Obama's Legacy: "Look forward, not back" on torture crimes

I said when President Obama took office that the most important thing he needed to do to protect the Constitution and the rule of law was to investigate and prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Bush Administration as the Torture Convention requires him to do. Because the one thing that was missing from Dick Cheney project to make torture a regular practice of the United States was for a successor Administration to validate it by refusing the prosecute the perpetrators.

Obama did exactly that: he validated the practice by refusing to prosecute the perpetrators. Because he wanted to "look forward, not back."

And Digby gives us a grimly probable look at what comes after Obama (Donald Trump is bringing torture back: His entire foreign-policy team is comprised of big fans of the worst Bush-era practices Salon 11/18/2016):

And sadly, despite ending the practice upon taking office, President Barack Obama didn’t require any accountability for what had happened and the whole question was swept under the rug. Indeed, the administration fought the release of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s torture report and to this day has kept the full report under wraps. And so it became further normalized — never punished or fully repudiated — leaving it there for someone to come along and pick right up where the Bush administration left off.

Our next president is downright eager and excited to do it. He has proclaimed that he loves waterboarding, and has repeatedly promised to do “a lot more than that” as president. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he has insisted that it works and “if it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”

David Cole wrote about this problem six years ago to the date in Obama’s Torture Problem NYR Daily 11/18/2010. I think he was right in saying, "It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy.... Torture and its after-effects will be with us until we are willing to confront them head-on."

The legacy of President Obama's decision to "look forward, not back" on the torture crimes will be with us for a long time.

Digby translates a Trump rant into plain English and good syntax

Digby in Trump the moderate Hullabaloo 02/27/2016 looks at one of the prospective Republican Presidential nominee's rants about violence and torture and puts it in clear terms for those who are confused, or want to be confused, and find it convenient to pretend to be confused:

Note how his mind works. In the good old days the police could crack some heads. Now they're too scared because of political correctness. We've becoming a frightened country afraid to "do the right thing" --- like torture people.

He flows very smoothly from police "taking care" of protesters to waterboarding in one long stream of consciousness rant. What do you suppose that means? And what do you suppose it means that his audience cheers wildly for it?

This is what they love about him, don't kid yourself. They don't know from "deals" with Mexico, they just thing they've been screwed and they think this guy will kick some foreigners' asses, inside this country and out. (And his paeans to police indicate that they wouldn't mind if he kicked some darker hued American asses either.) He's articulating their rage at all those people --- and promising to act on it.

When has Trump said he'd go after Wall Street? He promises to get rid of all environmental laws the way the hated Chinese do. (They come up with the idea and then start digging the next day! No environmental impact statements!) This is a guy who said that wages were going to have to go down. (He's since said he wants them to go up, but his first utterances are usually the real ones ...) On who's behalf is he arguing? Workers? Citizens? No, I'm going to guess it's corporations and business. [emphasis in original]

Digby is rightly skeptical of the sprouting claims that Trump is somehow an economic populist who will pursue some kind of liberal economic policies.

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

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

Obama's Libya policy in light of Ghaddafi's cooperation with Cheney and Bush in torture

I wrote after last week's Vice Presidential debate that one of the problems not addressed in the arguments over Libya had to do with nuclear nonproliferation. Ghaddafi's was bad in numerous ways. But it had agreed to US demands to give up its nuclear weapons program, which was a positive thing for nuclear nonproliferation. However, by siding with the rebels against that regime, the Obama Administration surely raised questions in other countries' minds about whether cooperating with the US on nonproliferation is the most advisable thing to do. If a country has nuclear weapons, they have a strong deterrent against US invasion. If you give up seeking that deterrent at US demand, the Americans may well invade you anyway.

This is part of a broader contradiction between the US embrace of the policy of preventive war and our the nuclear nonproliferation policy.

(BTW, there's actually an argument to be made that US operations in nuclear-armed Pakistan constitute a partial exception to the deterrence framework I just stated. But a full-fledged US invasion aimed at regime change in Islamabad would be a different story.)

One of the bad sides of the Ghaddafi government in Libya with which the Cheney-Bush Administration actively collaborated was torture. Scott Horton summarizes the result of a Human Rights Watch report released this summer on that topic in CIA Waterboarding, Qaddafi Collaboration Revealed No Comment 09/06/2012. Closely aligning the US with the most brutal practices of a dictatorial regime can also have bad longer-term consequences:

The report, coupled with recent developments in Libya, also highlights the CIA’s chronic inability to distinguish between violent anti-American Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda and those who simply opposed their own oppressive regime and sought to overturn it. The Bush Administration promoted cordial relations with Qaddafi, while the Bush-era CIA worked intensively to develop a close rapport with Qaddafi’s security forces, much as it did in Egypt, Yemen and a number of other repressive Arab states. In 2011, the Obama Administration reversed course, siding with the rebels opposing Qaddafi and deploying military and intelligence resources to topple his regime. Many of the Libyan groups persecuted and abused by the CIA belonged to the alliance that toppled Qaddafi, and a number of their leaders are now in positions of importance in the new regime. Thus the CIA’s miscalculations could not have been more sweeping or more harmful to long-term U.S. interests.

In an important speech last year at Harvard University, CIA veteran and Obama counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan stressed that the administration’s Middle East policies emphasize the rule of law and respect for human rights. If that’s true, then the cache of evidence disclosed by the Libyan revolution and the comparable evidence that has emerged in Egypt point to the CIA as a rogue institution operating at dangerous cross-purposes with official U.S. policy. The agency aligned itself closely with the most abusive institutions in the countries where it was operating, and enabled the wanton torture of political opponents. Those tight relationships appear to have seriously warped its intelligence posture, leaving it dangerously blind to the developments that swept the Arab world early last year. Moreover, much of the conduct highlighted in the HRW report violated criminal statutes, including the Anti-Torture Act and the prohibition on renditions of persons to countries where they were likely to face torture.

These issues are unlikely to be much discussed in the second Obama-Romney debate. Because neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are willing to address some of these chronic problems in American foreign policy.

Even though I quote Stephen Walt all the time, I don't see myself as taking a Realist-theory view of foreign policy. I suppose of the major foreign policy schools out there, I'm more closely aligned with the liberal internationalist view, though I would like to think that a democratic internationalist view such as that in the original purpose of the European Union was a near-term possibility.

The US should be careful not to identify itself too closely with unpopular, un-elected regimes and especially not with their nastiest anti-human rights practices. In the world of nation-states that we have, it will always be easier to wag the finger at other countries than to honestly evaluate the United States' own record at any given moment. And when a country wants to go to war with another one, they suddenly become very concerned about bad human rights practices in the country they want to attack and kill lots of people.

World progress on human rights proceeds in fits and starts with lots of setbacks. But that shouldn't be an excuse not to keep trying.

I'm also disturbed that military interventions like that in Libya are often justified primarily on humanitarian grounds. But somehow the presence of oil or some geopolitical power concern seems to make it much easier for outside forces to intervene under the guise of "responsibility to protect."

Reducing nuclear proliferation and avoiding international wars should be overriding concerns that coexist with concern for human rights and the "responsibility to protect." Because the latter can and are used for excuses justifying military interventions that undermine the first two priorities.

Tags: libya, 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

Lynndie England is sorry about Abu Ghuraib - about the photos, that is, not the torture; plus, Bobo sympathizes with the Kandahar massacre shooter

Talia Ralph reports in Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib soldier, still not sorry Global Post 03/19/2012:

Lynndie England, one of the soldiers infamous for her portrayal in the horrifying photos of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said Monday that she still isn't sorry about how she treated detainees, The Daily reported.

"Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal," England said in an exclusive interview with The Daily. "They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy."

She seems to be moved by the same sentiments as the good Rev. Wade Burleson: "If you have to apologize, you shouldn't be at war. The United States is at war. NO MORE APOLOGIES." (Update 10/29/2012: The Rev. Burleson has changed the name and graphics on his blog to Istoria Ministries Blog; he seems to have kept many of the posts from his previous blog but not the one quoted here. As of this update, the post is cached here.) Lynndie England hears you, Rev. Burleson!

Lynndie England, one of the soldiers infamous for her portrayal in the horrifying photos of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said Monday that she still isn't sorry about how she treated detainees, The Daily reported.

"Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal," England said in an exclusive interview with The Daily. “They weren’t innocent. They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It's like saying sorry to the enemy."

Yes, that's the quote: "Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal."

But she is sorry about the photographs:

Despite her lack of remorse for the victims, England said she does regret that the photos, which sparked anti-American backlash around the world, may have caused more US casualties, Slate reported.

"That's something that falls on my head," she told the Daily. "I think about it all the time.... Losing people on our side because of me coming out on a picture."

In other words, she learned that committing the war crime wasn't the problem, getting caught was the problem.

Then we have David "Bobo" Brooks, who specializes in calmly explaining why even the craziest Republican proposals are moderate and sensible, taking on the Kandahar massacre, explaining in his best Thoughtful Conservative mode why it wasn't such a big deal. It's kind of like riding on a bus. Or something.

Bobo's pro-massacre column is When the Good Do Bad New York Times 03/19/2012. Charlie Pierce does a takedown of it in The Savage Within David Brooks Esquire Politics Blog 03/20/2012.

But cynicism about Bobo's ponderous and pretentious manner of argument shouldn't detract from what he's doing there. He's presenting the highbrow, Very Serious People case defending the massacre for which Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is charged.

Would it be too much for Bobo to mention a name or two of the people whose murders he's justifying?

Qais Azimy provides the names of the dead and wounded in the massacre in No one asked their names by Aljazeera English 03/19/2012. One of the dead was named Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, kandahar massacre, torture, war crimes

Big civil liberties concerns for the US

The mainstream press will be flooding the zone from now until November with news about the Presidential race.

Serious civil liberties currently facing the United States are not likely to get much attention in that coverage. But they remain. Here I'm providing some links and brief quotes about four of them: the corporatization of free speech; deporting American citizens; detention without due process; and, torture.

The corporatization of free speech: bmaz in The Corporatist Free Speech Superiority of the Roberts Court Emptywheel 01/08/2012 looks at the heavy corporate tilt in recent Supreme Court free speech rulings.

Brutal immigration policies that often sweep up American citizens in illegal deportations: Digby, State sanctioned kidnapping Hullabaloo 01/07/2012

Arrest and deterntion without due process: Daphne Eviatar provides and example of the problems those policies continue to cause in The Latest Skirmish in Afghanistan: Hate to Say We Told You So Huffington Post 01/08/2012.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the new law allowing the President to order indefinite detention of anyone including American citizens, a right both the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administration have claimed is within the President's authority even without Congressional authorization (The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritize it Salon 01/08/2012):

The Obama DOJ has repeatedly argued that the Boumediene ruling [requiring habeas corpus procedures for military detainees] should not apply to Bagram, where - the Obama administration insists - it has the power to imprison people with no due process, not even a habeas hearing; the Obama DOJ has succeeded in having that power enshrined. Obama has proposed a law to vest him with powers of "prolonged detention" to allow Terrorist suspects to be imprisoned with no trials. His plan for closing Guantanamo entailed the mere re-location of its indefinite detention system to U.S. soil, where dozens of detainees, at least, would continue to be imprisoned with no trial. And, of course, the President just signed into law the NDAA which contains - as the ACLU put it - "a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision," meaning - as Human Rights Watch put it - that "President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law." Those held at Guantanamo will continue to receive at least a habeas hearing, but those held in other American War on Terror prisons will not. [my emphasis]

Marcy Wheeler writes about the Guantánamo Gulag in Our New Teachers about Rule of Law 01/10/2012:

Gitmo has come to embody many things in this country over the last decade: Bush’s incompetence and criminality, our bigotry and inhumanity, and – as most would like to treat it now – a big political tussle between Obama and Republicans.

But at every turn – from the Bush Administration grasping claiming the piece of land existed outside the rule of law, to the corrupt legal process that created memos authorizing torture there, to Jim Haynes' insistence that "we can’t have acquittals," to the DC Circuit's continued efforts to make sure detainees get no meaningful review of their detention–Gitmo has been about shedding the rule of law. It has been about finding ways for America to defy the law even while maintaining the pretense we still uphold it. [my emphasis]

Torture: Digby has for years now been following the indiscriminate use of tasers by domestic police as torture weapons, which often has fatal results. As she points out in Dispatch from torture nation: execution by pepper spray Hullabaloo 01/07/2012, abuse of chemical weapons by police can also have the same consequences.

And we train them early to adapt to police-state conditions by putting cops in schools to rough up young evildoers: girls who won't pick up crumbs off the floor in the cafeteria, for instance, or spraying perfume on yourself at unapproved moments: Chris McGreal, The US schools with their own police Guardian 01/09/2012; Schul-Polizei.Wie US-Behörden Schüler kriminalisieren Frankfurter Rundschau 11.01.2012.

Tags: torture, guantánamo

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