1 Boring Old Man

What Torture Never Told Us
New York Times
By ALI H. SOUFAN
September 5, 2009

PUBLIC bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism. The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter [materials found on detainees when they were captured], from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive. Soon after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in 2003, according to the 2005 memo, he “elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow Airport.” The memo speculates that he may have assumed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow member of Al Qaeda who had been captured in 2002, had already divulged the plan. The same motivation — the assumption that another detainee had already talked — is offered to explain why Mr. Mohammed provided details about the Hambali-Southeast Asia Qaeda network.

Mr. Mohammed must have likewise assumed that his interrogators already had the details about Al Qaeda’s organizational structure that he gave them. When I testified in the trial of Salim Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver, I provided many unclassified details about Al Qaeda’s structure and operations, none of which came from Mr. Mohammed…

A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out. Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him…

The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the C.I.A. operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do. The inspector general then conducted an internal audit of the entire program. In his report, he questions the effectiveness of the harsh techniques that were authorized. And he slams the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques.” This is probably why the enhanced interrogation program was shelved in 2005. Meanwhile, the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.

In the field, Soufan said it wasn’t going to work. He also said, "We don’t do that!" Now he says over and over that what former Vice President Cheney says ["Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States."] is not true. from Soufan, "… released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism."

or this senior U.S. intelligence official…

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link
McClatchy Newspapers
By Jonathan S. Landay
April 21, 2009

… A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed]) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder," he continued. "Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA … and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said…

White House Adviser Van Jones Resigns Amid Controversy Over Past Activism
Washington Post
By Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornblut
September 5, 2009

White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned Saturday after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.

 

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

He continued: "I have been inundated with calls – from across the political spectrum – urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration…

Cheney’s Tortured Logic
He wants to redefine the Constitution.
Newsweek
by Jonathan Alter
September 4, 2009

Dick Cheney is in retirement, a cable nuisance but not a political threat to President Obama—unless there’s another terrorist attack. In that case, Cheney will no doubt cast himself as a sagebrush prophet whose vicious slurs against the president [he’s "soft" and not protecting America] were vindicated by events. Unless Obama can go seven and a half years without some kind of attack, he’ll need a more muscular way to rebut the former vice president’s calumnies. The U.S. is using pilotless drones [soon to outnumber aircraft in the Air Force] to kill as many Qaeda operatives as possible. If Obama whacks Osama, will Cheney finally shut up?

Probably not, for this is a man who is attempting to do more than win a historical argument and poison any potential jury pool. He’s seeking nothing less than a redefinition of the Constitution and the rule of law. The stakes are high. If the Cheney view prevails, it will give comfort to human-rights abusers everywhere, help terrorist recruitment, harm U.S. foreign policy, and set back the prosecution of terrorists by giving defense attorneys more grounds on which to get their clients acquitted.

Two words jumped out at me from Cheney’s Fox News interview last week. Chris Wallace asked, "So even in those cases where they [CIA interrogators] went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it?" Cheney answered, "I am." That unadorned "I am" was terrifying. Cheney was saying that certain ends justify criminal means. This is a deeply antidemocratic and authoritarian notion. Why even create his bogus legal authorization for "enhanced interrogation techniques" [a way to get around U.S. laws banning torture] if it could be disregarded without consequence?

Even if torture worked, it wouldn’t be justified. And it’s not clear that it does. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, apparently provided some useful information about that plot after he was waterboarded. According to The Washington Post, he also fingered as many as 70 other terrorists. But KSM, like anyone being tortured, lied to stop the pain. Following bogus leads from tortured detainees wastes precious time, as many interrogators have testified. The recently declassified Justice Department memos include a 2004 report from the CIA inspector general that found no conclusive proof that any specific "imminent" threats had been thwarted by information gleaned from waterboarding and other forms of torture. Cheney’s claim that torture was "absolutely essential" in saving thousands of American lives is unproven. And if there was proof, don’t you think he would do everything he could to publicize it?…

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky – a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made [or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim]. Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).

Of course these current attacks are ridiculous, but , but this one takes the cake. And they’re so loud with these antics, I suppose it makes us think that everyone on the right is this crazy. That’s not fair, anymore that their conflating Obama with the SDS and the Weathermen is fair.

Sanford says he told ‘a little white lie’
God is on his side

^{Gov. Mark Sanford says he told "a little white lie" to his staff to conceal his secret trip to Argentina in June to visit his lover. The governor also says God is on his side, and he has no intentions of resigning. Sanford, in an interview published Tuesday in The Washington Times, said he is disappointed no House Republicans offered to support his bid to save his job in a meeting last week in Myrtle Beach.}

^{But Sanford also said he will fight to stick around, even as members of the General Assembly expect a bill to be filed to impeach Sanford when lawmakers reconvene in January…}

^{Sanford told the Times he would continue to fight for conservative causes and for "what God wanted me to do with my life." Sanford has been under fire since secretly leaving the state for five days in June, during which his staff was unsure of his whereabouts. For days, Sanford’s staff could not reach him. Sanford was met by a reporter at an Atlanta airport returning from Argentina. Sanford had told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He later admitted to an extramarital affair with an Argentinean woman.}

^{Sanford has been defending himself during twin probes into his travel expenses and disclosures, one conducted by the S.C Ethics Commission and one by Sen. David Thomas, R-Greenville. Sanford compared the probes to the inquiries that essentially forced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin out of office.}

• "I didn’t inhale…"
• "I did not have sex with that woman…"
• John McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby…
• Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda on 9/11…
• Iraq has weapons of mass destruction…
• “… Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
• Joseph Wilson was sent on a "boon-doggle" by his wife…
• "We don’t Torture…"
• "The Surge worked!"
• Obama is a Moslem, Communist, Socialist, Fascist, Racist…

When you get in trouble and you don’t know right from wrong
Give a little whistle! Give a little whistle!
When you meet temptation and the urge is very strong
Give a little whistle! Give a little whistle!

Take the straight and narrow path
And if you start to slide
Give a little whistle! Give a little whistle!
And always let your conscience be your guide

First They Did Harm
Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
September 4, 2009

For the Bush administration, torture was a delicate business. The aim was to injure but not incapacitate – to inflict precisely enough pain and terror to break a subject’s will, but no more. To calibrate the proper degree of abuse, the torturer needed an accurate sense of how much agony the subject’s mind and body can tolerate. In the administration’s program of "enhanced interrogation," this expertise was provided by doctors and psychologists – professionals who are supposed to heal and comfort. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights assembles the evidence and reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: "Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture"…

The interrogation program – using 11 abusive "enhanced" techniques, including waterboarding – was designed by two PhD psychologists. The techniques, according to a statement released in April by American Psychological Association President James H. Bray, "are tantamount to torture as defined by APA and international law." Said the APA: "The central tenet of psychology’s code of ethics is, like that of medicine, to do no harm. It is unthinkable that any psychologist could assert that stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, exploiting phobias, and waterboarding — along with other forms of torture techniques that the American Psychological Association has condemned and prohibited — cause no lasting damage to a human being’s psyche." According to Bray, "There is one ethical response to an order to torture: Disobey the order."

We know that medical doctors were asked to sign off on the "enhanced" techniques. We know from detainees themselves, as quoted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, that there was medical monitoring of waterboarding sessions. We know from the CIA inspector general’s report that a 2004 letter from a Justice Department official reauthorizing the use of waterboarding specified a maximum of two two-hour sessions per day, with both a doctor and a psychologist present… The American Medical Association’s code of ethics "forcefully states medicine’s opposition to torture or coercive interrogation and prohibits physician participation in such activities," according to a letter AMA officials sent President Obama in April. AMA guidelines state that "physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation," and that doctors "must not monitor interrogations with the intention of intervening in the process, because this constitutes direct participation"…

Doctors and psychologists might have been able to prevent this whole shameful episode by refusing to participate. Instead, professionals who were trained in the healing arts used their experience and skill in a way that facilitated harm. They played a vital role in enabling torture. I like to believe that some psychologists and physicians took a stand and said no. As for those who said yes, the law should hold them accountable – just as conscience, one hopes, is already doing.

• "The interrogation program – using 11 abusive ‘enhanced’ techniques, including waterboarding – was designed by two PhD psychologists." I don’t care if it was designed by Salad Chefs or Rodeo Riders – whomever designed it should be held accountable.
• "We know that medical doctors were asked to sign off on the ‘enhanced’ techniques. We know from detainees themselves, as quoted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, that there was medical monitoring of waterboarding sessions." This one gives me something of a headache. When I got inducted into the service during the Viet Nam War, I pondered this one. As I thought it was a wrong war, what should I do? As a non-combatant physician, I wouldn’t be asked to fight or kill, just to take care of injured soldiers. As I mused  about whether to refuse to go or to go take care of our troops, I got an assignment to Europe instead. Relieved, I never had to decide and had a fine time in Europe. In retrospect, I think I would’ve probably gone, and been haunted for the rest of my life that I went, in part, to avoid the stigma of refusing. Is monitoring these techniques similar? – without monitoring the Torture might have been much worse. I think that’s a rationalization. Robinson is right. They should’ve said "No."

^{ht to FDL}