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?

And Now...the Kill List

What others say:

• First, the New York Times story: "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will," 29 May 2012.
• Then Ta-Nehisi Coates: "The Kill List," posted 31 May 2012.
• Conor Friedersdorf weighs in: "Hey, Voters, The Kill List is What Matters," posted 31 May 2012.
• Joan Walsh at Salon speaks: "The Politico-Breitbart Mind Meld," posted 31 May 2012.
• David Sirota creates a petition against the Kill List: "Please, Don't Kill Me, Obama," posted on Salon, 31 May 2012.
• Glenn Glenwald on normalizing extremism: "How Extremism is Normalized," posted 30 May 2012.
• William Saletan goes "Beyond the Kill List," on Slate, posted 30 May 2012.

These voices of criticism, except for one or two, come from the those who lean left. What does the right have to say? Here's one: Marc Thiessen, "The Obama-Bush Doctrine," in The Washington Post.

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.

The Consequences of War

Here in the United States, we've been spared the real consequences of war. Our media and government censor the images that are shown on television news and, until recently, even the returning bodies of soldiers in flag-draped caskets. But Iraqis have not been spared the real consequences of war. Thousands of thousands of Iraqis remain missing. The number of missing isn't clear. Many bodies are hidden in mass graves that are discovered every once in awhile. Other bodies remain in morgues, yet to be identified. According to an article in The New York Times today:

Dr. Munjid Salah al-Deen, the manager of Baghdad’s central morgue, said his staff was working to identify 28,000 bodies from 2006 to 2008 alone.("Fate of Missing Iraqis Haunts War's Survivors," by Timothy Williams and Suadad Al-Salhy, The New York Times, May 24, 2009)

The article opens with a story of a mother of seven children, six who are still alive, the seventh, a thirteen-year-old who went out to buy vegetables one afternoon and never returned home. The mother has exhausted her life savings searching for her son. Sometimes I stop and think of the original act that started us on a trajectory into war with Iraq--the loss of those original 4,000 or so lives in the Twin Towers and on those planes. Those terrorist actions were horrendous, evil. But has the loss of life since then--the war in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of homeless Iraqis, what's probably hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and the lives of American soldiers worth the cost? The answer to many of us in this country may come easily as we salute the flag and hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung on this Memorial Day Weekend. But the answer is not so easy for those who have borne the consequences of a war that was peddled in bad faith. The obscenity of that war goes beyond the bodies to the living, a mother searching for a lost son, a woman whose family survives by recycling aluminum cans they find in a nearby dump. Or what about the soldier home from war but unable to find a job, perhaps physically disabled or suffering from PTSD? Yes, we should remember the dead, memorialize their sacrifice. But we also should damn well do all we can to take care of the living.

"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.

Gross Manipulation of Christian Scripture

Today Steven Benen has a link to GQ magazine, where Robert Draper, the author of the Bush-endorsed biography Dead Certain, has a long article on Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense during the Bush Administration. Frank Rich's column discusses that article in The New York Times today, as well. According to Rich, "Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers." I haven't read Draper's article yet; I'm printing it out to read later because I have more manual labor planned for this afternoon. However, I have looked at the selection of "cover sheets" that Rumsfeld and his department prepared for President Bush daily. These cover sheets "were approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself" (Rich, NYT, May 16, 2009).

Frank Rich calls these "triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations" creepy. A Christian would (or should) call them blasphemous. The Department of Defense used scripture from the letters of St. Paul and St. Peter, which were meant to encourage early Christians in their daily living in a highly militarized culture opposed to the teachings of Christ ("love your enemies," "Do good to those who hate you"), to promote war. Sure, Paul used military metaphors because these were metaphors his Greek audience would understand:

Put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, 6:13-17, NIV)

Rumsfeld and his department took these scriptures entirely out of context to manipulate those for whom they were intended, specifically a president of the United States who called himself a "born-again believer." St. Paul was not telling his readers to arm themselves literally with weapons. As he wrote just previous to the scripture quoted above, the war he foresaw was not one "against flesh and blood" but against evil. Christian faith, Paul said, was the weapon against evil. In addition, these words come at the very end of a letter in which Paul had more specifically described how those Ephesians should live: husbands and wives loving one another, masters and slaves treating one another well, fathers being kind to their children, people speaking truthfully to their neighbors and not allowing the sun to go down on their anger. "Live a life of love," Paul exhorted those early Christians, "as just Christ loved us" (Ephesians 5:1).

Any true Christian would be appalled to see those words accompanying a picture of an army tank bathed by the glow of a desert sunset. Any Muslim who saw that picture accompanied by those words would have every right to conclude that the U.S. government was engaged in a "holy" war against Muslims. Above a slide of Saddam Hussein, these words are quoted from I Peter 2:15: "It is God's will that by doing good you will silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." I am disgusted that these words were used to promote war. Sure, Saddam Hussein was an evil man who tortured and massacred his own people. But St. Peter's words were meant to encourage followers to live justly and righteously in a very repressive society. St. Peter was encouraging those early Christians to persuade by actions acted out of love and faith, not anger and retribution.

The more that is revealed of our government's actions in the "war on terror," the more appalled I am at how much of those actions are diametrically opposed to all I have believed about the values of our country and about the religious values with which I was reared (steeped and marinated).

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.

Anthrax in the News Again

Update below

"Whatever happened to the anthrax investigation?" I asked some of my co-workers recently during conversation between tutoring sessions at the community college where I now tutor part-time.

Well, that investigation is once again in the news, as the most recent suspect committed suicide this week. Considering the FBI's bumbling in the case (Steven Hatfill, the previous suspect, was exonerated and recently settled with the Dept. of Justice and the FBI for $5.2 million), I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about this final suspect. Maybe he was pushed to the edge by the focus of the investigation. However, these details about the man are rather interesting:

• Dr. Bruce Ivins worked in the Army lab at Fort Detrick where intensive studies on live anthrax spores were performed. He even swabbed contaminated areas in the lab and in his office in 2001 and 2002, without telling anyone until questioned later in an Army investigation.
• He had been acting erratically lately, suffering from depression and making homicidal threats against his co-workers and a social worker.
• According to letters he had written to his local newspaper, as a conservative Christian, he supported the Bush administration and believed that the U. S. should be governed according to the Gospel. (I would hesitate to call him a Christian "fanatic," as one blogger has, based just on these letters, however.)
• According to the Los Angeles Times, Ivins was "a co-inventor of a new anthrax vaccine", and he stood to benefit monetarily if the product came to market.
• Ivins conducted research on squalene, a component of the anthrax vaccines given to U. S. soldiers to supposedly protect them against bio-terrorism. These vaccinations have caused a lot of controversy. Journalist Gary Matsumoto has written a book on this controversy, titled Vaccine-A: The Covert Government Experiment that's Killing Our Soldiers and Why GIs are Only the First Victims.

When the anthrax letters were mailed, the fear and terror created by the attacks on 9/11 racheted up. Hoax letters were sent, and suspicious packages were found around the country, most turning out to be non-threatening. For instance, some white powder on the floor of a woman's restroom at a university where I was teaching caused a stir; local police were called to investigate. The substance was bath powder, if I remember correctly. Although I'm not susceptible to hysteria, I remember casually looking at websites advertising bio-terrorism wear for civilians--gas masks in child sizes and such!

More seriously, however, the anthrax letters were used to gender support for war against Iraq. Glenn Greenwald has extensively documented the role of ABC News in linking anthrax with Iraq.

This whole story is begging for a Congressional investigation. Congress should look into what government sources fed information to ABC, linking the anthrax with Iraq, and into why the FBI has been so ineffective in its search for the source of the anthrax. Is there a conspiracy? (My tendency is to think not conspiracy but opportunism as being the Bush administration's MO in manipulating facts to advance its desire to begin a war with Iraq.) Has there been a cover-up? Was Dr. Ivins the anthrax terrorist or is he a fall-guy? Inquiring minds want to know.

Update. Monday, 4 August
A New York Times article paints a disturbing picture of the FBI's errors and sloppiness in investigating the origins of the anthrax-laden letters. Here is the link: "Anthrax Evidence is Said to Be Circumstantial," Scott Shane, New York Times, 4 Aug. 2008.

2nd Update
Glenn Greenwald has posted information about the credibility of the social worker upon whose public record hangs a great deal of the negative perception of Dr. Ivins' personality. Greenwald points out that while Dr. Ivins may well be the person who sent the anthrax letters, those charges have not been proven yet. And plenty of people who knew Dr. Ivins well remain skeptical of the charges. We should be cautious about jumping to conclusions in a case in which the FBI's investigation has been so poorly led.

I recall how an investigation in the 1990s, by the Dayton and Liberty County police in Texas, led to the arrest of an aunt of mine. My aunt had been robbed and raped, yet before the investigation was over, the police had taken my emotionally shaken aunt alone in a room, hooked her up to a polygraph, and interrogated her to such an extent that she ended up confessing having stolen the money and lying about the rape. Prior to this harassment, the police had lost the rape kit, and they had tried to get my aunt to finger a man who had just been released from prison. In the later interrogation, the police browbeat my aunt, telling her the polygraph indicated that she was lying, that it would be better for her and her family if she confessed to the crime. My aunt was so emotionally unstable by this time that she copped to the crime even though she didn't do it. Then she tried to commit suicide.

Circumstantial evidence can seem to be damning when it's just an unhappy example of how connecting-the-dots can result in any number of conflicting scenarios, depending upon who is holding the pen.

Criminal History: best predictor of future behavior

In 2005, having been kidnapped and then released by insurgents in Iraq, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was wounded when U.S. soldiers fired upon her car on its way to the Baghdad International Airport. One of Sgrena's bodyguards was killed. The incident caused an international outcry, with Italians turning against the war in Iraq and influencing their government to pull out of the war.

I remember listening avidly to news reports of this event. The U.S. soldiers said that they had warned the occupants of the car, that they had a legitimate reason to shoot because the driver of the car did not respond. Sgrena and the surviving witnesses disputed the military's claims. What news media did not discover--or just did not report--was that the soldier who fired the fatal rounds, Army Spc. Mario L. Lozano Jr, had a criminal record in his civilian life. He had a record of domestic violence, of writing bad checks, of non-payment for child support, and of violently threatening other people--a record that ordinarily would have made him unfit for service in the military.

Because the U. S. military has a need for "bodies" in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has lowered recruiting standards. The Sacramento Bee has researched the records of military recruits with criminal backgrounds and has uncovered numerous consequences of these lowered standards. Many recruits with such records have continued their criminal behavior in the military, murdering Iraqis, their fellow soldiers, and other civilians and inflaming international ill will toward the United States.

I don't remember anyone being held responsible for the death of Sgrena's bodyguard; what I do remember is the military's firm statement that the firing on the car was justified. Nothing of Lozano's background was included in the subsequent news reports of the event. Lozano himself, in the great tradition of covering one's ass, blames the victim:

"If it wasn’t for her, it wouldn’t have happened," he said. "It was her [Giuliana Sgrena's] idea to go over there and mingle with terrorists."

My God! This is what we have representing us in the "war on terror." Read the entire story.

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

Torture: "It Depends on Who Does It"

I've been following the debate on torture since those first pictures of Iraqi prisoners emerged from Abu Ghraib. That debate has revealed the moral bankruptcy of the Bush administration and most of the Republican party. Rudy Giuliani, the front runner (God help us!) for the Republican nomination for president, recently said in a town meeting that the definition of torture depended on "how it's done. . . the circumstances. . . . [and] "who does it."

Well, people who represent us are doing it, and with our votes and our silence, we're complicit. Giuliani recites the old, tired, Republican mantra that the "liberal media" is distorting the facts. It's not "liberal media" that calls waterboarding torture; this method has been considered torture--by people of all political persuasions-- since its first use. Joan Walsh, at Salon, directs readers to a recent editorial in The Washington Post by Evan Wallach, a former JAG in the Nevada National Guard. Wallach gives us a brief history of water torture, including details on how the United States prosecuted for war crimes people who performed waterboarding on prisoners.

In his article, Wallach writes that waterboarding does not "simulate drowning," as so many who try to downplay the details claim: "To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death." Wallach supplies testimony of people who have experienced this form of torture.

So waterboarding is torture when used by the Japanese in World War II against Allied soldiers--but it's NOT when used by operatives of the United States government against suspected terrorists? Would it be torture if Rudy Giuliani were waterboarded? I think Giuliani--and all those other Republican faces who downplay torture--would sing a different tune if he were strapped to a table with his head down and experienced water being poured on a cloth over his mouth and nose until he lost consciousness.

Torture is torture, no matter who does it or who the victim is.

UPDATE: This evening (8 Nov. 2007) on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, "a former Navy instructor and an intelligence expert" were questioned about the legality and effectiveness of waterboarding as a coercive technique to extract information from suspected terrorists and "enemy combatants." The transcript of that discussion can be found here, on the PBS website. More about Former Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance, who, in my opinion, spoke so eloquently against the use of torture, can be found here. A short essay written by Malcolm Nance can be found here--and another here.

Habeas corpus

The Senate today failed to pass a bill restoring the right of habeas corpus to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Senate needed 60 votes to pass the bill; 56 Senators voted for the bill. Thus, the extraordinary measures of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 still stand, preventing detainees from access to a speedy trial and from access to their choice of legal representation.

Why should we care? While habeas corpus has been suspended at different times in the history of our country, these recent changes in the law may set precedents that will permanently affect this traditional right to challenge one's incarceration or the incarceration of another, as Jeffrey Toobin suggests in a 2006 article in The New Yorker.

President Bush has said over and over again that terrorists hate our freedom. Well, based on these legal challenges to the basic rights underlying those freedoms, it seems that the Republican party hates freedom, too. Note again the names of those who voted against re-establishing the right of habeas corpus to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Only six Republicans voted to uphold this traditional right that Americans have long held to be a cornerstone of freedom.

With a Friend Like This. . . .

Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer, published a short piece yesterday about how few Iraqi refugees the United States has taken in. According to Lee (and other sources I've read), approximately 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing their country every month, yet the United States has "only taken in 190 refugees since last year." Because we started this war, we owe something to the Iraqi people, especially to those who helped us and continue to help us there. This news report reminded me of an in-depth article I read some months ago, written by George Packer and published in The New Yorker. The title of the article is "Betrayed", and in the article, Packer describes in horrifying detail the ways in which the United States failed--and continues to fail--the Iraqis who serve as interpreters and staff and thus risk their lives and the lives of their friends and relatives.

Another writer has written more recently of an Iraqi friend who served as an interpreter for four years for the U. S. Army. The interpreter's house was bombed, his wife and young children threatened, and relatives (his father and brother) kidnapped and murdered. The American officers and soldiers who have worked with this Iraqi have written letters attesting to the young man's faithfulness and trustworthiness and of the need to get him out of Iraq before his family is murdered in retaliation for that very friendliness to Americans. But "Andy" has not been successful in acquiring immigration status. Read and weep over Maura Stephens' description of American bureaucratic incompetency and her follow-up to Andy's story.

George Packer describes how this failure to help our friends foreshadows our defeat: "America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat."

Story of a journalist

The Columbian Journalism Review has an article about an Al Jazeera cameraman who has been held in Guantánamo Bay since 2002, without access to legal aid until 2005. The story of Sami al-Haj should make the blood boil of every American who truly believes in the ideals of democracy. And yet this is a story repeated over and over again at Guantánamo Bay: someone gets picked up in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq and is handed over to the American military and assumed guilty. Sometimes the person is mistaken for someone else. Sometimes the person just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the person is an "enemy combatant" with no real military threat. Sometimes the person is indeed a member of Al-Qaeda. But none of these people, no matter what their level of guilt or innocence, has had access to adequate--if any at all--legal aid. They disappear into the black hole of Guantánamo Bay, and most Americans don't seem to care.

Why should we care? Because what happens at Guantánamo Bay reflects on us, on our legal system, on our sometimes indignantly righteous claims of freedom. Over 300 detainees from Guantánamo Bay have been released or transferred to prisons elsewhere. Do you think they are returning to their countries with stories of the greatness of democracy, of their fair treatment under a just legal system? How do the practices of Guantánamo Bay differ from any dictatorship?

Here's something that really struck me, as it also struck Glenn Greenwald: Although al-Haj was a journalist with Al-Jazeera, the Arab news organization didn't press the U.S. much for release of its employee at first. A spokesman for the organization said that right after 9/11, a great number of people thought that the horror of the terrorist attacks gave the U.S. some justification for detaining people. Also, people just didn't believe at first that the U. S. would torture prisoners. The rest of the world understands what democracy is; the rest of the world understands what the Statue of Liberty represents. As Ahmad Ibrahim, a producer for Al Jazeera says, ". . . in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even—that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it."

That naiveté is long gone. With Guantánamo Bay, the Bush administration has voided the democratic ideals that this country has long represented. And I can't help but wonder: if the administration can get away with suspending legal rights of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay with little outrage from ordinary, voting Americans, when will our government realize that it can import those practices for use against American citizens? Oh, wait. . . .that's already happening. . . .

Morris, Rachel. "Prisoner 345." Columbia Journalism Review. July/August 2007. Online: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/prisoner_345.php?page=1