1 Boring Old Man

The Torture Report
Published: December 17, 2008

^{Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.}

^{It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy. The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.}

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^{That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment. These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive…}

^{These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary. Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”}

^{We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.}

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^{Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step…}

^{We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law. That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.}

^{A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.}

Well, this couple of months between the election and the inauguration feels like the Purgatory of my childhood worries. It’s just taking forever. And each day brings some new gloomy news – something else that needs to be dealt with yesterday, that is just sitting there gathering grime. Blagojevich, Madoff, the Consumer Price Index, Unemployment, Auto Companies tanking, Deflation – where do they find all this stuff? Every Index is going the wrong direction. But to me, the worst has been Bush and Cheney coming out of their campaign hiding doing nasty things, or singing their own praises on their of magical legacy tour. Even pretty Dana Perino shows up with a black eye and does the same thing. Seems like at least Dana could stop with the party line already. Purgatory, that’s what it feels like, Purgatory. It feels like being obsessed with watching  apples rot, unable to leave  the shed. These are the longest months ever.

There are, however, a few substantive things happening here in the Purgatory that have promise. I posted one below, Henry Waxman’s persistence about the sixteen word big lie in Bush’s 2003 SOTUS. I don’t know what will come of it, but  at least that lie is being clarified. In my mind, his probe is the antecdote to some of the outrageous gibberish Bush seems determined to say about how swell he’s going to look to the historians. And the article above, as grim as the topic, paradoxically perks me up. The New York Times is actually pushing Obama and Holder to deal with the shameful Torture Policy of the Bush Administration, and pointing at the right people. This is the same paper that was publishing the absolutely ridiculous fabricated articles by Judith Miller six years ago that were used to send us off to war – articles about bombs and germs from professional liar Iraqi exiles. This is the paper that went to sleep for a few years. I can’t blame them too much – their offices aren’t that far from Ground Zero, and I expect the lot of them were badly shaken. But it’s good to have the paper back where it needs to be.