Discourse.net

Karpinski Alleges Rumsfeld Personally Ordered Abusive Interrogations

Former General Karpinsky (demoted to Colonel) has an axe to grind: she was made into the scapegoat for Abu Ghraib. Circumstantial evidence is pretty strong that higher-ups who reported directly to Rumsfeld, notably Gen. Miller, were at least as much to blame, but they escaped all responsibility.

How reliable a witness is Karpinsky? Hard to say -- but reliable enough to deserve a hearing. Or two: one in the House and one in the Senate, say.

Rumsfeld okayed abuses says former U.S. general: MADRID (Reuters) - Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.

And, of course, Rumsfeld had better not plan any European travel any time soon.

YATA (Hung By Wrists 'Till Dead)

Long quote. No comment needed: Yahoo! News - AP: Iraqi Died While Hung From Wrists (impermanent link, sorry about that) [alternate lnk).

An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA (news - web sites) interrogation while suspended by his wrists, which had been handcuffed behind his back, according to investigative reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that it had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances of the death were not disclosed at the time.

The prisoner died in a position known as “Palestinian hanging,” the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position — which human rights groups condemn as torture — was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

…

Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA’s “ghost” detainees at Abu Ghraib — prisoners being held secretly by the agency.

His death in November 2003 became public with the release of photos of Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his bruised and puffy-faced corpse, which had been packed in ice. One of those guards was Pvt. Charles Graner, who last month received 10 years in a military prison for abusing detainees.

Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA’s Inspector General’s office.

…

Dr. Vincent Iacopino, director of research for Physicians for Human Rights, called the hyper-extension of the arms behind the back “clear and simple torture.” The European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in a case of Palestinian hanging — a technique Iacopino said is used worldwide but named for its alleged use by Israel in the Palestinian territories.

The Washington Post reported last year that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the CIA suspended the use of its “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including stress positions, because of fears that the agency could be accused of unsanctioned and illegal activity. The newspaper said the White House had approved the tactics.

Pop Quiz

Crooked Timber: Pop Quiz:

From the Guardian, a sample from the test administered to recruits to the Iraqi Police Force:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person is: a) torture; b) interview techniques; c) nterrogation techniques; d) informative and reliable.

How sad that the United States now has an Attorney General who would get this question wrong.

Gonzales Confirmed: A New Low

Yesterday the Senate confirmed Alberto Gonzales to be the Attorney General of the US. That is the same man who both commissioned and approved the torture memos. Who could not bring himself to say torture is always wrong when quizzed live by a Senator. Who probably committed obstruction of justice in sabotaging the investigation into the Plame affair. Who may have lied to Congress about his shielding the boss in the Texas jury affair.

Yet all the Republicans — including POW torture victim John McCain — and six Democrats (including the quisling-like Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) and, sadly, our own Bill Nelson from Florida) voted to confirm. The final vote showed only 36 against, too few to sustain the filibuster which was thus not attempted, a tactical decision that I will not second guess.

A vote for Bush, I said before the election, is a vote for torture. We reap now the bitter fruits of what our fellow citizens then sowed.

May they (and the rest of us too) not get what they deserve.

The Evidence of Systematic Widespread Torture Is Growing: More Tales of Abuses In Iraq

Neil Lewis reports that A.C.L.U. Presents Accusations of Serious Abuse of Iraqi Civilians. But this isn’t about the Abu Ghraib:

The new accusations generally concern the behavior of American Special Forces, as opposed to prison guards or interrogators, who have been accused at Abu Ghraib.

Rather, it’s yet another sign of a pattern and practice.

The American Civil Liberties Union released documents on Monday describing complaints of serious abuse of Iraqi civilians, including reports of electric shocks and forced sodomy, and accused the military of not thoroughly investigating the cases.

The documents list dozens of allegations of abuse at American detention centers - the use of cigarettes to burn prisoners, aggressive dogs, electric shocks, sexual humiliation and beatings - that began at about the same time such acts were occurring at Abu Ghraib prison.

But it is not always clear whether every case described is a new incident.

Based only on the public evidence to date, how much is the ordinary carnage and inhumanity of war, and how much is something that trickled down from above, may be hard to say in a way that would satisfy the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard. But there seems to be the makings of at the very least a very strong case that is more than circumstantial. If a prosecutor were to tackle this with the aggressiveness with which we pursue Mafia cases, I think we’d see something. But there’s no sign yet of any desire to go after general officers, or even mid-level officers, much less ranking civilians.

War Crimes Trials -- A Cloud on the Horizon

I am very reluctantly coming to believe that there’s about a 50% chance that a senior administration official will face a war crime trial either for ordering or condoning torture, or for the excessive bombing and civilian casualties in Iraq. I think it’s most likely to happen after the official leaves office. It might be in absentia. It could be in Belgium, or in Germany, or (least likely) an international ad hoc tribunal. Already, SecDef Rumsfeld has had to cancel a trip to Germany to avoid the risk of prosecution.

Belgium recently changed its law to make it very difficult to launch war crimes prosecutions against foreign officials, and the supreme court there recently dismissed an attempted lawsuit against Bush. But meanwhile, a significant segment of Belgian public opinion appears to subscribe to the sentiment symbolized by this Wanted poster issued by a Belgian activist group:

Recall that the International Criminal Court agreement (.pdf) (to which the US is not a party) would prohibit these sorts of trials against our officials so long as we set our own house in order. But we are not doing that.

I wonder how long it will take the new Iraqi government to join the ICC? Joining would give the ICC jurisdiction over all actions on Iraqi soil dating after the accession. Regardless of whether they were committed by Iraqis. Then again, joining the ICC without agreeing to exclude jurisdiction against US forces would run Iraq into retaliation from the US: the US has halted military assistance to several nations that have refused to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ by which they promise not to surrender US nationals to the ICC.

Update: If I had to bet right now, I’d bet it’s the wanton harm to civilians (which I suspect is vastly underreported in the US) that would be most likely to trigger a trial, not the prisoner abuse. But should these allegations of systematic rape in captivity, coupled with claims that the Pentagon is stonewalling by trying to avoid inquiries prove to be true, that might alter the odds.

PS. As noted in the comments, my intent in this particular post was to be positive, not normative. Under what circumstances if any a foreign war crimes trial of a former US President or Cabinet official could ever be be a good thing is very hard for me to think coherently about, as I so passionately want the US to act in a way that makes the whole question absurd.

Gonzales Admits CIA At Liberty to be Inhumane

Just as Marty Lederman has been saying,

The New York Times > Washington > Gonzales Says ‘02 Policy on Detainees Doesn’t Bind C.I.A.: Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a 2002 directive issued by President Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in American custody, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in documents released on Tuesday.

I don’t care how they parse it: waterboarding — that’s repeated near drowning — is torture in my book.

A Bit Late, What?

I would have found this much more convincing if he could have brought himself to say this live last week. Or, better yet, about two years ago.

Politics News Article | Reuters.com: Alberto Gonzales, seeking to win Senate confirmation as President Bush’s attorney general, declared that any torture by American personnel would be unlawful, according to written responses released on Tuesday to questions by senators.

“As the president has made clear, the United States will not engage in torture and U.S. personnel are prohibited from doing so,” Gonzales wrote in response to a question by assistant Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin of Illinois.

We're Just Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading

Marty Lederman has another in his series of extraoridanry posts on the legal regulation of US torture and torture-like activiites. Here’s one of the key legal points:

The problem, which I’ve tried to explain in somewhat soporific detail in posts here, here, here, here, here and here, is that Congress (at the urging of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush) has defined the term “torture” exceedingly narrowly—so narrowly, in fact, that OLC has concluded it does not cover techniques such as waterboarding, threats of live burial, and threats of rendition to nations that do torture. Those forms of highly coercive interrogation, going just up to the line of “torture” without going over, are generally unlawful, not

because they are “torture,” but because they fall within the category of conduct denominated “cruel, inhuman and degrading (“CID”) treatment,” i.e., conduct that “shocks the conscience” and hence would violate due process if it occurred within the U.S. Such CID treatment is categorically off limits to the military by virtue of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the President’s directive that the military treat all detainees “humanely.” Such CID treatment is also categorically prohibited — even for the CIA — with respect to detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions; and such CID treatment would (by definition) be unconstitutional — even for the CIA and even as applied to Al Qaeda detainees — here in the U.S.

But the Administration has concluded the CID treatment is not unlawful when the CIA interrogates Al Qaeda suspects outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Stay Tuned For Hell To Freeze Over

Words I never thought I would write dept: Andrew Sullivan’s Sunday NYT book review article on American torture is … brace yourself … remarkably sensible:

The critical enabling decision was the president’s insistence that prisoners in the war on terror be deemed ”unlawful combatants” rather than prisoners of war. …

The president’s underlings got the mixed message. …

What’s notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know, in any number of hidden jails affecting ”ghost detainees” kept from the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the Marines, the Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special Forces and on and on. …

Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment ”abuse” or some other euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed it was sanctioned from above. …

Who was responsible? There are various levels of accountability. But it seems unmistakable from these documents that decisions made by the president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion, vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture. The president bears sole responsibility for ignoring Colin Powell’s noble warnings. …

Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity of what has taken place. His first instinct was to minimize the issue; later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences claiming that the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants, rather than a consequence of his own decisions. …

And the damage done was intensified by President Bush’s refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president’s response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ”Get off his back.” In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term, while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. … Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president’s discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ”evil” might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

…

I’m not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it’s worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ”heroic” protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.

OK, one might have preferred to see this before the election, but better late than later.

(Much of) The Right Wing Is Now In Denial on Torture

At the AALS last week, I heard a (formerly) respected law professor announce to a room that he had looked carefully and he didn’t see any evidence of systematic torture by the US. It was — although he didn’t use these words — the ‘few bad apples’ all over again. At least a few of us in the packed room expressed our shock audibly — which isn’t something you usually get at such a polite, even staid, event.

There’s clearly a lot of this denial going around, which is why Marty Lederman’s latest item demolishing the “best defense of the administration’s record on torture” is well worth reading.

In her article, MacDonald agrees that the 2002 OLC Memo was “hair-raising,” and “understandably caused widespread alarm.” She argues, however, that the OLC Memo “had nothing to do” with the interrogation “debates and experiments unfolding among Pentagon interrogators in Afghanistan and Cuba,” and had no connection to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or to the extreme methods of military interrogation that have been alleged at Guantanamo and elsewhere. MacDonald further argues that, in contrast to the CIA, Pentagon officials have not come close to violating the law; that the military’s techniques have been “light years from real torture”; that the interrogation policies in Cuba and Afghanistan are “irrelevant” to what happened in Abu Ghraib; and that, in fact, the Armed Forces have been unduly hamstrung by a culture of legalism that is an unfortunate byproduct of “fanatically cautious” Pentagon lawyers steeped in the outmoded ways of the Geneva Conventions.

This version of the story appears to be selective, at best.

There’s clearly much here that’s not fully in the open, notably the extent to which the Torture Memos were driven by a need to attempt to justify CIA abuses which had already happened.

But given the number of reports we do have of overly coercive questioning to say the least, no one should be allowed to claim that there wasn’t some sort of pattern and practice at work, creeping its way from the CIA to other interrogation centers, destroying whatever moral authority the US might hope to claim, inflaming the locals against us, and creating a new cadre of detainees (and families) who will hate us and try to destroy us.

Whether it also will make a mockery of the concepts such as the rule of law that we try to teach our students still remains to be seen.

What Alberto Gonzales Doesn't Get

Initial Report of the U.S. to the UN Committee Against Torture (October 15, 1999) [emphasis added]:

Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. U.S. law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a “state of public emergency”) or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension. The United States is committed to the full and effective implementation of its obligations under the Convention throughout its territory.

Alberto Gonzales’s confirmation hearing (Jan 5, 2005):

SEN. LEAHY: … I asked a specific question: Does the president have the authority, in your judgment, to exercise a commander-in-chief override and immunize acts of torture?

MR. GONZALES: With all due respect, Senator, the president has said we’re not going to engage in torture. That is a hypothetical question that would involve an analysis of a great number of factors.

Everyone except the most craven administration apologists understands the only acceptable answer is that not even the President can authorize torture. A lawyer who doesn’t understand this is at best a fool or a knave. If he’s a government official, however, there are other, far baser, options.

Gonzales, Damned By His Own Words

An excerpt from the Gonzales hearing:

SEN. LEAHY: I just want to know: Did you agree — I mean, we could spend an hour with that answer, but I’m trying to keep it very simple. Did you agree with that interpretation of the torture statute back in August 2002?

MR. GONZALES: If I may, sir, let me try to — I will try to — I’m going to give you a very quick answer, but I’d like to put a little bit of context. There obviously — we were interpreting a statute that had never been reviewed in the courts, a statute drafted by Congress. We were trying to — interpretation of a standard by Congress. There was discussion between the White House and the Department of Justice as well as other agencies about what does this statute mean. It was a very, very difficult — I don’t recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don’t have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department. Ultimately it is the responsibility of the department to tell us what the law means, Senator.

SEN. LEAHY: Then do you agree today that for an act to violate the torture statute, it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death?

MR. GONZALES: I do not, sir. That does not represent the position of the executive branch. As you know —

SEN. LEAHY: But —

SEN. SPECTER: Well, let him finish his answer.

SEN. LEAHY: But it was the position in 2002.

SEN. SPECTER: Wait a minute, Senator Leahy. Let him finish his answer.

MR. GONZALES: Senator, what you’re asking the counsel to do is to interject himself and direct the Department of Justice, who is supposed to be free of any kind of political influence, in reaching a legal interpretation of a law passed by Congress. I certainly give my views. There was, of course, conversation and a give-and-take discussion about what does the law mean. But ultimately — ultimately by statute the Department of Justice is charged by Congress to provide legal advice on behalf of the president. We asked the question. That memo represented the position of the executive branch at the time it was issued.

SEN. LEAHY: Well, let me then ask you: If you’re going to be attorney general, and I’ll accept what you said, then let’s put on the hat, if you’re going to be confirmed as attorney general. The Bybee memo concludes that a president has authority as commander in chief to override domestic and international law as prohibiting torture and can immunize from prosecution anyone — anyone — who commits torture under his act; whether legal or not, he can immunize them.

Now, as attorney general, would you believe the president has the authority to exercise a commander-in-chief override and immunize acts of torture?

MR. GONZALES: First of all, sir, the president has said we’re not going to engage in torture under any circumstances. And so you’re asking me to answer a hypothetical that is never going to occur. This president has said we’re not going to engage in torture under any circumstances, and therefore, that portion of the opinion was unnecessary and was the reason that we asked that that portion be withdrawn.

SEN. LEAHY: But I’m trying to think what type of opinions you might give as attorney general. Do you agree with that conclusion?

MR. GONZALES: Sir, again —

SEN. LEAHY: You’re a lawyer, and you’ve held a position as a justice of the Texas Supreme Court, you’ve been the president’s counsel, you’ve studied this issue deeply. Do you agree with that conclusion?

MR. GONZALES: Senator, I do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a statute that the president may view as unconstitutional. And that is a position and a view not just of this president, but many, many presidents from both sides of the aisle.

Obviously, a decision as to whether or not to ignore a statute passed by Congress is a very, very serious one, and it would be one that I would spend a great deal of time and attention before arriving at a conclusion that in fact a president had the authority under the Constitution to —

SEN. LEAHY: Mr. Gonzales, I’d almost think that you’d served in the Senate, you’ve learned how to filibuster so well, because I asked a specific question: Does the president have the authority, in your judgment, to exercise a commander-in-chief override and immunize acts of torture?

MR. GONZALES: With all due respect, Senator, the president has said we’re not going to engage in torture. That is a hypothetical question that would involve an analysis of a great number of factors.

And he wants to be Attorney General of the United States.

Other torture links:

Washington Post, Detainee Says U.S. Sent Him to Egypt Before Guantanamo

Jurist, Law deans assail torture memos as Gonzales hearing concludes

Daily Kos, How Bad Is Gonzales? Very Bad

Human Rights First, Gonzales Confirmation Hearings Blog

Mark Danner, NYT op-ed, We Are All Torturers Now

And be sure to see Anthony D’Amato, via Brian Leiter, An Unnoted Aspect of Alberto Gonzales’s Career

Marty Lederman on the Torture Memos

Marty Lederman, formerly of the OLC, has an important series of posts on the torture memos, including a discussion of the latest effort from the Justice Department, issued late in Dec. 2004.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Here’s a sample,

it becomes clear that perhaps the most important part of the new Levin Opinion is footnote 8, which reads: “While we have identified various disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum, we have reviewed this Office’s prior opinions addressing issues involving treatment of detainees and do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.” In other words, despite its admirable and considerable repudiation of the 2002 OLC Opinion, the new OLC Opinion does not in any significant way affect what the CIA has already been specifically authorized to do. And the Administration has concealed from the public (and perhaps from the Congress, too?) the extreme forms of interrogation—just short of the strict statutory standard of “torture”—that the CIA presumably is authorized to use upon detainees overseas.

And, from the conclusion,

There are extremely strong arguments that if they approved or used certain of these techniques, military officials and other personnel have violated the law—including the UCMJ, article 16 of the CAT, the Geneva Conventions (as to detainees protected by those treaties), and the President’s directive that detainees be treated “humanely”—wholly apart from the torture statute that the OLC Opinions discuss. (Indeed, from the time of the 2001 enactment of the USA PATRIOT ACT until the enactment of the 2005 Defense Authorization Act this past October 28th, the torture statute itself did not even apply to GTMO because of a technical jurisdictional provision.)

And, in any event, if those recent accounts are correct about what the Pentagon has actually approved and implemented at Guantanamo, then the President’s assurance that all Armed Forces detainees be treated “humanely,” and that the military does not engage in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, ring hollow.

It is a very salutary development that OLC has finally construed the torture statute with the care and judgment that typically characterizes OLC’s best work, and that the Administration has reiterated the Nation’s commitment that torture is never legal, not even for “a good reason.” But that is only half the story. The other half remains untold. We are yet to have an informed public debate about what forms of conduct OLC has sanctioned as lawful, about what forms of interrogation and coercion this nation does permit, and about what is, in fact, being done in our name. If we are to have such a debate, the Administration would have to be much more forthcoming with explanations of which ostensibly “humane” treatments have been approved for military interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and would have to provide some information concerning the forms of inhumane treatment the CIA has been authorized to use (subject, of course, to redaction where there are legitimate and compelling needs for classification).

If we begin such a debate, here’s one modest question to consider: Would it be too much to ask that Congress approve—and the President sign—a statute that would unambiguously prohibit all U.S. personnel, everywhere in the world, from engaging in cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment—including, at a minimum, conduct that would shock the conscience, and thus violate the Due Process Clause, if it occurred within the U.S.?

Digby Said It

I’ve been trying to write something comprehensive about the the state of the torture memos, US torture policy, and the coming confirmation hearings of the Enabler, one White House Counsel Gonzales. But it’s too depressing.

So just read Hullabaloo. Digby says most of it. (And even has one small tiny ray of light — not quite everyone is going to take Gonzales lying down.)

The American Gulag

The US holds maybe hundreds of non-citizens, all captured abroad (we are told), incarcerated in Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world. The Bush administration plans to hold them up to forever.

Of course, there is a difference between the Soviet Gulag, which was aimed at saboteurs, dissidents, or people who somehow got on the wrong end of officialdom, and the US Gulag, which is we are told aimed merely at the foreign version of the same.

Whether the creation of a secret archipelago of prisons and coercive questioning facilities will inevitably fail to be deployed against US citizens is a question that one is not permitted to ask in public, as it is too far outside the permitted consensus. So put that issue aside.

Ask instead whether from a moral, political, or even legal point of view, the fact that only foreigners are incarcerated for life without trial (or indeed any rights, it appears), at the complete and unconstrained pleasure of the super-imperial presidency, gives us much in the way of bragging rights over the former Soviet Union.

What’s that? Our gulag is much smaller? And our policy this week is not to torture people, the last two years notwithstanding? And that nice Mr. Bush (with Justice Thomas’s endorsement, to his and the Court’s eternal shame) promises that all the people being held really deserve it, so who needs complications like a trial?

Well, that’s alright then!

Administration's Anti-Torture Zeal Knows No Bound (Lower Bound, That is)

The Carpetbagger Report: Replacing the torture-tolerance policy with…nothing in particular.

And the Senate is going to confirm Gonzales? Whithout a fight?

Name the Country that Abuses Psychiatry to Silence Dissidents

One of the many horrifying things about the old Soviet Union was the use of psychiatry to silence dissidents. Anyone who dared suggest that the country wasn’t a workers’ paradise clearly had lost their grip on reality, right?

Fortunately, nothing like that could ever happen here, say to someone who claims that US troops torture captives.

Um.

German Abu Ghraib Complaint

The ever-reliable Karl Lenz reports:

I have just looked at the criminal complaint filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against high-ranking Americans with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office under the 2002 German Code of Crimes against International Law, asserting liability for torture at Abu Ghraib.

Under German law, even if the Federal Prosecutor should be not inclined to initiate an investigation, the plaintiffs can appeal that decision to a court. If the plaintiffs don’t change their minds for some reason, this is heading to court one way or the other.

Mark Kleiman: J'Accuse

In Qui s’excuse, s’accuse, Mark Kleiman demonstrates that the Joint Chiefs, like the White House above them, are OK with the US’s current torture policy, one that the Red Cross thinks involves actual torture, whatever we may call it for domestic consumption.

Today's Torture News

I hate having to write headlines like that one.

• New York Times, Red Cross President Plans Visit to Washington on Question of Detainees’ Treatment…showing how seriously the Red Cross takes the US’s apparent non-compliance with basic human rights norms
• Washington Post, U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds: “A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner mistreatment.”
  
  But did anyone do anything as a result of the report? We don’t know:

  “Of the Herrington report, a Pentagon official said top generals in Iraq, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who at the time directed U.S. forces there, reported the alleged abuses to officials at U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activities in the Middle East. The official said TF 121 was investigated, but he could not provide results.
  
  ‘The Herrington report was taken very seriously,’ said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released.”

• New York Times editorial, Abu Ghraib, Caribbean Style. Key quote:

  The White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department clearly have no intention of addressing the abuse. Indeed, Mr. Bush has nominated one of the architects of the administration’s prisoner policy, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. The general who set up the system at Guantánamo is now in charge of prisons in Iraq.
  
  Only Congress can hold the administration accountable and begin to repair the damage to American values and America’s image caused by the mistreatment of prisoners.

Have they gone mad in the White House or were they born that way?

Guardian: The Road to Abu Ghraib

The Guardian has a two-part series online called The road to Abu Ghraib. It’s sufficiently weird that it reads like gonzo fiction, but we are asked to believe it.

Did a Major General really decide that psychic powers would let him walk through walls, and psychic healing could save troops wounded without access to ordinary medical care? And even if so, is this really connected to Abu Ghraib?

It’s interesting, though, to read about the mythical First Earth Battalion and how the ideas behind it might have seeped into reality.

More Hersh, More News of Iraq Atrocities

A Tiny Revolution: Uh Oh quotes Seymour Hersh speaking at Berkeley last Friday, October 8th:

I got a call last week from a soldier — it’s different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He’s an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It’s a place where we claim we’ve done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.

It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary… It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn’t explicit — we’re talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody…

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”

George W. Bush is responsible for this. Don’t forget that. George Bush is reponsible for this. As much as the individuals who pulled the triggers, George W. Bush is responsible for this.

New Abu Ghraib Documents: "abuse far worse than what was originally reported"

Phil Carter reports that:

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a series of previously classified documents from Rolling Stone writer Osha Gray Davidson surrounding the abuse investigations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Most of the documents are appendices to the various investigative reports that have been done, such as sworn statements from BG Janis Karpinski’s aide-de-camp and a high-ranking JAG officer at the prison, as well as an Army CID report documenting some of the worst abuses there. Together, these reports paint a picture of abuse far worse than what was originally reported.

(emphasis added)

I’m not sure I can bear to look.

A Vote for Bush Is a Vote for Torture

Harsh words, yes, but how else to describe this atrocity?

The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership’s intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago. …

The provision, human rights advocates said, contradicts pledges President Bush made after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal erupted this spring that the United States would stand behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the Justice Department “really wants and supports” the provision.

For background please see Voting Republican This Year = Voting for Torture .

Don't Forget

War crimes? Criminal activity? Criminal neglect? Major cover-up? Any of these is enough to demonstrate the moral unfitness to govern of the current lot.

TalkLeft—Female Abu Ghraib Prisoner Speaks Out: Huda Alazawi was one of the few females imprisoned at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. She was a wealthy businesswoman, blackmailed by a lowlife informant who falsely dropped a dime on her and her brothers, claiming they were supporters of the Iraqi resistance after she refused to meet his demand for money. Recently released after several months at Abu Ghraib, she recounted her ordeal to The Guardian.

Alazawi was imprisoned with two of her brothers and a sister. One brother was brutally sexually assaulted —hours later he was thrown at her and her sister’s feet, bleeding from his head, knees and between his legs. He was dead.

The torture, abuse and degradation of Alazawi and other prisoners went on for months. She was able to document some of the abuse in a Koran. Other aspects of her report match those of other prisoners.

A few bad apples? No way.

Pattern and Practice

Blogging of the President 2004 (aka BOP News) has choice quotes from the new Hersh book.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the torture was the work of a few rogue elements off duty in the prision where they weren’t supposed to be. That may be the source of some of the more shocking pictures to become public so far, but if Hersh is accurate, there was a pattern and practice of abusive conduct that (1) had to be endorsed by the prison administration and (2) was the subject of at least one blistering warning to higher-ups…who turned a blind eye.

This is war crimes stuff at least for the direct perpetrators and their prison commanders; how high up it could go is a painful question that is being swept under the rug as fast as possible.

Seymour M. Hersh Says Senior Officials Ignored Warnings About Atrocities

The NYT reports that Seymour M. Hersh’s new book says the highest level military and civilian officials in the administration — including Rice and Rumsfeld — ignored warnings about abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Prison Scandal: New Book Says Bush Officials Were Told of Detainee Abuse: Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist.

Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib” (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday. …

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, a deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser.

But when General Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted. Mr. Hersh’s account is based on anonymous sources, some of them secondhand, and could not be independently verified.

Although a number of senior officials were briefed on the analyst’s findings of abuse, the high-level White House meeting did not “dwell on” that question, but rather focused on whether some of the prisoners should not have been held at all, the book says. A White House official confirmed Saturday that this meeting was held and reiterated that the focus, when the matter was referred to Mr. Rumsfeld, was on whether people were being improperly held.

Mr. Hersh also says that a military officer involved in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in November and reported it to two of his superiors, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the regional commander, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith.

“I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons,” the unidentified officer is quoted as telling Mr. Hersh. “Abizaid didn’t say a thing. He looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, ‘Move on. I don’t want to touch this.’ “

But Capt. Hal Pittman, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement Saturday, “General Abizaid does not recall any officer discussing with him any specific cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prior to January 2004, nor do any of the officers of the Centcom staff who travel with him.”

Note the non-denial denial: in response to a charge about ignoring a warning about general and systemic abuse, the response is that the General ‘does not recall any officer discussing with him any specific cases of abuse.’

Note also that Pentagon is worried about Hersh’s book. Earlier today the Washington Note reported that the Pentagon let off a pre-emptive press strike against what it expected Hersh would be saying. The core of that campaign is the zillion whitewash reports issued in the past weeks, all designed to shield senior officials from any examination of their responsibilities.

They should be worried. I don’t know if ignoring reports of abuse is technically a war crime under these circumstances — so much depends on exactly what they were told, and how — but it has to be close enough to be worrying. There does come a point where closing your eyes to the evidence is a form of complicity, although I can’t say from the NYT article alone that this conduct reaches that high bar.

But whatever you call it, if Seymour Hersh is right again (and his accuracy record is imperfect) ignoring these warnings looks pretty raw.

Senate Denied Access to CIA 'Ghost' Detainee Headcount

It’s good that the Senators care enough, belatedly, to try to get to the bottom of a small amount of information about who did what to whom in the great Iraq prison/war crime scandal. But it doesn’t sound as if they are getting very far.

Senators Criticize C.I.A. in Inquiry on Iraqi Prison Abuse: Senators examining the Abu Ghraib prison scandal criticized the CIA on Thursday for failing to provide Army investigators with documents on unregistered “ghost detainees.”

At a hearing, lawmakers indicated their frustration that Army generals who investigated the prison abuses couldn’t put a specific figure on the number of ghost detainees and could only give a range of up to 100 detainees, though they said it was more likely closer to two dozen.

“It’s a very difficult question for us to answer, Mr. Chairman, because we don’t have the documentation,” Gen. Paul Kern, who oversaw an Army investigation of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va.

The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said “it’s totally unacceptable that documents that are requested from the CIA have not been forthcoming.” And, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the ghost detainee issue “needs to be cleared up really badly.”

Contacted after the hearing, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield declined to comment on number of ghost detainees and said it is one aspect of a review under way by the agency’s inspector general

Translation of the CIA’s comment: [                           ]

Sanchez's Memo Let Loose the Dogs of Torture

Today’s dumb headline (but interesting story) is, Documents Helped Sow Abuse, Army Report Finds. The headline writer seems to think that documents write themselves, and also buys into the spin of the Army report that an order from a two-star General to “Exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations” somehow “was not clear”.

Seems pretty clear to me.

What I want to know is whose idea it was to try to cover up the torture by sending Sanchez to do the first investigation of himself.

Sign of Progress on CIA Torture

The signs have been clear from the start that the lion’s share of the US’s organized and systematized torture is by the civilians in the intelligence biz. In Iraq, their example, or pressure to emulate them, appears to have inspired those military torturers who were not simply free-lance sadists.

So far, though, it appeared that the CIA’s conduct (and that of other similar agencies?) was out of bounds for a discussion which focused on the uniformed services. Perhaps, though, the ice is cracking.

C.I.A. Expands Its Inquiry Into Interrogation Tactics: Former intelligence officials say that lawyers from the C.I.A. and the Justice Department have been involved in intensive discussions in recent months to review the legal basis for some extreme tactics used at those secret centers, including “waterboarding,” in which a detainee is strapped down, dunked under water and made to believe that he might be drowned.

…

It has been known that, after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were disclosed, the Justice Department abandoned some legal opinions written in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks that had been used as the basis for the broad latitude allowed interrogators in using extreme procedures against suspected Qaeda detainees. In recent months, government lawyers said the legal opinions were too broad and were being rewritten to restrict the harshest interrogation measures.

The broader inspector general investigation into the agency’s involvement in detention and intelligence in Iraq since May 2003 was ordered in May by George J. Tenet, who was then director of central intelligence. But additional questions about the C.I.A.’s practices center on a small number of high-level suspected Qaeda detainees being held by the agency outside Iraq in undisclosed locations around the world.

The C.I.A. has already scaled back some coercive methods used against detainees, although officials would not discuss specific techniques. Agency officials have demanded advance Justice Department approval for each tactic used against detainees and a new legal analysis of federal laws on the subject, including a statute that makes it a felony for American officials, including C.I.A. employees, to engage in torture.

One seminal document repudiated by the government was an August 2002 memo by the Justice Department. It concluded that interrogators could use extreme techniques on detainees in the effort to prevent terrorism.

Unfortunately, the NYT article also suggests that the CIA is seeking, or using, torture to question Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a “high-level Al Qaeda suspect”.

Some of the most evil regimes have cloaked their vilest acts with a blizzard of paperwork and legality. Let’s not end up like them.

Not Just a River In Egypt

Rumsfeld in the NYT

“I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes.” A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon’s Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that “all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated.” After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Mr. Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found “two or three” cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogations process. In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said.

OK, how do we explain this repeated lapse on the part of a supposedly hands-on detailed-oriented man?

• Couldn’t care less about torture
• Deep denial, perhaps fueled by spread of ‘war crimes trial’ meme [I am not making this last part up]
• Yes-men (and women) surrounding him never briefed him on the abuses at any time
• Knows about abuses but ordered cover-up (why else send Sanchez to do intial report?) and no one dared tell him it failed
• Is past his sell-by date

One slip of the tongue I could believe. But more than one, and so wrong on basic facts, about one of the most serious issues facing the Pentagon today?

Whatever it is, it’s quite serious.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I’ve suggested before that the folks who blew the whistle about the abuses in Iraq deserve a medal.

Well, instead of medals, what at least one of them is getting is death threats — threats serious enough for the Army to place Joe Darby and his wife in a secure undisclosed location. I’ve take the liberty of quoting more than I usually do; I hope author Wil S. Hylton and GQ magazine will forgive me. (That said, you really should read the whole article.):

They shut him up. Fast. You never even saw him. No footage of him coming off the plane, no flags or banners waving, no parade in his honor. He came home from Iraq in May, but there wasn’t even a formal announcement. In fact, you’re not supposed to know he’s here.

He lives in a secret location. It might be just down the street, or it might be halfway to nowhere. Maybe he was sitting at the next table last night, having dinner right beside you. You have no way of knowing: Nobody knows what he looks like. …

… He’s been under a gag order for three months.

First the media drove Darby’s wife out of her home. Then danger from the neighbors drove her into hiding.

Meanwhile, why can’t Darby talk to the press? One reason may be that he knows just how bad the horrors were at Abu Ghraib — and as yet no one has gone on the record to confirm them…

… Back at Maxine and Clay’s house, it didn’t take long for the storm to catch up with Bernadette [Joe Darby’s wife]. Any fantasy she had entertained about escape to the hills was dashed at 7 A.M., when her cell phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop for the rest of the day. …

By noon, the house was surrounded by TV trucks and cameramen setting up lights and microphones. As soon as Maxine stepped in front of the first camera, she could feel the quicksand at her ankles. Every time she finished with one reporter, two more would arrive, then four more after that. How many times could she say the same thing? Afternoon fell and evening came and the reporters just kept coming, through sunset and into the night, newspapers and magazines and TV stations from New York and Washington, D.C., all the major dailies and the weeklies, too. Upstairs in the bedroom, Clay and Bernadette gazed out the window in awe, watching the line of reporters inch forward, single file, toward Maxine. Diane Sawyer’s people called. Katie Couric’s, too.

As the week wore on, it barely slowed down. In some ways it even got worse. No one slept, and the phones rang all night, and as the articles began to appear, the family realized that some journalists don’t care what they say or how they make you feel. There was the writer from The Washington Post who asked a bunch of questions about Joe, then wrote an article about Maxine instead, about how small-town she was and how she’d never left Pennsylvania, which wasn’t even true, and how her house was a mess, which was only true that week, and only for the obvious reasons, and nobody’s business anyway. Then there was the team from ABC, calling so often it became like a joke. At one point, Clay counted fifteen calls from ABC in the span of a single dinner. But the worst was the guy from the New York Post who parked his white Mustang across the street, banging on the door every thirty minutes and demanding an interview with Bernadette. “I know she’s in there,” he would say. “I’m not leaving until she comes out.” Sure enough, he didn’t. He sat there for hours, watching every move they made and rushing to the door whenever anyone opened it. Well into the night, he was still there, and when Virginia came by to pick up her son Billy, Maxine brought him out with a blanket over his head, but the Post guy sprang out of his car, rushing toward them, and Billy started screaming and crying and Maxine shouted for help from the police officers who were standing across the street, but they just stared at her, then looked away. “It’s a public street,” they said.

That was the real hell of it. The media blitz was bad, but at least it was in their faces. You could see it coming and knew what to expect, which was a total disregard for privacy. It was bad but predictable. By contrast, the rest of the community, from the cops to the checkout clerk at the grocery, had become a terrifying mystery. There was no way of knowing where anyone stood, how they felt, or what they might do. Forget about the families of Joe’s unit. Bernadette knew they would hate her, but there were only so many of them. It was everyone else she was worried about. There were thousands of people in this stretch of valley, and she had lived here for most of her life. She knew some of them wouldn’t support Joe. They wouldn’t feel any sympathy for the Iraqis in those pictures, and they would consider Joe a traitor for blowing the whistle. Bernadette could see that coming. But the question was, how many were there? And which ones would they be?

Each day, she would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do “a little devilish thing,” on the whole he was “a wonderful kid.”

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was “walking around with a bull’s-eye on his head,” just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe’s dead. Some of Bernadette’s family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn’t support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn’t be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

…one thing Bernadette didn’t know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven’t been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is “a good deal more terrible” than what you’ve seen. But you don’t hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what “more terrible” means.

You don’t hear anybody explaining, for example, how Private Lynndie England, the woman in so many of those pictures, the one smiling and laughing and giving the thumbs-up, wasn’t even supposed to be in the cellblock, how she didn’t have any police authority and shouldn’t have been dealing with inmates in the first place. You don’t hear much of anything about her job, because the truth is, her job was something else entirely. Lynndie England was an administration clerk; not an MP like Joe but the equivalent of a secretary. “She was assigned to an MP unit,” says Blake Ellis, a paralegal with England’s defense team, “but she wasn’t an MP. She did not have any police authority. She was not supposed to be walking tiers or working with inmates.”

…

Then there’s Sivits. Guess what? Not an MP, either. No business being in a cellblock, no business interacting with detainees. This is a prison with 300 military police on duty, and they’ve got a mechanic up at one in the morning taking pictures while they terrorize prisoners.

Sound kosher?

All this in a prison, by the way, that was overcrowded by about 350 percent. According to Major David DiNenna, who served under Karpinski in Abu Ghraib, “Towards the end, we had over 7,000 prisoners. We were only supposed to run 2,000.” Karpinski says the same thing.

Or how about this: children. Little kids. In the prison. …

… it’s tough to know exactly how old the kids in Abu Ghraib really are and how many of them are in there, just like it’s tough to know how they’re being treated. Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the Abu Ghraib scandal in The New Yorker, claims that video exists of young Iraqi boys being sodomized. But Hersh hasn’t come forward with the video, and neither has anybody else. Even if he’s not right, there’s no question that other prisoners were sodomized by U.S. soldiers. There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn’t see those pictures on the news though, didn’t hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba’s 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are “confidential.” Just like all the pornography coming out of Abu Ghraib is being kept from you, the videos of Lynndie England fellating an unidentified man, the pictures of soldiers having sex. The members of the United States Congress apparently couldn’t tell who the man was when they watched the highlight reel on a loop in a dark room on Capitol Hill one afternoon in May, an event that one Congressman calls “Bizarro World,” with representatives coming and going while hundreds of pictures and videos rolled by, people like Nancy Pelosi sitting in front of a screen of depravity, with a military minder occasionally interjecting, “This one’s from Tier 1A.”

That wasn’t on 60 Minutes II, either.

Just try calling your senator and asking him about that. Ask him what he saw. Any children? Pornography? Sexual abuse? Richard Durbin: No comment. Lindsey Graham: Can neither confirm nor deny. Joseph Lieberman: No response. Sam Brownback: No response. Carl Levin: No comment. Joseph Biden: No comment. Ron Wyden: Can neither confirm nor deny. Tim Johnson: Can neither confirm nor deny. Jon Corzine: No comment. Chuck Schumer: No response. Barbara Boxer: No comment. John Warner: No comment. Lincoln Chafee: No comment. Dianne Feinstein: No comment.

It’s an election year, by the way.

And so, what Bernadette didn’t know when the military escort came to get her—what she couldn’t possibly imagine—was that she didn’t need any help. All she needed was the truth. Because the irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn’t about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn’t even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren’t supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime. And as long as that stays hidden, so will Bernadette and Joe, outcasts in their own community, two more victims of Abu Ghraib.

Don't Let's Let this Be Water Under the Bridge

This item, by a soldier recently returned from Iraq, is upsetting on many levels:

Better Angels of our Nature: Over the Bridge: On January 2 of this year, a team of soldiers in my brigade stopped a couple of Iraqis near the town of Samarra. We were engaging in counterinsurgency operations there, trying to stabilize the town so the area could begin to recover and rebuild from the rigors of war. And on that day, one of the men I knew and had worked with, CPT Eric Paliwoda, lost his life during a mortar attack.

Four soldiers stopped two Iraqis. In the passion of war, on a day marred by anger and tragedy, the two Iraqis ended up getting thrown off a bridge. The bridge in question was, if I recall correctly, about 15 feet above the Tigris. The river, at that point, was about 6 feet deep.

That much we know; that much is beyond dispute. Beyond that, everything is in dispute. A man may or may not have died—the soldiers claim he lives, the other man who was flung into the waters says he met a watery doom.

But there is one other thing that I haven’t mentioned yet that is also beyond a doubt. No matter what happened on that bridge, the soldiers were ordered to lie about it. And they were ordered to lie about it not just by their team leader, but by the entire leadership of their unit, from their company commander all the way up to their battalion commander.

How do we know this? Because at the Article 32 hearing only 2 weeks ago, their commanders, under grant of immunity, said so.

It’s wrong it should happen. It’s wrong it should be covered up. It is very very wrong that the investigators should give immunity to the high-ranking officers in order to get evidence against the low-ranking ones and the grunts (isn’t it supposed to work the other way? Prosecutors get cooperation from the low-ranking members of the conspiracy to get the leaders?)

There’s more in this post besides what I quoted, which discusses the more general context in which these things happen, and that’s upsetting too.

Abu Ghraib Photos

Ghastly Abu Ghraib photos at The Memory Hole (via The Yin Blog).

Gitmo Torture Regime Documented

Digby points to a report by the Center for Constitutional Rights based on the testimony of three UK citizens released from Gitmo. It describes an organized and systematic regime of psychological and physical torture to break the detainees.

If these charges are true, then this is not a few bad apples, but policy. And the person responsible for that policy is up for re-election soon.

Separately, information about doctors who at least failed to report physical torture and in some cases were complicit in enabling psychological abuse is emerging.

More Evil From the Administration

Phillip Carter, Prisoners’ Dilemma - How the administration is obstructing the Supreme Court’s terror decisions.

If there is a historical analogy to be drawn here, it is with the legal tactics of segregationists in the years following the Supreme Court’s famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In its second Brown decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the segregated school districts to integrate themselves “with all deliberate speed.” Segregationists took that message to heart, literally taking decades to integrate their schools (a task which some say has still not been accomplished). Segregationists used every legal tactic imaginable to delay the progress of integration—from filibusters in the Senate on civil rights legislation, to crazy school districting schemes, to literally standing in the schoolhouse door of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Eventually, the legal principle of equality won, and segregation faded into the history books, but it took a protracted fight to make the Supreme Court’s Brown decision a reality.

The issue here is not so much the detainees’ rights per se (although the detainees might say otherwise) as the need to restore the U.S. commitment to the rule of law in the eyes of the world. To date, the United States has not been able to enlist many of its allies to help shoulder the burden of Iraq, and Sen. John Kerry is unlikely to do much better given the current state of animus toward the U.S. in the world. Treating the wartime detainees fairly by giving them a fair hearing before a neutral magistrate (as ordered by the Supreme Court) would go a long way toward rebuilding bridges with our allies abroad. American moral leadership on these issues will also help win hearts and minds in Iraq, where the parallels between the Abu Ghraib abuses by U.S. soldiers and Saddam Hussein’s henchmen are all too easy to draw. But none of that will happen if the United States continues to drag its feet, kicking and screaming at every step of the way. Indeed, if the fight to implement Rasul takes as long as the fight for equality after Brown, then many of the detainees at Gitmo could die in captivity before they see their rights vindicated.

Oh, just read it.

Eyewitness to 'Iraqitraz'

Sadly No! posts the text of an email from from John Heacock, “who served for nearly a year in Iraq with the 267th MP Company from the Tennessee National Guard.” It has very credible-sounding details about the treatment of under-18 detainees in Iraq.

The writer blames the mistreatment of detainees on three causes:

1) soldiers asked to be guards without proper training responding to their own fear by trying to be as intimdating to prisoners as possible;

2) bureaucratic failure: no one made any decent plans to cope with a number of forseeable contingencies, e.g. child prisoners; and

3) what I see as plain bad faith on the part of ranking officers (see the end of this paragraph):

The problems with the treatment of the kids at Camp Bucca was about the same as the flaws with the other prisoners: lack of a policy regarding standards of guilt or length of imprisonment, bureaucratic indifference, laziness of those of high rank whose job it was to process prisoners, scarce resources, and conflicting guidance from above. Consequently, we had hundreds if not thousands of prisoners that we didn’t know why they were being held, who would never be convicted of a crime under any civilized standard of proof, and who spent more time awaiting a hearing than they would have been held in prison if convicted. A typical example: men held for months for stealing gasoline or butting in lines, when their sentence would have been 2 weeks or 30 days. I once asked the sole JAG attorney (a 1st Lt., BTW, the lowest rank for JAG) why we weren’t following the Geneva Convention rules about hearings and length of incarceration, and he expressed shock; when I told him he could go to either the main camp or Iraqitraz [the nickname for the high-threat detention area], to see the shortcomings for himself, he told me that the camp commander wouldn’t let him into either site. It’s hard to do your job ensuring that the military follows its rules when you can’t even see what’s going on.

It. Just. Gets. Worse.

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,” the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was “a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.”

See Ed Cone for pointers to more grisly stuff.

Of course, none of this in any way should be laid at the feet of our leaders, who consistently deplore torture in all forms. Indeed, the very concept of command responsibility, and especially ‘buck stops here’ theories of the Presidency, are anachronistic thinking ill-suited to the realities of modern governance in large organizations.

Where once we aspired to leadership of virtue, now we must learn to enjoy Virtual Leadership.

Were the Torture Memos Just Normal Lawyering?

Adrian Vermeule and Eric Posner, both respected law scholars at U. Chicago, penned an op-ed last week [now suddenly offline, only available via google cache] in which they argued that the torture memos were in fact quality lawyering, a view endorsed by the pseudonymous member of the Volokh conspiracy (who often writes as if s/he were a government lawyer).

There are a lot of things I find disturbing about this view. First, if the Torture Memo author(s) (mostly John Yoo) were asked to survey the field and opine on the best answer, they clearly failed. They did not even let on there was another side to the Presidential power question, much less that the majority of the Supreme Court had endorsed it, and most likely would again endorse it.

The Chicago profs counter this argument by saying that the OLC engaged in “standard lawyerly fare, routine stuff”. And,

Although it is true that they did not, in their memorandum, tell their political superiors that torture was immoral or foolish or politically unwise, they were not asked for moral or political advice; they were asked about the legal limits on interrogation. They provided reasonable legal advice and no more, trusting that their political superiors would make the right call. Legal ethics classes will debate for years to come whether Justice’s lawyers had a moral duty to provide moral advice (which would surely have been ignored) or to resign in protest.

Wrong. This isn’t a close call at all. To the extent that they lawyers may have been told they had to justify as much torture as could be squared with the law, they again failed on two grounds. First, their arguments as to specific intent, at least, were (I have it on good authority) specious. Second, if tasked with justifiying a given and evil conclusion, they should have found somewhere to mention that torture would be wrong. The failure to do so, as Jack Balkin noted some time ago, makes the entire argument one of those documents that makes you ashamed to be a lawyer.

Indeed, Balkin again has useful things to say about this op-ed, focusing on the claim that in the Torture Memo the OLC was just doing what it usually does, asserting a strong view of Presidential power.

Both Posner and Vermeule (and yes for that matter John Yoo also) have written scholarly papers that I respect. But there’s something worryingly wrong here when smart lawyers endorse the view that a lawyer is a machine, and can or should turn off his moral compasses, justifying it by saying he is just following the client’s orders, or meeting his expectations, or that saying “this would be wrong” is a futile gesture. This is never more true when they are government lawyers with an independent oath and obligation to the American people and to the Constitution.

Fafblog Explains Why You Have to Read About Torture

Fafblog—evidence for the hypothesis that the nation’s mental ecosystem has powerful waffle-based antibodies against evil:

“But Fafnir I do not want to read about torture” you say because you are a lazy whining person. “I want to read about gumdrops an rainbows and Presidents who are made of gumdrops an rainbows an use them to blow up the terrorists.”

No you should really read it it is a very important issue now go or I will have Giblets hit you with the waffle again.

“Blah blah blah torture, blah blah blah human rights. I like watchin things blow up on television, it gives me a feelin of comfy security, readin about human rights violations makes me feel bad.”

That does it, Im tellin Giblets to go get the waffle! He’s gettin the waffle now!

“Okay Fafnir I will do whatever you say just so long as Giblets an the waffle are not involved!”

It’s so easy to kind of sweep it all under your brain an think “Well theres nothin more to be said an nothin more to think about it” cause let’s face it nobody wants to think about their government participating in horror. An right now the level of torture talk has gone from “Torture: Bad!” to “Torture: Bad, But Not As Bad As Saddam Hussein” to “Torture: Bad, But What About Ticking Bombs?” to “Torture: Bad, But Not Necessarily Proof That The People Who Ordered Torture Are Bad” to “Torture: We Still Talkin Bout Torture?” to “Torture: Bad?” An before we get to “Torture: Sorta Like Mowin Your Lawn” I think we should try as hard as we can to wake up.

Calming the Troops...Or Propaganda?

A reader sent me something interesting: It seems that just before the July 4th holidays, everyone at Andrews Air Force Base -- including the local contingent of the Air National Guard -- was sent a power point file of talking points about the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandal produced by the Office of the Assistant Secretary Of Defense for Legislative Affairs.

The two-pager includes some information about what the public can do to support the troops, but the main thrust of it is how important intelligence is to the war effort...

The United States is at war. In the Global War on Terror, the most important weapon in our arsenal is intelligence. Because of the intelligence gathered from interrogations we have thwarted enemy attacks and saved American lives.

• Intelligence gathered from detainee interrogations contribute to Coalition success in the Global War on Terror.
• Interrogations played a key role in the capture of Saddam Hussein.
• Interrogations are critical to determining how foreign fighters get into Fallujah and Ar Ramadi.
• Interrogations are critical to discovering improvised explosive devices targeted at Coalition force

• The President directed in February 2002 that all persons in U.S. custody are to be treated humanely. This decision was made by the President and it is in accordance with all applicable national and international laws.
  • The so-called "torture memo" was a speculative work that explored the limits of detainee treatment under U.S. and international law. It was not a policy recommendation. DoD policy requires that all interrogation practices be humane.

• The actions of the soldiers in the Abu Graib photographs were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military, they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel.
• Eight Iraq-related detention lines of inquiry have been ordered by DoD.
• At least seven soldiers now face or may soon face criminal charges. Three of them have been preferred for court martial
  • Charges include dereliction of duty, conspiracy to maltreat subordinates, maltreatment of subordinates, indecent acts, and battery.
  • Additionally, two noncommissioned officers were charged with aggravated assault.
• Since the onset of the war in Iraq, the United States government has recognized and made clear that the Geneva Convention applies to our activities in Iraq. General Sanchez has instructed the forces under his command of that obligation.
• Orders placing Abu Ghraib under the tactical control of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in no way changed the rules governing the conduct of the military police and military intelligence personnel in Iraq with respect to the laws of war or the Geneva Convention.
• Contractors at the prison were primarily used for translation, interpretation, and interrogation purposes. Felony criminal sanctions for any crimes a defense contractor may commit are available under U.S. Federal law.

• Development and approval of interrogation techniques were done in a deliberate manner with strict legal and policy review to ensure the protection of detainees, our institutions and our troops responsible for carrying out those operations.
• Throughout this conflict the procedures have been constantly reviewed and modified when deemed necessary and appropriate.
• The implication that the United States government has, in one way or another, ordered, permitted, or tolerated torture is simply not true.
• Individuals who have abused the trust and confidence placed in them, regardless of rank or position, will be held accountable

Leaving aside the question of why the Pentagon uses Powerpoint for two pages of crowded three-column text, one might ask why the troops are getting this message, and why just before a weekend in which many of them would either be going home or having other July 4th related contact with the public.

In normal times, one might look at this document, complete with the centered and inset quote from a Bush Presidential directive, and say that it's just normal to give the troops information about issues that would obviously be of concern to them. (Although in fact I have no idea how common this is -- not very, I'd imagine?) It's surely a sign of the times that at least some of the recipients saw it as a clumsy way to prime the recipients with pro-administration propaganda.

Read it for yourself and decide. In case the original powerpoint doesn't work, I've converted it to a much larger .pdf version, but it may be harder to read.

Iraq Coverup Unravels A Little More?

It has seemed very strange that Gen. Sanchez would be sent to ‘get to the bottom’ of the Iraq atrocities mess when he seemed implicated in them himself. Of course, if you want a cover-up, send the guy with a lot to hide. Now Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, not obviously the world’s most disinterested source herself, fingers Sanchez, and maybe Rumsfeld, for ordering the use of dogs and other “types of coercive interrogation methods for detainees at Abu Ghraib’” like those that Gen. Sanchez approved for use on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Note also that “The Pentagon denied the assertion Thursday,” so this may be CYA by Karpinski…

Gutless

Excuse me if I don’t join the NYT editorial board in its cheers for the Senate’s Vote to require the administration to account for all the prisoners it has captured abroad, and to turn over information about US military prisons to the Red Cross, and to comply with the Geneva conventions.

This cheering is wrong on multiple levels.

First, the Senate’s action comes just a little late. The administration was able to invade Iraq because Congress didn’t do its job in asking questions and holding it to account. And news about problems in the prisons is hardly new. There were rumors of trouble long before the infamous photos. One can argue about whether the legislature was on notice before they emerged. But there’s no question that they have been on notice for weeks, yet this vote comes only in the shadow of the Supreme Court’s reassertion of long-standing verities of separation of powers.

Notably, the Senate’s resolution requires nothing significant beyond what likely would happen anyway as a result of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions.

And, the Senate’s action is limited to military prisons, leaving the CIA gulag in the shadows.

Last, but not least, Art. VI, Clause 2 of the US Constitution reads,

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

It shouldn’t require legislative action to compel the President to take care that the “supreme Law of the Land” be observed, and indeed I wonder if it could be a bad precedent to even suggest in any way that but for legislative action the President ought to feel any freedom of action to unilaterally disregard fundamental norms of international law such as the Geneva conventions.

I’ll cheer when the legislature starts investigating the CIA’s network of interrogation camps. Does anyone ever get out alive?

Administration Approved Repeated Almost-Drowning as a Non-Torture Interrogation Method

Meanwhile, back at torture… USATODAY.com - Memo lists acceptable ‘aggressive’ interrogation methods. In an as yet-unreleased August 2002 legal memo, the administration approved the CIA repeatedly dunking detainees under water, for periods long enough to make them think they might drown, in order to make them talk:

The techniques discussed were “aggressive” but “lawful,” the former official said. A current Justice official who knows the memo’s contents said it specifically authorized the CIA to use “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he is suffocating.

…

Initially, the Office of Legal Counsel was assigned the task of approving specific interrogation techniques, but high-ranking Justice Department officials intercepted the CIA request, and the matter was handled by top officials in the deputy attorney general’s office and Justice’s criminal division.

…

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said the thrust of the publicly released documents was that President Bush insisted on humane treatment of all prisoners, even though legal opinions from Justice and the Pentagon said there was wide latitude in wartime within the limits of anti-torture laws and treaties.

Well if the way Bush governs is “compassionate” I guess it is no less Orwellian to call repeated near-drowning “humane”.

A vote for Bush is a vote for waterboarding.

Torture Memo Enthusiastically Approved at Highest Levels; CIA Getting Cold Feet

Dana Priest has so many scoops in one story, there’s a danger some may get lost:

First, the CIA is getting nervous and has decided to stop doing whatever undisclosed things its has been doing to its prisoners in its series of secret camps in undisclosed foreign locations, pending legal review:

The “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

…

“Everything’s on hold,” said a former senior CIA official aware of the agency’s decision.