Rest of world turns as usual

It's been all Honduras here for the last month because for once I feel I can actually contribute something by blogging. I'm no expert, but fifteen years of Central American solidarity work and my (weak, weak) Spanish still put me far ahead of many people likely to be mildly interested but unable or uninclined to seek out information. Connecting with posters who are experts in one way or another, and who're using their skills to provide a solid alternative to the superficial and zombie-lie-filled old media, reminds me that another world is possible.

But maybe, reader, you're looking for an update on how our own democracy continues to be threatened by an out-of-control military in a permanent-war national security mindset, impunity for torture, and an overweening oligarchy. A Lovely Promise is here to serve:

- Peaceful and law-abiding people and organizations continue to be massively spied on by the U.S. military and "fusion centers" that connect the military with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and completely unregulated, unaccountable private database contractors.

- U.S. troops are never going to leave Iraq. The ones who've come home are assaulting and killing other people and themselves, and those who stay alive and out of jail are heading off to that other war. Which is unwinnable and on its way to becoming permanently unpopular.

- No one who ordered or had command responsibility for torture (always illegal) is going to be prosecuted. At most, cases might be brought against some more scapegoats, underlings who went beyond what was "authorized" (impossibly, illegally) in spurious opinions written by Justice and Defense Dept. lawyers.

- Corporate rule of our politics and media means that the very best we can hope for in the way of health care reform is the House bill, H.R. 3200. And it sucks.

- The banks and financial companies own us. That very much includes Pres. Obama, who's helping to keep us from being able to see what's being done with the trillions we've handed over to them.

But there are occasional bright spots: Mohammed Jawad, who was twelve when U.S. soldiers took him prisoner in 2002, has been ordered to be freed next month and returned home to Afghanistan, won't face charges there, and probably won't face U.S. criminal charges (in part because much of the "evidence" against him was produced by torture). Huzzah! [Hat tip Gary Farber]
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Pull the other one.

Pres. Obama's getting cold feet about releasing long-withheld images of U.S. torture. [Update: Decision made.] The excuse he gives insults our intelligence:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters yesterday that President Obama has "great concern" about the impact that releasing the photos would have on soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asked whether the Justice Department's decision might be reversed, Gibbs declined to reaffirm the government's intentions.

"Great concern about the impact on troops?" Brotha, puhleeze. He's worried about the impact on the U.S. public, half of which is already far more interested in accountability for torture than he is, and the other half unwilling or unable to conceive of U.S. torture unless shown pictures.


He's worried about the impact on the Senate confirmation of Lt.Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who led a network of torture and assassination squads in Iraq until last year, as commander in Afghanistan. Many members of McChrystal's dirty-war task forces are still in the field in both countries, and probably Pakistan. They were told by Army JAGs that the abuse and torture of prisoners was legal, given a directive that said they were allowed to use torture techniques forbidden to regular soldiers, assured repeatedly that they'd be protected by higher-ups from being held responsible for their actions, and when a little investigative heat was applied, managed to scuttle it by the convenient destruction of computer files.

It's sickening to see Obama try to justify illegal secrecy by hiding behind the troops in just the way Bush used to do. It's even more appalling to see him not only do nothing to hold torture commanders accountable, but promote them.

Update: 1:00 pm, 14 May - Guest poster Neel Krishnaswami at Unqualified Offerings wonders if the connection between the photos and McChrystal is even more direct.

Update 2: 1:05 pm, 14 May - Revised and expanded version cross-posted at A Tiny Revolution.
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Where is Hassan Ghul?

We don't torture.

And we certainly don't remove captured prisoners of war from an active theater to a secret prison and never account for their whereabouts.

That's 'disappearing', something that we just don't do.
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It takes all kinds.

Throughout my life, I've had the experience of bridging different 'worlds'. It started young, when we lived in Bavaria for a year. Immersed through attendance at a Catholic nursery school, I quickly became fluent in the local dialect, and acted as interpreter, linguistic and cultural, for my mother; at school I was a little ambassador for Amerika. Once back home in a community sharply divided between college town and agricultural county, I was part of a tiny minority of town-centric students in my county school. I was the only child at Sunday school or in my Brownie troop to stick up for county kids -- my neighborhood and school friends -- when townies made redneck jokes. I was also the only member of the 4-H club to do my exhibit project on ornamental hollies...

Later on, as an LBJ-liberal southerner at a northern Quaker high school divided internally between 'jocks' and 'artsy-craftsies', I was unusual in having friends in both camps. As I got involved in political work, it seemed I was always the radical among liberals or the moderate among radicals. Bridging the gulf between election-focused and movement activists has been a long-standing tension.

This lifetime of straddling has sharpened my ability to see the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and the usefulness of having a variety of approaches overall.

That said, I find myself lately at a low ebb in my appreciation for "process liberals." Familiarity gained by yoking myself to them over the last seven years in the broad anti-Bush/Cheney coalition has inevitably bred a bit of contempt.

Human rights, specifically the issue of torture, is what brought me into political work and continues to motivate me. The record of just who stood up for what principles and when over the last fifteen years has been instructive. Those who didn't shrink from voicing their darkest suspicions early on out of concern for being thought unreasonable or "reflexive America-haters" were proved right, and quickly. Those who stepped up to take on the cases of people accused of terrorism when doing so was beyond unpopular -- considered treasonous, even -- have my undying respect.

I trimmed my own sails for several months after September 2001, trying to see things from the centrists' view well enough to make myself effective in communicating to them the wrongness of wars of choice and of endless, lawless, unreviewable detention. I've not only used pragmatic arguments but tried to help others learn when and how to make them. But for some time now, an inner Nell has been curling her lip and saying, "Fvck that noise."

Which brings me to Clive Stafford-Smith and Reprieve.

Stafford Smith's career m.o. involves publicity and showboating, but always for a point, and to good purpose. I don't doubt that his actions sometimes make other Guantanamo lawyers wince. But without someone with his chutzpah, we'd be much more in the dark than we are about the crimes committed by the U.S. and U.K. authorities and their accomplice states. In a system of lawless dictatorship and Catch-22 -- the system in which the prison at Guantanamo was established, and from which it has yet to break free -- there has to be a Yossarian or two.

Hilzoy (of Obsidian Wings and Washington Monthly), someone who exemplifies the best and the most maddening qualities of process liberals, posted this back in February:

[Binyam] Mohamed's lawyer has alleged that DoD officials censored a letter that he sent to Barack Obama about what his client had gone through. His evidence seems to be that he got a redacted copy of the letter back. ... does it sound plausible that some DoD official could have blacked out these pages in order to keep Obama from seeing them and succeeded? The President can see any classified information he wants. And if I were trying to prevent him from seeing something, handing him a letter with two pages blacked out would not be my method of choice.

In comments to that post I responded:

Good on Clive Stafford [Smith] for publicizing the Kafka-esque redaction of his own client's [history]. By posing the question of whether the information in it was kept from Obama, he implictly raises the serious issue of Obama's obligations should he become undeniably aware of what was done to Mohamed at the behest of the U.S. government.

Now the Pentagon's privilege review team has confirmed my reading of their purpose in redacting the memo (to give Obama plausible deniability of the knowledge of the U.S. crimes), by retaliating against Stafford Smith for publishing it:

Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed face the incredible prospect of a six-month jail sentence in America after writing a letter to President Obama detailing their client's allegations of torture by US agents.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of legal charity Reprieve, and his colleague Ahmed Ghappour have been summoned to appear before a Washington court on May 11 after a complaint was made by the privilege review team ... [who] argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of "unprofessional conduct".

There are significant differences among Guantanamo defense lawyers in their adherence to the letter and spirit of the rules laid down by the Department of Defense. But I imagine that even those lawyers who've been most circumspect about complying would agree that the rules and the enforcement of them by the privilege review team have been arbitrary, punitive, petty, and abusive over the last seven years. Granting the lawless jailers legitimacy at all is a grim necessity of functioning as a lawyer in such a repressive system; giving them the benefit of the doubt and attributing decent motivations to them means being played for a fool.

Thanks be for seriously un-foolish jesters like Clive Stafford Smith. He deserves support and gratitude, not sniffy diffidence.
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Cross-posted to A Tiny Revolution

Torture: It's not about "intelligence gathering"

One of the most persistent and discouraging themes that crops up in discussions of torture is the question of whether it "works" or not. The people engaging this question make a fatally wrong assumption: that the goal of torturers is the same as that of legitimate interrogators -- to get reliable information useful for active, circumscribed military operations or police investigations.

But torture does something else altogether, and is designed to do so: it extracts false confessions. These confessions, along with the agony of the torture itself, serve the goals of limitless, lawless "war": to humiliate and break opponents, to divide them from supporters, to terrify those not actively in opposition into staying inactive, and, most importantly, to justify the operations of the dirty war within which torture takes place: commando raids, assassinations, spying, kidnaping, secret and/or indefinite (and unreviewable) detention, and further torture.

The mistaken assumption that those in the previous administration who set the torture policy were motivated solely by an urgent need for information has several other bad effects. It reinforces the absurd ticking-bomb hypothetical that allows so many people to justify torture to themselves. It provides a noble-sounding excuse for the officials who promoted torture, making it harder for citizens to muster the will to hold them legally accountable for their crimes: "They were just trying to keep the country safe."

The euphemism of "enhanced interrogation" for torture was chosen by both the Nazis and the Bush-Cheney regime exactly because of its propaganda value in reinforcing this false picture: It's just legitimate questioning that goes a little further. An error of enthusiasm, if you will. An understandable mistake, a policy difference that we sure don't want to criminalize, looking backward with our 20-20 hindsight.

But, as useful as these effects are to the torturing regime, the most important role of the spurious linkage with intelligence-gathering and interrogation is as a screen: It hides the role of torture in creating and expanding the dirty war itself.

The Principals knew by mid-2002 that the vast majority of prisoners they were holding in Guantanamo and elsewhere had no meaningful connection to terror attacks against the U.S., past or planned. But they had a global "war on terror" to pump up. That "war" was vital not only for promoting the long-planned assault on Iraq, but for expanding executive power, cowing political opposition, and maintaining enough of a threat level in the public mind to make voters reluctant to change parties in the next several rounds of elections.

So the torture regime was set in motion and migrated to all the prisons in the dirty war: not just the dozens of CIA secret prisons, but Bagram, Guantanamo, and the many military and secret prisons in Iraq. Statements extracted under torture from a few prisoners could suffice to justify the continued detention of hundreds of others simply by being inserted into the uncontestable list of charges against them. People could be picked up, shipped off to cooperating torturers in Morocco and Syria and Egypt, and the results trumpeted as foiled terror plots to forestall Congressional questions, round up still other men, convince judges to quash lawsuits by asserting that state secrets would be endangered, and feed allies information to justify their own involvement in the dirty war. In Iraq, the process spun into a perpetual motion machine of raids, imprisonment, and "questioning", leading to further raids and captures, as well as the bombing and mortaring of purported "enemy safe houses."

The prolonged failure at Guantanamo to gather the evidence against prisoners into even minimally professional, reviewable form for prosecution was a big red flag that those in charge knew there was no real evidence to be had. The 2005 destruction of the tapes of the CIA's sessions with Abu Zubaydah and Al-Nasiri was intended to hide not their torture, which was well known to the Principals who authorized it in detail, but the way in which the "intelligence" about other "terror plots" was fed to the prisoners through the process rather than originating from them.

The origins of the occupations and wars in which we're now mired are almost completely phony; only the costs are real. They were ginned up to their current scale by the use of torture and the resulting "intelligence." The human, material, political, and propaganda investment up to now makes it all but impossible for those in power to admit to the phoniness at the roots of each conflict.

This self-justifying, self-multiplying quality is inherent to torture. It's poison that seeps everywhere if it's allowed anywhere. That's why the Convention Against Torture prohibits it absolutely -- in all cases, for any reason. That's why jurisdiction is universal. Torture is a grave crime against humanity because of the violence it does not only to the person tortured but also to the society in which it takes place.

Cross-posted at A Tiny Revolution

Update: 17 April, 10:00 am - Valtin makes an important contribution to the thoughtful comments below, and in slightly longer form at his blog (which should be a regular stop for anyone concerned with this issue). I've responded in comments there.
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Evidence in the public domain

This is my favorite passage from the letter* calling on the Obama administration to appoint a special counsel to investigate for prosecution those responsible for U.S. torture:

We see no need for these prosecutions to be extraordinarily lengthy or costly, and no need to wait for the recommendations of a panel or "truth" commission when substantial evidence of the crimes is already in the public domain.

A new article by Mark Danner puts possibly the most substantial piece of evidence yet in the public domain, the Red Cross report of the accounts of what prisoners experienced in CIA "black sites" before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The accounts are chilling and detailed. The report notes that the strong similarities in the accounts by 14 prisoners who had had no contact with each other before speaking to the Red Cross, down to small details, add to their credibility.

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*More than a hundred organizations have now signed on. Perhaps your local bar association or other concerned group would be interested in joining the effort.
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Plus ça change

Torture continues at Guantanamo. Fifty prisoners on hunger strike are being strapped down and force fed. They are also being beaten and abused as they are "extracted" from their cells.

No prisoners have been released, even those, like Binyam Mohamed, against whom charges have been dismissed and who have been cleared for release for months. The only reason why Binyam Mohamed is not on his way back to England now is that the U.K. and U.S. governments want to silence his potential testimony about torture.

In furtherance of that end, the Obama Justice Department has today maintained with no change at all the Bush administration's claim of 'state secrets' privilege to block accountability for rendition to torture in a suit in which Mohamed is the lead plaintiff. ACLU spokespeople are disappointed and shocked. I am only disappointed. And disgusted.

If you know nothing about force feeding and prison hunger strikes, your mental health is no doubt the better for it, but there's a significant gap in your grasp of political history. This article provides some context. This interview with al-Jazeera journalist Sami El-Hajj a few months after his release this past May after more than six years of imprisonment and torture, makes it impossible to find excuses for the new custodian of the torture regime.

Update: 7:30 pm, 10 February - Thanks to the Military Commissions Act, U.S. judges cannot affect the conditions under which Guantanamo prisoners are held. So one has just ruled that she cannot stop the force feedings, leaving it up to the Obama administration. As I said, there are no excuses for the new custodian. Disturbingly, Judge Kessler also said

even if she had authority to consider the case, she would not have stopped the force feeding process because the government’s actions do not violate an established legal standard.

Update 2: 2:15 pm, 15 February - The new administration is either very far from having established control of the prison, or they are affirming that they have the same understanding of "humane" treatment as the Bush regime.

A letter from the ACLU on the issue of force feeding was answered by the Bush holdover in the Defense Department who is still in charge of detainee affairs. Written after the Obama executive orders were issued, it reads in exactly the same way as it would have if Bush and Cheney were still in charge.

Reporting on Guantanamo is sketchy at best, due to the difficulties of access. The Miami Herald's reporting has been consistently the most detailed, but contains no sign that Obama's choice for new commander of the base has taken over nor any indication when he will. Apparently, the visit of the Navy's second-ranking admiral last week was something in the nature of advance work.
I see no sign of any broom being taken to the operation, and am growing less and less optimistic than anything will change for the prisoners as a result of the review now happening.

Update 3: 4:30 pm, 20 February - Finally, something to cheer. Binyam Mohamed may be released to Britain as soon as Monday. White House Counsel Greg Craig was at the prison this week. Privately, a lawyer recently at the prison says that conditions have improved somewhat, though not enough, for prisoners; he's forbidden to go into details.

Another extremely easy-to-accomplish release would be that of the 17 Uighurs, who were just failed by the D.C. Circuit court of appeals. It's solely up to the executive branch, apparently. Call the White House and urge their release (background here). Although VP Biden said in the first week in office that he doesn't expect that any prisoners will be released to the U.S., the reality is that, partly due to threats from China, there is no other country that will accept the Uighurs. There are communities here ready to take them. If we do not accept some men released from Guantanamo, it will be that much harder to expect other countries to do so.

Image: drawing by Lewis Peake based on censored drawings of Sami El-Hajj, originally published by Reprieve and reproduced by Andy Worthington, whose site and book are definitive sources for information on Guantanamo prisoners.
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"That word 'example'...

...I do not think it means what you think it means."

Scott Horton has been a clear, principled, and authoritative voice against torture and other high crimes of the current administration. He's made the case unflinchingly for holding accountable those who institutionalized torture, abused the justice system for political purposes, and ordered massive domestic spying. He's earned great respect for his views.

But he's not always right. One mistake, which he's already acknowledged, was to support Michael Mukasey's confirmation as Attorney General and to give him the benefit of the doubt as he undertook that job. Horton has documented his many and deep disappointments since, concluding recently that Mukasey has shown nearly the same degree of commitment as his predecessor Gonzales to covering up the administration's abuses.

Horton is making another mistake now in his approach to accountability for torture. In this case, there's plenty of time for reconsideration before it's too late. Commenting on the recent AP story, 'Obama advisers: no charges likely vs. interrogators', he correctly warns against accepting the statements of unnamed sources as anything other than efforts to move forward those sources' agendas. Horton rightly dismisses any statements, on or off the record, about decisions in advance on the part of a not-yet-in-office Obama administration Justice Department to prosecute or not:

the bottom line is that there should be no call about prosecutions until there has been an investigation. ... In the end any prosecution would require a special prosecutor, but who should handle the threshold inquiry into whether enough [evidence] exists to appoint one?

But then he goes very wrong:

There is one clear answer, which is for President Obama to follow the example of President Ford in his dealings with allegations of intelligence community misconduct with high-level complicity that rocked the mid-seventies. He should appoint a commission to lay bare the facts, putting what the public needs to know on the record. Only then should the call about a special prosecutor be made by the attorney general. He should have the commission’s advice and findings to draw on in the process...

This is either a little joke on Horton's part, or a bizarre rewriting of the history of the Rockefeller Commission of 1975, which was widely viewed even at the time as an attempt by the Ford administration to fend off more energetic investigations by Congress and to limit disclosures of CIA wrongdoing. The attempt, moreover, was a failure; especially by comparison with the results unearthed by the Church and Pike committees during and after the commission's brief existence, its efforts amount to a classic whitewash.

But even if it had conducted an independent, wide-ranging, and thorough examination of the CIA's activities, the Rockefeller Commission has no relevance as an example for the Obama administration because it was never intended to develop evidence for weighing possible prosecution. Its explicit, public mandate was to determine whether any domestic CIA activities exceeded the Agency's statutory mandate and to make appropriate recommendations. Specifically, it was to address whether existing safeguards were adequate to prevent violations.

There was no hint that revised safeguards or corrective action might include prosecution of anyone -- the idea was very much that the administration itself would take care of any excesses, with possibly some restructuring of Congressional oversight. The closest the commission came to the subject of prosecution was in its recommendation that the administration draw up written guidelines for handling criminal allegations against Agency personnel, with the idea that these would be handled by the Justice Departmnet in consultation with the CIA (i.e., virtually giving the Agency a veto on prosecutions).

The internal objectives of the Ford administration in convening the commission were documented by the aide who encouraged Ford to form it, one Dick Cheney:

In a draft memo to the president written on 27 December, Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Cheney explained that the president had several reasons to establish such a commission: to avoid being put on the defensive, to minimize "damage" to the CIA, to head off "Congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch," to demonstrate presidential leadership, and to reestablish Americans' faith in their government. [From Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI by historian Kathryn Olmsted]

There may be a real case for a commission as the best procedure by which to gather evidence that would then provide a basis for the Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor or not. Citing the Rockefeller Commission as an example does not make that case; it undermines it. Update: 21 November, 5:10 pm - Horton makes the case for a commission more cleanly in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. End update.

Furthermore, any assessment of the best course of action open to the Obama administration has to take into account the dramatically contrasting political situations of Presidents Obama and Ford in their first year in office. A popular incoming president elected by a wide margin with a mandate for change and strong, increased majorities in both Houses of Congress who has explicitly promised to end the policy of torture and close the prison at Guantanamo, Obama is clearly counting on being given time to deal with the mess created by the previous administration's policies before facing the question of how to hold its officials accountable.

He is not facing a hostile Congress that has just exercised its power against the executive branch, but a cooperative legislature that even under an unpopular and discredited Republican administration has shown very little determination to do its own investigations into the executive branch's crimes. The focus of Obama, Congress, and the public is almost entirely elsewhere: on the down-spiraling economy, health care, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, and the narrowing window for action to avert climate and energy crises.

Much of the pressure for legal accountability is likely to come from abroad, though there are enough of us seeking it here to warm my heart.

Update 2: 24 November, 9:30 pm - TPM Cafe book club discussion of proposals for accountability, with Scott Horton, Charles Homans, Daniel Larison, Mickey Edwards, and others; start here.

[Image from Hecate's Daughter, linked above at 'warm my heart']
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Torture Awareness Month Update

Everyone's observing Torture Awareness Month in their own way.

The clique of criminals who rule us are making efforts to cover up the extent and specifics of the tortures to which prisoners at Guantanamo have been subjected, while doing so in a way that actually calls attention to the cover-up:

Urging interrogators in a printed operations manual to destroy their notes to avoid revealing torture.

Using a sound delay and mute button to prevent observers at the arraignment of five defendants in Guantanamo from hearing the men describe their treatment, while allowing several outright references to torture.

The crudeness of these evasions makes it hard for those who want to deny that a systematic policy of torture is in effect to keep up the pretense.

Carol Rosenberg's coverage for the Miami Herald of the show trials underway at Guantanamo is the best in the corporate media. Her account of the recent arraignment of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and four other defendants makes vivid the surreal, Soviet atmosphere in which prosecutors and defendants cooperated to shed the defense lawyers who might slow down the express train to judicial murder/martyrdom/permanent destruction of witnesses to torture.

Some other journalists who've already earned respect are about to mark this month by strengthening their reputation for putting the truth in front of the public. Here's a preview from one of them, John Walcott:

Next Sunday, June 15, McClatchy will begin publishing the most extensive investigation to date of the treatment of detainees, not only at Guantanamo but also at Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan. Reporters Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield tracked down and interviewed 66 former detainees -- more than any other organization, media or NGO, we think -- in 11 countries on three continents. They also interviewed former prison guards, interrogators, translators, Pentagon and administration officials, defense lawyers and Afghan intelligence and security officials to paint the most complete picture we could of who U.S. picked up, how and why, what happened to “suspected enemy combatants” and who’s responsible.

The package was overseen by the McClatchy Washington Bureau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign editor, Roy Gutman, the editor of "Crimes of War" and the author of a new book on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan before 9/11. It includes five main stories, a video, photos, numerous sidebars, the stories of all 66 former detainees and an online database.

If you don’t live in an area served by one of our papers, or even if you do, you can find the whole package at www.mcclatchydc.com starting on Sunday, June 15 and running for five days.

[A heartfelt hat tip to bmaz at Emptywheel for all the items above.]

The Supreme Court is observing Torture Awareness Month by upholding, narrowly, the principle of habeas corpus that is fundamental to preventing indefinite detention and torture: the guarantee of access to civilian federal courts to contest the basis of the detention. As Human Rights First pointed out in fighting Congress's craven passage of the habeas-stripping Military Commissions Act in September 2006, virtually everything known about the mistreatment of prisoners up to that point was made public only through the process of their habeas appeals.

The Boumediene/Al Odah decision is not as far-reaching as some had hoped, but not as narrow as some had feared. It is resoundingly Constitution-affirming. A sigh of relief, a small sip of champagne.

Speaking of affirming the Constitution, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and three co-sponsors this week made Bush's policy of torture two of the central articles of impeachment (pdf) introduced against him, along with 33 other high crimes and misdemeanors. The House Judiciary Committee has to take the next step.

So. What are you doing for Torture Awareness Month?

Update: 15 June, 2:00 pm - The McClatchy series has begun. Bless them for including photos of each of the detainees in their 'detainee database', a degree of humanization that even many sympathetic accounts have not reached.

June: Torture Awareness Month

June 26th is the International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture. In recent years the month of June has become a time in which to undertake actions to raise awareness of this country's use of torture, and to end it.

The month of June in a presidential election year presents a specifically political opportunity to help end U.S. torture: No Torture. No Exceptions. is an initiative to get both political parties to adopt comprehensive no-torture provisions as part of their platforms at this year's national conventions. The admirable Scott Horton is involved in the effort, and in my opinion makes a more effective case for it than its originators. (Whoever they are; I've guest-posted about that and my other reservations at A Tiny Revolution.)

Torture is a moral issue. Torture is wrong. These are the fundamental truths about this grave crime against humanity, no matter what other kinds of arguments have to be employed in the compromised political arena. The National Religious Coalition Against Torture and Rabbis for Human Rights are partnering to spread this message by way of banners in every state, in as many communities as possible. Get a banner for your church, synagogue, mosque, school, business, organization, or home here.

Sorta like mowin your lawn 3

The relative silence that's greeted Pres. George W. Bush's nonchalant confirmation that he authorized torture -- in the corporate media and among some biggish liberal blogs where I'd expect to see at least a reference -- has been unsettling. I'm sure they all have their reasons or excuses.

For now, an antidote is to focus on actions that can be taken, however small.

• You can support the ACLU's call for a special prosecutor.
  
  
• Thanks to tenure, John Yoo will probably not be removed from his position on the faculty of Berkeley's law school unless and until he is convicted for the crimes he committed. However, there's no issue of academic freedom surrounding his association with the U.S. Constitution Center; help end it. Via commenter James Mullin.
  
  
• The Defense Appropriations bill will be considered in the House before too long. Urge your Congressman to
  

  attach H.R. 1416 the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 repealing the portions of the Military Commissions Act which suspended habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions --- and H.R 1352 the Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act which would “prohibit the return or other transfer of persons by the United States, for the purpose of detention, interrogation, trial, or otherwise, to countries where torture or other inhuman treatment of persons occurs, and for other purposes.” [Digby, whose response to the recent revelations has been exemplary.]

  
  
• Urge ABC to follow up on their own story by asking the presidential candidates about it. [Many editors and reporters in the stenographic traditional media openly say that they won't cover issues unless members of Congress or candidates are talking about them -- that'd be "making news."] This excellent suggestion courtesy of dday:
  

  contact them here and demand that they follow up their reporting on torture by pushing it into the Presidential race. Contacting World News Tonight with moderator Charlie Gibson and ABC News Programming Specials would probably be the most helpful.

Update: 10:00 pm, 16 April - The disgraceful quality of ABC's debate questions makes clear that the above suggestion was pointless. But you can help break the silence by writing a letter or letters to your local and area newspapers. Firedoglake's gizmo makes it easy, and you'll be one of many. As you compose your less-than-200-word message, you may find inspiration in Dan Froomkin's column of a few days ago. He explains concisely why this story is new and startling.

Image: Tom Tomorrow design from June 2004, as seen on my wrinkly T-shirt. Alas, no longer available via his CafePress store.

The gang's all here

We don't have to wonder who should be on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency ...
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" tortures were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. [My editing from Orwellian to plain English in the first paragraph - Nell.]

What a surprise to see that Colin Powell took part, after all the exertions of Larry Wilkerson and other loyalists to paint him as out of the loop and shocked, shocked...
and Wilkerson Armitage, as Powell's deputy, is likely to have attended some of these sessions himself.

Wondering who was the source for this story?

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Update: 10 April, 3:00 pm - Emptywheel has a different and very plausible possibility for the source, and corrects my misunderstanding of who would have been Powell's deputy at Principals meetings. She helpfully lists all the deputies.

Update: 20 April, 3:30 pm - Cogent further post and comments at Emptywheel on the question of sourcing. Most persuasive to me are cases for Robert Mueller (FBI Director) and David Ayres, Ashcroft's chief of staff.

Torture and Democracy

I cannot recommend strongly enough Scott Horton's interview with Darius Rejali, an Iranian expatriate whose recently released book Torture and Democracy emphasizes uncomfortable truths that most Americans prefer not to face.

These include:

- Liberal democracies torture.

- Torture techniques always come home from wars "over there."

- Focusing just on waterboarding is a distraction.

- Two-track systems, in which one agency is allowed to torture and others are not, or in which it's allowable to torture some categories of people but not others, invariably spread the rot throughout the society:

...[T]orture just doesn’t hide in a vault in the CIA. It hides in all the dark pockets of society -- military barracks, schools, frat houses, our supermax prisons and immigration lockups.

And much more. Read the whole interview, and then read the book.

Nuremberg principles for thee but not for me

A federal judge rules against four British men who were tortured at Guantanamo:

Without addressing the details of the alleged treatment, the judge said the officials could not be made individually responsible for it under the terms of the suit brought against them, since they were doing their jobs.

Just following orders...

The former prisoners were also suing Donald Rumsfeld, to whom this "defense" does not apply, but we'll have to look to human rights lawyers rather than reporters to explain the actual status of this case. Via Jan at Happening Here?, the Center for Constitutional Rights relays an even more chilling part of the judge's ruling:

Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The Court also dismissed the detainees' claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants."

This may reach the Supreme Court. Let's hope the justices retain the more robust commitment to the rule of law shown by participants in the peaceful but intensely serious protests around the world marking the beginning of the seventh year of lawless indefinite detention at Guantanamo. Eighty people were arrested at the Court yesterday.

Saturday syndrome

Today's Washington Post continues the tradition, noted here before, of submerging stories that reflect poorly on our permanent national security state in the least-read edition of the week: "Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA."

Credit where credit is due -- the story's on the front page, and the subhead actually contains the magic word: "Foreign Terror Suspects Tell of Torture."

Apologies for lack of posting. The pace may or may not pick up; I'm trying to stay away from politics for my own mental health. This story speaks too strongly to what got me involved in political work to ignore.

What's the hurry?

Yesterday a young man committed suicide in Guantanamo. Abdul Rahman Ma Ath Thafir al Amri, 34, of Taif, Saudi Arabia, was never charged with a crime. He was never permitted to see a lawyer. He has been imprisoned for the last five years. He was interrogated again and again and again, and quite possibly tortured. For most of the past year he has been locked away, like the hundreds of other men held with no charges and no hope of a trial or release, in a solitary cell for 22 hours a day.

His death deepens the stain on this country. The hopelessness that drove him to suicide was created by those who voted to deny him the fundamental right of habeas corpus. You, Sherrod Brown. You, Debbie Stabenow. You, Arlen Specter. You, John "What's the hurry?" Warner. If there were any justice in this world, you and all the other cowards like you would have nightmares for the rest of your lives about being locked away forever with no redress, no hope of release, no contact with the rest of the world.

Security theater

Call me cynical. I see a clear connection between 1) the recent New York Times and Washington Post stories about our government's moves to further limit contacts between Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers, 2) recent Senate efforts to restore prisoners' habeas rights, and 3) today's big splash: 'Al Qaeda Suspect Caught, Sent to Guantanamo'.

Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi has apparently been held for months now in one of the CIA's many secret prisons around the world. His very public transfer to Guantanamo is meant to reinforce the picture the government wants to paint of that prison as holding "the worst of the worst," a term that might be fairly applied to up to thirty detainees there.

Today's news, like the ruling regime's efforts to hamstring and stigmatize defense and human rights lawyers, is part of an ongoing effort to obscure the disgraceful reality: We are holding hundreds of men in living coffins. Most have been there for years without being charged with any crime; indeed, most probably never will. They have never had anything remotely resembling a fair process to determine the basis on which we are holding them. The question faces us: will we hold them forever?

Fine with the senior senator from my state: "What is the hurry?" Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing."

[Further detail from one of the lawyers affected in comments at Jim Henley's blog.]

Update: 27 April, 2:45 pm - Jan in San Francisco has an excellent roundup of the Democratic presidential candidates' statements on the subject of closing Guantanamo.

Shut it down.

Five years ago this weekend, I took part in the annual protest against the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia. It was a moving experience in many ways -- a reunion of sorts, and strengthening to be in the company of peacemakers in the war atmosphere after the September 11 attacks. Almost nine thousand people participated, more than the organizers had hoped for under the circumstances.

The local authorities, seizing on the national mood to identify anything dissident with terror and bottle it up, decreed that the usual Saturday speeches and music in the park would have to take place instead inside a baseball stadium miles from the base, where we were guarded by hundreds of police, who checked bags of everyone entering. Many of the cops had done SOA demo duty before, but usually at the perimeter of the park, beyond the range of the speakers. This time they were listening along with everyone who came, all the more so because the wholly peaceful and friendly crowd gave them nothing else to do. By the end it didn't seem like such a smooth move on the part of the Columbus city government: officers were applauding the farmworkers, visibly moved by the testimonies of torture victims, and humming along to 'Guantanamera'.

While we were on our way back to the motel, the U.S. military swept into Kabul, Afghanistan, and the television was filled with nonstop propaganda. The most surreal bit was Laura Bush's pre-filmed segment decrying the oppression of Afghan women.

The Columbus city government had also tried to ban Sunday's funeral procession and protest outside the gates of Ft. Benning, again on "anti-terror" grounds. At the last minute, a federal judge ruled that the years of SOA Watch's persistent and persistently peaceful demonstrations had made the area outside the base a free speech zone, so that the city couldn't even require a permit. In the atmosphere of that moment, it felt like a huge victory for this country's constitutional freedoms and the rule of law. Looking back, it seems even more so.

That judge is the same one who annually gives six-month sentences to those who cross the line onto the base grounds. Those who return to the demonstrations after serving are honored as Prisoners of Conscience, and wear insignia to identify them as such. I was privileged to have traveled to the event that year with a 75-year-old man who'd been to federal prison two years before for crossing the line. It was his first time back at the demonstration. Prison had been hard, and had done nothing to slow the aging process. My companion was beginning to have lapses into dementia, but when he saw Father Roy Bourgeois and several of the friends who'd been arrested with him, he was fully present, and his anxiety seemed to melt away. I'll always treasure the memory of our trip home: we swapped stories of Central American solidarity organizing, had friendly arguments about politics, and, in response to my questions, he shared experiences from his childhood, from his service on a battleship in the second world war, and from his long life of activism.

The November protest is an integral part of an ongoing, year-round campaign to close down the school (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation a few years ago; as the SOA Watchers say: "new name, same shame"). This year Congress came within 15 votes of doing so, and many of those voting to keep it open were not re-elected. Stopping terrorism starts at home; we will shut it down before too many years have passed.

Sorta like mowin your lawn 2

Dick Cheney proudly confirms in an interview with a right-wing radio host that the U.S. waterboards detainees, blandly denying in the same breath that we torture.

In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told Cheney that listeners had asked him to "let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?"

"I do agree," Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the interview released Wednesday. "And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation. ... We need to be able to continue that."

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" asked Hennen.

"It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president `for torture.' We don't torture. ..." Cheney replied.

So, for glass-half-full adherents, the Pincus article blogged here previously can be viewed as playing a constructive role in setting the baseline that waterboarding is torture.

Sourpusses like me object to any such moving of the goalposts, and insist on maintaining the pre-September 2006 clarity that torture is torture. Sleep deprivation is torture, forced standing is torture, forced nudity is torture, dousing with cold water is torture, sustained loud music is torture, sexual humiliation is torture. Not "aggressive interrogation techniques that some human rights activists say border on torture". Torture. Crimes against humanity and war crimes, for which Dick Cheney will someday stand trial.

Laura Rozen is the journalist and blogger who's kept the sharpest eye on this issue as it plays out in Europe, where torture is still not remotely like mowin your lawn. In particular, she's highlighted two recent instances in which it's becoming clear that the Italian and German intelligence services have known all along that U.S. operatives were snatching people off the streets of their countries to be tortured.

Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's SISMI, may be forced out of his job and even charged for having knowingly allowed CIA operatives to kidnap an Egyptian imam in Milan in 2003. The current evidence that German intelligence officials knew is at a lower level, but it will eventually become undeniable.

We're way beyond that here. Advocacy of torture has become a get-out-the-vote tactic for the ruling party.

Sorta like mowin your lawn

Today in the Washington Post, almost five years to the day since the front-page article there that introduced torture as a debatable subject, Walter Pincus appears to be working comfortably within the new norms: 'Waterboarding Historically Controversial'.

Remember back in the old days, when torture was controversial, period?

And back before that, in the quaint twentieth century -- when it wasn't even controversial, but was considered a settled, closed question, like slavery?

Good times, good times.

Update: 9:45 am 6 Oct - Thomas Nephew has persuaded me in comments that I was unfairly blaming the messenger.

Update: 6:00 pm 29 Apr 2014 - On the other hand, Pincus is a blame-able messenger: He has faithfully conveyed CIA thinking over a long career, and his torture talk piece came right after Bush signed the "gloves come off" Memorandum of Notification spotlighted by Marcy Wheeler). __ Find link for Pincus' article (in which David Cole took the bait and discussed torture, instead of refusing to address it as anything but the crime it is).