Obama crosses John Cusack's "line of conscience"

The "Line of Conscience" phrase in the headline is mine. I wrote here, in the start of a series I will still complete:

Group 1 in the "Can't vote for Obama" crowd — no matter the other reasons for pulling that trigger — are those whose lines of conscience have been crossed.

I aim this at the people who say, "But President Santorum would take marching orders from Koch Bros Central." That's true; President Santorum would rule from Wichita (via its Wisconsin field office).

But there are those whose consciences are so offended (that's a war crimes link) that they cannot let themselves do one good thing for the perpetrator. Not one.

Unlike phony "consciences", these genuine cries of integrity must be honored, in my view, even if you tactically disagreed. You can fight a war, in other words, and still respect the Quakers.

There are other reasons for not voting for Obama, and many for voting for him as well. That's the point of the series — identify the reasons for and against that make sense, and sort out the ones that make no sense at all.

But back to this one — crossing lines of conscience. At what point does a generally good office-holder lose your support? What if they*:

• Stole from the office lotto pool?
• Had sex with a colleague in the back room?
• Had sex with an intern in the back room?
• Tortured frogs?
• Hit a spouse?
• Committed murder?

At the lesser "crimes" you overlook the bad for the good. But at some point in that list, if your candidate were guilty, you would not be able to support them*. He or she has crossed your "line of conscience."

Back to Obama. I've written many times:

Barack Obama is crossing lines of conscience, one Democrat at a time.

It's obvious, true on its face. And whether your line has been crossed or not, he seems to be testing us all, one step at a time. FISA betrayal? No? Bush tax cuts? Not yet? NDAA perhaps? No? Let's try this one then...

Nevertheless, as I've also said, the next Republican president will be a wrecking ball — he'll use the radical Republican governors as a template.

What are the Republican governors doing, if they can get away with it? Constitutional coup at the state level, with the goal of permanent one-party rule. It's almost impossible to say that any other way.

But this piece is not about your vote. It's about Barack Obama, lines of conscience, and John Cusack.

Here's Cusack writing at Shannyn Moore's site (my emphasis, paragraphing and asterisks; yes, plural):

[T]here are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed. ...

Three markers — the Nobel prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me…

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.”

And so we have our democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? ... Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullsh*t and an insult to the very idea of peace. ...

To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed [but] he and his satellites get their four more years.

Cusack concludes:

One is forced to ask ... Is the President just another Ivy League Assh*le shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh*thole for purely political reasons?

You really should click over if this interests you. The article continues with a terrific interchange between Cusack and constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, of whom we've written much. It's well worth your time.

This election has turned into a Rorschach test for Dems, with clusters of answers and all of them about you, not the candidates.

Romney and the Koch-couped Republicans are a solid known. ("Power please, and no, you may not have it back.") Obama is also a known. ("Look out Lame Duck; you could be Dead Duck in December. Keystone, you're next.")

But what about you? The choices define your care-line. Is drone-killing babies a bridge too far? Or do you think Republicans are doing even worse? Do you prefer the slow death of Social Security to the fast? How much new carbon before Obama is a criminal too?

How about the genuine victory of electing the first Black president, offset by the fact that he too won't help the "undeserving" — "moochers" in Repub-speak; "not-bankers" in Obama-world. Talk about an ironic choice.

Fascinating stuff, I have to admit. If I didn't care about the outcome, this would make a lively and ghoulish family drama, an aching Long Day's Journey into Night for the American people and their unguarded dying democracy.

Obama or Romney? Really. How did average Americans get shoved into this box? (Oh that's right; their addiction to hating the "undeserving" and a last little straw called Bush v Gore, which passed by majority vote of an unprotesting people.)

But I do care, and I don't want to watch a friend choose which drug to die from. Trouble is, he's doing it in front of me. Cusack is another who's noticed, as has Turley. The piece is quite a find. (Interesting thought; I'll bet Cusack has acted in Long Day's Journey. Wonder if he's thinking of it now.)

* Grammar note for fans: "They" and "them" are slowly gaining the singular meaning "he or she" ("him or her") in addition to their plural meanings. Note that they, them and their are already both singular and plural in speech — "everyone has their book."

As a talk-around for the "he or she" problem, this has become my preferred solution, far less clunky than any of the others. (Fair warning — this is deliberate. In thirty years, no one will notice.)

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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UN confirms previous reports of child torture in Syria

Just because it's not surprising doesn't mean it's any less disgusting.

Children were slaughtered, tortured, sexually attacked and used as human shields by pro-government Syrian forces, according to a damning United Nations report released late on Monday.

"Children were victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, by the Syrian Armed Forces, the intelligence forces, and the Shabbiha militia," the U.N.'s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a release issued along with the report.

The shabiha are a pro-government militia that recruits largely from the Alawite community- the same Muslim sect as President Bashar Assad. Sunnis, who make up the majority of the rebels, are an estimated 74 percent of the population.

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DEA left college kid handcuffed for 4 days with no food or water, drank own urine, tried suicide

His crime was smoking pot.

Oh my God, this story just gets worse and worse. He was handcuffed the entire time. And now the Associated Press is on the story, and you have to think that there's more to this if AP is buying it.

As we noted yesterday, this college kid was apparently getting high with his friends on 4/20 day when DEA agents busted in, arrested them, and without even charging him with anything, threw him in a holding cell, handcuffed, and left him for 4 days with no food, water, a toilet, anything. They just left him. The kid had to drink his own urine - an expert says this may have saved his life - and he finally tried to commit suicide after having hallucinations, and with his vital organs starting to shut down.

If this story ends up being true, a lot of heads need to roll, and this kid needs to get the $20 million he's seeking and then some. Horrific story.

After two days of being handcuffed in a tiny holding cell and desperate for food and water, Daniel Chong said he realized he had to stop wondering when he’d be let out and start thinking about how to stay alive.

Entering what he called “survival mode,” and already drinking his own urine, he futilely tried to trigger an overhead fire sprinkler for some water, stacking clothes and a blanket and swinging his cuffed arms in an attempt to set it off.

Chong, 23, a student at the University of California, San Diego, had been picked up in a drug sweep but was never arrested or charged.

He spent four days forgotten in the windowless cell before Drug Enforcement Administration agents opened the door.

This feels like part of the larger "don't f--- with me" attitude that we've seen in law enforcement, and even flight attendants, since the nation lost its mind post-9/11. Don't question anyone in authority or they'll beat the bejeesus out of you and/or have you arrested. (Though even private citizens have a growing sense of angry entitlement that's getting scarier by the day - the people who get out of their cars and threaten you after THEY blow a stop sign and nearly run you over.) Our country is getting nastier, and the war on terror hasn't helped. In many ways, bin Laden got exactly what he wanted, to change who were are, for the worst, at a basic level. Read the rest of this post...

British government approved rendition to Gaddafi

Those would be the Tony "Middle East Peace Envoy" Blair years. BBC News:

The UK government approved the 2004 rendition of a terror suspect to the Gaddafi regime, the BBC can reveal.

A letter from an MI6 officer refers to Abdel Hakim Belhaj's rendition to Libya. It congratulates the Libyans on the "safe arrival" of the "air cargo".

Mr Belhaj says he was tortured in jail. Successive UK governments have denied complicity in rendition or torture.

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Maddow: Bush-era torture "probably a war crime," Obama "legally obligated to prosecute"

The good folks at The Political Carnival have brought this to our attention — Rachel Maddow discussing the fact that Bush-era torture was illegal, "probably a war crime," and our government has a responsibility to prosecute it.

Let that sink in. (1) It is a fact. (2) Maddow really said what I attributed to her. On the always O-friendly, forward-leaning MSNBC, no less.

If I'm going to give out an Eleven-Dimensional Chess award, it goes to Maddow. This one is up there with her non-outing outing of Rick Perry.

She cleverly works this information into a segment about the nature of today's Republican party.

▪ She starts with four-minute intro about how these Republicans aren't even in sync with their 2008 incarnation.

▪ Then she talks about the Zelikow memo (a high-level Bush-administration opinion that raised objections to white-washing torture as legal), and how the recent release of that memo places responsibility for prosecuting Bush-torture on the U.S. government (the current executive branch, whoever is running it).

▪ She closes with a question, again about Republicans — now that Obama is vulnerable to the same charge as Bush (not prosecuting torturers), are Republicans too far gone to pass up this golden attack opportunity?

See how clever? I've trimmed off the introduction in order to highlight what she clearly says about Obama and his administration. Watch; I'll add a few comments afterward.



So the Bush administration tried to destroy all copies of Zelikow's memo to "disappear" evidence they were told internally that torture was illegal (2:32 in my clip).

The Obama part of the discussion starts at 3:32. The "war crime" comment comes at 3:50, followed by Obama being "obligated to prosecute." Notice, though — she cleverly says "we" are obligated ... meaning the government ... meaning the sitting president ... meaning Obama (but not by name, exactly). See how that works?

This is not disappearing the facts; this is telling the truth while keeping your high profile job. Maddow is a very clever woman, an Alekhine come to judgement.

For more, go to the Political Carnival post where I saw this clip. They have further information and a great many torture links, including and especially the continuing abuse of Gitmo prisoner Fayiz al-Kandari, an educated charity worker sold by Afghan bounty hunters to the Americans — who paid them. Fayiz is a prisoner to this day, under very harsh conditions.

Why didn't Obama pursue Bush-era torture prosecutions? Perhaps this is the reason (h/t my Twitter friend Les Zuazo). Makes one pause, does it not?

This stuff really does have to stop. Someone really will end up in The Hague. Even Obama could find himself on a No-Fly-Abroad list.

If you wish to follow on Twitter and send links, I'm more than happy to have them. Just click here: @Gaius_Publius. Thanks.

GP Read the rest of this post...

The time Christopher Hitchens let himself be waterboarded

Christopher Hitchens writing in Vanity Fair in 2008:

ou may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Totally unrelated, I love this anecdote about the guy. Read the rest of this post...

Amnesty Int'l calls on African nations to arrest George Bush for authorizing torture

You have to make these calls for the voices to be heard. And I do hope Bush II lives a long time, long enough to see his name in The Hague as his wheelchair moves him about his palatial cabin, Charles Foster Kane–like, muttering.

Think Progress:

President Bush “received a warm welcome” after he arrived in Tanzania today, his first stop on a philanthropic tour of Africa. But the human rights group Amnesty International is calling for his arrest.

The Amnesty International statement includes this (my emphasis):

International law requires that there be no safe haven for those responsible for torture; Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia must seize this opportunity to fulfill their obligations and end the impunity George W. Bush has so far enjoyed[.] ...

Amnesty International recognizes the value of raising awareness about cervical and breast cancer in Africa, the stated aim of the visit, but this cannot lessen the damage to the fight against torture caused by allowing someone who has admitted to authorizing water-boarding to travel without facing the consequences prescribed by law[.]

Talk about calling people out. They won't, of course, but at some point someone will.

About those obligations: Any signatory to the Geneva Conventions, specifically, the Convention Against Torture (CAT), is required to prosecute torture and to assist in torture prosecutions:

The CAT requires states to make torture illegal and provide appropriate punishment for those who commit torture. It requires states to assert jurisdiction when torture is committed within their jurisdiction, either investigate and prosecute themselves, or upon proper request extradite suspects to face trial before another competent court. It also requires states to cooperate with any civil proceedings against accused torturers.

There is also an obligation to investigate torture in another country if that other country declines to investigate itself (it's all through Scott Horton's writings, though I can't find a link for it at the moment). This is the obligation that Amnesty Int'l refers to.

President Obama has clearly declined to investigate torture, which is why places like Spain have taken up the torch.

More please...

GP Read the rest of this post...

U.S. torture policy comes home—UC Davis cops "pepper-sprayed down the throats" of students

John covered this in his original post (see last update), but I want to highlight this one part.

This is from an open letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (a name to remember) from Prof Nathan Brown, UC Davis (my emphasis):

When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

Torture. There's no other word for this behavior.

You can talk about one cop, or provocation (if they can find it), or cop behavior, but that's small-bore analysis.

This is the Bush–Obama torture regime come home. When a nation tortures, forgives torture, justifies torture, glories in torture — it corrupts itself from the core. This nation, my nation, is rotting from the core.

No defender of torture will be able to take a clean position on this incident. Watch them. They'll twist themselves into knots with their too-bad's and their yes-but's and their "Sorry Mrs White, I know that cruelty was meant for other people; we'll do better next time."

Only the torture-free will make sense when they speak.

Did I say Torture? Add Sadism. The purpose of torture is to give pleasure to the torturer. The rest is just the cover story.

Who's the torturer? The man with his hand on the pepper-spray gun. The one who put a sadist on the front line. The one who, from his couch, wants cops to deliver "Second Amendment justice" to all those he leads himself to hate. And the one who cheers on as "Justice" Jack Bauer separates the testicles of another of America's many enemies.

Yes, the delight they took in torture watching the "fictional" 24 is the true black heart of America. The inestimable Dahlia Lithwick, writing in 2008 (my emphasis):

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer's stunning "The Dark Side," and Philippe Sands's "Torture Team," it quickly becomes plain that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television's "24," Jack Bauer.

Torture and sadism. This is America's black heart, America's Bush–Obama torture policy come home.

You could say that it's always been that way. True, but it's getting worse. I wish I could say this is a one-off. It's clearly not.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Second Iraq war vet in intensive care after brutal police beating at Occupy Oakland

It's apparently what they do. The Guardian (h/t an alert email correspondent; my emphasis and reparagraphing):

Kayvan Sabehgi in intensive care with a lacerated spleen after protests in Oakland, a week after Scott Olsen was hurt. He says police beat him with batons ...

Sabehgi told the Guardian from hospital he was walking alone along 14th Street in central Oakland – away from the main area of clashes – when he was injured.

"There was a group of police in front of me," he told the Guardian from his hospital bed. "They told me to move, but I was like: 'Move to where?' There was nowhere to move. Then they lined up in front of me. I was talking to one of them, saying 'Why are you doing this?' when one moved forward and hit me in my arm and legs and back with his baton. Then three or four cops tackled me and arrested me."

Sabeghi, who left the army in 2007 and now part-owns a small bar-restaurant in El Cerrito, about 10 miles north of Oakland, said he was handcuffed and placed in a police van for three hours before being taken to jail. By the time he got there he was in "unbelievable pain".

The rest of the article details the horror of Sabeghi's time in jail. Sample: "I was vomiting and had diarrhoea," Sabehgi said. "I just lay there in pain for hours."

He's now in intensive care with a lacerated spleen.

There's a word for this stuff, and it describes a crime in most Western countries — just not in ours.

Here's Rachel Maddow on the Oakland PD and their history, just in case you didn't think this was part of the culture.

My guess is we should brace for more news like this. The defenders of liberty will not go gentle into that good night; they'll go kicking and screaming, if they leave at all.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Pittsburgh cops using sound-blast against protesters—suit says it caused permanent hearing loss

Via John Perry Barlow and Matt Stoller comes this, news of the latest in crowd-control (and potentially, crowd-punishing) technology.

It's called LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), a perfectly innocent-sounding name. What it does is not so innocent, though it does involve sound:

The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is a distance hailing device and non-lethal crowd control weapon developed by LRAD Corporation to send messages, warnings and harmful, pain inducing tones over longer distances than normal loudspeakers. ... LRAD systems are used by maritime, law enforcement, military and commercial security companies to send instructions and warnings over distances, and to force compliance.

The LRAD company, formerly American Technology Corporation, says it was designed for use in "short bursts at 300 metres" (about 1000 feet, or [corrected] more than three football fields), and that being within 100 meters can cause permanent ear damage.

Of course, the company says that blasting people at short range is not its recommended use (read, "it's not our fault if abused"):

LRAD officials deny such common uses, claiming that the device is not a weapon, rather it is a "directed-sound communications system", and that it can damage hearing at 15 metres (49 ft).^[4]

Oddly, it seems that's just what happened. From the ACLU last month (my emphasis):

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a federal lawsuit today [September 21] on behalf of Karen Piper, a bystander who suffered permanent hearing loss after Pittsburgh police deployed a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) against protestors during the 2009 G-20 Summit. An LRAD emits harmful, pain-inducing sounds over long distances. Developed for use by the military, LRAD technology had never before been used against US civilians.

"Police departments should not be using weapons built for the military on civilian protesters," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania[.] "As this case shows, the LRAD cannot be controlled to prevent serious harm to innocent bystanders. Collateral harm to innocents may be justifiable in wartime, but not to quell protesters who overturned a couple of trash dumpsters."

So there are two issues. One is the use of a military weapon-like device against American citizens on U.S. soil. The other is the countenancing of "collateral damage" — a military concept for dead and injured innocents — as a defensible aspect of police behavior.

Here's what happened to Ms. Piper:

On September 24, 2009, Piper, then a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to observe G-20 protests in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood ... She arrived at Arsenal Park around 10 a.m. and saw protestors calmly and peacefully milling around the area. After the protest began, Piper walked on the sidewalk a short distance from the marching protesters, in the company of other curiosity seekers and journalists. When Piper became concerned about rapidly increasing police activity, she tried to leave the area. As she was walking away, police officers activated, suddenly and without warning, an LRAD a short distance away from her. It emitted a continuous piercing sound lasting several minutes.

Piper immediately suffered intense pain as mucus discharged from her ear. She became nauseous and dizzy and developed a severe headache. Since then, Piper has suffered from tinnitus (ringing of the ears), barotrauma, left ear pain and fluid drainage, dizziness, and nausea. She still suffers from permanent nerve damage.

"The intensity of being hit at close range ... is indescribable. The sound vibrates through you and causes pain throughout your body, not only in the ears. I thought I might die," said Piper[.]

Did you notice the "lasting several minutes" part? Compare that with the "short bursts" description of its intended use. Seems that some people, when handed a pain-inducing device and permission to use it, just can't stop themselves from dishing the goods in large, quasi-orgasmic doses. (Why do I say "quasi-orgasmic?" For a perfectly good reason: The purpose of torture is to give pleasure to the torturer. But you knew that.)

And naturally, all the regimes that really are regimes are buying them.

I might be tempted to add that the "rules of engagement" of the military and police are merging — but I resist. They merged more than a century ago.

Why do you care? Because LRAD looks like this; it's the big black circle behind the uniformed police officer (this was taken at the GOP convention in 2004):

Photographer: Peter Bergin

And it looks like the NYPD has them. Occupy.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Amnesty: 88 killed during detention by Syrian government during protests

Most have been victims of terrorism by the Syrian government. The Guardian:

At least 88 people, including 10 children, have died in detention in Syria since the uprising against the regime began in March in what amounts to "systematic persecution on a vast scale", according to Amnesty International.

The majority of victims were tortured or ill-treated, with injuries ranging from beatings, burns and blunt-force traumas to whipping marks, electrocution, slashes and mutilated genitals.

Amnesty documented the names, dates and places of arrest of victims, while independent forensic pathologists have established possible causes of death in some cases by examining film of the bodies.

Now that Dick Cheney has reared his ugly head again and so freely discussed terrorism, does anyone in their right mind think state-run torture doesn't harm the perception of a country besides being a crime against humanity? As someone who lived and traveled extensively outside of the US during the Bush-Cheney years, this latest Cheney remark is completely false. He's a serial liar. Read the rest of this post...

Human Rights Watch: Crimes against humanity in Syria

Maybe the UN can get on board as well sometime soon as well. The news yesterday about the alleged torture and mutilation of a young body has made the protesters even more angry about Assad's dictatorship. Al Jazeera:

In a statement released on Wednesday, the New York-based rights body said interviews with victims and witnesses indicate "systematic killings, beatings, torture using electroshock devices, and detention of people seeking medical care".

It said abuses by Syrian authorities "strongly suggest that these qualify as crimes against humanity".

More than 1,000 civilians have been killed by security forces and 10,000 detained since demonstrations first erupted in mid-March, according to human rights groups.

"For more than two months now, Syrian security forces have been killing and torturing their own people with complete impunity," Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director, said in the statement.

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Santorum doesn't think John McCain understands how torture works

From Political Wire:

Extra Bonus Quote of the Day

"He doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."

-- Rick Santorum, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, on Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) arguing that there's no evidence "enhanced interrogation" led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

McCain, of course, was tortured while held prisoner during the Vietnam war.

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Cheney: "War criminal"

Andrew Sullivan's The Dish:

[L]et us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.

On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

What on earth are we debating?

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Torture didn't deliver bin Laden

First, McJoan quotes Rummy:

Dick Cheney said today that “it wouldn’t be surprising” the intel came from Bush’s torture program. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that the detainees that provided the information that led to bin Laden were subject to torture. And Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who presumably has some knowledge about what went on at Gitmo, today threw some cold water on this theory:

"The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding."

Marcy Wheeler at FDL:

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

Andrew Sullivan:

What really broke the case? From the NYT:

Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.

Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden's standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.

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Bahrain's former head of "torture service" attending the royal wedding

It's a motley crew all around with this pathetic spectacle. The Guardian:

The former head of an agency accused of torture and human rights abuses is expected to be a guest at Friday's royal wedding, the Guardian has learned.

Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa is a former head of Bahrain's National Security Agency (NSA) and will attend the wedding in his role as the current Bahraini ambassador to London.

British sources confirmed he had been invited and a spokesperson for the Bahraini embassy in London said he was expected to attend.

Khalifa was head of the agency from 2005 to 2008. The pressure group Human Rights Watch alleges that in 2007 detainees in Bahrain suffered torture including electric shocks and beatings.

Read the rest of this post...

Did the White House appoint top Bush-era Gitmo and Abu Ghraib psychologist to a WH task force?

This started out as a story about a White House task force appointment, the source being this article by Glenn Greenwald from last Friday. Greenwald begins (my emphasis throughout):

One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush's worldwide torture regime. Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was -- and is -- Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, "with great pride," that he has now been selected to serve on the "White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family." In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday [March 29].

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio. ... The complaints detailed how James "was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionalsu whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners."

But that was so last weekend. Note that the ultimate source of this news is Dr. James himself, via an email he sent to colleagues that was obtained by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program.

When contacted for confirmation, however, the White House, through the First Lady's communication's director Kristina Schake, said one of two things. She either said this (via Greenwald's update to his original post):

Several members of the White House staff are convening a meeting with multiple mental health professionals on Tuesday to discuss issues pertaining to the wellness of military families. SAMHSA and the American Psychological Association have both been asked to attend. We understand that Dr. James is involved with these groups and may have been indirectly invited to attend this meeting.

Or perhaps she said this (via a google-cached version of an apparently deleted Truthout post):

Kristina Schake, Michelle Obama's communication's director, told Truthout that there is no official task force to address the psychological well being of military families.

No one else is talking, not Dr. James, not the White House, as near as I could tell.

So which is it? Did Dr. Larry "Gitmo psychologist" James, the Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University, announce his appointment to a non-existent White House task force?

Did he lie about his appointment to an existing one?

Or did the White House disappear (sorry, render out of existence) the task force after Greenwald wrote about it?

Perhaps the key is in that weasel-sounding word "official" in the cached quote above. It is a puzzlement, to be sure. I find no reference to a Tuesday meeting having occurred, much less to Dr. James' involvement in it.

What is certain is that there's a scandal in the psychology profession that's under most people's radars. That scandal involves the American Psychological Association (APA) and its agonizing slowness to condemn, and reluctance to discipline, its members for participating in Bush-era torture and torture-design. This is in addition to the scandal involving the Obama administration's failure to move against any torture-policy architect.

The fight within the psychology profession is ongoing, and this week's skirmish is just a part of it. There's more after the break. It's ugly.

GP

For just a taste of the APA's history on Bush-era torture:

When in 2005 news reports exposed the fact that psychologists were working with the US military and the CIA to develop brutal interrogation methods, American Psychological Association (APA) leaders assembled a task force to examine the issue. After just two days of deliberations, the ten-member task force concluded that psychologists were playing a “valuable and ethical role” in assisting the military.

And again, in 2007 (same source):

At the annual APA convention in August 2007, members presented the APA Council of Representatives with a moratorium amendment to the APA resolution[.] ... The Council voted overwhelmingly to reject this measure that would have banned its members from participating in abusive interrogation of detainees.

As late as 2010:

Dr. Jim L. H. Cox filed a formal ethics complaint against [Dr. James] Mitchell in the state of Texas, where Mitchell remains a licensed psychologist. The American Psychological Association sent a letter to the Texas State Board of Psychologists calling the allegations in the complaint "represent 'patently unethical' actions inconsistent with the organization's ethics guidelines.", If "a member of the APA were found to have committed the acts alleged against Mitchell, 'he or she would be expelled from the APA membership,'" The letter is the first of its kind issued in the board's history. ... The Board of Examiners of Psychologists dismissed the complaint against Mitchell February 10, 2011, saying there wasn't enough evidence to prove Mitchell violated its rules. This was described as one of several recent cases where such complaints about post-9/11 ethical violations were dismissed for lack of proof.

Dr. Mitchell was identified by the New York Times as "the architect of the U.S. torture program after 9/11". People like Dr. Mitchell, Dr. James, and others used their medical knowledge to deepen the suffering of the victims at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. That's the very definition of violating the Hippocratic Oath. Imagine the AMA refusing to de-certify someone like Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz torturer. It's that serious.

Which brings us back to Obama and Dr. Larry James. Glenn's post is rich in detail about Dr. James and he bottom-lines the issue well. If that task force exists in any form, and if Dr. James was invited, the following is certainly true:

This isn't exactly a powerful Task Force, but what this appointment does is have the White House -- yet again -- signal that it does not really take very seriously the Bush torture regime. On appearance grounds alone, the Obama administration should not be embracing and legitimizing the Bush-era Chief Psychologist of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Is there really nobody in the White House who was able to come to that realization on their own, or is this part of some twisted "reaching out" effort to show that they view bygones as bygones when it comes to the war crimes our leaders committed and whom the Obama administration continues to protect?

If more comes out about this, I'll report back. As I said, this is truly ugly. Read the rest of this post...

Seymour Hersh: Why were the U.S. 'Kill Team' soldiers smiling?

Chris in Paris wrote earlier about the opening of the "Kill Team" trials, the court marshalls of the soldiers who shot up a bunch of Afghan civilians and then took pictures of them, Abu Ghraib–style. (Calling this "Abu Ghraib 2" would not be an overstatement, though "My Lai 2" would also fit.)

As Chris noted, the soldiers knew they were killing innocents:

Asked by the judge what his intent was, [Corporal Jeremy] Morlock replied, "The plan was to kill people."

"Did everybody know, `We're killing people who are completely innocent'?" the judge asked.

"Generally, yes, sir, everyone knew," Morlock replied.

Painful. But I want to spotlight these comments by Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker about this incident.

First, our soldiers — and our whole society — are victims of our wars. We desensitize both them and ourselves, to the point where we make monsters of us all (my emphasis and minor paragraphing):

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare.

In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

Not innocent victims, but victims nonetheless.

Same with ourselves: not innocent, but victims. To choose one example from many: it has become ordinary in the U.S. to accept war by decree, by presidential fiat, instead of by democratic deliberation of our elected Congress. The U.S. hasn't declared war since Pearl Harbor. And most of us go on with our lives, thinking ourselves relieved of responsibility.

That's the song of the guilty, thinking that Afghan brutality is somehow just the president's fault. Yet we huddle under his umbrella.

Second, this will come home. That cannot be stopped, not by dreams of exceptionalism, nor by any number of Cheney-esque power fantasies. Hersh comments here (and not for the first time):

The Der Spiegel photographs also help to explain why the American war in Afghanistan can probably never be “won,” in my view, just as we did not win in Vietnam. Terrible things happen in war, and terrible things are happening every day in Afghanistan, as Americans continue to conduct nightly assassination raids and have escalated the number of bombing sorties. There are also reports of suspected Taliban sympathizers we turn over to Afghan police and soldiers being tortured or worse.

This will be a long haul; revenge in Afghan society does not have to come immediately. We could end up not knowing who hit us, or why, a decade or two from now.

Revenge in Afghan society. Even if we turned the whole country — shopping malls and golf courses, crystal cathedrals and condo-complexes — into a mass of barbed-wire gate-checked communities — ask yourself, what could a determined vengeance-seeker do to us? The answer is obvious; anything he wants.

The dirty little secret of security checks? Every popular place you put a security check, you put a large bottleneck of bodies, packed tight and waiting to get through.

You'd have to put a security check outside of every security check, to make sure the Bads didn't get into the security lines, and blow it up. Think about it; that's an M.C. Escher impossibility.

We could be hosed for a generation thanks to this stuff. All of us.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Judge asks why Obama admin is seeking unusually tough charges against GetEqual DADT protesters, invokes MLK

A rather interesting day in court for the anti-"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protesters who chained themselves to the White House fence last year. Federal Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola, we've just heard, was not at all pleased that the Obama administration is seeking much harsher charges against the LGBT protesters than what it usually sought against people who protest at the White House (which is a pretty regular occurrence). The judge then went on to invoke Martin Luther King. Joe has the story over at AMERICAblog Gay.

Wouldn't it be neat if the Obama administration were as zealous about prosecuting torture, or even just Scott Bloch. Read the rest of this post...

NY Review of Books: Prison rape is constant and mainly done by the guards

The March 24 issue of The New York Review of Books has a stunning article on the frequency of prison rape, and on Eric Holder's DOJ dragging its feet in correcting the problem. That's Barack Obama's Eric Holder's DOJ.

The article starts with a story (my emphasis throughout):

Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Her job was working at a warehouse for a nearby men’s prison. She got along well with two of the corrections officers who supervised her, but she thought the third was creepy. “He was always talking about how much power he had,” she said, “how he liked being able to write someone a ticket just for looking at him funny.” Then, one day, he raped her.

Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” If Jan had gone to the officers she trusted, they would have had to repeat her story to the same warden. Jan was only a few months away from release to a halfway house. She was desperate to get out of prison, to return to her husband and children. So she kept quiet—and the officer raped her again, and again. There were plenty of secluded places in the huge warehouse, behind piles of crates or in the freezer. Three or four times a week he would assault her, from June all the way through December, and the whole time she was too terrified to report the attacks. Later, she would be tormented by guilt for not speaking out, because the same officer went on to rape other women at the prison.

The authors hit all the bases. For example, how frequent is prison rape?

How many people are really victimized every year? Recent BJS studies using a “snapshot” technique have found that, of those incarcerated on the days the surveys were administered, about 90,000 had been abused in the previous year, but as we have argued previously, [2] those numbers were also misleadingly low. Finally, in January, the Justice Department published its first plausible estimates. In 2008, it now says, more than 216,600 people were sexually abused in prisons and jails and, in the case of at least 17,100 of them, in juvenile detention. Overall, that’s almost six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour.

Who are the rapists? Mostly, it's the people with the power:

Overall, most victims were abused not by other inmates but, like Jan, by corrections staff: agents of our government, paid with our taxes, whose job it is to keep inmates safe.

And Holder is dragging his feet in multiple ways. For example:

In 2003, seeking to address this disgraceful situation, both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a law that created a commission to study best practices and come up with national standards for preventing, detecting, and responding to the problem. This commission spent years consulting with corrections officials and other experts. Finally, in June 2009, it delivered its recommendations to Attorney General Eric Holder, who by law then had twelve months to revise them before formally issuing standards that would be nationally binding.

He missed that deadline. The estimate of 216,600 inmates sexually abused in a year comes from a draft of the proposed final standards, which Holder has only now published for public comment—a step that is still far from the last. (The public comment period will run until April 4, 2011. People wishing to comment on the Justice Department’s proposals can learn how on our organization’s website, www.justdetention.org.) Moreover, the standards that the department has proposed, taken all together, fall far short of the commission’s recommendations.

The article is, as I said, stunning; filled with numbers and damning data.

I'll just add this. In popular culture, the notion that if you go to prison you meet "Bubba" — the (darkly hued) prisoner-next-door who takes "care" of you — is ha-ha funny, a cruel joke for the comedy club circuit. And behind that is the widely held notion that prison rape is just part of the gig, part of what you get. Wrong.

(1) Prison rape is torture, or as the article says, "a human rights" violation. The judge doesn't sentence people to "three years of rape, with one year off for lying about it." Everyone who laughs at this kind of "joke" is a vicarious participant in the cruelty. Everyone.

(2) Rape by the powerful is systematically protected by the institution. In the same way that cops who commit police brutality are systematically protected by the "code of silence" in every police organization, prison employees who abuse are protected. The article details in how many ways that works.

As a society, we're both as good as our aspirations and ideals and as bad as our behavior. This is another face of torture in America.

GP Read the rest of this post...