Being "pro-American" by being pro-torture

I'm seeing an ugly trend among European commentators taking a "pro-American" position on the CIA torture report.

What better example of obnoxious trends could we hope for than an installment from alleged philosopher and professional twit Bernard-Henri Lévy? In Thank You, America Huffington Post 12/19/2014, the always-irritating Frenchman writes:

The good news ... is that this same democracy [the USA] has once again demonstrated its extraordinary vitality, its capacity to pull itself together, to confront its crimes, and, in criticizing itself, to rediscover its founding values. Oh, one can expound on the puritanism of an America obsessed with any stain that might tarnish its pastoral vision of itself (Philip Roth). Hard heads can always be found to mock the nostalgia for innocence that is so characteristic of this country (Tocqueville) and whose consequences are often ridiculous or absurd. Be that as it may, there was something beautiful in the spectacle offered to the world by Senator Dianne Feinstein as she read, in a voice full of with emotion, the summary of 500 pages that are so damning for her country. President Obama struck the right tone in the difficult task of upholding his responsibilities as commander in chief, charged with safeguarding the security of his fellow citizens, while ceding no ground on the principles that make up the nation's credo -- principles that are, in the last analysis, America's best weapon against barbarism. The Republicans, for their part, found a voice worthy of their party's great historical consciences in the person of Senator John McCain, who thundered, from the high ground of his own experience as a prisoner of war and victim of torture, that torture is not only sordid but ineffective. America is never so great as in such moments of crisis, doubt, and upset. It is never so strong as when it indulges its taste for the truth. As a citizen of a country that had to confront a similar situation during and after its war in Algeria, a country that spent not years but decades dismantling an official lie and acknowledging the extent of the crimes committed in France's name, I can only salute, with deep humility, the example given here. [my emphasis]

Did President Obama say he was going to prosecute the torture perpetrators? Well, no.

Did the bold Maverick McCain demand that government prosecute the torture perpetrators? During the Cheney-Bush Administration, did he demand impeachment proceedings against officials implicated in the torture crimes? Well, no. And, no.

The torture report shows how wonderful America is? "The good news, by contrast, is that this same democracy has once again demonstrated its extraordinary vitality, its capacity to pull itself together, to confront its crimes, and, in criticizing itself, to rediscover its founding values." Except that most of the torture perpetrators are not being prosecuted under Obama's "look forward, not backward" excuse. There have been a few prosecutions of lower-level perps like some of the Abu Ghuraib prison guards. Allen West, now a rightwing hero, also was disciplined over a torture incident in Iraq. But publishing part of an investigative report on horrible crimes that the government has no intention to prosecute isn't really a very impressive way to demonstrate a democracy's "extraordinary vitality." Did I mention that Bernard-Henri Lévy is a professional twit?

When it comes to being a twit, Bernard-Henri Lévy is hard to top. But Josef Joffe gushes over the virtue of America as evidenced by publishing the torture report while holding the torture perpetrators harmless in the same vein in Der Teufelspakt Die Zeit 17.12.2014.

Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof makes his own contribution to this reprehensible brand of "pro-Americanism" in Der Fluch der Folter Profil 13.12.2014. He cheefully labels critics of American torture crimes "die notorischen Feinde Amerikas, die rechten und linken Anti-Liberalen aller Länder, die islamischen Fundis und die heimlichen und unheimlichen Putin-Anhänger" ("the notorious enemies of America, the right and left anti-liberals of all countries, the Islamist fundamentalists and secret and open Putin sympathizers").

Oh, just bite me, Herr Georg. (Oder, lech mich doch, auf Deutsch.) The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, the Soviet Union has long since disappeared. I know those Cold War clichees are hard to get over, especially since you're obviously so fond of them. But it's time to try to get your head within at least 10 years or so of the present.

So Bernard-Henri Lévy and all the rest of the "pro-American" commentators who surely know very well they are supporting torture with this kind of commentary, despite any of their disclaimers to the contrary, are only being "pro-American" if being pro-torture is also being pro-American, then this counts as pro-American.

Otherwise, it's just more support for immunity for torture perpetrators.

It's defending -torture, in other words. And it's disgusting.

Really, people? Bernard-Henri Lévy, Josef Joffe, Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof? Your so intent on showing how "pro-American" you are that you will in practice defend even torture if practiced by Americans? The whole lot of you should be ashamed of yourselves.

At least you can take comfort in one thing: Dick Cheney agrees with you that to be pro-American is to be pro-torture. If you enjoy the company of war criminals and people who give no perceptible evidence of possessing a conscience, you're where you want to be.

The torture mentality in lawless authorities

Digby has a very good post linking the lawless attitude of way too many of our armed authorities to the CIA-military torture crimes, the use of tasers by police and other forms of police brutality (Dispatch from torture nation, year end wrap up Hullabaloo 12/30/2014):

The problems with this attitude have been well documented here and elsewhere. Elderly people with dementia are being killed with electro-shock. Small children are being disciplined with electro-shock. The mentally ill, the deaf and those suffering from epilepsy are being tortured because they cannot understand, hera or respond to police orders. Average citizens are being tortured on the side of the highway, in their homes, everywhere for failing to understand that when a police officer stops them they are not allowed to speak or react in any way lest they be shot through with electricity.

All these people live under the assumption that their rights exist whether they are talking to a police officer or are in custody. This is not true in any practical sense. When a police officer stops you in America they believe you must submit immediately --- and if you feel your rights were violated you can get a lawyer and take it up with a judge. In that moment they do not exist. (And needless to say, the way police are coddled by the justice system your chances of getting justice in any altercation with them are fairly nil.)

This is the way police are behaving toward citizens of all races throughout America. Police are torturing citizens into compliance.

But too many young black men do not even get the taser. They are just shot dead. And in circumstances where the taser, if it were used for something other than torture, was supposed to be used --- where the alternative would be deadly force.

This has to change. The public either succeeds in rolling this trend back, or it gets worse and does further damage to democracy and the rule of law.

Charlie Pierce also weighed in on this link (The CIA & NYPD: Perilous Insubordination in Our Democracy Esquire Politics Blog 12/22/2014):

For the past two weeks, on two different fronts, we have been confronted with the unpleasant fact that there are people working in the institutions of our self-government who believe themselves not only beyond the control and sanctions of the civil power, but also beyond the control and sanctions of their direct superiors. We also have been confronted with the fact that there are too many people in our political elite who are encouraging this behavior for their own purposes, most of which are cheap and dangerous. In Washington, John Brennan, the head of the CIA, came right up to the edge of insubordination against the president who hired him in the wake of the Senate report on American torture. Meanwhile, in New York, in the aftermath of weeks of protests against the strangulation of Eric Garner by members of the New York Police Department, two patrolmen, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were murdered in their squad car by a career criminal and apparent maniac named Ismaaiyl Brinsley. In response, and at the encouragement of television hucksters like Joe Scarborough, police union blowhards like Patrick Lynch, political zombies like George Pataki, and comical fascists like Rudolph Giuliani, the NYPD is acting in open rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, and the civil power he represents over them. This is an incredibly perilous time for democracy at the most basic levels.

Our culture of immunity for murderers in police uniforms. For torturers in any capacity. For high officials and wealthy CEO's who commit crimes that damage the lives of other, sometimes on a large scale.

To me the most serious failure of the Obama Administration has been its decision to give torture perpetrators de facto immunity. I don't care if it was politically inconvenient. It's his duty. And in failing to do it he has become an after-the-fact enabler of the torture crimes of the Cheney Administration.

Torture attacks the rule of law in the most basic way. Even more so than capital punishment.

The torture issue isn't going away.

Obama and the torture program

Alyona Minkowski has a post detailing the deficiencies of Obama's policy on enforcing the anti-torture laws, Obama's Cowardly Response to Torture Revelations Huffington Post 12/12/2014:

This one sentence really dramatically describes the ugliest side of the Obama Administration from a democratic point of view: "The only man to go to prison in relation to torture is John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who was the first to inform the public that the program existed."

Venezuela's current problems

"Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flare Reuters 02/24/2014

One of the issues that often gets a very out-of-context play in reporting on Latin America is inflation.

For US or European publics, a 10% inflation rate sounds horrendous. But inflation rates are often higher in Latin American countries that is routinely the case in the US and Europe. Or, I guess for the US and Europe we may now need to say that inflation was "routine prior to deflation setting in."

In any case, "lowflation" is not a problem in Venezuela right now. They do have an inflation problem.

Mark Weisbrot writes about a technique that the Maduro government started using this year to restrain the inflation there, SICAD II is Important Step Toward Resolving Exchange Rate Problem in Venezuela CEPR 04/10/2014:

This is particularly important right now because opposition leaders who have called for the overthrow of the government have pointed to 57 percent inflation and widespread shortages of consumer goods as justification for (often violent) street protests over the past two months. Although the protests have failed to attract the working and poorer people who are most hurt by the shortages, they are still a major complaint – as is inflation – for most Venezuelans.

As recently as two years ago, in the first quarter of 2012, the exchange rate system wasn’t causing any crisis. The economy was growing at a healthy pace and inflation was falling, coming in at an annual rate of just 10.1 percent in the first quarter. However, in the fall of 2012 inflation began to rise and so did the black market rate for the dollar, which went from 12 BsF per dollar in October of 2012 to a peak of 88 in late February 2014. To many people it seemed like Venezuela was suffering from an "inflation-depreciation" spiral. This is a situation where the domestic currency loses value against the dollar, causing inflation, which then causes the currency to fall further, and so on. In extreme cases such a spiral can end in hyperinflation, and government opponents (including much of the domestic and international media) promoted the idea that this is where the economy has been headed.

Of course hyperinflation was never a real threat – and still isn't -- but the relation between the rising cost of the black market dollar and the inflation rate was a serious problem. [my emphasis]

SICAD II (SICAD=Sistema Complementario de Administración de Divisas) is an exchange rate system that, as Weisbrot explains, seems to offer some practical hope of moderating inflation generated via the black market exchange rate.

Capital controls are not simple. But the lack of capital controls that the neoliberal gospel demands can be ruinous, as well. As examples from Mexico to Argentina to Greece and Spain illustrate.

Also in Venezuela, far-right protests and street blockades continue:

Desprendieron barandas y cerraron la avenida Guajira con C2 Panorama 14.05.2014

Detenido en protestas de Las Mercedes hijo del gobernador de Guárico Últimas Noticias 13.05.2014

Al menos 90 estudiantes fueron detenidos por la GNB en protesta en Altamira El Informador 14.05.2014

80 detenidos en protesta opositora en Caracas Últimas Noticias 14.05.2014:

Ya en el lugar, un grupo de manifestantes violentos comenzó a lanzar piedras y fuegos artificiales contra la fachada del ministerio de Turismo y fueron dispersados con gases lacrimógenos por grupos antimotines que, de inmediato, realizaron la masiva redada.

Pero cuando los camiones con detenidos intentaban trasladarse por la avenida principal del municipio Chacao, donde se han desarrollado la mayoría de las protestas opositoras, un grupo de vecinos obstaculizó su tránsito al grito de "¡Suéltenlos!".

Venezuela cumplió más de tres meses de protestas opositoras con reclamos por la violencia criminal, la detención de estudiantes, la inflación anualizada de 60% y la escasez de productos básicos como café, leche o azúcar, que han dejado un saldo de 42 muertos y más de 800 lesionados, así como centenar y medio de denuncias de tortura.

[In the location, a group of violent demonstators started to throw rocks and fireworks against the façade of the Ministry of Tourism and were dispersed with tear gas by groups of riot police who who suddenly made a massive raid.

But when the vehicles with those arrested tried to pass the main avenue of the Chacao district, with the majority of the opposition protests have taken place, a group of neighbors blocked their passage with the cry of, "Release them!"

Venezuela has had more than three months of opposition protests with grievances over criminal violence, the detention of students, the annualized inflation of 60% and the shortage of basic products like coffee, milk or sugar, which has left a balance of 42 dead and more than 800 wounded, as well as 150 denuciations for torture.]

And formal talks between the government and the main opposition groups united in the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) have been proceeding, though the far right led by Leonardo López and María Corina Machado have been boycotting them. This week, MUD announced they were "freezing" participation in the talks until the Maduro government shows more concrete responses. (MUD exige al Gobierno hechos para reactivar el diálogo El Universal 14.05.2014) The practical effect of this declaration is unclear to me at the moment.

Maduro: Yo no me voy a parar de la mesa de diálogo Últimas Noticias 14.05.2014

Here is Nicolás Maduro talking about the dialogue process and various projects his government plans, Maduro: Yo no me voy a parar de la mesa de diálogo Últimas Noticias 13.05.2014:

Machado has been in Canada in recent days promoting the far-right effort to overthrow the elected government of Venezueala. (María Corina Machado sostuvo reunión privada con Canciller de Canadá El Universal 07.05.2014; Canadian Parliament welcomes former Deputy Machado El Universal 05/08/2014

There continue to be real concerns about torture in Venezuela, as expressed by Amnesty International, for instance: Amnistía Internacional preocupada por situación en Brasil y Venezuela Últimas Noticias 13.05.2014; Amnistía Internacional acusa a los gobiernos de América de adoptar un enfoque hipócrita respecto a la tortura AI press release, 13.05.2014.

Recent violence that appears to have come from the radical far-right opposition includes the assassination of a state intelligence chief (Z.C. Dutka, Venezuelan Intelligence Chief Murdered, 11 Protestors Indicted after Thursday’s Mass Arrests Venezuela Analysis 05/09/2014):

Yesterday at noon, Rafael Celestino Albino Arteaga, 44, Vargas state chief of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), was shot dead by an unidentified male assailant in a shopping mall in the western city of Maracay.

Arteaga’s killer, witnesses say, pointed a gun at him with the apparent intention of robbing him. After Arteaga turned over all of his possessions, the man shot him twice and then fled.

This marks the second murder of a Venezuelan intelligence officer in recent weeks, the first being Eliecer Otaiza, ex-chief of CIDIP, the national intelligence agency that preceded SEBIN. Otaiza was found dead on April 27th, and his suspected murderer (now in custody) had clear political motives, official sources say.

Tags: accountability for torture, human rights watch, national endowment for democracy, torture, venezuela

This week's chapter in the reckoning for torture crimes

The torture crimes aren't going away. The implications of the full-blown torture program instituted by the United States under the Cheney-Bush Administration - a program whose greatest public support in polls was among those who identified with the Christian Right - are just too far-reaching.

The reckoning is taking place in fits and starts and without the prosecutions that the Obama Administration was and is bound under the Torture Convention to pursue. (So was the Cheney Administration, for that matter.)

The conclusions of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the CIA's part in the torture crimes have been leaked. The Booman Tribune provides the bullet-points (Senate Intel Committee's Findings on Torture Leak 04/11/2014) direct from the leaked text:

• The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not effectively assist the agency in acquiring intelligence or in gaining cooperation from detainees.
• The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
• The CIA subjected detainees to interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
• The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention.
• The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
• The CIA inaccurately characterized the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques to justify their use.
• The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
• The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
• The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
• The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
• The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
• Numerous internal critiques and objections concerning the CIA’s management and use of the Detention and Interrogation were ignored.
• The CIA manipulated the media by coordinating the release of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
• The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
• The way in which the CIA operated and managed the program complicated, and in some cases hindered the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
• Management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout its duration, particularly so in 2002 and 2003.
• Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and were central figures in the program’s operation.
• By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program. The effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques was not sufficiently evaluated by the CIA.
• CIA personnel who were responsible for serious violations, inappropriate behavior, or management failures in the program’s operation were seldom reprimanded or held accountable by the agency.
• The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program ended by 2006 due to legal and oversight concerns, unauthorized press disclosures and reduced cooperation from other nations.
• The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ global reputation, and came with heavy costs, both monetary and nonmonetary.

If the Obama Administration continues its previous practice, they will aggressively seek to hunt down, prosecute and imprison whoever leaked this report and continue to waive any attempt at prosecuting the torture perpetrators themselves.

Charlies Pierce weighs in with Now We Know What's Being Done In Our Name Esquire Politics Blog 04/11/2014:

It is further evidence that nothing said by the heroes of our all-too-human, but curiously error-prone surveillance state about their activities can be trusted. Nothing. Ever. They lie for a living because their mission is a messianic one. They are contemptuous of democratic institutions, democratic norms, and any democratic spirit abroad in the people who pay their salaries and in whose name they carried out their crimes. If that skepticism is the most lasting result, that will be a good thing.

McClatchy's team of Ali Watkins, Jonathan Landay and Marisa Taylor report on the leaked report in CIA’s use of harsh interrogation went beyond legal authority, Senate report says 04/11/2014:

The report has been embroiled in a public furor since Feinstein, D-Calif., took to the Senate floor last month to accuse the CIA of possibly violating the law and the Constitution by monitoring computers used by her staff to assemble the report, and by removing and blocking access to documents.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, launched a criminal investigation at the CIA’s request into the alleged unauthorized removal of classified documents by Democratic committee staffers from the top-secret facility where they were required to review more than 6 million pages of operational emails and other documents related to the interrogation program.

Some current and former U.S. officials and military commanders, numerous experts and foreign governments have condemned the harsh interrogation methods as violations of international and U.S. laws against torture, a charge denied by the CIA and the Bush administration.

The leaked oversight report describes the CIA's horrible record on torture. And its findings are also an implicit indictment of the deeply irresponsible approach of President Obama and his Administration to prosecute these very serious crimes as they are obligated to do under the Torture Convention.

It's important to keep in mind that it was not only the CIA but our glorious generals in our sacred military who also participating in and facilitated torture. The just-leaked report discussed above is about the CIA's torture crimes, not about the military's. One reminder of the latter's role comes in this dossier from the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) dossier on Geoffrey Miller, the one-time commander of the Guantánamo station of the Bush Gulag (Al Gore's term) who played a leading role in exporting the torture practices from Guantánamo to Abu Ghuraib. The dossier concludes:

The information above demonstrates that Geoffrey Miller bears individual criminal responsibility for the war crimes and acts of torture inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody at Guantánamo and in Iraq. Based on his position as a commander, Miller is responsible for the acts he authorized, commanded or directed his subordinates to commit, as well as for the acts of his subordinates which he failed to prevent or punish. Based on his leadership position and involvement in developing, authorizing and implementing interrogation policies, Miller can also be held responsible as a member of a joint criminal enterprise for his involvement in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody, or, alternatively, for aiding and abetting torture and other war crimes.

See also: Jason Leopold, Revealed: Senate Report Contains New Details on CIA Black Sites Aljazeera America 04/09/2014; Peter Foster, CIA use of torture 'far worse' than admitted, says leaked Senate report Telegraph 04/11/2014

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

The torture crimes aren't going away

They aren't. The implications are just too big. There has to be a real legal reckoning for them.

I continue to think President Obama's decision to give the torture perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush Administration a free pass on those crimes is the most fundamental failing of this Administration. And that was done in defiance of his own very serious obligations under the 1984 Convention against Torture, which the US signed and the Senate approved as an international treaty obligation. It includes these provisions:

(iv) Each State party shall, on certain conditions, take a person suspected of the offence of torture into custody and make a preliminary inquiry into the facts (article 6);
(v) Each State party shall either extradite a person suspected of the offence of torture or submit the case to its own authorities for prosecution (article 7);
(vi) Each State party shall ensure that its authorities make investigations when there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed (article 12)

Charlie Pierce writes today about one of the many continuing problems the torture crimes and Obama's shameful failure to prosecute them are creating (Obama, the CIA, and the Limits Conciliation Esquire Politics Blog 03/14/2014):

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, in one very important way, the president has lost control of his own government. The current constitutional crisis between the CIA and the Senate committee tasked with investigating its policies regarding torture during the previous administration has only one real solution that is consonant with the rule of law. Either CIA director John Brennan gets to the bottom of what his people were doing and publicly fires everyone involved, or John Brennan becomes the ex-director of the CIA. By the Constitution, this isn't even a hard call. The Senate has every legal right to investigate what was done in the name of the American people during the previous decade. It has every legal right to every scrap of information relating to its investigation, and the CIA has an affirmative legal obligation to cooperate. Period. The only way this is not true is if we come to accept the intelligence apparatus as an extra-legal, formal fourth branch of the government.

He may be right when he says, "The Senate investigation is really the last chance for even the ghost of a full accounting," if we put emphasis on the full.

But the torture crimes aren't going away. Both the practical and moral implications are just far too severe and wide-ranging for there not to be a real accounting, even if it's another decade or more in coming.

Obama is still President for nearly three years. And he's just as legally obligated to prosecute these crimes today as he was on the day he took the oath of office the first time. He still needs to do the right thing.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Obama, a President who has seriously failed the rule of law

"It is not ... war crimes and torture that upsets the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House, but rather those that manage to make these crimes public," writes Ralph Sina in George W. Obama: Das Ende einer Hoffnung Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 7/2013 (July 2013) ("Es sind somit nicht Kriegsverbrechen und Folter, die den Friedensnobelpreisträger im Weißen Haus empören, sondern jene, die es wagen, diese Verbrechen publik zu machen.")

Sina's article focuses on Obama's massive domestic and international spying programs and his harsh war on whistleblowers including Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. The article could have used some closer editing. In the first paragraph, for instance he says that George W. Bush retired to his "farm", apparently unaware that Bush dumped his famous ranch for a place in Dallas as soon as he no longer saw the need for the ranch as a showplace where he could imitate Ronald Reagan playing a cowboy.

But he does make some important points. One that I don't see made often enough about Obama treatment of Bradley Manning was his openly declaring that Manning was guilty of a crime. As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, this creates tremendous and illegitimate pressure on the military court martial to find him guilty and hand out the most severe sentence. Some of the "torture-like" conditions to which Manning was subjected were modified when a reporter finally confronted Obama with a question about it in public. But it went on unconscionably for a long time. And there was no indication that Obama ordered any disciplinary measures for those who ordered Manning's disgraceful treatment.

Obama, after all, had already publicly declared Manning a criminal and (effectively) a traitor. And he adopted an indefensible Look Forward Not Backward policy toward prosecuting torture crimes and war crimes under the Cheney-Bush Administration.

He points also to the shameless situation, which Obama as President owns, that at least 56 inmates at the Guantánamo torture gulag that even the authoritarian Obama Administration acknowledge to be innocent of any crime are still indefinitely imprisoned there. Obama, who has no scruples launched drone "signature strike" assassination against completely unknown persons, has the power to have fixed that situation for those innocent men. He also has the power and the solemn obligation to prosecute those who falsely imprisoned men like that them and tortured so many, brutally murdering some of them in the process. But he won't prosecute the torturers. And I fully expect he will leave office with those innocent prisoners at Guantánamo still there with no foreseeable prospect of resolving their situation.

Obama's most important Constitutional responsibility as President was and still is restoring the rule of law after the Cheney-Bush Administration's tortures and war crimes. He has completely rejected that responsibility.

Toward the end of the piece, Sina points out that Obama's extreme policies on electronic surveillance mean that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the neoliberal trade treaty now being negotiated between the US and the EU, would carry real dangers for EU laws and constitutional principles of privacy and individual rights. These treaties are a favorite instrument in the neoliberal framework of economic policy to undermine protections for workers and consumers and, in the case of telecommunications, individual rights for the financial benefit of the corporations involved and for the governments dominated by them.

Sina concludes of Obama, "Nicht nur Amerika hat einen großen Hoffnungsträger verloren, sondern auch Europa." ("Not only America but also Europe has lost a great focus for hope.")

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, bradley manning, edward snowden, guantánamo, obama administration, torture, transatlantic trade and investment partnership, ttip

Obama and Bush

The one thing Dick Cheney couldn't do in the Bush Administration with his "dark side" policies of torture and violations of the laws of war was to have a subsequent Administration that validated those policies by either continuing them directly or by failing to prosecute known crimes. Obama did some of both for him. But the failure to prosecute the torture crimes is the most consequential.

Kevin Gosztola has useful things to say about Obama's laudatory comments for Shrub Bush today at the didication of the Bush Library in 'The World's Most Exclusive Club': Obama's Speech at the Bush Library Dedication FDL Dissenter 04/25/2013. Including this:

... today President Obama has more in common with former President George W. Bush than with Senator Barack Obama, who decided to run for president in the 2008 Election.

That is partly because Senator Barack Obama did not know what it would be like to be the most powerful man in the world. It is also because Obama has bought into many of Bush's counterterrorism policies and that has helped Bush’s legacy in ways that many of his supporters probably never imagined.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who served under Bush, has said, "Obama came to embrace Bush's positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be." Former vice president Dick Cheney said in an NBC interview in January 2011, "In terms of a lot of the terrorism policies — the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies — all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate." Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who authorized torture at Abu Ghraib, said in September 2011 Obama had accepted much of the Bush doctrine out of necessity.

Jack Goldsmith, who served as an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer under Bush, wrote in 2009, "The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit." He argued, "Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies."

Thus, Obama has done what Bush could not do: he has taken policies that were unpopular or reviled and transformed them into something legitimate and acceptable. He also has made the "war on terrorism" more permanent by abandoning the phrase "war on terrorism" and relying on covert operations that involve targeted assassinations by drones or the outsourcing of detentions and interrogations to unsavory characters that national security agencies have allied themselves with (like, for example, in Somalia). [my emphasis]

Not a pretty picture.

Neither his foreign nor domestic policies on the whole have been as destructive as those of the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But he has also largely accepted the framing of both. The foreign policy strategy of world hegemony and not allowing any "peer competitor" country or alliances to arise remains, virtually insuring future wars like that in Afghanistan and more limited military interventions like those in Libya and Syria.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, george w bush, global war on terror, torture

"The Point" on the War on Terror and related issues

This is an episode of The Point, hosted by Ana Kasparian, on the topic of Military Industrial Complex, Drones, & Torture 02/02/2013

Her three panel guests are Cameron White, the Los Angeles chapter President of Iraq Veterans Against the War; Kurt Schlichter, a real rightwinger; and, one of my favorites, Alyona Minkovski.

Tags: accountability for torture, drone war, torture

Reservations on the newly liberal Obama

I am happy, encouraged, even optimistic about the more progressive tone President Obama set in his Second Inaugural Address this past Monday.

But he does have a four-year record as President. So he and his most unquestioning supporters will have to forgive the rest of us for being cautious about how much of a policy shift that speech is actually signaling.

For one thing, just after the speech he formalized his nomination of torture advocate John Brennan to head the CIA, thus reinforcing his Look Forward Not Backward approach to crimes committed by government officials and financial robber barons. Scott Lemieux writes in Embracing the Legacy of Torture The American Prospect 01/14/2013:

I do not mean to suggest that the nomination of Brennan means that there are no differences between the Bush and Obama administrations on civil liberties. Obama did ban torture and extraordinary rendition by executive order upon taking office, and that matters. Where Obama has failed, however, is in creating the institutional incentives that will inhibit torture on the part of future administrations. His failure to prosecute even the most egregious instances of torture under the previous administration sends an unmistakable message that torturers can expect not to be held accountable. Nor has the administration (or the Democratic leadership in Congress) shown any interest in hearings that would at least shine a public light on post -9/11 security abuses. The Brennan nomination fits in all too well with this pattern of denying accountability. One would think that at a minimum being a defender of arbitrary detention and torture would exclude someone from consideration from a job as important as head of the CIA.

Sadly, the nomination of John Brennan probably does not signal any significant changes in policy; it is but another hum-drum example of the Beltway's increasingly debased sense of accountability. A consensual affair may cost a prominent public official his or her job and trigger a major investigation, privacy be damned. But abusing human rights has no consequence.

The torture cases are particularly important because torture represents such a fundamental breakdown of the rule of law in itself. And because Obama's obligation under the Torture Convention to prosecute known cases of torture is so clear. Whatever his reasons for this, they are no excuse.

The flip side of Obama's politicization of the rule of law for torturers, renegade federal prosecutors and wealthy banksters is represented by his extreme policy on prosecuting leakers and whistleblowers and by his aggressive arrests of alleged undocumented immigrants. His policy on government secrecy is the most extreme of any Administration ever. And his round-ups of alleged illegal immigrants has gone far beyond those of the Cheney-Bush Administration.

In all these cases, Obama can down on the conservative side: protecting torturers, immunizing major financial criminals from prosecution, government secrecy and anti-immigrant law enforcement. The torture crimes aren't going away. There will be a real public reckoning for them someday, hopefully sooner than later.

We've also seen this Administration make a four-year push for a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on what I recently heard Congressman Keith Ellison call "the Big Three" social programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This is a really bad policy and really bad politics for the Democratic Party. Yet he pursued this destructive goal for four years, most recently just this past month (December 2012) proposed first increasing the Medicare eligibility age and then a significant cut via the "chained CPI" scam in Social Security benefits. Digby recaps the sad history of Obama's pursuit of this awful Grand Bargain in Villager pap Hullabaloo 01/21/2013.

Apart from the noxious Grand Bargain, Obama pursued compromise with the intransigent Republicans long after it was clear that their were pursuing a course of fundamental opposition, determined to block as much of his domestic legislation as they could. We saw it early on in his pre-compromised stimulus and health-care reform proposals. And we saw it continue, even though by the latest in the Tea Party summer of 2009, it was clear that a "post-partisan", end-of-ideology state was going to be impossible with the real exiting Republican Party. And yet he continued that policy well into December 2012.

One thing that Obama did not emphasize in his Inaugural Address was the urgency of job creation. And his has largely pursued the "left" neoliberal approach during his first Administration: bail out the big banks, minimize regulation and legal culpability for major businesses and financial institutions, emphasize tolerant social policies on issues like gay rights, pursue antilabor international trade agreements, emphasize "fiscal responsibility" on spending even during a depression, rely on private business to address social needs (e.g., Obamacare without a public insurance option), and generally limit the role of the state in the economy to vaguely-defined concepts like "education" and "infrastructure". Will he significantly change direction during the second term? Mike Konczal warns in How Has the Liberal Project Fared Under President Obama? Rortybomb 01/22/2013:

In addition to managing the short-term economy, there's also the issue of setting the stage for longer-term growth. This is necessarily a grab-bag category, overlapping with the other categories, but it is useful to distinguish it from short-term unemployment. Michael Grunwald's excellent book The New New Deal revived the extensive investment in energy and other innovations that were part of the stimulus. Preventing the mass firesale and collapse of the auto industry were crucial as well.

But there's been a decline in primary and secondary education investment driven by the states, as well as a large decrease in the number of government employees. That's largely the focus of states. At the federal level, investments in infrastructure, research and development, and education, all crucial to building longer-term prosperity, are at risk. Through the Budget Control Act and upcoming sequestration, President Obama and Congress have cut non-defense discretionary spending in order to balance the medium-term debt-to-GDP ratio. As EPI's Ethan Pollack notes, it is difficult to cut here without threatening long-term prosperity.

The stimulus brought a large wave of investment, but that could be more than cancelled out by both collapsing state budgets and long-term austerity and cuts.

For all that, I like the kind of pragmatic optimism that Robert Perry strikes in What to Make of Barack Obama? Consortium News 01/22/2013:

Even though his speech on Monday was the most ringing defense of liberal government that the American people have heard in decades, there will still be those on the Left who doubt his sincerity and will surely find evidence of inconsistencies in his compromises.

But the truth may be that Obama actually does believe in progressive governance, that he saw his Second Inaugural as his last big opportunity to make that case to the American public. In his heart, he appears to be a reformer, yet also a pragmatist, recognizing the many impediments and obstacles in the political terrain where he finds himself.

Yet, after a first term in which he seemed to cede too much ground, Obama took the rhetorical fight to right-wingers in his Second Inaugural, challenging their claim to be the true protectors of America's Founding principles ...

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, grand bargain, medicaid, medicare, social security, accountability for torture

The torture crimes aren't going away even though our re-elected President insisted on Look Forward Not Backward

David Bromwich looks at the ways he sees the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) as supporting the use of torture in Torture and Zero Dark Thirty Huffington Post 01/19/2013. In the process, he makes a critical point about how (even apart from his reading of the film's messages) President Obama's disgraceful decision to Look Forward Not Backward and decline to fulfill his legal duty to prosecute torture perpetrators had the effect of validating their awful crimes:

Complicity by non-aesthetic sources was required for the success of this film. There was the political complicity of President Obama, along with CIA director Panetta, in 2009, when they assured agents there would be no prosecutions for crimes committed in the previous administration; and the parallel exertions of officials like David Margolis at the justice department's Office of Professional Responsibility, whose 2010 report downgraded the assessment against the torture lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee from violation of professional obligation to "poor judgment." What does this have to do with the making of Zero Dark Thirty? "The sad truth," writes Karen Greenberg in a disturbing analysis, "is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented U.S. torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it." In that case it would have been like making a film about a gangland murder as viewed by the police -- a crime that in real life the police went after -- but showing it in the film as if all the police on the scene had watched and done nothing. Such a film would stand exposed, and the falseness would draw general comment.

Yet regarding the American torture of prisoners, our leading officials said it was wrong, but then did nothing to back their saying so, nothing to prove that we believed it was wrong. The movie if anything endorses an attitude akin to the new president's: acceptance (with distaste) of a new policy of official ban supported by no accountability. For that is the status quo, and Zero Dark Thirty has this curious contradiction at its heart. Whatever can be absorbed into the story of the successful killing now qualifies as a necessary step toward the killing. The mood of self-protective abridgment and untruth was best captured by Barack Obama when he said -- as he often did before and during the 2012 election campaign -- that "we delivered justice to Bin Laden." Delivered justice. The neutralizing abstraction of the phrase, so dear to the president, hovers like a bad angel over the entire length of Zero Dark Thirty.

On the day of Obama's Second Inauguration, it's worth remembering this huge piece of unfinished business.

In these days in which the Pentagon theorists must show their concern for manipulating American public opinion to support wars as a minimal bar of seriousness, it seems "quaint" (to use a notorious phrase of John Yoo's) to recall that it is illegal for the US government to conduct propaganda on the American public. Even a propaganda film can have aesthetic value in addition to its propaganda message. But if Congress weren't currently so enthralled with the underlying militaristic assumption of American foreign policy, a serious investigation of whether the CIA and other Administration officials collaborating with the makers of Zero Dark Thirty may have violated classification and anti-propaganda laws.

It does sound "quaint", doesn't it?

Bromwich's article is also interesting in that it looks frankly at the question of the value judgment of torture in the film, and treats it as part of an aesthetic critic of the film rather than as something extraneous to the aesthetics. And whatever its Oscar qualities may be, the film's treatment of torture isn't a matter purely of artistic technique:

It omits all evidence that after September 11 there were courageous Americans with a conscience who worked against terrorism even as they protested against torture. The filmmakers have said that their approach is "journalistic," and by that they seem to mean that the film imitates what journalism has become. Unfortunately this is true. In fact, the film resembles much of the journalism of the war on terror: cool, wised-up, sure that there are many points of view out there, but "embedded" with American troops because what choice do we have? The film betrays a weak control of its historical materials, but it loves Americans for what we suffered twelve years ago. That will be enough for many. But the deadpan narrative of extrajudicial killings is not going to be experienced in the same way everywhere. It will play differently in Pakistan. [my emphasis]

Given the NRA's insistence on promoting a simplistic culture-war view of violent movies and videos, it's worth noting that there is a vast difference between the (at best) highly tenuous notion that watching a violent movie is somehow a direct causal factor in pushing people to violent acts and the larger issue of shaping views of an emotionally-charged historical event like the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty isn't going to give anyone an irresistible compulsion to torture someone. But it may very well have a propaganda effect on encouraging people to accept torture as an acceptable policy of governmental terror.

Jimmy Carter wrote in his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005):

Aside from the humanitarian aspects, it is well known that, under excruciating torture, a prisoner will admit almost any suggested crime. Such confessions are, of course,not admissible in trials in civilized countries. The primary goal of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear. Some of our leaders have found that it is easy to forgo human rights for those who are considered to be subhuman, or "enemy combatants." [my emphasis]

Torture is a policy of state terror, no matter how it is justified.

And it's worth recalling that the justification of torture that those who see Zero Dark Thirty as justifying it is that it produces useful information over the long run. But the justification we heard for years from the apologists of the Cheney-Bush torture policy was the "ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a super-bomb is going to blow up in an our and the intrepid forces of law and order must torture a person who knows where it is to save millions of lives.

Either justification actually works as well, because torture isn't about getting accurate confessions or about extracting accurate information to track down criminals or terrorists. As Jason Vest wrote in Pray and Tell (The American Prospect 01/19/2005)

... from a review of thousands of documents -- e-mails, still-unreported communiqués, and other pieces of paper -- certain themes have become increasingly apparent. Among the most consistent: FBI agents issued repeated objections to the use of torture against foreign terrorism suspects. And from this theme emerges a conclusion that future presidential administrations, and all American citizens, would do well to remember: For the purpose of prying actionable information from suspects, torture is essentially useless.

It's a policy of state terror, meant "to engender and maintain fear."

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

The torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration aren't going away

The systematic use of torture during the Cheney-Bush Administration continue to be an issue and will be for many years into the future. So far, we have only circumstantial evidence that the Obama Administration may be continuing torture in some form. It certainly seems clear that Bradley Manning was tortured by the extreme sensory isolation to which he was subjected, similar in kind to the treatment that fried US citizen Jose Padilla's brain. Padilla was publicized by former Attorney General John Ashcroft as an aspiring "dirty bomber", but the government never even charged him with anything related to a "dirty bomb".

Human rights attorney and torture opponent Scott Horton talks about the recent spectacle of Jose Rodriguez, CIA torturer who is now doing a book tour bragging about his career as a war criminal. (Jose Rodriguez, Poster Boy No Comment 05/01/2012)

He points out the painfully obvious - painfully obvious, that is, if your not a celebrity pundit who lives to be invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner every year - about Rodriguez' motive to destroy torture tapes: "His motivations in shredding them therefore seem clear enough: he was afraid of criminal prosecution."

And Horton writes (italicized insert in original):

Indeed, why has Rodriguez not been charged and put on trial? That’s a question many are asking as he takes to the airwaves to push the idea that torture works. The only satisfactory answer lies in the doctrine of in pari delicto [In pari delicto applies when both sides of a lawsuit have been involved in the same wrongdoing.] - the Justice Department is itself so deeply enmeshed in Rodriguez's crimes that it could hardly prosecute the case. But if this doctrine explains the DOJ’s failure to prosecute, it also suggests that someone else should be bringing the charges. ...

There is no immediate threat that charges will be brought against Rodriguez and his bosses - not under Barack Obama and Eric Holder. But Rodriguez has plenty of reason to be concerned that such charges will be pressed against him outside of the United States, and eventually here as well. Rodriguez is a thirty-year veteran of the CIA who spent virtually his entire career in Latin America, serving in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and other locations. He happily embraces the dark side; indeed, Latin America was home to some of the blackest of CIA black ops, including assassinations and operational support for regimes that routinely used torture. But he would also have observed what happened to many of the CIA’s allies who turned to torture—to generals and admirals who fought the “dirty war” in Argentina and Uruguay, to Pinochet loyalists in Chile, and to Alberto Fujimori in Peru. Each of these regimes left office armored with amnesties and immunities, with official decisions to decline prosecution, and, significantly, with strong public support for the use of torture as a necessary evil in the battle against terrorists. But in the past few years, former heads of state and leading figures in the intelligence communities of each of these countries have been charged, tried, and convicted of crimes that include torture and conspiring to torture.

What happened? Across more than two decades, public opinion steadily turned against those who had used torture. This process was driven by disclosures of photographs and tapes of heinous acts, by the meticulous work of forensic pathologists who gave the victims a voice, by survivors who forcefully recounted their experiences, by journalists who published exposés, and by lawyers who pressed for information to be revealed and who painstakingly assembled facts for lawsuits. [my emphasis in bold]

I continue to think that the single greatest failure of the Obama Administration was to decline their legal obligation under international treaty to prosecute torture crimes. Torture is a fundamental breach of the rule of law that threatens the entire structure of the rule of law in a fundamental way. Obama's obligation as President was to see that these crimes were prosecuted and the practice halted. He very consciously declined to do so.

The torture crimes aren't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

No, the torture issue isn't going away

It's too big and the implications are too far-reaching for it to go away before there's a real reckoning. As in, people going to jail for ordering and implementing torture, unambiguous official condemnations of the practice, and US laws written to specify that they apply no matter how some crooked torture lawyer in the Justice Department or the White House may want to interpret them.

Spencer Ackerman does some journalism in CIA Committed 'War Crimes,' Bush Official Says Danger Room 04/04/2012.

The short version is that State Department advisor "counselor" Philip Zelikow wrote to his boss Condi-Condi and told her clearly that the US was practicing criminal torture and that it wasn't aimed at getting useful intelligence but at producing propaganda. He provides a copy of the six-page memo of 02/15/2006 at links in his article. He also interviewed Zelikow for the piece:

Zelikow’s warnings about the legal dangers of torture went unheeded — not just by the Bush administration, which ignored them, but, ironically, by the Obama administration, which effectively refuted them. In June, the Justice Department concluded an extensive inquiry into CIA torture by dropping potential charges against agency interrogators in 99 out of 101 cases of detainee abuse. That inquiry did not examine criminal complicity for senior Bush administration officials who designed the torture regimen and ordered agency interrogators to implement it.

"I don’t know why Mr. Durham came to the conclusions he did," Zelikow says, referring to the Justice Department special prosecutor for the CIA torture inquiry, John Durham. "I’m not impugning them, I just literally don’t know why, because he never published any details about either the factual analysis or legal analysis that led to those conclusions."

Also beyond the scope of Durham’s inquiry: The international damage to the U.S. reputation caused by the post-9/11 embrace of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" interrogation methods; and the damage done to international protocols against torture.

The torture issue isn't going away.
See also:

Marcy Wheeler's well-informed analysis in Philip Zelikow Saves Condi Rice’s Hiney (Again) Emptywheel 04/04/2012: "Philip Zelikow did really important work fighting the Bush Administration’s efforts to defy international obligations on torture. But the written record, at least, shows that he was fighting, in part, against the negligence of his boss, Condi Rice."

Marcy does what good investigative reporters do: she spends a lot of time carefully reviewing the contents of relevant documents and relating them to each other.

Charlie Pierce's thoughts on it in Democracy On A Waterboard Esquire Politics Blog 04/04/2012: The Zelikow memo "It blows up (yet again) the standard Bush Administration alibi that they thought they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted because their pet DOJ lawyers told them it was OK, and also because, you know, 9/11!".

Tags: accountability for torture, bush administration, torture

Appeals Court validates torture of American citizens on American soil

I keep saying the torture issue isn't going away. One big reason is because the torture policy initiated by the Cheney-Bush Administration and left unprosecuted by the Obama Administration is corrupting the American system and will continue to do so until the trend is reversed by our political and legal institutions realizing how deeply criminal it is.

Glenn Greenwald explains the implications of a brutal 11th Circuit Federal Appeals Court decision that validated the torture of American citizen Jose Padilla, who was held in federal custody for three years in the United States and severely tortured (Jose Padilla and how American justice functions Salon 09/20/2011).

As Glenn reminds us, Padilla was dramatically accused of being involved in a "dirty bomb" plot, i.e., one involving radioactive material. So fare as anything in the public record shows, however, there was never anything more substantial than John Ashcroft lying imagination. Padilla was convicted of "supporting Islamic terrorism overseas" and sentenced to 17 years in a super-max prison. He was never charged with anything connected to a "dirty bomb" and nothing in the government's case on the actual charges linked him to that scary-sounding plot. Our crippled media, however, still commonly refer to him as the "dirty bomber."

Glenn summarizes the grim story of Pedilla's torture:

The story of Jose Padilla, continuing through the events of yesterday, expresses so much of the true nature of the War on Terror and especially America's justice system. In 2002, the American citizen was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, publicly labeled by John Ashcroft as The Dirty Bomber, and then imprisoned for the next three years on U.S. soil as an "enemy combatant" without charges of any kind, and denied all contact with the outside world, including even a lawyer. During his lawless incarceration, he was kept not just in extreme solitary confinement but extreme sensory deprivation as well, and was abused and tortured to the point of severe and probably permanent mental incapacity (Bush lawyers told a court that they were unable to produce videos of Padilla's interrogations because those videos were mysteriously and tragically "lost").

Needless to say, none of the government officials responsible for this abuse of a U.S. citizen on American soil has been held accountable in any way. That's because President Obama decreed that Bush officials shall not be criminally investigated for War on Terror crimes, while his Justice Department vigorously defended John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and other responsible functionaries in civil suits brought by Padilla seeking damages for what was done to him.

Eric Holder's Justice Department demanded more punishment for the convicted man:

Not content with what was done to Padilla, the Bush DOJ -- and then the Obama DOJ -- contested the sentence on appeal, insisting that it was too lenient; Padilla also appealed, arguing that the trial court made numerous errors in excluding his evidence while allowing the Government's. Yesterday, a federal appeals panel of the 11th Circuit issued a ruling, by a 2-1 vote, rejecting each and every one of Padilla's arguments. It then took the very unusual step of vacating the 17-year-sentence imposed by the trial court as too lenient and, in effect, ordered the trial judge to impose a substantially harsher prison term ...

And in our Republican-dominated federal judiciary, the partisan affiliation of the Appeals Court judges is telling:

It should be said that part of what happened here is just the typical politicization of the judiciary, as the two-judge majority was comprised of a hard-core right-wing Reagan/Bush 41 appointee from Alabama (Joel Dubina), while the other was one of Bush 43's most controversial appointees, the former Alabama Attorney General who was filibustered by the Democrats and allowed onto the bench only by virtue of the "Gang of 14" compromise (William Pryor). Meanwhile, the dissenting judge was born in Mexico to Syrian parents and, after moving to Miami at the age of 6, became the first female judge (as well as the first Hispanic and Arab American judge) on the Florida Supreme Court (rising to Chief Justice), and was a Clinton appointee to the federal appeals court (Rosemary Barkett); Barkett, incidentally, dissented from an 11th Circuit ruling denying a habeas petition to Troy Davis, the African-American death row inmate scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia this week despite mountains of evidence showing his innocence. So this episode highlights one of the few genuine differences that remain between the two parties that can truly impact people's lives: their judicial appointments.

The torture issue isn't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture,, glenn greenwald, jose padilla, accountability for torture

September 11 retrospective: Torture

Much has been written about the Cheney-Bush Administration's torture policy. The 9/11 attacks on the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) became the excuse for the torture policy.

The Obama Administration made the indefensible decision to not prosecute the torture perpetrators, as they were required to do under American and international law. So was the Cheney-Bush Administration, but they were involved at the higest levels in perpetrating the crimes. One result of Obama's failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators has been that polls now show a majority of Americans approving of torture.

President Obama allegedly ended torture. There have been reports under this Administration of American officials participating in torture. We know that Bradley Mannng was kept in conditions amounting to torture, and of a serious kind (prolonged extreme isolation, humiliation by nudity). But his conditions were improved after a reporter confronted Obama with a question about Manning, although Obama's immediate response was to defend the way he had been treated. This is the closest evidence of which I'm aware that Obama may have specifically approved of torture, though it's possible he wasn't fully aware of how Manning was being tortured.

Obama has kept the Guantánamo station of what Al Gore memorably called the Bush Gulag open. He has accepted the lawless policy of indefinite detention without trial or charges. He has kept "black site" secret prisons open. Those are all in themselves conditions that virtually guarantee that torture will occur. I would be astonished if it's not going on, even though Obama doesn't obscenely celebrate torture the way Dick Cheney and virtually the entire Republican Party do.

But no matter how passionately the Republican Party celebrates it or how large a majority of Americans tell pollsters they support it, it's wrong and is destructive of the rule of law in a basic way that is only possibly matched by war itself. Jimmy Carter was on the mark in his 2005 book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis:

Aside from the humanitarian aspects, it is well known that, under excruciating torture, a prisoner will admit almost any suggested crime. Such confessions are, of course, not admissible in trials in civilized nations. The primary goal of torture of the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear. Some of our leaders have found that it is easy to forgo human rights for those who are considered to be subhuman, or "enemy combatants." [my emphasis]

The torture issue isn't going away.

Tags: 9/11, accountability for torture, torture

Did torture produce the lead to Osama bin Laden's final hideout?

Marcy Wheeler has been following the torture issue carefully. And as of this May 2 post, she didn't think the information in the public record shows that torture produced the lead that wound up in Bin Laden's last stand in Pakistan: The Osama bin Laden Trail Shows Waterboarding Didn't Work Emptywheel 05/02/2011.

But the advocates of torture like Liz Cheney are insisting that it worked. It has now become entirely respectable for Republican politicians and pundits to openly advocate torture, though they are still insisting on the euphemism "enhanced interrogation."

It's true that torture produces less usable information than legal interrogations and deal-making. But the most important point is that torture is wrong, a fundamental violation of human rights. It's also illegal.

Jimmy Carter called in right in Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005): "The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear."

Torture is an instrument of state terror. It's completely inconsistent with the rule of law.

Tags: accountability for torture, jimmy carter, torture

Torture, the rule of law and Bin Laden

Glenn Greenwald sums up the issues of international law as it relates to the death of Osama bin Laden and the broader question of applying the rule of law to terrorism cases in The Osama bin Laden exception Salon 05/06/2011:

For me, the better principles are those established by the Nuremberg Trials, and numerous other war crimes trials accorded some of history's most gruesome monsters. It should go without saying for all but the most intellectually and morally stunted that none of this has anything to do with sympathy for bin Laden. Just as was true for objections to the torture regime or Guantanamo or CIA black sites, this is about the standards to which we and our Government adhere, who we are as a nation and a people.

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn't do that, and the reason they didn't is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out.

I should note here that we also need to apply a critical understanding to the Nuremberg Trials, even though I agree with Glenn's characterization. There was an aspect of "victor's justice" to them. Some charges - like shooting survivors of a ship sinking - were not used because the United Nations Allies (including the US) had often committed them as well.

Joan McCarter calls attention to this interview with "Matthew Alexander" (a pseudonym) in which he discusses the morality, legality and effectiveness of torture. That is: it's immoral, illegal, and at best marginally effective in obtaining useful information. Dan Froomkin weighs in on the same, including information from an interview with Michael Alexander, in Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It Huffington Post 05/06/2011:

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post.

"We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.

The torture issue isn't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, glenn greenwald, michael alexander, torture

The "new" torture debate

Amerika schlittert in neue Folterdebatte (America slides into a new torture debate) reads the headline for a Der Spiegel Online article.

Juan Cole writes (No need for Torture. Did a Telephone Call to al-Qaeda in Iraq Unravel Bin Laden? Informed Comment 05/05/2011)

The Obama team is said to have been dismayed by the rapidity with which the national subject has switched from the death of Usama Bin Laden to the use of torture in interrogations.

The first thing to say is that Democratic leaders and the Obama administration only have themselves to blame for this torture issue still being salient. It can be deployed by the Cheney family and their surrogates only because Democratic leaders made a decision not to have anyone prosecuted for the crimes of the Bush administration. Not torture. Not warrantless domestic surveillance. Nada. If there had been prosecutions, and, better, convictions for torture, then people defending it would be defending convicted criminals,and would reveal themselves for what they are. [my emphasis]

This is right. The Obama Administration gave torture advocates a new validation. The opposition party came to power and refused to enforce the laws against torture against perpetrators who had publicly admitted to ordering it. This Administration accepted the Guantánamo mess and the Cheney-Bush alternative prosecution track for terrorist suspects - including indefinite detention without trial. And at least in the case of Bradley Manning, torture is still being practiced by the military. (Or at least was until public and international pressure got them to place Manning in more decent cond

Jonathan Hafetz writes in Bin Laden and the Torture Debate Balkinization 05/04/2011:

Bin Laden's death won't resolve the torture debate, nor will it be the last time the capture or trial of a suspected terrorist reignites controversy over the basic direction of U.S. counter-terrorism policy. What the response to bin Laden's death shows is how questions that before were not subject to debate--i.e., is torture permissible (answer: no, never)--have seemingly become a legitimate subject of public discourse. It also suggests that until the United States establishes a meaningful accountability mechanism and comes to grips with the abuses committed after 9/11, those who support torture will continue to exploit each new opportunity to defend it through the creation of a pro-torture narrative. [my emphasis]

The torture issue isn't going away. There has to be a real accounting for it.

Tags: accountability for torture, jonathan hafetz, juan cole, torture

Shrub Bush on Bin Laden's death: total absence of self-reflection

It's not that George W. Bush ever presented himself to the public as particularly self-reflective or even especially serious.

But his reaction to the news of Osama bin Laden's demise (from Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich, US forces kill Osama bin Laden The Independent 05/02/2011) still surprised me by its cluelessness:

The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done. [my emphasis]

For a man who will have potential arrest and indictment hanging over him for the rest of his life for torture and even potentially murder in connection with the torture program, it takes some combination of incredible arrogance and lack of appreciation of one's own vulnerabilities to say something like, "No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."

There is a sense, of course, in which that is true. The torture issue isn't going away. There will be a formal reckoning with it someday. For the good of the United States, I hope it's sooner rather than later.

The Obama Administration should take a hint from Bush's statement and do its duty to prosecute the torture crimes of the previous Administration. And of this one, if the evidence warrants it.

Tags: accountability for torture, george w bush, osama bin laden, torture

The Obama White House, Bradley Manning and the rule of law

Joan McCarter in Messenger shooting: State Dept.'s P.J. Crowley resigns after criticizing Manning treatment Daily Kos 03/14/2011 captures what I imagine to be the feeling of frustration and disappointment many Democrats are feeling who hoped that President Obama would end the Bush Administration's departures from the rule of law, especially torture. Referring to the White House firing State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley for stating on the record his objection to the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning, she writes:

President Obama told the nation in his press conference last week that he accepted the Pentagon's assurances that "the procedures that have been taken in terms of [Manning's] confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards." With those words, President Obama took ownership of Manning's abuse, took ownership of actions that the UN could very well conclude are torture.

Forcing Crowley out for shining a light on the issue only compounds the problem this administration has with transparency. Its relentless war on whistleblowers and leakers—particularly in national security and civil liberties cases—is in direct contradiction to his campaign promises that whistleblowers would be protected because "such acts of courage and patriotism should be encouraged rather than stifled." It's also the last inheritance from the Bush administration Obama should have sought to uphold. [my emphasis]

Pvt. Bradley Manning is under arrest, accused of the felong crime of unauthorized leaking of classified information, has been held for months in what is starting to look like indefinite detention. Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, Marcy Wheeler and others have been following the Manning case closely. Their coverage leaves no doubt in my mind that his treatment constitutes torture. And very little doubt that it is being used on him both to terrorize other soldiers - torture by governments is always an instrument of state terror - and to illegally coerce him to give false testimony against Wikileaks.

If I actually believed the blather we hear from traditional veterans groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion, blowhard politicians, and warmongers both professional and amateur about "honoring our soldiers" and "supporting the troops," I would be surprised that they are not screaming about Manning's treatment. Soldiers accused of crimes are entitled to fair trials, even if it is in a court-martial. They are also entitled to have their legal rights respected, including the right not to be tortured.

Torture to me was only a partisan issue in the years since 2001, when people paying close attention to the news out of Afghanistan could see that it was being practiced by Americans there, and especially since the Abu Ghuraib and subsequent disclosures made clear it had become a standard practice under the Bush Administration, because it was being defended and practiced by the Republican Party and generally criticized by the Democratic Party. To me it was always a religious issue, a human rights issue, and a vital problem for the rule of law before it was a partisan issue.

As much as I hate to say so, it's now no longer a partisan issue in US politics. Obama's press conference last Friday made that clear because, as Joan puts it, the Democratic President "took ownership of Manning's abuse."

This doesn't mean that I'm no longer a Democratic partisan or that I put any hope in a third-party movement in the foreseeable future. If the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression along with two nasty, unpopular wars didn't shatter the two-party system in the US, it's hard to see what in any immediate future would do so. (Then again, a week ago no one would have predicted that the Fukushima power plant who most of the world had never heard of then would today be a leading news item worldwide. Stuff happens.)

So, especially given the increasingly authoritarian, reactionary and even nihilistic behavior of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is still the vehicle for hopes for constructive economic and foreign policies. The core voting constituency for democracy, workers rights, peace and the rule of law is largely the same right now as the Democratic Party's base.

In the wake of Crowley's firing, Republican commentator David Frum tweeted, in slightly garbled form, thata the firing reinforced an earlier formulation of his, that the Republican Party is afraid of their base, but the Democratic Party hates theirs. That's not exactly true, on either side. But it does catch some of the feeling, certainly among Democrats, on seeing the Republicans both use and follow their Tea Party zealots in an increasingly radical direction, while the Democratic leadership including Obama's White House seem almost eager to through the concerns of their base voters under the bus.

Progressive Democrats, certainly including organized labor, have gotten more aggressive in mounting primary challenges against Democrats who behave that way. It's a healthy trend, and one we saw the Republicans use in 2010 to enforce greater political conformity in what was already a highly conformist Party. It needs to continue. Democrats like Virginia's Mark Warner who support fazing out the Social Security program would seem to be especially promising targets.

I would love to see a primary challenge to President Obama next year from a progressive Democrat who would be a hardliner on Social Security and clearly opposed to torture - as Obama was on the campaign trail. The Obama White House has clearly become smug and arrogant enough to think that the Democratic voters have to support them no matter what in 2012. A serious primary challenge that would shake them out of that attitude would serve the Democratic Party well in 2012. Because the "professional left" the White House loves to verbally bash isn't going to be pushing for a third party candidacy in the Presidential election. But with the economy on the course it is and the Democratic President still apparently pursuing and absurd fantasy of being a "post-partisan" leader, the Obama campaign will find it a serious challenge to get their voters out to the polls in sufficient numbers to win a second term. Some of them that do go to the polls will be tempted to cast a protest vote for some chronic third party. And, as we saw so dramatically with the Nader campaign in 2000, that can make a critical difference.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, bradley manning, torture, obama administration