1 Boring Old Man

This is a difficult time to keep up with the Torture Debate. It’s getting into the details and the connections and timelines become a blurry mass of memos and stories. At the end of this post, there’s a roster of the high value detainees for reference with capture dates and links to their biographies [see also emptywheel‘s timeline].

There’s nothing pretty about this story. This is a fairly virulent group for the most part. I’m actually impressed that we caught so many of them. But our part is pretty unsavory too. If they weren’t POW’s, then they were criminals, but they were treated as neither. Now they have been tortured in foreign prisons so that bringing them to trial is sticky.

In my mind, there are two distinct threads to this story. First, many of these "detainees" Are lethal actors.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed apparently masterminded 9/11 and many of the other al Qaeda bombings, with his aid, al-Hasawi. It’s hard to know exactly what he did because he changes his story frequently, but apparently he’s been identified by plenty of others to have played a central role in things. Ibn Sheik al-libi and Abu Zubaydah were both trainers at the al Qaeda Terrorist Camps and involved in planning attacks on their own. Mohamed Mani Ahmad al-Kahtani, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were candidates for the 9/11 20th highjacker position, but couldn’t get into the country.There were others who are accused of direct involvement in the al Qaeda bombings. They don’t seem like Prisoners of War. The seem like mass criminals, whether driven by religious fanaticism or other sadistic personal motives. To my way of understanding our laws, they seem like criminals.

• Our International Agreements and our own laws prohibit the use of torture.
• Our International Agreements and our own laws grant the rights of habeas corpus,  due process, and a fair trial to anyone accused of a crime.
• The Legal decisions used to justify torture and the suspension of rights were obtained in secret, and rendered by a biased tribunal [of one or two people] in consultation with the very people who wanted the decisions.
• There was either no oversight or inadequate oversight throughout.
• By every artifice, the government evaded our own laws by sending these detainees to overseas CIA Sites or to countries that tortured them for us – both being crimes under our own and International Law.
• Torture doesn’t work. It extracts false confessions [it always has].
• We had interrogation techniques that were time honored and effective that did not step over the legal lines.
• The use of torture makes the ultimate task of bringing these men to justice in a courtroom either very hard or impossible.
• This behavior is antithetical to the American and UN standards of human rights.
• It is very possible that zeal in interrogation was motivated to get confirmation of untruths that would justify our pre-emptive, unprovoked war with Iraq – again running counter to American policy.
• We responded to the primitive and uncivilized attack on our country by taking the bait and behaving in a primitive and uncivilized manner.

Simply put – it was a massive mistake. It was a criminal mistake, one that was covered up by the 9/11 Commission, one that lead us into a disastrous War. As it plays out, these men will become better know to us. Here’s the roster: