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Vagabond Scholar: Torture Watch 10/8/09
several important pieces on torture from that past month or two
NPR's ombudsman: Why we bar the word "torture" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Anyone who believes that NPR is a "liberal" media outlet -- and anyone who wants to understand the decay of American journalism -- should read this column by NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, as she explains and justifies why NPR bars the use of the word "torture" to describe what the Bush administration did.
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It doesn’t seem to occur to her that something other than base vindictiveness – such as a desire to maintain the universal taboo against torture, or allegiance to accuracy in language – might motivate those who want NPR to call torture "torture," rather than prettify it with banality-of-evil euphemisms invented by the very people who perpetrated it.
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As is virtually always the case with modern journalists, those who scream the loudest about how they must refrain from stating facts in order to maintain "neutrality" are the ones who, in reality, are the least neutral of all. They're just too dishonest to acknowledge it.
NPR: Harsh Interrogation Techniques or Torture?
defending the indefensible
Major new accountability campaign from the ACLU - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
The ACLU today launched a major new campaign to impose accountability for torture and related Bush-era crimes. The campaign -- Accountability for Torture -- is devoted principally to a restoration of the rule of law and the appointment by the DOJ of a Special Prosecutor. The website to coordinate these efforts is here, and that site is also now probably the single best resource for all documents and other information relating to torture and accountability efforts.
Defeat of Graham-Lieberman and the ongoing war on transaprency - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Just look at the obvious, dangerous precedent being set by those who are advocating for suppression of war crimes evidence. As I wrote when Obama first announced that he had reversed himself and decided to appeal the Second Circuit's order requiring disclosure of these photos:
Think about what Obama's rationale would justify. Obama's claim -- that release of the photographs "would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger" -- means we should conceal or even outright lie about all the bad things we do that might reflect poorly on us. For instance, if an Obama bombing raid slaughters civilians in Afghanistan (as has happened several times already), then, by this reasoning, we ought to lie about what happened and conceal the evidence depicting what was done -- as the Bush administration did -- because release of such evidence would "would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger." Indeed, evidence of our killing civilians in Afghanistan inflames anti-American sentiment far more than these photographs would. Isn't it better to hide the evidence showing the bad things we do?
Life on Permanent Lockdown | Mother Jones
The use of so-called extended lockdown has grown exponentially since the 1980s and is now an almost routine part of the American criminal justice system. The practice has been denounced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, among others. Yet it has never aroused much public opposition, even among progressives who are outraged by reports of psychological abuse from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
Powell Told U.S. Tortured Detainees, But He Failed to Act
(Source of Truthout article) The next month, February 2004, the ICRC gave Bush administration officials a confidential report which found that U.S. occupation forces in Iraq often arrested Iraqis without good reason and subjected them to abuse and humiliation that sometimes was “tantamount to torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
t r u t h o u t | Red Cross Informed Powell About Torture
"According to the allegations collected by the ICRC, ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence' value," the report said.
"In these cases, persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators."
Hullabaloo
torture apologists frequently offer extremely convoluted and even contradictory arguments. As I've written before, their defenses normally fit into a pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault.
Hullabaloo > Another phony soldier weighs in
The General went on to say that, "during my time in Iraq there was not one instance of actionable intelligence that came out of these interrogation techniques."
Richard A. Clarke -- Cheney and Rice Remember 9/11. I Do, Too. - washingtonpost.com
By Richard A. Clarke
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
The Battle for a Country's Soul - The New York Review of Books
As Major General Antonio Taguba told The New Yorker, his investigation of Abu Ghraib was limited to the military police below, not those above him. "I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority," he said. "I was limited to a box."
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Instead of heeding this well-intentioned dissent, however, the Bush administration invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a small handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals' liberties that had been prohibited since the country's founding. They turned the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel into a political instrument, which they used to expand their own executive power at the expense of long-standing checks and balances.
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One of the most flagrant instances of unjust treatment was the case of Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen who was falsely identified as a member of al-Qaeda with a similar name.
US Interrogator in Iraq Says Torture Policy Has Led to Deaths of Thousands of American Soldiers
former special intelligence operations officer who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago. His nonviolent interrogation methods led Special Forces to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq - washingtonpost.com
What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work. -Matthew Alexander
Jeremy Scahill: "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama"
Jeremy Scahilll: In fact, in February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were sixteen prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantanamo. The Immediate Response—or Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs. And what the IRF teams, as they’re called—when they beat someone, it’s called IRF-ing, or to be IRF-ed up by these teams. They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.
This force has received almost no scrutiny in the US Congress or the US media and operates at this moment.
Cheney's speech ignored some inconvenient truths | McClatchy
Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.
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The former vice president didn't point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban.
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a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
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The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room » VIDEO: GOP uses 9/11 footage in detainees battle
The video is part of a Republican offensive against the prospect of transferring or releasing Guantanamo detainees into the United States.
Yesterday, Republicans introduced the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act, which would require consent of the governor and legislature of a state before detainees could be transferred there.
Full transcript: Dick Cheney's speech - Politico.com Print View
Cheney: I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.
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n public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
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In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.
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Richard A. Clarke -- Cheney and Rice Remember 9/11. I Do, Too.
Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic.
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Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
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there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
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Hullabaloo
Conservatives want their justices to empathize with the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests. Liberals want their justices to empathize with women and minorities, workers and the downtrodden.
For all the pearl-clutching horror coming from the right, the conservative legal movement has picked its plaintiffs carefully, with an eye toward catching the winds of public opinion through sympathetic plaintiffs such as Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who was denied a promotion, or Terri Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who sought to keep Schiavo on life support despite her husband's claim that she expressed a desire not to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Empathy is an important element of the conservative legal movement on both sides of the bench. Most recently, it's been conservatives who have been arguing for empathy for the architects and perpetrators of torture on the grounds that they broke the law ostensibly in the interest of the country, while liberals have called for rigidity in upholding laws against torture.
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