I’m simply not comfortable with paying someone to be waterboarded, even if it is “for charity” and even if it is Sean Hannity.
Anyone else thinking of Videodrome?
Tagtorture
With each new revelation on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo (and who, knows, probably elsewhere), I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who I have written about numerous times in the past three years but now with especially sad relevance. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what we would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, in September 2003.
Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the U.S. Senate committee probe and various new press reports, that the “Gitmo-izing” of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.
Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq. A cover-up, naturally, followed.
Huffington Post: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself — After Refusing to Take Part in Torture
(via OVO)
Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique, as early as 2002, a Senate intelligence report shows.
On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with “alternative interrogation methods,” including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.
The decision was contingent on the Justice Department’s determining the method’s legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the “proposed interrogation techniques were lawful,” the report said. […]
In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, “the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy,” the report said.
CNN: Senate report: Rice, Cheney OK’d CIA use of waterboarding
(via OVO)
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Apparently, one of the individuals applying pressure for results was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major advocate of the Iraq invasion. Wolfowitz called the man in charge of Guantánamo at the time, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey. Wolfowitz called “to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production” at Guantánamo, the report says. Wolfowitz suggested the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques. The report cites the Guantánamo interrogation chief at that time, David Becker, as the source of this information about Wolfowitz. Dunlavey, however, told the Senate investigators he could not recall the Wolfowitz call.
The Agitator: Put Them in Prison. Really.
Balko writes:
So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.
And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.
These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.
I fully agree.
Surprising even a judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a lawyer for the Obama administration embraced the Bush administration’s position in the first state secrets case since Obama took power. The case involves five accused terrorist detainees who are attempting to sue a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights to accommodate the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which flew them off to be tortured by other governments.
Though it’s now well-known that the practice went on and the details even of these particular cases have been well-documented, just as it did in the horrifying case of Khalen Masri the Bush administration invoked states secrets privilege to prevent the suit from coming to trial. State secrets is a judge-made law (based entirely on a lie, by the way) allowing the executive branch to exclude evidence in a case merely by stating it would be contrary to the interests of national security to allow the evidence to be admitted. Bush administration officials claimed judges are obligated to show the president “utmost deference” on state secrets claims, provoking a federal judge in a domestic spying/wiretapping case to ask if that means “the king can do no wrong,” and that judges are supposed to “bow” before the president in such claims.
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the state secrets privilege was invoked about 55 times from 1954 to 2001. In the first four years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration invoked it 23 times.
Obama has promised to review Bush’s invocation of state secrets privilege, including voicing his support for a reform bill working its way through Congress. But the case this week was his first opportunity to do something about it. He didn’t.
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In a breathless piece of reporting in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama “left intact” a “controversial counter-terrorism tool” called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed “current and former U.S. intelligence figures,” Obama may actually be planning to expand the program. The report notes the existence of a European Parliament report condemning the practice, but states “the Obama Administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.”
The Los Angeles Times just got punked. Its description of the European Parliament’s report is not accurate. (Point of disclosure: I served as an expert witness in hearings leading to the report.) But that’s the least of its problems. It misses the difference between the renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week.
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U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men — or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.
Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.
(via Cryptogon)
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”
“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.
Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.
(via Pink on Brown)
President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.
In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
(via Cryptogon)
I would be very interested in hearing what Biden has to say about this quote now: “I think we should be acquiring and accumulating all the data that is appropriate for possibly bringing criminal charges against members of this administration at a later date.”
You are correct that relationship- (or confidence-) building approaches are not new and have been known to law enforcement for decades. Even World War II interrogators used relationship-building approaches to great success, but we can build on that. Interrogation is an art and a science and, like every discipline, can be improved upon. My group began to integrate relationship-building with other criminal investigative techniques, always tailoring it to the culture at hand. This is what made our techniques new. I watched day in and day out as my group of interrogators used American ingenuity in adapting these approaches for each individual detainee and they were highly effective. Interrogation is about being smarter, not harsher.
Why these techniques have not yet been integrated into intelligence interrogation is a mystery to me. I made a list of criminal investigation techniques that would be effective in interrogations and included it in my “after-action” report. The next administration needs to institutionalize this approach by contracting a cadre of experienced law enforcement officers to help train our intelligence interrogators. This same relationship already exists between civilian and military criminal investigators.
See also: Matthew Alexander’s WaPo editorial
(via Schneier)
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