003, justified using harsh tactics on detainees held overseas so long as military interrogators did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Both legal opinions since have been withdrawn.

The second former senior intelligence official said rescinding the memos caused the CIA to seek even more detailed approvals for the interrogations.

The department issued another still-secret memo in October 2001 that, in part, sought to outline novel ways the military could be used domestically to defend the country in the face of an impending attack. The Justice Department so far has refused to release it, citing attorney-client privilege, and Attorney General Michael Mukasey declined to describe it Thursday at a Senate panel where Democrats characterized it as a “torture memo.”

Not all of the principals who attended were fully comfortable with the White House meetings.

The ABC News report portrayed Ashcroft as troubled by the discussions, despite agreeing that the interrogations methods were legal.

“Why are we talking about this in the White House?” the network quoted Ashcroft as saying during one meeting. “History will not judge this kindly.” ++

snipped from Froomkin’s “White House Torture Advisers”

Will They Be Held to Account?

Marc Ambinder blogs for the Atlantic that “it remains one of those hidden secrets in Washington that a Democratic Justice Department is going to be very interested in figuring out whether there’s a case to be made that senior Bush Administration officials were guilty of war crimes.”

But legal blogger Jack Balkin says no way:

“[S]ections 8 and 6(b) of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006. Moreover, as [fellow blogger Martin Lederman] has pointed out, there’s a strong argument that a later Justice Department would not prosecute people who reasonably relied on legal advice from a previous Justice Department. . . .

“And putting aside the purely legal obstacles to a prosecution for war crimes, there’s also the political cost. Why would an Obama or Clinton Administration waste precious political capital early on with a politically divisive prosecution of former government officials? . . .

“It is not that certain members of the Bush Administration haven’t committed war crimes. I’m pretty certain that at least some of them have. The point rather is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be brought to justice for it, at least in our own country– despite the fact that there are statutes on the books which assert that the commission of war crimes violates our laws. . . .

“As I noted in a previous post, the most likely prosecution for war crimes will not occur in the United States; if it occurs at all, it will come through the use of universal jurisdiction against Bush Administration officials who make the mistake of traveling outside the United States.” […] ++

There Were Orders to Follow
New York Times Editorial
Published: April 4, 2008

You can often tell if someone understands how wrong their actions are by the lengths to which they go to rationalize them. It took 81 pages of twisted legal reasoning to justify President Bush’s decision to ignore federal law and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners.

Eighty-one spine-crawling pages in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the annals of the United States. It is must reading for anyone who still doubts whether the abuse of prisoners were rogue acts rather than calculated policy.

The March 14, 2003, memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a lawyer for the Justice Department. He earlier helped draft a memo that redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts against Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

The purpose of the March 14 memo was equally insidious: to make sure that the policy makers who authorized those acts, or the subordinates who carried out the orders, were not convicted of any crime. The list of laws that Mr. Yoo’s memo sought to circumvent is long: federal laws against assault, maiming, interstate stalking, war crimes and torture; international laws against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, never directly argues that it is legal to chain prisoners to the ceiling for days, sexually abuse them or subject them to waterboarding - all things done by American jailers.

His primary argument, in which he reaches back to 19th-century legal opinions justifying the execution of Indians who rejected the reservation, is that the laws didn’t apply to Mr. Bush because he is commander in chief. He cited an earlier opinion from Bush administration lawyers that Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were not covered by the Geneva Conventions - a decision that put every captured American soldier at grave risk.

Then, should someone reject his legal reasoning and decide to file charges, Mr. Yoo offered a detailed blueprint for escaping accountability.

American and international laws against torture prohibit making a prisoner fear “imminent death.” For most people, waterboarding - making a prisoner feel as if he is about to drown - would fit. But Mr. Yoo argues that the statutes apply only if the interrogators actually intended to kill the prisoner. Since waterboarding simulates drowning, there is no “threat of imminent death.”

After the memo’s general contents were first reported, the Pentagon said in early 2004 that it was “no longer operative.” Reading the full text, released this week, makes it startlingly clear how deeply the Bush administration corrupted the law and the role of lawyers to give cover to existing and plainly illegal policies.

The memo is also a reminder of how many secrets about this administration’s cynical and abusive policies still need to be revealed. As Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted, the release of the Yoo memo is a reminder that neither Congress nor the American people have seen the policy memos that govern interrogations today. We know of at least two being kept secret for supposed reasons of national security, including one authorizing waterboarding.

When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, we were told these were the depraved actions of a few soldiers. The Yoo memo makes it chillingly apparent that senior officials authorized unspeakable acts and went to great lengths to shield themselves from prosecution. ++

Yoo Disbarment Sought
The National Lawyers’ Guild has called for the disbarment of John Yoo
Steve Fournier, OpEdNews
4/11/08

Real Justice
Brian Morton, SmirkingChimp
April 10, 2008

Picture the scene: It’s early morning in Northern California. Two grim-faced men in suits knock on the door of a house, and a scholarly-looking man answers. In a matter of minutes, the men show the man golden badges of the U.S. Marshals Service, and he is loaded into a minivan in handcuffs. In less than a day, he is flown to the East Coast, transferred to a small government jet, and soon it is in the air, winging toward the Netherlands.

In a world where there is justice, this man’s name is John Yoo, and he would be headed to the Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. And ideally, Yoo would be defending himself.

Everybody knows a lawyer joke or three: “What do you call 100 lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea?” “A good start.” “What is the definition of waste?” “A bus full of lawyers going off a cliff with an empty seat.” “What’s the difference between a dead skunk in the middle of the road and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road?” “There are skid marks in front of the skunk.”

What isn’t said is that, occasionally, along comes a lawyer who justifies all these types of jokes, and Yoo is that lawyer.

Yoo, a former member of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, is the man who, back in 2003, wrote the memos for the Bush administration that sanctioned torture, opening the door and some even say creating the road map for the atrocities at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Last week it came to light that not only was Yoo the creator of that memo, but that he wrote expansive memos that all but tossed away the Fourth Amendment as part of a claim of executive authority during wartime. This opinion was written in October 2001, and stated that the U.S. military was not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure when combating terrorism inside the United States.

“Breathtaking” doesn’t even begin to cover this. Yoo blithely tossed out the window the legal principle, enshrined in federal law, of posse comitatus, which says that the military cannot exercise law-enforcement functions that are the province of state officials. The president, in wartime, has the powers of a king, if you believe what Yoo wrote (and for a period of time, the U.S. government believed it).

Remember the old story about Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787? A woman asks him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got–a republic or a monarchy?” Recall Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Yoo is the fellow who, at the first sign of trouble, gave it away.

Another stunning example of a right he casually threw away was mentioned in a footnote to the Yoo memos released last week. Apparently, right to due process under the Fifth Amendment “[does] not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation’s enemies.” After more than two centuries and dozens of wars and military actions, including combating the the Axis powers and waging the Cold War, it took 19 people flying planes into buildings for one man to unilaterally decide–and have adopted as official government policy–that the president can do anything he wants during wartime because the Constitution calls him “commander in chief.” It takes a special kind of mind to believe in such a thing.

Now, normally when one imagines members of the Bush administration standing trial, it is because they end up getting arrested while traveling overseas, and a country with standing in the International Criminal Court places said offender under arrest, similar to the way Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in the United Kingdom on a Spanish warrant for the murder of Spanish citizens in Chile under his regime. With the current bloody nose that the United States has regarding human rights and the invasion of Iraq under false and manufactured pretenses–not to mention Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, and involuntary rendition of prisoners to nations that sponsor torture–the first, easiest and best way for America to regain some standing in the global community would be to offer up a sign of good faith.

What better sign of good faith than delivering the unabashed architect of these policies to the International Criminal Court?

Note that I am not calling right off the bat for his conviction–Yoo, unlike the hundreds of people subject to his abhorrent legal opinions, has the right to counsel, and the right to trial in a court of laws. Given Yoo’s almost supercilious arguments in favor of opinions so contrary to the Constitution, I think that he is best equipped to present his own defense in front of that court. And considering the fool he’d have for a client, I also think it would be deliciously ironic.

Come the next administration, there’s one simple way to begin to make amends for the bloody smear across the face of justice that has been effected under George W. Bush. In the language of reality TV, it’s about time to vote someone off the island. One man needs to go. I vote for John Yoo. ++

ON THE MATTER OF TORTURE
Richard Reeves, Yahoo
Tue Apr 8, 2008

LOS ANGELES — The order from the commander in chief regarding torture of prisoners was clear: “It has been recognized at all times that this manner of interrogating human beings, of putting them under torture, produces nothing good. The unfortunates say whatever comes into their heads, and everything they think we want to know.”

The commander in chief, and that was the title he preferred then, was Napoleon Bonaparte, leader of the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798. The torture order was dated Nov. 11, 1799. Napoleon, a mass murderer by any standard, was quite specific in his thinking: He was not against torture as punishment; he was prohibiting it only as an intelligence technique.

In fact, 19 days before, on Oct. 23, 1799, he had issued this order regarding 2,000 insurgents captured during an insurgency against the French occupiers: “Please give the order to the commander of the plaza to cut off the heads of all the prisoners that were taken with arms in their hands. They will be transported tonight to the bank of the Nile between Bulaq and Old Cairo; their headless cadavers will be thrown in the river.”

Those orders are quoted in Juan Cole’s “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East,” a new book that could be subtitled “Bush’s Iraq.” In the end, which came in 1801, the French were driven from Egypt, though Napoleon, as usual, claimed victory. He also ordered the burning of all the records of the occupation that could be found.

In our time, burning has been replaced by shredding, deletion and classification. But somehow, orders, letters and memos remain stubborn things. The latest Bush administration memo to be declassified — under a Freedom of Information Act filing by the American Civil Liberties Union — is a 2003 Justice Department memo titled “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States.” The document’s 81 pages comprise one of a series of opinions from 2002 to 2005 — this one was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel — throwing a thin legal veil over torture by Americans working secretly around the world. It also pretty much shreds the Constitution and its ideas of balanced powers between the three branches of the United States government.

This one states:

“There can be little doubt that the conduct of war is a matter that is fundamentally executive in nature, the power over which the Framers vested in a unitary executive. … (W)e address whether restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights govern the interrogation of alien enemy combatants during armed conflict. Two constitutional provisions that might be thought to extend to interrogations — the Fifth and Eighth Amendments — do not apply here. The Fifth Amendment provides in relevant part that ‘(n)o person … shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ … The Eighth Amendment bars the ‘inflict(ion)’ of ‘cruel and unusual punishments.’ These provisions, however, do not regulate the interrogation of alien enemy combatants outside the United States during an international armed conflict.”

The memo continues: “In contrast to the domestic realm, foreign affairs and war clearly place the President in the dominant constitutional position due to his authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and his plenary control over diplomatic relations.”

Leaving aside the fact that the cowardice of Congress is such that the United States has not declared a war in the past 67 years, the memos could describe the workings of an authoritarian government operating outside its own laws. It is a sad comment on the breakdown of democratic government that the words and symbols that will be remembered about America’s role in the world today may not be “9/11″ or even “terrorism,” but “torture” … “Abu Ghraib” … “Guantanamo.”

The invasion of Iraq may have been, to be charitable, a mistake, but the words in these memos are evil — and stupid.

Do people never learn? The most prominent American witness on torture is obviously Sen. John McCain and, ironically, his hard-earned words as a victim mirror those of the torturer Napoleon.

Said McCain:

“We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. … In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — whether it is true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. … I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line.” ++

A Torture Debate Among Healers
Amy Goodman, TruthDig
Apr 9, 2008

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: “If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of “Reviving Ophelia,” Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn’t go far enough.”

He expanded: “American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country.”

The APA’s annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central. ++

The Torture Drawings the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See
Drawings by journalist Sami Al-Haj depicting torture at Gitmo have been censored.
Andy Worthington, AlterNet
April 11, 2008

“And then a plank in reason broke”…The Crematorium at Abu Ghraib
Larisa Alexandrovna, at-Largely
March 22, 2008

When you read this - and do read the whole thing - remember that this continues to happen in secret prisons, in our name, with our silent permission while we play the election game as though something off in the future can erase the crimes of the present. I will need to channel my beloved Emily to help illustrate how these horrors read to me:

“Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. “Like something from a Mad Max movie,” Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. “Just like that-like, medieval.”

There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, “it’s nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot.

“The prisoners-several thousand of them, clad in orange-were crowded behind concertina wire. “The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost,” Davis said.”

Yes, a concentration camp is exactly what these “Hitler things” are called, only these come complete with the US flag and words of freedom. But wait my friends, this is about to get a whole lot worse than any American could have imagined of “freedom marching.” This freedom, however, is decked out in lead boots, marching:

“Nobody had expected luxury at Saddam Hussein’s old prison, but morale was low to begin with-the M.P.s just wanted to know when they were going home-and there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right.

“We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,” Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. “It was this huge circular thing. We just didn’t know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew-bodies.” Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. “It had bones in it,” he said, and he called it the crematorium. “But hey, you’re at war,” he said. “Suck it up or drive on.”

(And then a plank in reason broke…)

“Of course, the prisoners in the tented camps couldn’t move, and as mortars kept falling on Abu Ghraib, prisoners kept getting killed and maimed. These casualties were promptly recorded in Serious Incident Reports on the military security networks. Then the dead were removed and their remains were sent to a morgue, while the wounded were treated at the prison clinic or, if the damage was severe, evacuated to a hospital before being returned to the camps. The Americans running the prison knew that it was their duty to protect their prisoners, and they knew that at Abu Ghraib that was impossible.”

The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.”

(A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating - till I thought My Mind was going numb -)

“The M.P.s on the M.I. cellblock never learned the prisoners’ names. Officially, they referred to their wards by their five-digit prison numbers, but the numbering system was confusing, and the numbers told you nothing about a person, which made them hard to remember. So the soldiers gave the prisoners nicknames based on their looks and their behavior.

A prisoner who made a shank and tried to stab someone was Shank, and a prisoner who got hold of a razor blade and cut himself was called Slash. A prisoner who kept spraying himself and his cell with water and was always asking for a broom was Mr. Clean. A prisoner who repeatedly soaked his mattress with water was Swamp Thing.”

(As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here -)

“And you could inflict pain. “You also had stress positions, and you escalated the stress positions,” Davis said. “Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You put the people in garbage cans, and you’d put ice in it, and water. Or stick them underneath the shower spigot naked. They’d be freezing.” It was a routine, he said: “Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves . . . before they go into shock.”‘

There are 12 pages to this exceptional piece of reporting. What happens when a mind collapses under the strain of helplessness in the face of such desperate cries for help? What happens to your mind? The guilt, shame, and helplessness I feel leave me wordless, tired. I cannot describe it better than my beloved Emily has in describing the march toward madness:

…”And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to fill,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -”

-Emily Dickinson (poem 280) ++

“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

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves

Yoo, Hu and the gang: “History will not judge this kindly.”

April 11th, 2008

[Yes, pun intended.] The Chinese are claiming a positively Bushian terrorist threat against their games — Muslims and Tibetans and Al Qaida, oh my … Toto, too, me’ thinks. A nice tidy justification for more repression; an attempt to save face. Another Yu, this one a Chinese spokeswoman, complained that Pelosi’s support of Tibet is “confusing black with white and is vicious-minded.” Ahhhh, yes — black/white. Ms. Yu has only learned the ends of the color spectrum, all the gray in between eludes her.

Might there be actual terrorism? Of course. But we’ll never know for sure [and should something happen during the games, the Chinese will be censoring what is broadcast on TV; if there is an actual event we will get the doctored version.] The Chinese are entwined in our lives due to finance and corporatism, but they’re still a Communist totalitarian country … and still, in some respects, cold war-hawks; they spy on us in ways that would make McCarthy salivate, they posture, repress and torture. And since we do too, we have no moral underpinnings to bitch about it.

The weekend reads are a collection on torture, now that the whole “bad apple” conversation has gone south; the bad apples were at the top of the tree as we presumed, planning victory through brutal coercion. Uncle Dick leading the pack is a no-brainer, even Tenet and Condi … but I’m sorry to see Colin Powell’s name in the mix.

Here are reads on the wrinkles — some on John Yoo, who is in trouble with Congress, the legal profession [and, likely, God/dess.] You’ll find an interesting read from Amy Goodman on the psychologists, who have ‘helped out’ in torture; Richard Reeves cites historical similarities to Napoleon; the last link and article are about torture in Gitmo … it is to weep.

There is talk of War Crime — obvious to more of us, now — but that seems unlikely to be pursued, due to the protections these canny brutes put into place and the will of the American people/politicians, who will probably have to make a pragmatic choice of attending to the chaos left behind by the Bushies rather than making an example of them. But never underestimate the amount of rage that is yet to awaken … somewhere down the line what is practical may dissolve in the face of what is emotionally required of a country betrayed.

So, here are your reads; make a good weekend for yourself, and I hope your weather is better than mine — I’m building an ark to navigate the spring floods [from the heaps of fallen tree branches that cracked during the winter ice storms and structures that collapsed under the pounding of mini-tornado’s.] Makes me wonder what summer will bring, besides mosquitoes as big as catchers mitts.

Jude

Cheney, others OK’d harsh questioning
USA Today
4/10/08

WASHINGTON (AP) - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaeda detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The White House, Justice and State departments and the CIA refused comment Thursday, as did a spokesman for Tenet. A message for Ashcroft was not immediately returned.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as “yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture.”

“Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?” Kennedy said in a statement. “Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration’s renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights.”

The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate.

“With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House,” ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. “This is what we suspected all along.”

The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA’s interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of “principals” fully understood what the al-Qaeda detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

“No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,” said a second former senior intelligence official. “People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command.”

The Office of Legal Counsel issued at least two opinions on interrogation methods.

In one, dated Aug. 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee defined torture as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. A second, dated March 14, 2003, justified using harsh tactics on detainees held overseas so long as military interrogators did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Both legal opinions since have been withdrawn.

The second former senior intelligence official said rescinding the memos caused the CIA to seek even more detailed approvals for the interrogations.

The department issued another still-secret memo in October 2001 that, in part, sought to outline novel ways the military could be used domestically to defend the country in the face of an impending attack. The Justice Department so far has refused to release it, citing attorney-client privilege, and Attorney General Michael Mukasey declined to describe it Thursday at a Senate panel where Democrats characterized it as a “torture memo.”

Not all of the principals who attended were fully comfortable with the White House meetings.

The ABC News report portrayed Ashcroft as troubled by the discussions, despite agreeing that the interrogations methods were legal.

“Why are we talking about this in the White House?” the network quoted Ashcroft as saying during one meeting. “History will not judge this kindly.” ++

snipped from Froomkin’s “White House Torture Advisers”

Will They Be Held to Account?

Marc Ambinder blogs for the Atlantic that “it remains one of those hidden secrets in Washington that a Democratic Justice Department is going to be very interested in figuring out whether there’s a case to be made that senior Bush Administration officials were guilty of war crimes.”

But legal blogger Jack Balkin says no way:

“[S]ections 8 and 6(b) of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006. Moreover, as [fellow blogger Martin Lederman] has pointed out, there’s a strong argument that a later Justice Department would not prosecute people who reasonably relied on legal advice from a previous Justice Department. . . .

“And putting aside the purely legal obstacles to a prosecution for war crimes, there’s also the political cost. Why would an Obama or Clinton Administration waste precious political capital early on with a politically divisive prosecution of former government officials? . . .

“It is not that certain members of the Bush Administration haven’t committed war crimes. I’m pretty certain that at least some of them have. The point rather is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be brought to justice for it, at least in our own country– despite the fact that there are statutes on the books which assert that the commission of war crimes violates our laws. . . .

“As I noted in a previous post, the most likely prosecution for war crimes will not occur in the United States; if it occurs at all, it will come through the use of universal jurisdiction against Bush Administration officials who make the mistake of traveling outside the United States.” […] ++

There Were Orders to Follow
New York Times Editorial
Published: April 4, 2008

You can often tell if someone understands how wrong their actions are by the lengths to which they go to rationalize them. It took 81 pages of twisted legal reasoning to justify President Bush’s decision to ignore federal law and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners.

Eighty-one spine-crawling pages in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the annals of the United States. It is must reading for anyone who still doubts whether the abuse of prisoners were rogue acts rather than calculated policy.

The March 14, 2003, memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a lawyer for the Justice Department. He earlier helped draft a memo that redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts against Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

The purpose of the March 14 memo was equally insidious: to make sure that the policy makers who authorized those acts, or the subordinates who carried out the orders, were not convicted of any crime. The list of laws that Mr. Yoo’s memo sought to circumvent is long: federal laws against assault, maiming, interstate stalking, war crimes and torture; international laws against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, never directly argues that it is legal to chain prisoners to the ceiling for days, sexually abuse them or subject them to waterboarding - all things done by American jailers.

His primary argument, in which he reaches back to 19th-century legal opinions justifying the execution of Indians who rejected the reservation, is that the laws didn’t apply to Mr. Bush because he is commander in chief. He cited an earlier opinion from Bush administration lawyers that Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were not covered by the Geneva Conventions - a decision that put every captured American soldier at grave risk.

Then, should someone reject his legal reasoning and decide to file charges, Mr. Yoo offered a detailed blueprint for escaping accountability.

American and international laws against torture prohibit making a prisoner fear “imminent death.” For most people, waterboarding - making a prisoner feel as if he is about to drown - would fit. But Mr. Yoo argues that the statutes apply only if the interrogators actually intended to kill the prisoner. Since waterboarding simulates drowning, there is no “threat of imminent death.”

After the memo’s general contents were first reported, the Pentagon said in early 2004 that it was “no longer operative.” Reading the full text, released this week, makes it startlingly clear how deeply the Bush administration corrupted the law and the role of lawyers to give cover to existing and plainly illegal policies.

The memo is also a reminder of how many secrets about this administration’s cynical and abusive policies still need to be revealed. As Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted, the release of the Yoo memo is a reminder that neither Congress nor the American people have seen the policy memos that govern interrogations today. We know of at least two being kept secret for supposed reasons of national security, including one authorizing waterboarding.

When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, we were told these were the depraved actions of a few soldiers. The Yoo memo makes it chillingly apparent that senior officials authorized unspeakable acts and went to great lengths to shield themselves from prosecution. ++

Yoo Disbarment Sought
The National Lawyers’ Guild has called for the disbarment of John Yoo
Steve Fournier, OpEdNews
4/11/08

Real Justice
Brian Morton, SmirkingChimp
April 10, 2008

Picture the scene: It’s early morning in Northern California. Two grim-faced men in suits knock on the door of a house, and a scholarly-looking man answers. In a matter of minutes, the men show the man golden badges of the U.S. Marshals Service, and he is loaded into a minivan in handcuffs. In less than a day, he is flown to the East Coast, transferred to a small government jet, and soon it is in the air, winging toward the Netherlands.

In a world where there is justice, this man’s name is John Yoo, and he would be headed to the Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. And ideally, Yoo would be defending himself.

Everybody knows a lawyer joke or three: “What do you call 100 lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea?” “A good start.” “What is the definition of waste?” “A bus full of lawyers going off a cliff with an empty seat.” “What’s the difference between a dead skunk in the middle of the road and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road?” “There are skid marks in front of the skunk.”

What isn’t said is that, occasionally, along comes a lawyer who justifies all these types of jokes, and Yoo is that lawyer.

Yoo, a former member of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, is the man who, back in 2003, wrote the memos for the Bush administration that sanctioned torture, opening the door and some even say creating the road map for the atrocities at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Last week it came to light that not only was Yoo the creator of that memo, but that he wrote expansive memos that all but tossed away the Fourth Amendment as part of a claim of executive authority during wartime. This opinion was written in October 2001, and stated that the U.S. military was not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure when combating terrorism inside the United States.

“Breathtaking” doesn’t even begin to cover this. Yoo blithely tossed out the window the legal principle, enshrined in federal law, of posse comitatus, which says that the military cannot exercise law-enforcement functions that are the province of state officials. The president, in wartime, has the powers of a king, if you believe what Yoo wrote (and for a period of time, the U.S. government believed it).

Remember the old story about Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787? A woman asks him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got–a republic or a monarchy?” Recall Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Yoo is the fellow who, at the first sign of trouble, gave it away.

Another stunning example of a right he casually threw away was mentioned in a footnote to the Yoo memos released last week. Apparently, right to due process under the Fifth Amendment “[does] not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation’s enemies.” After more than two centuries and dozens of wars and military actions, including combating the the Axis powers and waging the Cold War, it took 19 people flying planes into buildings for one man to unilaterally decide–and have adopted as official government policy–that the president can do anything he wants during wartime because the Constitution calls him “commander in chief.” It takes a special kind of mind to believe in such a thing.

Now, normally when one imagines members of the Bush administration standing trial, it is because they end up getting arrested while traveling overseas, and a country with standing in the International Criminal Court places said offender under arrest, similar to the way Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in the United Kingdom on a Spanish warrant for the murder of Spanish citizens in Chile under his regime. With the current bloody nose that the United States has regarding human rights and the invasion of Iraq under false and manufactured pretenses–not to mention Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, and involuntary rendition of prisoners to nations that sponsor torture–the first, easiest and best way for America to regain some standing in the global community would be to offer up a sign of good faith.

What better sign of good faith than delivering the unabashed architect of these policies to the International Criminal Court?

Note that I am not calling right off the bat for his conviction–Yoo, unlike the hundreds of people subject to his abhorrent legal opinions, has the right to counsel, and the right to trial in a court of laws. Given Yoo’s almost supercilious arguments in favor of opinions so contrary to the Constitution, I think that he is best equipped to present his own defense in front of that court. And considering the fool he’d have for a client, I also think it would be deliciously ironic.

Come the next administration, there’s one simple way to begin to make amends for the bloody smear across the face of justice that has been effected under George W. Bush. In the language of reality TV, it’s about time to vote someone off the island. One man needs to go. I vote for John Yoo. ++

ON THE MATTER OF TORTURE
Richard Reeves, Yahoo
Tue Apr 8, 2008

LOS ANGELES — The order from the commander in chief regarding torture of prisoners was clear: “It has been recognized at all times that this manner of interrogating human beings, of putting them under torture, produces nothing good. The unfortunates say whatever comes into their heads, and everything they think we want to know.”

The commander in chief, and that was the title he preferred then, was Napoleon Bonaparte, leader of the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798. The torture order was dated Nov. 11, 1799. Napoleon, a mass murderer by any standard, was quite specific in his thinking: He was not against torture as punishment; he was prohibiting it only as an intelligence technique.

In fact, 19 days before, on Oct. 23, 1799, he had issued this order regarding 2,000 insurgents captured during an insurgency against the French occupiers: “Please give the order to the commander of the plaza to cut off the heads of all the prisoners that were taken with arms in their hands. They will be transported tonight to the bank of the Nile between Bulaq and Old Cairo; their headless cadavers will be thrown in the river.”

Those orders are quoted in Juan Cole’s “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East,” a new book that could be subtitled “Bush’s Iraq.” In the end, which came in 1801, the French were driven from Egypt, though Napoleon, as usual, claimed victory. He also ordered the burning of all the records of the occupation that could be found.

In our time, burning has been replaced by shredding, deletion and classification. But somehow, orders, letters and memos remain stubborn things. The latest Bush administration memo to be declassified — under a Freedom of Information Act filing by the American Civil Liberties Union — is a 2003 Justice Department memo titled “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States.” The document’s 81 pages comprise one of a series of opinions from 2002 to 2005 — this one was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel — throwing a thin legal veil over torture by Americans working secretly around the world. It also pretty much shreds the Constitution and its ideas of balanced powers between the three branches of the United States government.

This one states:

“There can be little doubt that the conduct of war is a matter that is fundamentally executive in nature, the power over which the Framers vested in a unitary executive. … (W)e address whether restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights govern the interrogation of alien enemy combatants during armed conflict. Two constitutional provisions that might be thought to extend to interrogations — the Fifth and Eighth Amendments — do not apply here. The Fifth Amendment provides in relevant part that ‘(n)o person … shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ … The Eighth Amendment bars the ‘inflict(ion)’ of ‘cruel and unusual punishments.’ These provisions, however, do not regulate the interrogation of alien enemy combatants outside the United States during an international armed conflict.”

The memo continues: “In contrast to the domestic realm, foreign affairs and war clearly place the President in the dominant constitutional position due to his authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and his plenary control over diplomatic relations.”

Leaving aside the fact that the cowardice of Congress is such that the United States has not declared a war in the past 67 years, the memos could describe the workings of an authoritarian government operating outside its own laws. It is a sad comment on the breakdown of democratic government that the words and symbols that will be remembered about America’s role in the world today may not be “9/11″ or even “terrorism,” but “torture” … “Abu Ghraib” … “Guantanamo.”

The invasion of Iraq may have been, to be charitable, a mistake, but the words in these memos are evil — and stupid.

Do people never learn? The most prominent American witness on torture is obviously Sen. John McCain and, ironically, his hard-earned words as a victim mirror those of the torturer Napoleon.

Said McCain:

“We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. … In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — whether it is true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. … I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line.” ++

A Torture Debate Among Healers
Amy Goodman, TruthDig
Apr 9, 2008

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: “If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of “Reviving Ophelia,” Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step bu