Noted for the record: "Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres"

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

As you can tell from the spelling of "centres," this is furrin reporting. Another win for our homeland media! USA! USA! USA!

Oh, and ...

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Read it and weep.

(h/t: Gary Legum | pic. source | pic credit: "Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au")

Remember when she was just a nice wholesome lingerie model?

Urk:

(click to enlarge)

That creature Tyra Banks has her arm around up there apparently now spends a lot of time on the Facebook, where he posts things like this …

I will be in Yorba Linda tonight at the Nixon Library with Hugh Hewitt. I'm still so grateful that Richard Nixon persuaded me to join him in the executive branch more than forty years ago.

… and excitedly links to things like this:

(click to enlarge)

So he's not just keeping his collection of torture porn to himself anymore. Now he's redistributing it. As long as it's not Americans doing it. Because that would be wrong, amirite?

[Added] Never forget:

(pic. source)

I got your Decision Point right here

How can we miss him, when he'll never leave?

Reuters:

Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.

[...]

"He's avoiding the handcuffs," Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

[...]

Brody is an American-trained lawyer specialized in pursuing war crimes worldwide, especially those allegedly ordered by former leaders, including Chile's late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad's ousted president Hissene Habre. Habre has been charged by Belgium with crimes against humanity and torture, and is currently exiled in Senegal.

"President Bush has admitted he ordered waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law. Under the Convention against Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush," Brody said.

There's more.

(h/t: @Mrxk and @pwire | pic. source | x-posted)

Taking Down Thiessen

Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial.

The above is from a review of Marc Thiessen's recent book published on Slate by "Matthew Alexander," "... a former senior military interrogator who publishes under a pseudonym for security reasons." Anyone who has any doubts along the lines that Thiessen and other former Bushies continue to try to push is strongly encouraged to read it. Those already on firm enough moral ground to know how fundamentally wrong torture is, and, in particular, who already know that waterboarding is in fact torture, may enjoy reading it for the devastation.

(h/t: Adam Serwer | x-posted, with slight mods)

A Name To Keep In Mind

Jennifer K. Hardy, formerly known as Jennifer Koester.

Just following orders, I'm sure.

Will we be learning about her countertops anytime soon, Ms. Malkin?

And while you're there, ask her if she saved her old work email messages. Her last boss claims to have "lost" his.

Line of the Day: 2009-08-31

When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.
      --Andrew Sullivan

I was led to this post -- a description of Wallace on his knees before Dick Cheney, or as Sully put it, "A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers" -- by Glenn Greenwald's fine post on nepotism among the Villager media, to which I was directed by Jim Newell's take on Jenna Bush's new "job." I salute them both for being able to bring some humor to this sad state of affairs. Read 'em and weep.

Also, more from Sully on the Wallace "interview" here.

"The Secret Government"

Matthew Yglesias says you should read the new piece by Chris Hayes.

I agree, especially if you're unfamiliar with the Church Committee and Operation Chaos.

Seriously, Can The MSM Ever Get Anything Right?

Or is it that they're all still terrified of Dick Cheney?

Wheels of Justice ... How Do They Grind Again?

I confess that my first reaction to the news about Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that he had appointed "a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses, including episodes that resulted in prisoner deaths" was about the same as Jim Newell's headline on Wonkette:

VERY LIBERAL ERIC HOLDER TO APPOINT INVESTIGATOR TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER THERE IS ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO TO HAVE AN INVESTIGATION FOR CRIMES, SUCH AS TORTURE, BUT ONLY THE STUFF THAT GEORGE W. BUSH DIDN’T SAY WAS A-OKAY

I expect to see ten Fox News stories over the next couple of days howling that this is an attempt by Obama to "distract." And I expect a dozen gross of stories from the so-called liberal media JUST ASKING "is it fair to ask whether this an attempt by Obama to distract?"

However, I just ran across a somewhat encouraging post by Zachary Roth of TPM that has official statements from several prominent Congressional Democrats (Feingold and Leahy from the Senate and Conyers and Nadler from the House) that express hopes that the investigation will not be as limited as Holder's initial statement indicates.

So, not holding my breath quite yet, but maybe, just maybe …

The Trickle of Information Continues

Dan Froomkin's lede:

Three newly-disclosed Justice Department e-mails thoroughly vindicate the most cynical suspicions about how former vice president Dick Cheney bent ostensibly independent Justice Department lawyers to his will and forced them to manufacture legal cover for his torture policies.

The e-mails, which date back to a 2005 re-evaluation of interrogation policies, were written by then-deputy attorney general James Comey. They reveal Cheney's extraordinary influence over then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales and key lieutenants -- including top officials in the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

And don't miss, among others, Froomkin's links to Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald.

I grow ever more convinced that what's really driving the Cheney media offensive is his desire to keep his sorry ass out of jail.

(h/t: Andrew Sullivan)

Line of the Day: 2009-05-17

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.
-- The Editors

Meet the Newest America-Hater, Jesse Ventura!

Here's a face that illustrates what it means to say Dick Cheney has a 18% approval rating:

(alt. video link)

We'll take the strong anti-torture statement, but seriously, the Sharon Tate murders?

(h/t: Andrew Sullivan)

Another Torture Memo?

Special thanks to David Corn for bringing up the Foreign Policy blog post, written in late April by Philip Zelikow, in which Zelikow discusses his (classified) dissenting memo against the Bush Administration's moves towards instituting a torture policy. I urge everyone to read it.

I also urge everyone to read David's Mother Jones post on the possible Cheney-directed cover-up of the memo, which he wrote with Nick Baumann.

At the time he wrote the memo, Zelikow was counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, if you can't place his name. He also served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

Here are David Corn and Jim Pinkerton discussing this issue during their diavlog on Bloggingheads.tv, which was posted yesterday. This segment is about twelve minutes long.

(alt. video link)

It's worth restating a couple of points: If Zelikow's claims are accurate, his memo was buried by the Bush White House, and what's more, they tried to destroy every copy of it. The latter is all by itself a crime.

According to the David's post and the Boston Globe, a Senate subcommittee chaired by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) is scheduled to begin the first set of public hearings on the Bush Administration's torture policies beginning next Wednesday, 13 May. Zelikow is expected to be a witness, as is former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, whom we've mentioned before.

Sen. Whitehouse (and don't think that won't get confusing as time goes on), of course, has formally requested the Zelikow memo. It's worth passing along Spencer Ackerman's observation that the current request by Whitehouse marks the fifth time a member of Congress has asked for this memo. Let's hope this time is the charm.

__________

Finally, if you'd like some more background, you might begin with a couple of short posts on TPMMuckraker from Zachary Roth, dated 21 April and 4 May.

And here, also via Spackerman, are videos of Zelikow appearing on Rachel Maddow's show on 21 April 2009:

Part 1:

Part 2:

He does look a little like John Dean, doesn't he?

Chait on Torture

Jonathan Chait has a fine short essay up on TNR's site about the political battle lines that have been drawn over the Bush Administration's torture policies. Maybe you already agree with everything he says, but he puts it very well.

Here's how it begins:

Remember the Rule of Law? In the late 1990s, it was all the rage in conservative circles. Having maneuvered Bill Clinton into a position where he could either lie under oath or suffer massive personal and political embarrassment, conservatives reasoned that Clinton must be held accountable for perjury or the basic underpinnings of democracy would be shattered. The Republican sensibility was best reflected by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which not only crusaded for impeachment but demanded, in 2001, that Bill Clinton be indicted even after leaving office. The Journal rejected the logic of promoting healing and insisted that a post-presidency indictment would uphold "the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law."

Over the last decade, though, the right's thinking on this question has evolved. Today, the administration malfeasance consists of illegal torture, a crime I'd argue is no less serious than lying under oath about fellatio. Yet Republicans now believe that the Rule of Law is not only consistent with letting administration crimes go unpunished but actually requires it. To prosecute the departed administration would make us (to use their new catchphrase) a "banana republic"--the premise being that banana republics are defined not by their use of torture but by their overly zealous enforcement of anti-torture laws.

The GOP line is once again reflected by the Journal editorial page, which now thunders against "a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements." The editorial notably fails to even address the question of whether the previous administration complied with the law, which is apparently no longer an important element of the Rule of Law.

The right's newfound outrage is a more hysterical manifestation of the mainstream sentiment that it would be an unseemly form of vengeance or "looking backward" to hold the previous administration legally accountable for torture. It's a bizarre sentiment. The prosecution of any crime is inherently backward-looking. We prosecute law-breakers to keep them or others from breaking the law.

There's also a brief video at the same link that's worth watching. I'd have embedded it here, but TNR does not seem to allow that.

Hat tip for the link to pampl, who said after recommending it:

I found it to be pretty incisive. I was a little skeptical towards prosecution before but I've become convinced that, in principle, it'd be the right thing to do.

Jeez, he kinda looks like ...

Click to enlarge.

(Sources: L | R | caption)

Ross Goes to Work

Ross Douthat's debut weekly column on the NYT's op-ed page is up. Thanks to graz for pointing this out.

Ross's column is on the torture debate, and it involves a fairly imaginative scenario, beginning thus:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

The idea is we should have had (started?) this national debate about torture that's heating up now during the campaign instead. I'll leave it at that and not try to paraphrase his whole argument.

I don't buy Ross's scenario, although it is fun to imagine how it might have played out. As I said back to graz:

If, however, Cheney actually had been the candidate, I think it is far more likely that he would have stonewalled on the torture issue. I think he is panting for face time on TV now because he is worried about what recent revelations have done to the public mood. A year ago, when these reports and memos were still incomplete and/or classified, Cheney would have had no reason to bring up the issue, and I don't think Obama would have pushed on it any more than he did when running against McCain, either.

Bottom line: The piece is worth a read, and I was happy to read this:

... we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it.

All together now, wingnuts: HE'S NOT A REAL CONSERVATIVE!!!1!

Good luck, Ross.

P.S. Just so you know, Ross's columnist page has links to his column and earlier work he published in the NYT as a contributor.

Another Official Torture Document Comes to Light

The lede from an article by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick in Saturday's WaPo:

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

The document (PDF) was a two-page attachment to one of a bunch of memos that were written when the CIA interrogation program was being formalized. Parts of it were quoted in the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week, the article says, and the WaPo apparently just got their hands on a copy of the whole thing.

It's hard to tell from reading the article what to make of this. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) is reported as saying he thinks that the attachment was "ignored" or "suppressed" shortly after it was submitted, and is quoted as saying that this was "part of a pattern of squelching dissent." Finn and Warrick say no one has been able to find out how high up it was passed. Various anonymous spokespeople are saying various top dogs didn't see it. So, I could believe it was a butt-covering exercise by the Pentagon, who weren't thrilled to be asked to help set the rules for the CIA's interrogators, or I could believe that the military really truly did not want any part of codifying a program of torture, thought the very idea was stupid, tried to say so, and then some apparatchik somewhere along the line took it upon him- or herself to give the bosses plausible deniability and stopped it from going any higher.

Reading the document itself makes me think the latter; i.e., at least whoever wrote it thought torturing was wrong for operational reasons alone. (The introduction makes plain the intent to focus only on this aspect and not "the myriad legal, ethical, or moral implications of torture.") This part seems pretty much like a straight slap at the 24-porn crowd who were running the show, albeit in a tone of voice more measured than my own:

The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible-in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life-has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture. Conceptually, proponents envision the application of torture as a means to expedite the exploitation process. In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence.

Some good specifics:

As noted previously, upwards of 90 percent of interrogations have been successful through the exclusive use of a direct approach, where a degree of rapport is established with the prisoner. Once any means of duress has been purposefully applied to the prisoner, the formerly cooperative relationship can not be reestablished. In addition, the prisoner's level of resolve to resist cooperating with the interrogator will likely be increased as a result of harsh or brutal treatment.

For skilled interrogators, the observation of subtle nonverbal behaviors provides an invaluable assessment of the prisoner's psychological and emotional state. This offers important insights into how the prisoner can be most effectively leveraged into compliance. Further, it often enables the interrogator to form a reasonably accurate assessment of the prisoner's veracity in answering pertinent questions. The prisoner's physical response to the pain inflicted by an interrogator would obliterate such nuance and deprive the interrogator of these key tools.

The rest of it says things you would almost think wouldn't need to be said; e.g., people being tortured will say anything to make it stop, and if word gets out that we're torturing, then US personnel abroad are going to pay the price. On the other hand, having these solicited recommendations on the record means nobody can say "I didn't know." Or it should mean that, which is why Sen. Levin's thought that this document was purposely not passed up the chain has merit.

The document is titled "Operational Issues Pertaining to the Use of Physical/Psychological Coercion in Interrogation." It was produced by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, the branch of the military that does SERE training, which among other things means teaching pilots and others how to resist harsh interrogation. (Two-page PDF, same link as above, via the WaPo article's sidebar.)

(h/t: digby, via Glenn Greenwald)

Read Frank Rich's Column

In his column this week, Frank Rich provides an excellent summary that is both comprehensive and succinct about the torture policies of the Bush Administration. He offers numerous links, as well. If you're at all unclear on what happened, how extensive it was, and how far up the chain it went, please give it a read.

Some key points that, to my mind anyway, strike me as less well-known or understood, based on how I hear others talk:

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like [Lynddie] England and [Charles] Graner [of Abu Ghraib infamy]. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young.

The [Senate Armed Services Committee] report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Reminder: See earlier posts for links to full text of the Justice Department memos and the Senate Armed Services Committee report.

"The End of Wingnut Welfare?"

... asks claymisher, before passing along a post from Paul Krugman, part of which appears below.

But you have to understand what Bybee is: he’s someone who made a career as a movement conservative apparatchik. In his world, following orders and getting rewarded for his obedience was what it was all about; he’s completely shocked to find that the rules have changed.

And here’s the thing: most prominent Republicans are just the same. We wonder how someone as hapless as John Boehner could be minority leader, why one Congressman after another abjectly apologizes to Rush Limbaugh, and so on; the answer is that they’re hollow men, careerists who thought they had a safe ride. If someone like Newt Gingrich seems like a giant in his party these days, that’s because, say what you like about him (and I don’t like much about him!), he got into the business when doing so involved taking some actual risks.

And that, I think, is why the Republicans have fallen apart so completely since losing the election. Careerism is what held the party together; an environment in which the party no longer has the patronage to reward all its loyalists, and may not even be able to protect apparatchiks who broke the law, destroys the whole system.

To his own question, clay answers, "I wish." But it is nice to think the gravy train will be parked on the siding for at least a little while.

In addition to reading the rest of PK's post, it's also worth having a look at the one from Adam Serwer that got him started. The final line is money.

[Added] Adam is also dead-on about the WaPo article on Jay Bybee that got him started: it's part of charm offensive on behalf of Bybee, and amazingly (he said in as sarcastic a tone as he could muster), the WaPo asks, "How much water may we carry for you, sir?"

Line of the Day: 2009-04-26

As Thers from Whiskey Fire reminds us, sometimes obscenities are needed, to describe obscenities (emph. added).

Sorry about the light posting; busy, for one thing. For another, the "torture memos" stuff is not conducive at all to humorous blogging. I've started and then deleted any number of posts in the past few days because, well, what's there to say about the idea that the United States can use torture and that's just fine, besides the word "fuck"? I mean... fuck. I am glad that I'm not a "conservative," though, because I'm not obligated to come up with convoluted apologias for torture, which if nothing else just looks like incredibly hard work. I am however grimly amused by the notion that if we prosecute any of the Bush apparatchiks complicit in the Bush torture regime, that somehow would make America a "banana republic."

Because, after all, the defining feature of a "banana republic" is the idea that when government officials break the law and use torture, they're held accountable.

I mean... well, fuck, that's what I mean. Fuck.

Follow the link to read about another obscenity: Sen. John Ensign, R-NV.

[Added] I know what Thers means about the recent news about torture inhibiting humor. Here is a cartoon that I bookmarked a couple of days ago that I thought (think) is funny, but I have hesitated to pass along because I don't like the idea of contributing in however small a way to making a very serious problem be thought of more superficially. On the other hand, being too serious, even about horrible things, is not too good either. So, up to you if you want to click. Apologies for dumping the moral quandary on you.