Category Archives: torture

NEWS: Destroying the evidence

CIA was urged to keep interrogation videotapes
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, December 8, 2007

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

The disclosures provide new details about what Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, has said was a decision “made within C.I.A. itself” to destroy the videotapes. In interviews, members of Congress and former intelligence officials also questioned some aspects of the account General Hayden provided Thursday about when Congress was notified that the tapes had been destroyed. [complete article]

Inquiry sought on CIA tapes
By Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick, Washington Post, December 8, 2007

Democratic lawmakers yesterday angrily demanded a Justice Department investigation into the CIA’s decision to destroy videotapes of harsh interrogation tactics used on two terrorism suspects.

The White House said that President Bush was unaware of the tapes or their destruction until this week, but administration sources acknowledged last night that longtime Bush aide Harriet E. Miers knew of the tapes’ existence and told CIA officials that she opposed their destruction.

The Senate intelligence committee also announced the start of its own probe into the destroyed videotapes, said Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: Destroying evidence of war crimes

CIA destroyed 2 tapes showing interrogations
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, December 7, 2007

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said. [complete article]

Obstruction of justice at the CIA
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 6, 2007

Let’s first focus on this question: Why is this evidence being destroyed? The answer is painfully acknowledged. The CIA leadership and other senior administration officials are fully cognizant of the fact that the use of a number of specific practices which these tapes almost certainly document, to-wit: waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days, are serious crimes under American law and the law of almost all nations. Consequently, those who have used them and those who have authorized their use will almost certainly ultimately face criminal prosecution at some point in the future. The Administration’s attempts to immunize the perpetrators have failed. Any purported grant of a pardon by President Bush will be legally ineffective, because Bush himself is a collaborator in the scheme. And there is no statute of limitations. Therefore the prospect of prosecution is hardly far-fetched. It is a virtual certainty. So the evidence is being destroyed precisely because it would be used as evidence of criminal acts in a prosecution of administration figures and those acting under their direction. Therefore, this is a conscious, calculated obstruction of justice. [complete article]

See also, CIA destroyed videos showing interrogations (WP), Marty Lederman – includes Hayden’s message to CIA employees (Balkinization), and This is a banana republic (Andrew Sullivan).

NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: America has abandoned the rule of law

Jordan’s spy agency: holding cell for the CIA
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, December 1, 2007

Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA’s behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.
[…]
Bush administration officials have said they do not hand over terrorism suspects to countries that are likely to abuse them. For several years, however, the State Department has cited widespread allegations of torture by Jordan’s security agencies in its annual report cards on human rights.

Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan’s record. Since 2006, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The White House has a page on its web site devoted to “Tales of Saddam’s Brutality.” There it refers to falaqa as Uday Hussein’s “favourite punishment.”

U.S. says it has right to kidnap British citizens
By David Leppard, The Sunday Times, December 2, 2007

America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America. [complete article]

The torture compromise of 2007
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, November 29, 2007

A friend at a dinner party on the East coast found herself in an argument in which she was the only person opposed to torture. The other invitees, all graduates of favored preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges, worked in the law, investment banking, urban planning and the arts. They agreed that President Bush was incompetent and untrustworthy; but his fundamental mistake about torture had been to go after the law. Torture, they said, cannot be a policy, and a law that permits torture cannot be on the books. What is wanted is a leader who will break the law selectively, in a way we can trust. Torture should be allowable, but only by the right people and for the right reason. To a man and woman, the guests who held this view were supporters of Hillary Clinton. [complete article]

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
By Philip Giraldi, Huffington Post, November 26, 2007

There has been a long tradition of fear-mongering legislation in the United States directed against groups and individuals believed to threaten the established order. The first such measures were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress in 1798 during the administration of the second president of the United States John Adams. The Acts, consisting of four separate laws, made it more difficult to become a citizen, sought to control real or imagined foreign agents operating in the United States, and also gave the government broad powers to control “sedition.” Sedition was defined as “resisting any law of the United States or any act of the President” punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years. It also made illegal “false, scandalous or malicious writing” directed against either the government or government officials. The next President, Thomas Jefferson declared that three out of the four laws were unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under them. [complete article]

Witness names to be withheld from detainee
By William Glaberson, New York Times, December 1, 2007

Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.

The case of the detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, is being closely watched because it may be the first Guantánamo prosecution to go to trial, perhaps as soon as May.

Defense lawyers say military prosecutors have sought similar orders to keep the names of witnesses secret in other military commission cases, which have been a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s policies for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Some legal experts and defense lawyers said the judge’s order, issued on Oct. 15 without public disclosure, underscored the gap between military commission procedures and traditional American rules that the accused has a right to a public trial and to confront the witnesses against him. [complete article]

REVIEW & OPINION: The torture presidency

The man behind the torture
By David Cole, New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney’s backing, he has helped shape the administration’s strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called “Cheney’s Cheney,” Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him “an unopposable force.” Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

Addington’s combination of public silence and private power makes him an apt symbol for the Bush administration’s general approach to national security. Many of the administration’s most controversial policies have been adopted in secret, under Addington’s direction, often without much input from other parts of the executive branch, much less other branches of government, and without public accountability. Among the measures we know about are disappearances of detainees into secret CIA prisons, the use of torture to gather evidence, rendition of suspects to countries known for torture, and warrantless wiretapping of Americans. [complete article]

The missing IG report on Maher Arar
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, November 16, 2007

Of all the Bush Administration’s many perversions of the justice system, there is something particularly distressing about the case of Maher Arar. A Canadian software engineer, he was changing planes in JFK on his way home to Canada after a Mediterranean vacation when American law enforcement snatched him up. Arar had been fingered as a terrorism suspect by Canadian authorities. Within a brief period of time, he was interrogated, locked-up and then bundled off to Jordan with directions for transshipment to Syria, a nation known to use torture. Indeed, it was plain from the outset that he was shipped to Syria for purposes of being tortured, with a list of questions to be put to him passed along. Never mind that Syria is constantly reviled as a brutal dictatorship by some Bush Administration figures who openly dream of bombing or invading it… the Syrians, it seems, have a redeeming feature—their willingness to torture the occasional Canadian engineer as a gesture of friendship to the Americans. [complete article]

OPINION: The crime of waterboarding

Waterboarding used to be a crime
By Evan Wallach, Washington Post, November 4, 2007

As a JAG in the Nevada National Guard, I used to lecture the soldiers of the 72nd Military Police Company every year about their legal obligations when they guarded prisoners. I’d always conclude by saying, “I know you won’t remember everything I told you today, but just remember what your mom told you: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That’s a pretty good standard for life and for the law, and even though I left the unit in 1995, I like to think that some of my teaching had carried over when the 72nd refused to participate in misconduct at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Sometimes, though, the questions we face about detainees and interrogation get more specific. One such set of questions relates to “waterboarding.”

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as “simulated drowning.” That’s incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding’s effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years. [complete article]

ANALYSIS: The torture trail

CIA rendition: The smoking gun cable
By Stephen Grey, The Blotter, November 6, 2007

A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a “foreign government service” (Egypt) that: “the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq…This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches].” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.”

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war — the al Qaeda/Iraq link — was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

Although there have been claims about torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, this is the first clear example of such torture detailed in an official government document.

The information came almost one year before the president and other administration members first began to confirm the existence of the CIA rendition program, assuring the nation that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.”

Last September, these red-hot CIA cables were declassified and published by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but in, a welter of other news, one of the most important documents in the history of rendition had passed almost without notice by the media. As far as I can tell, not a single newspaper reported details of the cable. [complete article]

See also, The agonizing truth about CIA renditions (Stephen Grey).

EDITORIAL: The real world of torture

Jack Bauer vs. Abdallah Higazy — Fiction vs. Reality
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, November 6, 2007

According to a new CNN poll, 69 percent of Americans believe that waterboarding is a form of torture. Even so, a staggering 40 percent of Americans polled believe that the US government should be allowed to use this form of torture to get information from suspected terrorists.

Commentators on this issue have expressed moral outrage — “waterboarding is killing America’s soul,” proclaims the Philadelphia Daily News‘ “Attytood.” Some see this as an afront to American pride — Keith Olbermann challenges President Bush by saying, “[We don’t condone torture] because we’re Americans, sir, and we’re better than that. We’re better than you.” While there are those who express indifference — the Wall Street Journal regards this as “mostly a political sideshow.”

Yet for those 40 percent of Americans who favor the use of torture, their view has in all likelihood been clearly expressed by Democratic Senator, Charles Schumer, who in a 2004 Senate hearing said:

I think there are probably very few people in this room or in America who would say that torture should never ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. . . . It is easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used, but when you are in the foxhole it is a very different deal. And I respect, I think we all respect the fact that the President is in the foxhole every day.

This then is how the issue is being framed: on one side are those who see themselves adopting the moral high ground — though their critics perceive them as being holier-than-thou, starry-eyed idealists; and on the other side are those who believe in the necessity of making tough choices in extreme circumstances — though their opponents see them as having lost their moral bearings.

At the center of this debate is an argument of perceived necessity. And the narrative that animates this argument, borrowed from Israel and used there in an earlier debate on the legitimacy of torture, is the “ticking bomb” scenario.

The scenario itself is fanciful. We are all familiar with the suspense movie in which the reality of what is feared is confirmed by making the audience privilege to the whereabouts of a bomb and the time left before it will explode. In post-9/11 America the impact of such dramas has been heightened by the likes of Fox TV’s fictional counter-terrorism agent, Jack Bauer. Let’s face it, for a population that forms most of its understanding of the world through television, such imagery has a visceral impact. But in Israel itself, where the danger of terrorism is more tangible and ubiquitous, the ticking bomb scenario is itself no less a product of fiction and has served no less as a political tool. As Stephen Langfur wrote in 1996:

Israel wants to present itself as an enlightened democracy on the Western model, but it has locked itself into the role of Occupier, with the result that toward part of the population under its control it must behave like a police-state. The “ticking bomb scenario” offers an exceptional, border-line situation, in which everyone can understand that even an enlightened democracy might have to use torture. What Israel does, therefore, is to extend the fantasy of the bomb in the crowded building to include analogous situations—even remotely analogous. Israel can then allow its security apparatus to approach interrogations as if they were all “ticking bombs.” Thus it can keep wearing the mask of an enlightened democracy, while functioning like a police-state. The “ticking bomb scenario,” for which torture is useless, “koshers” other situations where torture can be useful.

Indeed, Langfur points out that Israeli General Security Service officials used the ticking bomb argument to intimidate judges. After all, who would be willing to curtail an interrogation and thereafter be accused of having failed to prevent carnage? Yet in practice, so-called ticking bombs turned out to be prisoners who had been held in detention for weeks — plenty of time for plots to be revised and for the seeming inevitability of any attack to evaporate.

If an interrogation method’s “necessity” was to be based on the magnitude of a risk averted, then any technique applied to bring about the desired result would surely be justifiable. On what basis could one say that it was acceptable to use waterboarding to make the prisoner fear that he was about to drown, yet bleach could not be poured in his eyes, if in both cases the justification for the brutality was the necessity of saving innocent Israeli or American lives? If brutality can be graded on a scale, then on what basis can we say that in one instance the end justify the means while in another it does not, when necessity is determined by the end and not the means?

The issue here cannot be addressed or resolved by considering fictional scenarios. Instead we need to focus on reality and fortunately there is already one case that provides the perfect litmus test: the case of Abdallah Higazy.

On December 17, 2001, Higazy was detained and questioned by the FBI and then held as a material witness, suspected of being an accomplice in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. He had been staying in a nearby hotel and was thought to have been in possession of an air-band transceiver capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground communication that could have been used as a beacon to direct the hijacked aircraft into their targets, the Twin Towers. As a terrorist suspect Higazy was as hot as they get.

Under interrogation he kept on changing his story. He had to be lying. FBI agents said they gave Higazy a “polygraph” yet the United States Court of Appeals opinion [PDF] quotes the suspect as saying that the test produced “intense pain.” The court opinion states that “Higazy asked whether anybody else had ever suffered physical pain during the polygraph, to which [FBI Special Agent Michael] Templeton replied: “[i]t never happened to anyone who told the truth.” Was Higazy being given a polygraph or was he being electrocuted?

The court opinion continues:

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

If so-called harsh interrogation methods can be justified, Abdallah Higazy was surely the perfect candidate to be given the third degree. He was suspected of having played an instrumental role in the worst terrorist attack the world has ever seen. This must have been — as Vice President Cheney would say — a no-brainer. Or not?

Anyone familiar with the name, Abdallah Higazy, will of course know that he was completely innocent. The FBI quickly realized as much when a few weeks after Higazy’s detention an airline pilot showed up looking for the radio transceiver he had left behind when he had been evacuated from his hotel on September 11.

When FBI Special Agent Templeton was interrogating his suspect, were Cheney’s words from September 16, 2001, still fresh in his mind?

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

Templeton certainly went to the dark side, but the terrorist he was after wasn’t there. The question that needs to be addressed now and that needs to be the concern of the next attorney general is not what methods of interrogation can be applied in a ticking bomb scenario; it is this: how should the law have protected Abdallah Higazy?

Interrogation is a means of inquiry, not a method of punishment. In the war on terrorism, the presumption of innocence should not be treated as a legal luxury — it is a recognition that suspects are not always (contrary to what the administration would have us believe) the worst of the worst, but on the contrary that with unfortunate frequency they have included the innocent.

Forget about ticking time bombs and remember Abdallah Higazy. After all, those who now want to justify torture do so in the name of protecting the innocent.

NEWS: The torture test

Bush administration blocked waterboarding critic
By Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue, ABC News, November 2, 2007

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration’s legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn’t die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Does Cheney have as much guts as an acting assistant attorney general? Or does he think waterboarding guidelines should include a clause that exempts anyone with a pacemaker?

Mukasey all but a shoo-in for approval
By Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2007

Michael B. Mukasey appeared on Friday to be all but assured of becoming the nation’s 81st attorney general when two Senate Democrats broke ranks and said they would support the retired federal judge to head the Justice Department.

While acknowledging serious concerns about his views on interrogation techniques, Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles E. Schumer of New York said they would vote to confirm Mukasey when the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up his nomination to succeed Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday. [complete article]

See also, John Dean on Mukasey (TPM) and The torture litmus test (Scott Horton).

OPINION: Report treats torture-based confessions as news

NPR gives torture credibility
FAIR, October 30, 2007

Good journalists don’t base their stories on highly dubious “facts.” And they try to avoid reports that will encourage violence. Unfortunately, a recent segment on NPR’s Morning Edition (10/26/07) violated both rules.

NPR Iraq correspondent Anne Garrels’ report was based around the accounts of three men who were being held prisoner by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia. The captives were supposedly “renegade” members of Sadr’s militia who said “they were trained in roadside bombs and car bombings in Iran…to attack Americans and sow suspicion and violence between Shiites and Sunnis.” The details of the prisoners’ accounts made up much of Garrels’ report, despite her noting that “the three detainees had clearly been tortured.”

“There was blood all over their clothes,” Garrels reported. “They were in such bad shape they couldn’t walk. They had to be dragged onto the chairs, and one of them was just sobbing.”

Given the brutal treatment of the three men, there is no reason to put any stock whatsoever in the claims they made in the presence of their captors. [complete article]

NEWS: Mukasey: Bush and Cheney’s defense attorney

Nominee’s stand may avoid tangle of torture cases
By Scott Shane, New York Times, November 1, 2007

In adamantly refusing to declare waterboarding illegal, Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, is steering clear of a potential legal quagmire for the Bush administration: criminal prosecution or lawsuits against Central Intelligence Agency officers who used the harsh interrogation practice and those who authorized it, legal experts said Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, scheduled a confirmation vote for Tuesday amid deep uncertainty about the outcome at the committee level. If Mr. Mukasey’s nomination reaches the Senate floor, moderate Democrats appear likely to join Republicans to produce a majority for confirmation. But a party-line vote in the Judiciary Committee, which seemed a possibility, could block the nomination from reaching the floor.

The biggest problem for Mr. Mukasey remains his refusal to take a clear legal position on the interrogation technique. Fear of opening the door to criminal or civil liability for torture or abuse, whether in an American court or in courts overseas, appeared to loom large in Mr. Mukasey’s calculations as he parried questions from the committee this week. Some legal experts suggested that liability could go all the way to President Bush if he explicitly authorized waterboarding. [complete article]

NEWS, ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Why America uses torture

U.S. accused of torture
By Ian Munro, Sydney Morning Herald, October 31, 2007

The United States’s willingness to resort to harsh interrogation techniques in its so-called war on terror undermined human rights and the international ban on torture, a United Nations spokesman says.

Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said the US’s standing and importance meant it was a model to other countries which queried why they were subject to scrutiny when the US resorted to measures witnessed at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison.

Mr Nowak was speaking after releasing his finding that the use of torture was routine and widespread in Sri Lanka ,despite laws against it.

“I am very concerned about the undermining of the absolute prohibition of torture by interrogation methods themselves in Abu Grahib, in Guantanamo Bay and others, but also by rendition and the whole CIA secret places of detention. All that is really undermining the international rule of law in general and human rights but also the prohibition of torture,” said Mr Nowak. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The renewed debate on torture that has been provoked by statements made by AG-nominee Judge Mukasey on the legitimacy of waterboarding, has resulted in numerous assertions that torture is un-American. As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said today, “I remain very concerned that Judge Mukasey finds himself unable to state unequivocally that waterboarding is illegal and below the standards and values of the United States.”

To my mind, this is a rather weak moral argument. To say that we don’t torture because we’re American, is to imply that the majority of humanity, not being endowed with American virtue, might find the use of torture more acceptable than their high-minded stateside counterparts. But on the contrary, it is this notion that there is some intrinsic moral foundation to Americanness that is itself the great enabling force beneath a national trait that most of us would rather ignore: American hypocracy. The self-agrandizing virtue that this nation so often wants to celebrate is a mask that conceals a plethora of contradictions: that a nation that identifies itself as religious is so profoundly materialistic; that a nation that predominently identifies itself as Christian has such a strong preference for pre-Christian values; that a nation that sees itself as a moral beacon to the world has with such frequency chosen military engagement as its point of contact with the rest of the world. Americans can and do engage in torture not in spite of this being un-American, but because as Americans they find it all too easy to sustain an image of themselves that is a glaring contradiction with their actions.

If the Senate wants to assert that America will no longer condone torture, then first we need to acknowledge that the climate of fear engendered by the war on terrorism has in fact led many Americans to regard torture as an acceptable tool of national defense. And secondly, that if America wants to now change course and unequivocally renounce the use of torture, it will not be reclaiming moral high ground; it will be returning to an internationally recognized set of moral standards that for most of this decade it has chosen to ignore.

Waterboarding is torture… period
By Malcolm Nance, Small Wars Journal, October 29, 2007

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again. [complete article]

On torture, 2 messages and a high political cost
By Scott Shane, New York Times, October 30, 2007

Six years after the Bush administration embraced harsh physical tactics for interrogating terrorism suspects, and two years after it reportedly dropped the most extreme of those techniques, the taint of torture clings to American counterterrorism efforts.

The administration has a standard answer to queries about its interrogation practices: 1) We do not torture, and 2) we will not say what we do, for fear of tipping off future prisoners. In effect, officials want Al Qaeda to believe that the United States does torture, while convincing the rest of the world that it does not.

But that contradictory catechism is not holding up well under the battering that American interrogation policies have received from human rights organizations, European allies and increasingly skeptical members of Congress. [complete article]

Squeezing Mukasey on torture
By Massimo Calabresi, Time, October 30, 2007

George W. Bush has always wielded moral clarity as a weapon, beating Democrats by declaring his high purpose and principled resolve. But in recent months, as critics have shined new light on domestic spying and harsh interrogation techniques in the morally ambiguous world of counter-terrorism, Bush has had to retreat to gray-area defenses, using tailored definitions and legalisms to dodge questioners. And now, as Democrats raise the pressure on embattled Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey to state his opinion on whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture, it is the President’s opponents who are using moral clarity against him.

Mukasey’s (and the White House’s) problems began during his Oct. 18 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. At the hearing veteran Illinois Senator Dick Durbin asked Mukasey a deceptively simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Waterboarding simulates drowning, and involves constraining a person, restricting their breathing and pouring water on all or part of their face. Some version of it is widely reported to have been used by U.S. interrogators in an attempt to extract information from high-level terrorism suspects in the wake of 9/11. [complete article]

See also, Dozens of ‘ghost prisoners’ not publicly accounted for (WP) and Judgment day for the CIA? (Christopher Dickey).

NEWS: Torture and forced confessions

Second court ruling redacts information about interrogation
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, October 25, 2007

The FBI interviewer allegedly gave Abdallah Higazy a choice: Admit to having a special pilot’s radio in a hotel room near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, or the security service in his native Egypt would give his family “hell.” Higazy responded by confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

“I knew I couldn’t prove my innocence, and I knew my family was in danger,” Higazy said later. “. . . If I say this device is mine, I’m screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent [Michael] Templeton made it quite clear that ‘cooperate’ had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

The new details about the FBI’s allegedly aggressive tactics in the Higazy case were included in a ruling briefly issued last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit [PDF], which reinstated a civil lawsuit brought by Higazy against the FBI and Templeton. In an unusual move, however, the appeals court withdrew the first opinion within minutes on Thursday and issued a second opinion Friday, with the details of Higazy’s allegations removed.

“This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal,” the new ruling reads. “For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy’s statements were coerced.” Such redactions are imperfect in the Web age, and the original document remains accessible through links on sites and blogs devoted to appellate-court and legal issues.

Higazy was jailed for a month as a suspected accomplice to the World Trade Center attack, until a pilot showed up and asked for his radio back. The fresh details about his interrogation in December 2001 illustrate how an innocent man can be persuaded to confess to a crime that he did not commit, and the lengths to which the FBI was willing to go in its terrorism-related investigations after the Sept. 11 attacks. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — As this report says, the ruling was briefly issued, but much as the US government might wish otherwise, once something goes out onto the Web, it’s too late to redact the embarrasing details. They can all be read here: Higazy v. Millenium Hotel [PDF]

NEWS: Adminstration of torture

General claims Bush gave ‘marching orders’ on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
By Nick Juliano, Raw Story, October 2, 2007

More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.

In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

“[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. “Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ‘stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.” [complete article]

NEWS: Mukasey faces tough questions on torture

Mukasey faces tough questions on torture
By Philip Shenon, New York Times, October 19, 2007

President Bush’s nominee for attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, declined today to say if he considered harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding, which simulates drowning, to constitute torture or to be illegal if used on terrorism suspects.

On the second day of confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Mukasey went further than he had the day before in arguing that the White House had constitutional authority to act beyond the limits of laws passed by Congress, especially when it came to questions of national defense.

He suggested that both the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program and its use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects, including waterboarding, may be acceptable under the Constitution even if they go beyond what the law technically allows. Mr. Mukasey said the president’s authority as commander in chief may allow him to supersede laws written by Congress. [complete article]

OPINION: Bush’s Pentagon Papers

Do we already have our Pentagon Papers?
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, October 19, 2007

They can’t help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.” [complete article]

PREVIEW: The Cheney coup

Cheney’s law
Frontline, PBS, October 16, 2007

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy — without congressional approval or judicial review.

Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the wiretapping and U.S. attorneys’ cases, FRONTLINE’s season premiere, Cheney’s Law, airing Oct. 16, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney’s way of looking at the Constitution. [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Is the CIA trying to cover its tracks or avoid a set up?

CIA internal inquiry troubling, lawmaker says
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, October 12, 2007

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said today he was troubled by reports that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, noted in a statement that the law guarantees the independence of the inspector general. “It is this independence that Congress established and will very aggressively preserve,” Mr. Reyes said. “The initiation of this investigation, if accurately reported, is troubling.”

Mr. Reyes was reacting to reports that a small team working for the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, was looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.

The review is particularly focused on complaints that Mr. Helgerson’s office has not acted as a fair and impartial judge of agency operations but instead has begun a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Sounds like there are grounds for suspicion on all sides here. Undermining the IG’s independence stinks, but at the same time, a purported crusade against the CIA’s torturers could instead actually be a preemptive move initiated by the White House to line up some scapegoats-in-waiting to save Bush and Cheney from being charged with war crimes. Call it a search for the CIA’s Lynndie England and Charles Graner, even if the agency will have a much harder time portraying its interogators as witless subordinates.

NEWS: Supreme Court stands up for torture (so long as it’s secret)

Secrecy defense prevails in torture case
By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2007

In a victory for the Bush administration and its use of the “state secrets” defense, the Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear a lawsuit from a German car salesman who said he was wrongly abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA in a case of mistaken identity.

The court’s action, taken without comment, was a setback for civil libertarians who had hoped to win limits on the secrecy rule, a legacy of the Cold War.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the so-called state secrecy privilege has been invoked regularly to bar judges or juries from hearing claims of those who say they were beaten, abused or spied upon by the government during its war on terrorism. Administration lawyers have argued successfully that hearing such claims in open court would reveal national security secrets. [complete article]