For the Record: Torture

The New York Times published an article today about the findings of the independent, non-partisan 11-member panel appointed by the Constitution Project to review "interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Those who are horrified by our country's use of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attack will feel vindicated by the review. Those who have convinced themselves that torture is justified--despite our country's repudiating torture in the past, seeking convictions of those charged with perpetrating torture, and being a signatory of the International Convention Against Torture--will probably continue to support the Bush Administration's decision to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners. The power of propaganda lives on in the Orwellian language of the Bush Administration's torture memos.

But for the record, one more non-partisan review panel has concluded that our country did, indeed, torture people and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The Republican leader of the panel, Asa Hutchinson, who served in the Bush Administration, said that "after the panel’s nearly two years of research . . . he had no doubts about what the United States did":

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews. 

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds. . .  

. . . .The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

This report may be lost in the heavy media coverage of the most recent terror attack, that of the explosions at the Boston Marathon and the horrific--and fatal--injuries resulting from that attack. As of now, no one knows who is responsible for the attack--home-grown terrorists, an individual malcontent, or international terrorists. In the midst of such horror, some people are too ready to surrender freedom to fear, just as our country surrendered its ethics to fear in adopting torture after 9/11. But as these recent attacks indicate, we can never be completely protected from harm. Losing our "moral compass" is not worth such an impossible goal.

For further information:
The Constitution Project's Report on Detainee Treatment, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/16/world/16torture-report.html

Another Death in the "War on Terror"

I am going to vote for Barack Obama for president in November, and I have good reasons to do so. The Democratic ticket more closely represents my ideals, though it isn't perfect. I believe in gay rights; I believe in a woman's right to choose her own birth control and to have low-cost, easy access to methods that prevent pregnancy in the first place. I believe that the wealth gap is widening in our country, that corporations and the rich have too much power. I really think we should have universal healthcare and that the government should be able to negotiate lower drug prices. I believe in a public education that helps its citizens to become critical thinkers. I believe in the separation of church and state. The Republican Party, as it exists today, supports policies that are inimical to  these ideas, and it's largely responsible, through following the rhetorical instructions of people such as Newt Gingrich, in creating the toxic public rhetoric that drives our politics today. In addition, under the presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans have been pig-headedly obstructive in these times of economic crises, putting politics before the good of the country.

That being said, one of my really big disappointments in the Obama administration is its inability to shut down Guantanamo Bay and its continuing many of the war policies of the Bush administration. And I despise the fact that the DOJ hadn't the balls to go after those who approved administration-sanctioned torture in its "war on terror." (How's that working? Has terror disappeared from the face of the earth?) Unfortunately, voting Republican would not create a change here, either. Mitt Romney is being advised by some of the same neo-cons who got us in the war in Iraq with their lies and unbelievable naiveté about how long the war would last, how much the war would cost, and how little the war would impact the very people we were supposed to be liberating. 

My disappointment is magnified by stories such as that of Adnan Latif, who was finally successful this past week in his many attempts to commit suicide in that national disgrace of a prison, Guantanamo Bay. 

Congress, of course, is greatly at fault, too, in abdicating its responsibility to declare war and in allowing the executive branch to accrue more power. And so are we responsible, too, in our silence, in our eager readiness to follow that presidential advice years ago to "go shopping" rather than to deal with the harsh realities of our nation's actions.

Adnan Latif is finally returning home after ten years. . . . in a coffin. I doubt his death has aided the "war on terror." Do you?

Torture Probes in the UK

Scott Horton links to an article in The Guardian about a torture suspect whom British intelligence allowed to fly to Pakistan and then tipped off Pakistani intelligence to arrest the man. In Pakistan, the suspect was tortured, including having three of his fingernails removed, and British intelligence worked with the Pakistanis, knowing that torture was used, to question the man. Cozy. David Davis, former shadow home secretary, brought these details to light and had this to say about Britain's and the United States' examination and prosecution of those who used, or who were complicit in the use of, torture:

The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, whilst explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction. We have done the opposite. As it stands, we are awaiting a police investigation which will presumably end in the prosecution of frontline officers. At the same time the government is fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up both crimes and political embarrassments, to protect those who are the real villains of the piece, those who approved the policies in the first place. (quoted in "Revealed – the secret torture evidence MI5 tried to suppress," Ian Cobain, The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 July 2009).

David Davis ended his speech to the the British Commons with these words:

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

The entire speech can be read here: "David Davis on Torture: Statement in Full, The Guardian, 8 July 2009.

"Contrived Indignation"

Watching back-to-back segments from Dick Cheney's speech and President Obama's speech on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, I was struck by the different tones of the speeches. Cheney speaks with his characteristic sneer, like a grumpy and angry uncle, condescending to anyone who disagrees with him. Obama speaks as if we're all grown-ups; maybe we don't all agree, but we can treat one another with respect. Cheney seems to be addressing his words to the already-persuaded or those who don't keep up with the news and thus won't recognize statements that have been thoroughly discounted. Obama is still trying to speak to those who might not agree with him and to those who need to be more educated on whatever subject he is addressing. Cheney has to label all those who disagree with him as "other," as "enemies." Obama does not. I don't agree with all of Obama's decisions, but I'm willing to listen even to those views of his with which I disagree.

I was particularly annoyed with Cheney's claim that those who are against "enhanced interrogation" or "harsh questioning" (i. e., torture--"harsh questioning" is as sleazy a euphemism as I can think of) are guilty of "contrived indignation and faulty moralizing." Here is an example of that over-weaning condescension in the man. My indignation, I assure bilious Uncle Dick, is not "contrived"--it is strong and true indignation, based on deeply-held morals. Nor am I, and others like me, "blam[ing] America for the evil others do." I am thoroughly capable of recognizing the evil that others do. I want evil-doers held accountable. But I am blaming the American government for the evil it has done in my name: torturing prisoners of war. I want those held accountable who smeared my good name as an American citizen and who trampled on the values of my country. If you're gonna call fighting terror a "war," well, then, the prisoners you capture from that war are "prisoners of war." The United States has traditionally and lawfully denounced the use of torture against prisoners of war. Hence, the use of torture is un-American. Oh, and immoral.

I have loved and cherished the values this country stands for; any person who challenges those values challenges me, as an American citizen. Someone, please send Uncle Dick back to his bunker. Maybe there's room for some of those terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in there, too. Dick Cheney needs to look his real enemy--not the American people who disagree with him--in the eye and argue his values then.

Think Progress on Torture

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, conservatives continue to praise torture as effective. Think Progress has a long summary of experts demonstrating otherwise: "Why Bush's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Program Failed". Evidence does not convince a surprising number of people in this country, but at least the evidence is there for those who care.

Torture--It Won't Go Away

Every time I think this is the last post I'm going to write on torture, I change my mind. What our government did is unconscionable, and until justice is served, I'll keep bringing up the subject here, particularly since it is increasingly clear that some people would love for the subject to go away, and they are doing their darnedest to walk away; others are using their power in the public sphere to justify and to support the use of torture--Dick Cheney just can't shut up about how wonderful torture is; and others are just trying to obfuscate the issue as best they can.

Then there are those that continue to make the stupidest comments on record. Several bloggers have discussed the hearing on torture today before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (See “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration”). Think Progress has a post, with a video clip of Lindsey Graham saying:

The Vice President is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work. (Think Progress: ""Graham: Since torture techniques have ’survived for about 500 years,’ ‘apparently they work.’"

"Both sides of the story"? What sides, exactly? That torture works or doesn't work? That we should torture or not torture? If it works, does that justify our torturing people? If it doesn't work, should we still do it? That because something "has survived for about 500 years" it's necessarily successful and justifiable? Does Lindsey Graham read? does he know his history? Does he have any moral backbone? Here are just a few thoughts that come to my mind (and, how lucky, I've research notes right here):

• Torture has historically been used to get people to confess to what the torturers want to hear, not particularly because the torturers want the truth. Just read the story of the Frenchman Jean Calas in 1762. Calas was tortured by authorities because they wanted him to confess to killing his son--even though there was no proof. And when Voltaire sought information about procedures of the case, the authorities would not release that information; the procedures were kept secret. The man died without confessing, a niggling little detail that worried the authorities; had the man confessed--no matter whether the confession was "true" or not--they could rest easy.
  
  Oh, lo and behold, the Bush Administration wanted to increase the use of "coercive techniques" because the prisoners associated with Al Qaeda were not providing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq during questioning. More "coercive techniques" (some stressful positions, several days without sleep, some slapping around, a little waterboarding) might establish the link the government so desired in order to justify going to war against Iraq. (See Ron Suskind's The One-Percent Doctrine, specifically, chapter 3, from which this quote is taken: "Early doubts voiced by the CIA about any connection between [Saddam and Al Qaeda] were duly noted and largely ignored by the Vice President, Don Rumsfeld, and their respective staffs" p. 123)

• Does torture provide good information? According to an article on ProPublica that recounts the findings of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment, Major Paul Burney, from the Behavioral Science Consultation Team who "help[ed] ramp up intelligence collection at Guantanamo, "there was 'a lot of pressure to use more coercive techniques' because prisoners were resisting interrogators and 'we were not being successful at establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.'" That same article discusses how in a memo of Oct., 2, 2002, these psychologists "versed in the military's 'SERE' program" (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) warned government officials "that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command. 

Col. Larry C. James, then psychology chief at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, also warned that

 the use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects. . . When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, i. e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. . . it usually decreases the reliability of the information...Because of the danger involved, very few SERE instructors are allowed to actually use physical pressures. . . everything that is occurring [in SERE school] is very carefully monitored and paced. . . Even with all these safeguards, injuries and accidents do happen. The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially...(quoted in "Tortured Profession: Psychologists Warned of Abusive Interrogations, Then Helped Craft Them, by Sheri Fink, ProPublia, May 5, 2009).

• And just what is an "acceptable" level of torture? Well, according to CIA lawyer Jonathan Freedman, torture techniques that the Behavioral Science Consultation Team described were legal, and the signatory agreement to the United Nations Torture Convention could be disregarded because the wording was too vague. In short, he argued, the convention was "'basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.'" (quoted in Finks' article) Oops! I guess that was too much torture. The detainee died. My bad.

I could go on and on, but I'll just end with this note: I am disappointed with Barack Obama's refusal to release the remaining photos that record interrogation (and torture) of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think there should be a full accounting of the consequences of torture. Otherwise, it won't go away.

Other Voices:

Mark Benjamin, "Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering," Salon, May 14, 2009.

Scott Horton, "A Convenient Death," posted on his blog No Comment, at Harper's Magazine, May 12, 2009.

Juan Cole, "The Hidden Hand of Dick Cheney," in Salon, May 13, 2009.

Nick Baumann, "The Torture Dissidents' Tale," Mother Jones, May 13, 2009.

Mike Webb, "Mark Danner and ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer Talk Torture," on ProPublica, May 13, 2009.

David Rittgers, "Former FBI Agent: Torture Sucks; Don't Do It," Cato @ Liberty, posted May 13, 2009.

Andrew Sullivan, "The President Explains," on his blog, The Daily Dish, at The Atlantic," May 13, 2009.

Clint Hendler, "Transparency Interview: Jameel Jaffer," Columbia Journalism Review, May 4, 2009.

David Crisp, "Torture Revisited" and "Thursday Talk Radio Update II," on Billings Blog, May 1, 2009.

Mark Danner, "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means," The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2009.

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use," The New York Times, April 21, 2009.

When is Torture Torture?

As Andrew Sullivan points out, to the The New York Times, torture is torture, that is, those "enhanced interrogation techniques" or "harsh interrogations" being labeled "torture," when another country does it. The hypocrisy in this whole torture debate is disgusting: It's torture when "they" do it, but it's not torture when "we" do it.

The torture debate has now moved to finger-pointing about who knew what and when. Was Nancy Pelosi briefed on how interrogation techniques were being used? She seems to have been present for one briefing in September 2002. Pelosi says that she was not told that waterboarding was being used, and, anyway, there wasn't anything she could do. However, Zachary Roth, on Talking Points Memo, points out that "Jane Harman, who succeeded Pelosi as the ranking Democrat on the intel committee," sent an official letter of protest (classified) to the CIA in 2003.

I'm with Roth on this: the argument over who knew what and when, the partisan finger-pointing, is a dead-ender. An investigation into our government's using torture to interrogate prisoners should be authorized and commenced, with no regard to party involvement:

Here's the larger point: Whatever we end up finding out about the specifics of what was and wasn't said in that briefing, it already seems clear that Pelosi didn't do all that she could have. Of course, that's not an argument -- as some Republican torture supporters seem to think -- against a full investigation into how these techniques were developed and approved. In fact, it's yet another good reason why such a probe is exactly what we need.(Zachary Roth, "Record Suggests Pelosi Did Little In Response To Torture Briefing," TPM Muckraker, posted May 8, 2009)

So often our political leaders in Congress remind me of children. This particular finger-pointing is reminiscent of the Alpha kid who is caught beating up a little kid and is threatened with punishment. The bully kid then whines, "There were witnesses. In fact, Beta-kid was watching and did nothing to stop me." Beta-kid then says, "Hey, I didn't see the actual kick to the face and kidney."

Is there no adult in this country who can get these children to take responsibility for their actions?

Again, Torture Cannot be Contained

Spencer Ackerman has an article out this evening in The Washington Independent discussing the just-released unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The report demonstrates how the torture began and how its authorization from senior officials led to abuse, including the abuse of prisoners by military personnel at Abu Ghraib:

As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.

Ackerman ends his short article with a quote from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.

You can read Spencer Ackerman's article, from which these quotes were taken, here: "Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies," The Washington Independent, posted 4/21/2009, 10:00 p.m.

Spencer Ackerman has also written a short post on his article here: "How the Torture Started."

Earlier this evening, I watched Jon Stewart's clip of people justifying torture (Yes, I usually watch Jon Stewart a day late). Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I, too, found it difficult to laugh even though I appreciate Stewart's satire. But, as Coates noted, Peggy Noonan's comments on the release of the torture memos were so absurd as to be almost impossible to satirize. Listening to Noonan's so soft, so reasonable voice and watching her sad, sympathetic smile as she said the following words just about made me gag (beginning at 6:09 into Stewart's "We Don't Torture" clip):

It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents [the Obama administration's releasing the torture memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel] and sending them out to the world and thinking, 'Oh, much good will come of that.' Sometimes in life you want to keep walking... just keep walking. Some of life has to be mysterious.

(hmmmmm... What was that parable told by Jesus about the folks who just kept walking? Yeah, the priest who kept walking....the Levite who kept walking....the Samaritan who stopped...) So, according to Noonan, torture should be mysterious? Something from which we avert our eyes, whistling in the dark?

The critics who justify our "great nation's" use of torture evidently think it's more egregious to send truth out into the world than to send torture out into the world.

For a discussion of a timeline on torture, read "Torture Planning Began in 2001, Senate Report Reveals," by Mark Benjamin, Salon.

Torture in the 21st Century

For the past few days, I've been reading the "torture memos" and thinking about them. In previous posts, I've discussed Voltaire, who spoke out against torture in 18th-century France when European countries were still torturing citizens in the name of the state and of religion. Voltaire's imagined scenario where the wife of a torturer is first horrified and then interested and then inured to the horror seems so in keeping with the matter-of-fact tone of these 21st-century torture memos. Torture had become banal. The writers of the torture memos would have their readers believe that--totally ignoring moral considerations--torture was necessary, that torture could be targeted, that torture could be quantified, and that torture could be contained. Yet evidence proves otherwise.

Abu Zubaydah's capture in 2002 gave the administration what it needed, someone on whom to practice its newly-minted attitude toward torture. In a speech in April of that year, President Bush's characterization of Zubaydah as "one of [al-Qaeda's] top operatives" was proven incorrect. Dan Coleman, an FBI agent working with the CIA's bin Laden unit, read Zubaydah's secret diary and, along with many others, concluded that the guy was "insane, certifiable, split personality....He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights...He knew very little about real operations, or strategy." (Ron Suskind. The One Percent Doctrine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006: p. 100). Yet the President and Vice-president continued to claim publicly that Zubaydah was a top operative:

"Around the room a lot of people just rolled their eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was, in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO [chief operating officer]," said one top CIA official, who attended the 5 p.m. meeting where the issue of Zubaydah came up. (Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, p. 101)

When Zubaydah was captured, he had suffered serious injuries, but the United States gave him the "'finest medical attention on the planet,' said one CIA official. 'We got him in very good health, so we could start to torture him'" (Suskind, p. 100). Zubaydah was

"stabilized in mid-May [2002], and, thus, ready. An extraordinary moment in the "war on terror" was about to unfold. After months of interdepartmental exchanges over the detainment, interrogation, and prosecution of captives in the "war on terror"--as well as debates over which "debriefing" techniques would work most effectively on al Qaeda--the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered. (Suskind, p. 111).

And the torture memos just released reveal that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, in August 2002. That's just the waterboarding, not to mention other methods of coercion used against him ("confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall"--Scott Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure, The New York Times, April 18, 2009). The harsh coercive measures "were ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew... Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence officer with direct knowledge of the case" (Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure"). Even the most important information he had to provide--"naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed...as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot" (Shane, "Divisions Arose...")--was given up before these harsher interrogation methods were begun. The United States was to later capture KSM and to waterboard him 183 times in one month, in March 2003. And have we forgotten what happened the following fall at Abu Ghraib? The greenlight for torture trickled down to the military rank and file.

So much for "targeting" and "containing" torture.

The language of the torture memos is extremely dry, matter-of-fact, while describing the most grotesque methods of coercion. The memo of May 30, 2005, claims that "the interrogations at issue here are employed by the CIA only as reasonably deemed necessary to protect against grave threats to the United States interests, a determination that is made at CIA Headquarters, with input from the on-scene interrogation team, pursuant to careful screening procedures that ensure that the techniques will be used as little as possible on as few detainees as possible." Yet the history of the torture used on Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed clearly suggests the real problems with "careful screening procedures" and with using torture "as little as possible." Waterboarding someone 183 times in one month does not meet the standards of "as little as possible." Nor does applying the same method 83 times in one month to a mentally-unbalanced person who had already provided under less coercive means the useful information he had. The fact that these claims can be made so dryly, so surely, so deceptively should make a person with any remaining morality recoil in disgust.

The torture memo of May, 2005, authorizes up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, in which the detainee is kept standing and shackled, usually with hands tied in front of his body, under his chin. Or the hands can be raised above the head "for no more than two hours." The sleep-deprived detainee is given perhaps a two-to-three-foot diameter space in which to move. The detainee may also be kept nude. The memo confidently claims that keeping the detainee nude "does not involve any sexual abuse or threats of sexual abuse." Again, what's so coldly claimed on the page may not necessarily translate so coolly in the field. One has only to take another look at those pictures taken at Abu Ghraib to see the hollowness of such a claim.

Because the detainee is forced to stand, sleep-deprived and shackled, there is the problem of bodily functions. The lawyerly tone of the memo-writer assures readers that

a detainee undergoing sleep deprivation frequently wears an adult diaper. . . Diapers are checked and changed as needed so that no detainee should be allowed to remain in a soiled diaper, and the detainee's skin condition is monitored. You have informed us that diapers are used solely for sanitary and health reasons and not in order to humiliate the detainee. (p. 13 of Memorandum to John A. Riggs, Senior Deputy General Counsel, CIA; May 30, 2005)

Oh, of course, nudity, dietary manipulation, and sleep deprivation are not meant to humiliate prisoners. No, they are "conditioning techniques...used to put the detainee in a 'baseline' state, and to 'demonstrate to the [detainee] that he has no control over basic human needs" (p. 12, memo of May 30,2005). In other words, they are techniques used to dehumanize prisoners, to turn them into that "haggard, pale, defeated" man, no longer human to his keepers, described by Voltaire over two hundred years ago. The "conditioning" process prepares the way for "coercive" techniques of slamming the prisoner's head into a wall, dousing the prisoner with cold water, forcing the prisoner in stress positions and cramped confinement, and, the pièce de résistance, waterboarding the prisoner.

The memo of May 30, 2005, written by Steven Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, is but one of the torture memos. The one that has been targeted as the most egregious is that one dated August 1, 2002, and written by Jay Bybee, former Assistant Attorney General and now Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can read that memo here: at the Washington Post.

The argument of those who claim that torturing "enemy combatants" or possible Qaeda operatives keeps Americans safe is countered by men in the field, people who are charged with getting information from the enemy. Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym] who "led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006," writes that:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. (Matthew Alexander, "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," The Washington Post, November 30, 2008.)

Many are calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, who flourishes in his after-torture role as the Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. I concur, even though, as Marty Kaplan suggests, impeaching Bybee may "leave unplumbed the mystery of his moral blindness, and maybe, awfully, ours." Not to impeach him seems even more complicit to me. To put all this behind us when we haven't even fully confronted it doesn't seem right, either. I'm not necessarily advocating prosecution of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I do wish our collective disgust with their leadership would make Cheney particularly STFU. Cheney continues to slam President Obama publicly. "'I don't think we have much to apologize for,'" he recently told Sean Hannity in an interview. "[Waterboarding] worked,'" he added.[Ummmmm......266 times on two people?!] "'It's been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives and preventing another mass casualty attack on the US.'" The rule of law doesn't count much with these people. Neither does morality.

And now, to a blog roll of other voices on the topic of torture and consequences:

• Scott Horton, "The Torture Tango", posted April 20, 2009; "Impeach Jay Bybee," posted April 20, 2009.
• James Fallows, "Torture from Afar," posted April 20, 2009.
• Hilzoy, "Looking Forward," posted at Washington Monthly, April 20, 2009.
• Elizabeth de la Vega, "Of Black Holes and Radio Silence,", posted April 20, 2009.
• Andrew Sullivan, "They Waterboarded Him 183 Times in One Month," posted April 19, 2009.
• Glenn Greenwald, "Meet the Press and the media's distortions of the prosecutions debate,", posted April 20, 2009.
• And much less prosy than us all is David Crisp, "Tombstone Blues," posted April 20, 2009.

Voltaire's Published Comments on Torture

In his Dictionnaire Philosophique Portatif, which he began to circulate in July, 1764, and published anonymously later that year, Voltaire commented wittily and ironically on issues of morality and society . Here is his entry on torture. Note: "To apply the question" was double-speak for torture at that time.

Torture: The Romans never used torture except on slaves, but then slaves were not regarded as men. Nor does it appear that a judge in the criminal court regards as a fellow human being a man whom they bring to him haggard, pale, defeated, eyes downcast, the beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin that gnawed at him in his cell. He gives himself the pleasure of applying the great and the little torture, in the presence of a doctor who takes his pulse, up to the point where he could be in danger of death, after which they start again; as they say, 'It helps to pass an hour or two.'

The grave magistrate who has bought, for a certain amount of money, the right to carry out these experiments on his fellow-man, will tell his wife at dinner what happened that morning. The first time, Madame was revolted; the second, she acquired a taste for it, for after all women are curious; and then the first thing she says to him when he comes home in his judicial robes is: 'My little heart, haven't you had the question applied to anyone today?' The French, who pass, I do not know why, for a very humane people, are astonished that the English, who have had the inhumanity to take from us the whole of Canada, should have given up the pleasure of applying the question. [Ian Davidson, Voltaire in Exile, New York: Grove Press. 2004. page 116].

Open Letter to President Obama

Update below, links to other voices on the torture memos

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to President Obama, praising him for releasing the "torture memos" and encouraging him to do the right thing and the courageous thing: prosecute those who authorized torture. I then e-mailed a few friends, asking them to send their comments to the president, and included a copy of my own e-mail to the president. At least one friend immediately forwarded my e-mail to other friends and family. Now, a few hours later, I've decided I may as well post a copy of my letter. I don't have much hope that it will actually be placed on the president's desk. However, if we all remain silent, the rest of the world will believe that most Americans were complicit in these unjust actions, that we are hypocrites: accusing other countries of torture, telling other countries not to torture, and then using torture ourselves. Here is my letter:

Dear President Obama,
After eight years of a presidency that increasingly turned my country into something other than the beacon of democracy and freedom it has long touted itself to be, I was very happy to support your presidency. I kept up with the details of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the wire-tapping of American citizens, and with news associated with the incarceration of "enemy combatants." I was extremely distressed to discover that my leaders were authorizing treatment that has long been labeled torture. Today, my support of your presidency has been vindicated by your releasing what has been called the "torture memos," the despicable legal reasoning that led to a great Republic and democracy torturing people it deemed enemies, men who were provided no legal representation, no recourse to face the charges against them.

However, Mr. President, your actions should not stop there. Our country needs to bring to justice those leaders who justified torture, who sanctified such villainous actions, actions that reasoning people all over the world for at least two centuries have recognized as despotic and evil behavior.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire began a campaign against the use of torture in his own country of France, with a case about a man named Jean Calas, a man put to the rack, forced to drink many jugs of water, physically broken, and eventually strangled when he didn't confess to the murder of his own son, a charge for which the state could provide no proof. Calas was considered an enemy of the state because he was Protestant. This torture was done in the name of the "law." Voltaire wrote his friends: "You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof."

He demanded an account, a public airing of this horrible miscarriage of justice. Here in our "enlightened" times, we can do no less. To publish these memos and then refuse to indict the people associated with authorizing such medieval practices is dishonest and irresponsible. The world needs an accounting. We need an accounting. The men who were tortured need an accounting.

Not to demand such an accounting is to tacitly agree with the practices, no matter how many nice public words one expresses in horror. The men who used such dry legal language to justify torture continue to hold important positions in our government and in our universities. They--and anyone else who authorized torture-- should be required to justify their actions publicly, in court. Remember, in doing so, we will be providing for these torture promoters far more justice than they provided for the men they authorized to be tortured.

As a mother of two children, one an adult (who also voted for you in his first participation in a presidential election) and another nearly an adult, I do not want my children to live in a nation unable to address its failures, unable to rectify its mistakes. If powerful leaders cannot be held accountable, the powerless are in a heap of trouble, if not now, then the next time power is unchecked.

Update: For more on the torture memos, click on the links below. Andrew Sullivan's post is particularly thoughtful.

• Andrew Sullivan, "The Bigger Picture,", posted 17 April 2009.
• Kevin Drum, "Defining Torture Down, posted April 16, 2009.
• TMPMuckraker provides information on the torture memo authors, "Who are the Torture Memo Authors?," posted April 17, 2009.

Voltaire and Torture

A few days ago I began reading Ian Davidson's history of the last twenty-five years of the life of Voltaire, Voltaire in Exile. Born in 1694, François Marie Arouet took the name of "Voltaire" when he was 24 years old. Today, he is best known as the author of Candide, the picaresque tale that satirizes religious fanaticism, the excesses of power, and blind optimism in the face of horrible human suffering. The last twenty-five years of his life, Voltaire was in exile from Paris and the French court; it was during those years that he began championing the rights of ordinary people unjustly accused and punished by a state ruled by an absolute monarch and "buttressed by the superstitions of the Catholic Church." In his prologue, Davidson writes "that Voltaire's individual campaigns, together with the development of his thinking about the general principles and practices of the French justice system, were landmarks in the history of penal reform in France and Europe."

Eighteenth-century France was quite different from twenty-first-century America, but reading of the first case that Voltaire championed, I couldn't help but think of how power breeds similar despotic behavior even in democratic societies. We might be freer to check that power, but if the voice of reason is muted by fear, nationalism, fanaticism or fundamentalism, the powerful force of that freedom is diminished.

The case that Voltaire challenged was the case of a Protestant family led by its patriarch, Jean Calas, a prosperous cloth merchant. The Calas family were Protestant, except for one son who had converted to Catholicism. In France at that time, Protestants were terribly oppressed:

Protestant services of worship were forbidden, male offenders were liable to a life sentence in the galleys, female offenders to life imprisonment and preachers to execution. The only valid marriages were those sanctified by the Catholic Church, and all newborn children were required to be baptised and brought up as Catholics. Many professions, including that of the law, were open only to those who could prove they were practicing Catholics. Protestant families were required to employ Catholic servants.

One evening, this particular family discovered one of the adult sons dead in the family shop downstairs from the family's domicile. When the authorities were called, the family first said that the young man had been found dead on the floor. Later, they changed their story, saying that they had found the young man hanging in the shop; they had hoped to keep the suicide private because in France at that time, suicides were denied honorable burials. The brutal magistrate arrested the entire family on the assumption that the family had murdered the son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism (though there was no proof that this son was contemplating such an action), ignoring the fact that one son had already converted and wasn't murdered by his loved ones. However, the populace was superstitious, easily inflamed, and religiously intolerant; public opinion turned against the Calas family, even though no proof was ever discovered to tie the death of the son to the father. And anyway, the son was young and strong at twenty-nine-years of age; the old father much feebler at sixty-four. The family's Catholic servant was also present in the house.

Although the father was tortured--stretched on the rack, forced to drink ten jugs of water twice, and had his legs and arms broken with an iron bar--he did not confess. He was then strangled, and his body was burned.

A description of the typical trial process also reveals the extent of state repression in France at that time:

The accused was allowed a lawyer, who could make representations on his behalf outside the courtroom; but the lawyer was not permitted to be present at the questioning of the accused, which took place behind closed doors. The accused was not given any advance notice of the questions, nor of the evidence or witnesses arrayed against him, and he might even not know the details of the offence he was charged with.

We read of such torture and rigged trial proceedings and may well be happy that we don't live in such brutal times. But then perhaps we will remember the "enemy combatants" we kept for years (and continue to imprison) at Guantanamo Bay, men who for a long time had no access to legal representation and who were held without being charged. And now, the torture memos of the Bush administration are being released in which the following methods (i.e., torture!) were used to get prisoners to talk: slamming prisoners against a wall, pouring cold water on them, depriving them of food, making prisoners remain in stress positions, placing prisoners in close confines for hours, keeping prisoners awake for hours--even days, slapping prisoners in the face, making prisoners remain nude, confronting prisoners with things that they were terrified of, such as insects, waterboarding prisoners.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire faced an oppressive regime that tortured with impunity with the support of many of its illiterate and superstitious citizens, and he had this to say to his friends:

You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof.

Trying to get the facts of the trial proved extremely difficult because trials were conducted in secret. In letters to friends, Voltaire championed transparency:

What do we ask? Nothing more than that justice should not be as dumb as it is blind, that it should speak, and say why it condemned Calas. What horror is this, a secret judgement, a condemnation without explanations! Is there a more execrable tyranny than that of spilling blood on a whim, without giving the least reason? . . .You owe an accounting to men for the blood of men. As for me, I do not ask anything more than the publication of the trial procedure. . . It is important for everybody that such decisions should be publicly justified.

Later, Voltaire published a ninety-page pamphlet criticizing the roles the Catholic Church and a prejudiced Catholic population played in this miscarriage of justice; he argued for tolerance and warned of how such events effect us all:

If an innocent father of a family is delivered into the hands of error, of passion, or of fanaticism; if the accused has no defence except his own virtue; if the arbiters of his life run no other risk in killing him, than that of making a mistake; if they can kill with impunity by a simple decree; then the public outcry is raised, every man feels he is in danger, one can see that no one's life is in safety in the face of a tribunal set up for watching over the life of the citizens, and all voices in unison demand vengeance.

These words of a flawed but brilliant man, a father of the Enlightenment, a champion of reason, speak to us today.

Torture is the Tool of the Enemy

World War II poster

from www.billbradbury.com

More Reading:

David Rose, "Tortured Reasoning," web exclusive, Vanity Fair, posted December 16, 2008.

Scott Horton, "What Motivates the Torture Enablers?," blog at Harper's Magazine, posted December 20, 2008.

And Dick Cheney on torture: excerpt from interview with ABC's Jonathan Karl

Update: And see also Dahlia Lithwick's "Open and Shut Case" on Slate, posted December 22, 2008.

Interview with Interrogator

Of all the mistakes, missteps, and outright wrong decisions the Bush administration has made, the one thing that has made me angriest--and most worried for our nation--is the decision to torture enemies (well, in addition to suspending individual rights of privacy and of habeas corpus). That decision not only goes against the Geneva Conventions; it also goes against everything I was taught as a young Christian growing up in the Southern Baptist church, against the advice of military leaders who worry what might happen to our soldiers when captured, and against the advice of many experienced interrogators. I've posted on this topic a number of times because I think it's very important. (Hearing friends, family, and right-wing pundits who are fundamentalist Christians justify torture has just about turned me agnostic.)

On his blog, Scott Horton has an interview with one of those experienced interrogators, Matthew Alexander, about whom I've posted before. Check out the interview:“The American Public has a Right to Know That They Do Not Have to Choose Between Torture and Terror”: Six questions for Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist," posted December 18, 2008.

Other voices:
William Pfaff, "Torture Opponents Have No Serious Argument,"posted at Truthdig, December 18, 2008.

"Torture. . . inconsistent with American principles"

Updates Below (Tuesday, November 2)

When those first Abu Ghraib pictures were released, I was horrified. As an American citizen, I am strongly against torture. Nothing I have read convinces me that torture is a successful device in war (even short-term "success" has negative long-term consequences), and everything that is moral convinces me that it is wrong. As the war in Iraq wore on, we learned that leaders in the Bush administration discussed torture and justified its use. Now military personnel are telling their stories. The Washington Post published today an editorial by Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym used for security reasons), a senior interrogator in Iraq and former Air Force Special Operations pilot. Alexander led a team of interrogators in Iraq; his Washington Post article is titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," and his book is titled How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators who Used Brains, not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

Alexander describes how his team's interrogation methods convinced one of the associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to give up the location of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. (Zarqawi's followers blew up the golden-domed Shiite mosque in Samarra, an act that "unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed" and bloody reprisals in 2006.) That intelligence led to Zarqawi's death. The interrogation methods Alexander's team used? Not torture, but rapport and smarts:

I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Not only did the interrogation methods lead to the death of a man responsible for horrible terrorist attacks, but those methods also led to a greater understanding of the men who were taking arms and money from Zarqawi:

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

The Anbar Awakening is cited over and over again by pundits on the right and the center-left as crucial in the resultant diminishing violence in Iraq. Now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it behooves us to listen to men such as Matthew Alexander. We cannot defeat terrorism with military power alone; we have to understand the roots of terror, the people who become terrorists, the causes that inspire them to turn to murder. Alexander writes:

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Alexander reminds us, as have so many other writers, that the detainee abuse inflamed many foreigners who flocked to Iraq and escalated the violence there. Abu Ghraib became a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda.

As a new administration takes office in January, Americans should stand with brave military officers such as Matthew Alexander "to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them."

Update:Since writing this post, I've read other bloggers' responses to Matthew Alexander's op-ed. Here are links to a couple of those:

• Scott Horton, at Harper's Magazine: "How Many Americans Died Because of Bush's Torture Program?"--posted December 2, 2008.
• Steve Benen, at Washington Monthly: "Torture Doesn't Work Redux," posted December 1, 2008.

Quotation of the Year

On Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief:

Another distinguished aspect of Tecumseh's moral fiber was his aversion to the mistreatment of prisoners of war. In a culture that regularly practiced the torture and burning alive of captives as a religious rite, he was outspoken in his opposition to such barbarity. According to [Stephen] Ruddell [a white captive who had been Tecumseh's close friend as a child and young warrior], 'when prisoners fell into his hands he always treated them with as much humanity as if they had been in the hands of civilized people. No burning--no torturing.'"

from Jay Feldman's When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes (2005)--another fine book from the sales tables of BookPeople in Austin, Texas.

Ummmm..... George Bush et alia--and all such so-called civilized people--, please take note.

Grim Reading

My favorite bookstore in Austin, Texas, is BookPeople. When I'm in Austin visiting my son, I usually take time to drop by BookPeople and pore over the store's sales tables and shelves. By doing this, I've discovered some winners, including Caroline Elkins' book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), an examination of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the fifties and the British response to that uprising. This book won a Pulitzer for General Non-fiction in 2006. It's very grim reading.

The book interested me because I know so little about colonialism in Africa outside of what I learned in general history classes, what I've read over the years in book reviews and the passing article or two, and what I've caught in news stories on current events in Africa. And Africa is much in the news today, with genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the disputed elections and violence in Kenya and in Zimbabwe, and post-election violence in Nigeria.

Elkins' book is an eye-opener, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more fully the consequences of imperial powers' exporting their world view, their sense of superiority, and their military might. The Mau Mau conflict in Kenya arose out of years of native subjugation to British rule. The most advantageous land was wrested from tribes and given to white British settlers. The Kikuyu were relegated to reserves, as were other tribes, to land that was less fertile and to areas that were too small to provide for their growing populations. According to Caroline Elkins, the Kikuyu "was the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's policies of land alienation, or expropriation, and European settlement" (12). Agriculturalists, the Kikuyu "lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers, mostly in southern Kiambu, a highly fertile region just outside of Nairobi that would become some of the most productive European farmland in the colony."

Over the years, tribes brought their grievances to the British government, but the government favored white settlers and British needs over that of the natives. And, of course, racism was rampant. The British ruling class lived leisured lives supported by native servants. In the fifties, thousands of Kikuyu--and some from other tribes--took oaths of allegiance to fighting British colonialism and to evicting Europeans from Kenya. Thus began a bloody guerrilla war. The colonial government's response was to create "transit" camps in which tens of thousands of Kikuyus (and some other tribal members) were incarcerated--and creating a detainee population of over 52,000, scattered in various camps and militarily-confined villages.

As I read the descriptions of these camps and of the treatment of men, women, and children in these camps, I could not help comparing what happened here, at the hands of the British, to what happened in Nazi concentration camps. The numbers might have been smaller, the eventual dead less numerous, but the torture as horrendous. And this was governmentally-approved torture, official torture.

The goal of the British colonial government was to get Kikuyus to confess their Mau-Mau affiliations and to provide intelligence of any Mau Mau movements and plans. In addition to using British settlers and soldiers, the colonial government used loyalist Kikuyus and members of other tribes to subjugate those resisting--thus ensuring hatred between these groups for generations to come.

In Operation Anvil, the Kikuyu living in Nairobi were rounded up, Gestapo-like, by British soldiers. Many of these detainees were strip-searched, relieved of their valuables, packed in enclosed rail cars for the trip to one of the camps, forced through a cattle dip of disinfectant, forced to strip and were provided with little clothing in exchange (for men--a pair of shorts and a couple of blankets). And they were given identity bracelets with a number on them. These people were "screened" to get them to confess their Mau Mau sympathies, screenings which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. Life in the camps was horrific, where diseases such as typhoid spread. Women were raped. Men were castrated. Others were summarily executed. Thousands of children died. Truly brutal people were put in charge of many of the camps.

One Labour MP, Barbara Castle, became a public critic of British policies in Kenya, but Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd maintained these camps by outright lying to the British people--all in the name of national security. High-level British officials knew that they were violating international human rights treaties but used "national security" (as well as lying) to side-step those legal issues. Detainees were held without the right to a fair trial or legal help. The government often fabricated charges, but the detainees could not even find out what those charges were in order to address them. Charges were unspecified for "security reasons." Detainees who smuggled out letters describing their horrific circumstances were punished if caught. Sometimes the entire camp was punished. And, of course, people who had only slightly supported the land and freedom movement became radicalized by their treatment in the camps.

Many British records of this time have disappeared, been purged. But people who suffered in these camps still live. As I read this book, I couldn't help draw parallels with the atrocities associated with the war in Iraq, with the mind-set of people who think they are above international and even national law.

For more information:
"British Brutality in Mau Mau Conflict", by John McGhie, in The Guardian
"10 Downing Street's Gulag", in Harvard Magazine
"What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," by Caroline Elkins, in The Washington Post
"Who are the Kikuyu?" by Michela Wrong, in Slate
a book review by R. W. Johnson, in the Times Online
another book review, by Richard Dowden, in The Guardian

Promote Torture? Don't Travel!

Scott Horton has two pieces online this morning ["Travel Advisory" and "Torture from the Top Down"] that address the subject of war crimes, of whether or not our leaders will be held accountable for condoning and even actively promoting torture of prisoners in pursuit of information after the attacks of 9/11. Not only did our leaders discuss and direct particular torture techniques, but they also attempted to ensure that those directives would not be traced to them but would seem to appear to be instituted because of requests from Guantanamo.

In his article for The New Republic, Horton refers to a recently-released report by Physicians for Human Rights which details the abuse. That report is led by a quote from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and who authored the consequent report on that investigation, known as the Taguba Report: "

After years of disclosures by government investigators, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held into account.

Horton writes that only in very unusual circumstances will a country prosecute its own leaders for war crimes; to do so requires a political will that Americans just don't have. [We're distracted now by high gas prices, the increasing costs of food, flooding in the Midwest, and drought in the Southeast. Will the presidential campaign just add to the distraction or focus our attention on the previous administration's disastrous leadership?] But foreign countries have no such restrictions. Investigating magistrates for at least two European countries ("pro-Iraq war NATO allies," according to Horton) are assembling a case for war crimes, focusing on American policymakers. Horton suggests that certain of these policymakers should be mighty careful about traveling outside the United States.

Stupid, Venal, or Illegal Stuff Government Officials Do In the Post 9/11 "Keeping You Safe" Era

And these links are just from a few minutes of today's Internet news browsing. . .

"Italian's Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face" This article from The New York Times recounts the experience of an Italian man who had traveled to the United States to visit his American girlfriend. No threat to us United States citizens, this man ended up in jail for ten days.

"Official Urged Fewer Diagnoses of PTSD" The Washington Post reports on psychologist for Veterans Affairs Norma Perez, who sent an e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Texas, urging these medical professionals who treat our returning soldiers to avoid giving an "outright" diagnosis of PTSD. She suggested that the specialists diagnose "Adjustment Disorder" instead of PTSD, claiming that VA staff did not have time to do the extensive testing to determine PTSD with the increased diagnoses. Unlike soldiers who are diagnosed with PTSD, those diagnosed with the lesser disease, Adjustment Disorder, do not receive monetary disability compensation.

"Famed War Reporter Calls Pentagon /Media Propoganda Program Illegal" Joe Galloway, war reporter and author of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, speaks out against Donald Rumsfeld's secret program to use "friendly to the administration" military analysts to spread government propaganda about the Iraq war.

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers' Guild and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, testifies before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee. She calls for an "an immediate and thorough investigation of the circumstances under which torture was authorized and rationalized" by our top leaders. You can hear Scott Bateman's recording of some of her testimony here: Bateman's video

Americans Against Torture

This month's Washington Monthly is devoted to the subject of torture, with a series of essays and short statements by United States citizens--most of them prominent citizens. The list includes people who identify themselves as members of the Republican or Democratic party, former military leaders, former military interrogators, one former president, Senators (both Republican and Democratic), religious leaders. You can read the essays here: No Torture, No Exceptions.