Torture me this

Last week I started to write a post about the horror of America's policy on torture under George W. Bush. The post was inspired by an NPR story last week about Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was wrongly detained during a layover at JFK in 2002 and sent to Syria, where he was tortured. Eventually, officials realized he was innocent, and Arar was released. The Canadian government awarded him $10 million for his ordeal, and last week the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in his case.

I was struck by the NPR story because the personal story can be so moving. Hearing Arar describe his experience, which you can hear at NPR's website by clicking the link above, penetrates even the deepest cynicism.

That post I started was never finished. And now since Friday, the floodgates have opened on the Bush administration's torture scandal. In the administration's waning days, the Bush crime syndicate would probably prefer to control the message of Bush's legacy. Instead, it has had to deal with the stain it has left on America's reputation and the very real damage it did in America's pursuit of national security through its use of torture.

Last Thursday, the Senate Armed Forces Committee, led by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), released a report indicating that high level administration officials, going at least as high as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were directly responsible for torture committed by American military members. Lynndie England and Charles Graner weren't a couple of low level bad apples. They were told from on high to do what they did.

The committee report was the result of two years of investigation. It confirmed what we already knew due to the previous release of DOD and DOJ memos.

Stunningly, rather than tamping down the story, Vice President Dick Cheney has faced it head on, telling ABC News that he thinks the use of torture, including waterboarding, was appropriate. Of course, Cheney doesn't admit that the techniques used were torture. He sticks to the administration line that the United States doesn't torture, but in the same interview, within minutes, he states that he feels that all of the interrogation tactics used by the U.S., including waterboarding, were appropriate.

It is well known that torture techniques, including waterboarding, were used on al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and in the ABC interview, Cheney claims that about half of what we knew about al-Qaeda a few years ago came from KSM.

But Cheney's claim doesn't jibe with a new article at VanityFair.com. David Rose of VF has written a story, "Tortured Reasoning", in which counterterrorism officials from various agencies indicate that the Bush administration's use of torture not only did not produce reliable intelligence but it was also counterproductive in our country's attempt to protect itself.

In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

And here's where Cheney's assertion about KSM is blown to shreds:

But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f--king bulls--t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

So not only is torture morally reprehensible, it's not practical.

Incredibly, there are people out there still willing to defend this wretched practice. Philly radio talk show host Michael Smerconish told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday on Hardball that if the US does it, it's OK.

Meanwhile, Senator Levin stated on The Rachel Maddow Show that his committee's report warrants the creation of a commission to determine if Bush administration officials should be charged with crimes. (Gotta embed this one.)

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The New York Times' editorial board, meanwhile, believes the commission step should be skipped:

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

We're all looking forward to putting this sad chapter of American history behind us, but even with a mere month remaining in the Bush administration, this story continues to have plot twists.

Andy in Harrisburg

Fight defamation! Award the medal of freedom!

Or Bill Kristol is such a jerk

You gotta read this. No really. You…just…gotta…read…this.

William Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard that President George Bush should not only consider himself an old-fashioned last-minute preemptive pardoning spree of any and all folks who participated in the "War on Terror," but (get this) he should also award them the Medal of Freedom.

Bush should consider pardoning--and should at least be vociferously praising--everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

Let's forget for the moment about why those who have engaged in torture or illegal spying should be protected from public criticism. Let's focus instead on what the Medal of Freedom is supposed to be about. According to the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

Recipients of the medal are those who have made outstanding contributions to the security or national interest of the United States or to world peace, or those who have made a significant public or private accomplishment.

Sniff. Beautiful. Gets this red-blooded freedom-loving girl a little misty around the eyes.

Except that, as Andrew Sullivan writes in his Atlantic Monthly blog The Daily Dish:

There is no "witch-hunt" for CIA staffers ordered by their superiors to commit war crimes.

However, there remain questions. Very big, very constitutional questions. Whether President-elect Barack Obama will call for a governmental investigation into war crimes is still being debated - even though, as Sullivan points out, there may be very well be a vital need to hold those at the top accountable.

But to even suggest that the president - so obviously trying to dodge that door slamming shut right now on his butt - should use the highest civilian award to honor those folks who have spent the past eight years committed to shredding the very document on which this nation has been built is a suggestion of obscenely cynical proportions.

Lauri in York

Editor's note: To this day, I'm still in awe of the fact that the NY Times thought it was a good idea to give this nutcase a weekly column. He's the classic example of failing upward. "Wrong about everything? You, too, can be a high paid columnist and analyst, just like Bill Kristol!" --Andy in Harrisburg

Laughter is the best medicine

Ashcroft: Bush is "most respectful" ever of civil liberties

More from St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Bush "respects liberty so profoundly that he has protected it and has safeguarded civil liberties more than any other president in wartime that I know of,'' Ashcroft said.

Andy in Harrisburg

Bush signs bill bolstering Freedom of Information Act

And in other news, "Seven-Year-Old Eats Broccoli".

Yes, on Monday, President Bush quietly signed a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act. The law now requires documents to be released unless to do so would cause harm, builds greater expediency to the process, and a variety of other things to make the whole process easier and more user-friendly.

Smintheus over at Daily Kos has more.

Now we'll all wait for the Boston Globe story next week about Bush's signing statement and his intent to completely ignore the law.

Andy in Harrisburg

Insider: Another attack would doom freedom

At an event in State College in the fall of 2005, an evangelical pastor told me that we need the ACLU because, according to the pastor, if there is another terrorist attack, America will become a police state. (He was simultaneously chastising us for our stands on religious liberty.)

Now conservative Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law and late of the Justice Department, has laid out in a new book and an interview in The New York Times Magazine just how far the Bush administration is willing to go in decimating freedom.

According to a column by Robyn Blumner in the St. Petersburg Times,

In vivid detail, Goldsmith describes how the administration used the specter of terrorism as a means to expand the power of the presidency.

This was especially true, according to Goldsmith, of Dick Cheney's top aide, David Addington, who once told Goldsmith that if the OLC ruled against an administration policy, "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."

Addington seemed to relish the coming of another big one and what powers loyal Bushies could arrogate in the aftermath. Goldsmith recalls him saying: "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious (FISA) court."

In other words, after one more terrorist attack, the administration could get Congress to wipe away any kind of warrant requirement for domestic spying.
...

Team Bush and its "one bomb away" agenda would use the next attack to finish the job of consolidating the nation's power in one man.

Andy in Harrisburg

Alberto Gonzales resigns

The rats are jumping off the sinking ship.

A longtime friend of Bush, who once considered him for appointment to the Supreme Court, Gonzales is the fourth high-ranking administration official to leave since November 2006. Donald H. Rumsfeld, an architect of the Iraq war, resigned as defense secretary one day after the November elections. Paul Wolfowitz agreed in May to step down as president of the World Bank after an ethics inquiry. And top Bush adviser Karl Rove earlier this month announced he was stepping down.

Andy in Harrisburg

NY Times: Gonzales' time is up

Calling him "The Failed Attorney General," the New York Times today called for the ouster of AG Alberto Gonzales, based largely on numerous civil rights and constitutional violations:

He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush's imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush's rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.
...
The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.

But like so many of the administration's promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.
...
It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush's decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way.
...
The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration's assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.

His Justice Department has abandoned its duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights. It approved a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a poll tax, a case in which Mr. Gonzales's political team overrode the objections of the department's professional staff.

The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.

No one should hold their breath that Gonzo is going anywhere anytime soon. But kudos to the Times for keeping the heat on an administration that continues to abuse our basic constitutional protections.

Here is national ACLU's response to the revelation about the PATRIOT Act.

Andy in Harrisburg

Here come the stormtroopers

This is going to set the conspiracy theorists on overdrive, with good reason.

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration's behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

Andy in H-burg

Speedy delivery to the feds

National ACLU has announced that it is filing a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about President Bush's signing statement regarding the opening of Americans' mail without a warrant.

It is worth noting that the Postal Inspector can open mail without a warrant if there is reason to believe that it contains dangerous material, like a bomb.

(ACLU Executive Director Anthony) Romero said the Bush signing statement does not specify whether there are special circumstances beyond those already established in the law that would allow him to open mail without a warrant and if so, what they may be. For example, the ACLU questioned whether the "exigent circumstances" would include the singling out of mail addressed to or from people on government watch lists, which are notoriously flawed. Such deliberate ambiguity, Romero said, "raises a red flag because of President Bush's history of asserting broad powers to spy on Americans."

Stay tuned. The hits just keep on comin'.

Andy in H-burg

Here's the mail, it never fails

We just got a letter...if George W. Bush didn't take it. The New York Daily News reports today that El Presidente claims, via a signing statement, that he has the power to open every Americans' mail without a search warrant.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

The man knows no bounds, does he? There is a place in America where the authorities open your mail without a warrant. It's called prison.

Andy in Harrisburg