Gonna agree with Shep on this one

(NSFW unless on headphones)

The healthy man does not torture others

I feel a little sick to my stomach. It's not as though many of the facts contained within the recently released Bush-era torture memos are new to us. Several of the techniques described within had already been admitted to, sometimes rather flippantly, by the last administration and its officials.

Still, seeing so many of them spelled out with such clinical--and often blatantly hypocritical--language is difficult to absorb without being left with some nausea.

I applaud the ACLU for doggedly pursuing the release of these secret memos, and I applaud the Obama administration for going ahead and making them public, despite heavy pressure from vested interests like Gen. Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey and several others who claim the move will harm the country's ability to gather intelligence.

But I am more committed than ever to making sure those people who ordered and justified these disgusting and illegal interrogation methods are held accountable for their actions. I can understand Obama's decision to "assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

After all, prosecuting individual operatives for these actions would be both time-intensive and not at all a way to get at the root of the problem. So I sincerely hope that the rumors are true, and neither Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder's statements on the matter close the door on going after those people truly responsible for these reprehensible techniques. Obama specifically said:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

If he's just talking about the individual CIA agents, fine, but I would have to vehemently disagree that "nothing will be gained" by properly investigating and, if need be (and I suspect there will be a great need), prosecuting those officials responsible for ordering, drafting, and justifying torture.

What a farce we'd make of the rule of law if we simply let bygones be bygones is cases as egregious as this. These memos strongly implicate those behind them of war crimes, and there can be no hope of regaining any moral authority in the world if we do not hold the appropriate people truly accountable.

Glenn Greenwald, as usual, lays it out quite well:

But the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama's to make; ultimately, it is Holder's and/or a Special Prosecutor's. More importantly, Obama can only do so much by himself. The Obama administration should, on its own, initiate criminal proceedings, but the citizenry also has responsibilities here. These acts were carried out by our Government, and if we are really as repulsed by them as we claim, then the burden is on us to demand that something be done.

You can sign a petition urging Holder to assign a Special Prosecutor for this case here.

And you can speak out against the use of torture, the tricky linguistic maneuvering used to justify certain types of torture as not really being all that bad (I'd like to see Cheney volunteer for a nice waterboarding session), and allowing those responsible to get off scot-free.

If we're going to bother having standards in this country, why not do everything we can to hold to them?

(photo courtesy remuz [Jack the Ripper] on Flickr)

Disproportionate force

While I was performing my own news dump last Friday, the government was up to some of its own, releasing a bipartisan report on detainee abuses and torture policies at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. And boy howdy, it sure doesn't pull any punches. Researched and compiled by the Senate Armed Forces Committee (including John McCain) and released without a single dissent, the report makes clear that "top officials" in the Bush White House were responsible for the reprehensible techniques used on prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.

"Senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," said the report's 19-page unclassified executive summary. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

...

The Senate report traces the abuses to a Feb. 7, 2002, Bush memo that declared that international law on the treatment of war prisoners embodied in the 1949 Geneva Convention didn't apply to al Qaida or to the Taliban. (emphasis mine)

The report goes on to name Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers (the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) - but this indication that the torture policies originated in a memo signed by President Bush himself is really the icing on this shit cake.

Some may call the report too little, too late, but I'm firmly of the opinion that so long as justice is done, it's never too late. What remains, now, is seeing that justice is done, which means holding the incoming Obama administration and justice officials accountable for making that happen. We've got the research, the evidence, and the official report that states, in no uncertain terms, that officials right up to the president were responsible for a massive breach of trust and violation of international laws. They must be held responsible and punished accordingly. Whether that means jail time or a lifetime of community service is up to judges, but something should be done.

Not only were their actions and policies morally reprehensible, but so too were the effects that such policies had on the United States' reputation abroad. I was glad to see that the report addressed this very problem: "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Much of what the report has to say is what many people have suspected all along, but it's good to see it laid out in a solid, official medium. Now it's time to follow up. One of the many methods we need to employ to regain our stature and respect in the international community is to show a willingness to bring the bad actors in our ranks to justice. Instead of shrugging our shoulders and letting it all be bygones, we need to demonstrate our understanding of just how heinous these actions were, and that we are working to make sure it never happens again.

It should have been easily avoidable. The torture and harsh interrogation methods condemned in the report were "based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions from captured American prisoners and adapted for use against U.S. detainees." How is it that that didn't raise any red flags (no pun intended)?

Andrew Sullivan has several good posts about this topic, in which he also questions those people who defended the techniques and charts the "intellectual collapse" of the American conservative movement as it related to that defense. He goes on to say:

When conservatism abandoned core values of American decency in favor of pure force, exemplified by torture techniques designed by Communists and Nazis, then it ceased to be conservative in the sense that Burke or Hayek or Oakeshott or Kirk would begin to understand. And watching the intellectual dishonesty of the right on this issue in the last few years has been a watershed for me. It has been, in my judgment, one long, awful surrender of truth to power.

And that's the crux of it: one long, awful surrender of truth to power. Something we, as Americans, were supposed to have long ago learned to be ever vigilant about preventing. Yet here we are. Fear and power prove themselves potent forces, once again.

This issue will likely (unfortunately) pop up time and time again, but I strongly suspect that a good way to prepare ourselves and deal with it more effectively in the future is to actually hold those responsible accountable, really accountable, instead of allowing their abuses to recede into the history books.

We also need to be better about demanding more immediate answers and explanations from our elected officials as these things happen, so that they're not allowed to go on as long as these policies did. We must not take their clever, 15-second soundbites at face value, but instead dig deeper until we get to the core of things. We must find a balance between expecting the best from our politicians and officers, and remaining rightfully skeptical of the official accounting of events.

Then maybe we stand a chance of attaining some real measure of equality and justice in this country, even if it is 232+ years better late than never.

EDIT TO ADD: Reliably so, Wisco over at the Griper Blade has an interesting take on the report. He's a little more cynical than me, but I can't says as I blames him.

The good news for Oct. 15, 2008

Apologies in advance, as most of what I've linked here is actually pretty negative news, or at best, a case of schadenfreude. Still, I think these are all rather important and/or interesting pieces of news and commentary, so I hope you'll take a look.

Also, happy UN Global Handwashing Day! Now, go wash your damn hands (but be sure to use regular, non-antibacterial soap, eh?)!

• [LA Times] A remarkably comprehensive and honest look at the current GOP generated hubbub over ACORN and bogus voter registrations. Bottom line: ACORN is not the bogey-man so many on the right-wing have made it out to be.
• [Portfolio] A great, understandable-to-laymen-like-me look at what credit derivatives are, where they came from, and how they've contributed to the current economic mess.
• [ABC News] How is this not a bigger headline? White House memos specifically condoning CIA torture methods, including waterboarding, have been officially confirmed. Hello, outrage?
• [New York Magazine] Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone puts the IM smackdown on Byron York of the National Review over the sources of the credit crisis.
  

War Criminals R Us

Our President, and many of his top advisers and officials, should be tried for war crimes. Period.

I can't believe I didn't hear about this story until yesterday, especially since it originally broke on Friday. But instead of reporting on this massively important revelation, the news media seem content to go nuts with the "Obama said some stuff about small town America!" line that Clinton and McCain are currently trumpeting.

George W. Bush, President of these United States, admitted to being fully aware of and supporting top level meetings held to discuss torture policy and techniques. If the Watergate break-in and cover-up was enough to start impeachment proceedings against Nixon, how is this not enough to do, at the very least, the same thing to Bush? Beyond impeachment, these admitted torture techniques are illegal under international law. They're called war crimes.

From the ABC article:

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

The reason the administration is so cocky about all of this is that they lined up several crony lawyers to justify the policies. John Yoo would be case-and-point. Yoo is the charming fellow who apparently failed to pay attention while in law school, as he went on to author several memos, on behalf of the Justice Department, that made extremely shaky, fallacious arguments in favor of the torture techniques so desperately desired by the CIA and the Bush administration.

It should be noted that these memos were later rescinded by the Justice Department (after Yoo departed), but not before countless detainees were subjected to the harsh methods approved by them. Several of these detainees died as a direct result.

But Bush will happily defend things like waterboarding, even though it was for this same offense that Japanese and German officers were tried and convicted after World War II, and even though the United States has long been a signatory to the Third Geneva Convention, which explicitly forbids the torture of POWs.

In the interview with ABC News Friday, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM.

"We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew."

The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."

Those "legal opinions that enabled" them to do those things were memos like the one authored by Yoo, memos so egregious in scope that they were later rescinded and roundly criticized by legal scholars the world over.

Jack Goldsmith, who took over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the two memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."

Apparently, though, the president desired and got unlimited powers in "time of war" - something that has always been and should remain completely unconstitutional.

The counter argument usually goes something like this: "What if there's a bomb about to go off in the middle of a crowded city in about an hour, and we have the person responsible for it in custody? We need to know where it is so we can disarm it, but the suspect won't talk unless we use some of these techniques."

Outside of the television show "24", though, when does this ever actually happen? Pretty much never. Beyond that, the validity of confessions obtained through torture has been questioned and debunked time and time again. When someone's subjecting you to unimaginably horrible mental and physical pain, you're extremely prone to telling them what you think they want to hear in order to have that pain end.

These forced and often false confessions sometimes lead to the unfounded imprisonment, torture and even death of innocent people.

In the end, my main question is this: when did the climate in this country change to such a degree that we're even debating something like this? Torture is torture is torture. We, as a country, are supposed to be well above such methods. There should be no excuse, no loophole, no explaining away of the terrible shit we've been pulling in the name of "national security." Smarter, more experienced and well-trained people than I will tell you, and have been telling us for quite some time, that there are better, more humane and more effective means of gathering valuable intelligence and protecting our citizens.

Yet these voices go relatively unheard and ignored by an administration that has clearly demonstrated, time and time again, that it has no regard for national or international law, human rights, or even basic human decency.

War criminals.

These people and their disgusting ideas are a blight on our nation. How we can be more focused on some perceived Obama gaffe instead of the admission by Bush that he knew about and approved of these torture strategy meetings, I simply don't understand. I am offended as an American citizen and as a human being.

It's time to buy some plane tickets to the Hague.


(h/t Letter from Here)