Friedman's 2009 piece on U.S. torture still correct (Stratfor)

Here's the practical part of George Friedman's 2009 op-ed on U.S. torture for intelligence gathering, and it's still on-target:

The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator's tool kit.

At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn't.

If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war. That's not when you use torture. That's when you simply point out to the prisoner that, "for you the war is over." You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.

And here's the philosophical part:

And this raises the moral question. The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." This indicates that world opinion matters.

At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.

Let me repeat something: The U.S. is a moral project on display for the whole world.  It's not just another country defending its people and borders. U.S. conservatives and liberals alike believe in "the American way," whatever they take that to mean. So if we allow harm to that moral project, we allow harm to the essence of who we are. We become something else. That's why myself and others have argued since 9/11 that if we allow the terrorists to change who we are, then they've already won. They've convinced us to abandon our moral project.

Now to Friedman's qualifier on that: "Protecting the principles of the declaration [of Independence] and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation."

But the U.S. regime has never been threatened; and the defense of the nation was never in question -- perhaps only the defense of a few thousand potential citizens of that nation. No threat that we know about has risen to the level of a gun to the head of America, or an existential threat.

Furthermore, it's clearly not worth taking every possible precaution possible against any imaginable threat. Those threats have to be real and of sufficient magnitude and likelihood. And the costs mustn't exceed the benefits.

To put it in everyday terms, as my conservative friends like to do, think about the safety of your home. If you're honest, you would probably admit there are several measures you could take to make your home safer against intruders, accidental injury, fires and natural disasters. But there are costs and trade-offs to all these measures; and at a certain point each one of us says, "I've done enough," knowing full well we could be safer if we were willing to spend more, endure more inconvenience, etc. And these are only the material costs and trade-offs -- not moral costs and trade-offs involved in torturing people!

I say this to ward off oft-heard arguments, mostly from conservative politicians and pundits, that the U.S. Government exists primarily to protect us from every military or terrorist threat, both real and imaginable. No, it doesn't. Because the costs of doing that wouldn't be worth it. Indeed, trying to do "everything possible" could even make life in the U.S. not worth living, and make abandoning our "moral project" seem like a more appealing option. That's the danger. 

Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure

By George Friedman

April 20, 2009 | Stratfor

URL: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090420_torture_and_u_s_intelligence_failure#axzz3LQKKLpE1

Hostages beaten and tortured in Crimea

If you're inclined to ignore or disregard this report because of the source, then follow the hyperlinks provided therein.  They are all quite legitimate.

How anybody could say that the Crimean referendum was "free and fair" when journalists and anti-referendum activists in Crimea were being harassed, threatened, kidnapped, tortured, and in at least one case in Belohirsk, murdered, meanwhile Russian troops had shut down Ukrainian TV channels and laid siege to Ukrainian military bases ... well... then such people are determined to believe what they want to believe.

Ukrainian Hostages Beaten, Tortured in Crimea

By Mat Babiak

March 21, 2014 | Euromaidan PR

URL: http://euromaidanpr.com/2014/03/21/ukrainian-hostages-beaten-tortured-in-crimea/

Statement of Head of EU Delegation on human rights in Crimea (19/03/2014)

The Head of the EU Delegation, Ambassador Jan Tombinski, made the following comments on the Human Rights situation in Crimea:

Since a group of armed persons seized the Verkhovna Rada and Government of Autonomous Republic of Crimea buildings in Simferopol on 27 February, a growing number of Ukrainian citizens have fallen victim to serious Human Rights abuses. Reported violations include enforced disappearances, ill-treatment and torture, violent attacks against journalists, restrictions to freedom of the media, freedom of movement and freedom of peaceful assembly.

Our thoughts and prayers are now with the families and relatives of those who were killed in past days. Today Ukraine mourns the loss of a Ukrainian army serviceman, S. Kakurin, who was killed yesterday during an attack on a Ukrainian military facility in Simferopol. Several others were gravely wounded. I firmly condemn this and other acts of violence. On Monday we learned that the body of R. Ametov, a member of the Crimean Tatar community, was found dead with signs of torture. An effective and impartial police investigation must start immediately and those responsible for this shameful crime must be brought to justice.

Persons who have been kidnapped must be immediately and unconditionally released. These include Andriy Shchekun and Anatoliy Koval'skiy, his son Sergiy Koval'skiy, Mikhail Vdovchenko, Stanislav Polishchuk, Oleksiy Grytsenko, Natalya Lukyanchenko and Sergiy Suprun, Yaroslav Pilunski, Sergei Hruzinov, as well as several servicemen from the Ukrainian military who, according to reports, were abducted in the last few hours. I firmly condemn these cases of enforced disappearances, which put Crimea under self-proclaimed authorities at the level of some of the world's most dangerous regions.

The situation of freedom of expression and freedom of the media in Crimea is deeply worrisome. A number of Ukrainian national TV channels have been cut off the air, and journalists have been subject to a systematic campaign of violent attacks. Over 75 violations of freedom of the media have been reported by independent watchdogs.

Freedom of peaceful assembly has dramatically deteriorated. In past days persons, who peacefully demonstrated for the unity of Ukraine, were forcefully dispersed by violent groups.

Full respect of the rights of ethnic groups in Crimea, including the Crimean Tatar community, for whom Crimea is homeland for centuries, is of outmost importance.

International human rights observers, including from the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the UN, should immediately be allowed unrestricted access to Crimea.

Chomsky: Latin America is no U.S. whipping boy

Here's how my man Chomsky sums up a revolution that's going on down below us, unnoticed by all but a few U.S. elites:

There are other cases, but the crime of rendition returns us to the matter of Latin American independence. The Open Society Institute recently released a study called “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.” It reviewed global participation in the crime, which was very broad, including among European countries.

Latin American scholar Greg Grandin pointed out that one region was absent from the list of shame: Latin America. That is doubly remarkable. Latin America had long been the reliable “backyard” for the United States. If any of the locals sought to raise their heads, they would be decapitated by terror or military coup. And as it was under U.S. control throughout the latter half of the last century, Latin America was one of the torture capitals of the world.

That's no longer the case, as the United States and Canada are being virtually expelled from the hemisphere.

Without the threat of Communism to cover our crimes in Latin America, we don't have the great excuse we once did to foment coups and back dictators. The War on Drugs still serves that purpose to some extent, but not everywhere.

America's Imperial Power Is Showing Real Signs of Decline

By Noam Chomsky

August 2, 2013 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/chomsky-americas-imperial-power-showing-real-signs-decline?paging=off

GOP establishment pundit: U.S. prisons are 'torture'

Deceiv'st thou me, mine eye?  Lo! boon unsought!  

First he decides, 6 years too late, that the Government should break up the Too Big To Fail banks, and now this? ...Is crusty conservative curmudgeon George Will really seeing the light when it comes to the American Gulag?:

America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.

[...] 

Mass incarceration is expensive (California spends almost twice as much on prisons as on universities) and solitary confinement costs, on average, three times as much per inmate as in normal prisons. And remember: Most persons now in solitary confinement will someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what are called correctional institutions.

When solitude is torture

By George F. Will

February 21, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/ZsBSID

FBI interrogator: Less Kiefer Sutherland, more Julia Roberts

The book The Black Banners looks like the opposite of "24." The author's anecdote about interrogating bin Laden's personal secretary Ali al-Bahlul is particularly enlightening. From what we're told by hot-headed pundits and two-fisted politicians, the only way to get information out of hardened terrorists is to waterboard, torture, starve and humiliate them. Not so. It's more like: eat, pray, drink. Practically a Julia Roberts movie!

Behind The War On Terror's Dark Curtain

September 12, 2011 | Morning Edition on NPR

On Sept. 12, 2001, Ali H. Soufan, a special agent with the FBI, was handed a secret file. Soufan had spent nearly a decade investigating terrorism cases, like the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. He says that this file was one he had requested before the attacks, and that had it been given to him earlier it may have helped to prevent them.

Following 9/11, Soufan interrogated suspects as one of the few FBI agents at the time who spoke Arabic. In a new book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, out today, he reveals many long-held secrets about both the operations of terrorists as well as the American efforts to find and bring them to justice, including how he was able to elicit confessions from members of al-Qaeda.

According to his book, and as he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, Soufan's interrogations did not involve the physical technique known as waterboarding, but rather involved conversations that hinged on what each man knew.

"You interview a lot of people and the most important thing during interviews is to have the person talk," Soufan says. "And then you can figure out: he's lying here, he's not lying there, maybe he's trying to hide something here."

One of the men he interrogated was Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, and whom the Bush administration thought was a high-ranking al-Qaeda official. Soufan says though assessment was incorrect, Abu Zubaydah did give up valuable information.

"From the very beginning, Abu Zubaydah was very cooperative, and he provided the information that led us to identify the mastermind of 9/11, which is Khalid Sheikh Muhammed," Soufan says. "He also provided significant details about the plot and how the plot came to be."

Why would a terrorist volunteer such information?

"We were nice to him," Soufan says. "I mean, we had a lot of things going on, you know? He knew that we knew everything about him. We knew even what his mother used to call him as a child. He was not providing information just because he wanted to provide information. He was providing information because he's trying to convey to us that, 'Look, I am cooperating with you.' But at the same time, he didn't know what we knew. And we started playing this mental poker game with him, if you want to call it, and [got] more and more information from him."

Soufan says that the information stopped flowing after the arrival of a man he calls Boris.

"At the time, we were really surprised, because we had a good team on the ground and then we found that someone had hired this psychologist who supposedly was an expert. And when I spoke with him about his level of expertise, we were dumbfounded," Soufan says. Boris had not ever conducted an interrogation and lacked the team's depth of knowledge about al-Qaeda. He told Soufan, "I do know human nature."

"Unfortunately, he knew neither," Soufan says.

Boris employed what was referred to by former CIA director George Tenet as "standard interrogation techniques."

"And the standard interrogation techniques at the time was believed to be nudity, was believed to be sleep deprivation, loud noise," Soufan says. "And we had many problems with this technique. First of all, if it's working, why break it? if someone is talking, the best thing you can do is keep him talking. The number two issue is al-Qaeda and their associates, and Islamic extremists in general, they are anticipating to be tortured when they get caught."

Many of these extremists have been through jails in the Middle East, Soufan says, and "expect to be beaten, they expect to be burned, their nails to be pulled out, they expect to be sodomized. I mean, there is a lot of sick things that happens over there. And now we are saying that we're going to take your clothes off, we're going to put some loud music on, and you're going to cooperate. He's not going to cooperate because he's gonna see how long can he endure the treatment that you're giving him. And you know with 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, you hit the last one we have, which is waterboarding. So when you get [to] waterboarding, what do you do? You keep doing it again and again, in the case of Abu Zubaydah 83 times. In the case of KSM, 183 times. You know when do you realize that it's not working? 102nd time? 101st time? When?"

After his retirement from the FBI, Soufan testified before a Senate Administrative Oversight and the Courts subcommittee on the Bush administration's interrogation and detention program. He spoke to the subcommittee from behind a black screen to protect his identity.

"As I mentioned in my Senate statement, Abu Zubaydah stopped talking. So for a few days we didn't get one single piece of information. Just a day before that started, we get that KSM is the mastermind of 9/11," he says.

In The Black Banners, Soufan repeatedly uses a word not usually associated with interrogation to refer to another suspect, a man by the name of Ali al-Bahlul. Soufan visited Bahlul in Guantanamo, where the military explained that the prisoner was cooperative, and that there was no reason to believe that he was dangerous. His story: that he went to Afghanistan to teach the Quran to poor Afghanis.

"So when we had him brought to the interrogation room, I just felt that there is something wrong with this guy," Soufan says. I mean, he is saying all the rhetoric. He is repeating all the counter-narrative of al-Qaeda. He is very knowledgeable about it. But that means he is also very knowledgeable about al-Qaeda's rhetoric. So I was the devil's advocate here."

Soufan says that he began arguing on behalf of al-Qaeda, "from political perspective and from ideological perspective," and that during the debate, he stopped taking notes, which upset Bahlul.

"He asked me, 'So why are you not taking notes?' And I said, you know, 'I respected you this whole time. I never lied to you. I'm telling you who I am and why I'm here, but I don't see the same from you.' And this is the last thing somebody like him, who claims that he is pious, want to hear from someone," Soufan says. "So I explain to him that I know a lot about him, I know who he really is, and then I ask him to go and pray. So he went, he prayed, he came back. I gave him a cookie, if you want to eat a cookie. So he was chewing on the cookie and he was looking down on the floor and then he looked at me and he said, 'I am Anas al Makki. That's my Qaeda name.'"

The man they had known as Bahlul explained that he was actually a leader of al-Qaeda, and a personal secretary of Osama bin Laden. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

"I said, 'Do you want some tea?' He almost spit the cookies from his mouth," Soufan says. "He said, 'I just told you who I am, and you're just asking me if I want tea?' I said, 'Well, I knew that, but now I know you're respecting me, so I'm offering you some tea.' I had no clue who the guy was."

Al Makki eventually revealed that while the Sept. 11 attacks were being carried out, bin Laden was attempting to use a satellite to watch the destruction on television.

"He said that he was not able to get a signal because they were running away and they were hiding in the mountains somewhere," Soufan says. "So they ended up listening to it on the radio. He talked about different individuals in the group. He talked about the structure. And he is now going to be serving his life in jail."

Nokia Siemens helps Arab regimes catch dissidents

As one expert remarked, "There's very little chance a government is smart enough [to identify dissidents] without this [interception] technology."

That means firms like Nokia Siemens, which has actively sold mobile and Internet spying technology to despotic Arab regimes, are ethically complicit in their arrest and torture of peaceful dissidents.

Think about that the next time you're looking to buy one of their products!

Nokia: Connecting dictators and their victims

Torture in Bahrain Becomes Routine With Help From Nokia Siemens

By Vernon Silver and Ben Elgin

August 22, 2011 | Bloomberg

URL: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-becomes-routine-with-help-from-nokia-siemens-networking.html

U.S. torture: Past, present & future

Aint much difference.

It looks like the more they deny it, the more likely they're doing it. Kind of like Anthony Weiner.

Seriously though, Bush & Cheney were bad but Obama seems just as determined to continue torturing, despite his lofty oratory to the contrary.

We Americans cannot rely on politicians, the military, or the CIA to do the right thing; we need a national conversation about our values and the law, then we must demand the truth about what evil, sadistic acts they are performing in our name, supposedly for our safety.

Like it or not, we are all accessories to illegal imprisonment and torture, including torture resulting in homicide. Are we OK with that?

Happy Independence Day... for some.

Is Torture In America's Future As Well As In Our Country's Past?

By Dan Froomkin

July 4, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/04/is-torture-in-americas-future_n_889359.html

CIA's letter to McCain downplays torture's role in finding Bin Laden

A private letter sent from CIA head Leon Panetta to Senator John McCain destroys the claim that torture ("enhanced interrogation") provided key intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan. A copy of this letter was leaked to journalist Greg Sargent and its authenticity was later confirmed by CIA spokesperson Marie Harf.

Wrote Panetta to McCain:

"Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one "essential and indispensible" key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier's role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the "only timely and effective way" to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier's nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier's role were alerting.

"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier's full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."

On separate but related note, we as a country ought to decide if our safety requires and merits throwing hundreds of people in prison without charges, access to a lawyer or their families, and torturing them for years whether they were originally guilty of anything or not. (Most people involved admit that most detainees at G'itmo were rounded up because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Let's keep in mind that many Mideast countries like Egypt, Iran and Syria have followed similar practices to ensure their "safety" from "terrorists." The definition of terrorist depends on who is in power. Do those in power deserve extra-legal or illegal means to fight those whom they label terrorists? And do we trust them to use those means wisely? If we're discussing countries like Iran or Syria, the answer is certainly, "No, we don't trust them."

So why do we trust our military and intelligence services with such power? What gives them -- and ultimately, us -- the right? Because we're the "good guys"? Do good guys torture others? People like Sen. John McCain, who was a victim of torture, states clearly that good guys do not practice torture. This is a moral and ethical issue as much as it is a security issue. So I return to the original question: Is our personal security (or in most cases, our peace of mind, since we're not really at risk from terrorism) so precious that it requires imprisoning and torturing possibly innocent people for years if not decades?

Exclusive: Private letter from CIA chief undercuts claim torture was key to killing Bin Laden

By Greg Sargent

May 16, 2011 | The Plum Line - Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/exclusive-private-letter-from-cia-chief-undercuts-claim-torture-was-key-to-killing-bin-laden/2011/03/03/AFLFF04G_blog.html#pagebreak

Torture may have delayed Bin Laden's discovery

Yeah, but torturing your enemies for years feels good. As a nation we need revenge on our enemies, especially if they're inconsiderate enough not to wear uniforms and wave a country's flag.

Anyway, waterboarding somebody more than 100 times in 2 weeks is not torture -- neocon Christopher Hitchens did it once, after all, and he was just fine -- it's "enhanced interrogation." These hippy-pacifist journos just don't get it....

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It
By Dan Froomkin
May 6, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/06/torture-may-have-slowed-h_n_858642.html

Obama more fascist than Reagan?

It's pretty amazing to read these quotes from Reagan and his counter-terrorism chief Paul Bremer (yeah, that Paul Bremer), and realize that Reagan's policy of treating terrorists like criminals is considered limp-wristed, far-left, and dangerous today. It's shocking and depressing to think that Obama is more of a fascist than Reagan was. (And I don't mean that in the oxymoronical, Jonah Goldberg "liberal fascist" sense, I mean it in the real sense of the term.)

Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney radicalism

By Glenn Greenwald

January 31, 2009 | Salon.com

(updated below)

As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced. Even Obama's most loyal defenders often acknowledge that, as Michael Tomasky recently put it, "the civil liberties area has been [Obama's] worst. This is the one area in which the president's actions don't remotely match the candidate's promises." From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

Despite all that, there is substantial political pressure from all directions for Obama to reverse the very few decisions where he actually deviated from Bush/Cheney radicalism in these areas. In the wake of extreme political pressure, mostly from Democrats, the White House just forced Eric Holder to retreat on his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, and numerous Democrats now appear prepared to join with the GOP to cut-off funding for civilian trials altogether, forcing the administration to try all Terrorists in military commissions or just hold them indefinitely. The administration has created a warped multi-tiered justice system where only a select few even get civilian trials -- those whom they know in advance they can convict -- yet there are growing signs that the President will abandon even that symbolic, piecemeal nod to due process.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post is publishing demands from former Bush CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden -- who presided over the blatantly criminal warrantless eavesdropping program -- that Obama must even more closely model his Terrorism policies on Bush's, as though the architects of Bush's illegal policies are our Guiding Lights when deciding what to do now. Even Obama's own top intelligence official criticized the Justice Department's decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as what he is -- a criminal -- and accord him normal due process. And an internal Justice Department investigation which -- under Bush -- had concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed ethical violations in their authoring of the "torture memos" and should be investigated by their state bars has now, under Obama, reportedly been changed -- whitewashed -- to conclude that they acted appropriately (even if their written opinions exhibited "poor judgment").

In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because we're "at war" with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad lingering taste left from having such discredited and unpopular leadership for eight years, we collectively pretended for a little while to regret the excesses of the Bush/Cheney approach to such matters. But it's now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation "of our values." One can only marvel at the consensus outrage generated by the mere notion that we charge people with crimes and give them trials if we want to lock them in a cage for life. Indeed, what was once the most basic and defining American principle -- the State must charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them -- has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become, just consider two facts. First, look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in America's history: the Reagan administration. In this post yesterday, Larry Johnson does quite a good job of documenting how Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon, a 1982 and 1984 bombing of Jewish sites in Argentina, numerous plane hijackings, the blowing up of a Pan Am jet, the Achille Lauro seizure, and what the State Department called "a host of spectacular, publicity-grabbing events that ultimately ended in coldblooded murder" (many masterminded by Abu Nidal).

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled "Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:"

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

It was also Ronald Reagan who signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 -- after many years of countless, horrific Terrorist attacks -- which not only declared that there are "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever" justifying torture, but also required all signatory countries to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law" and -- and Reagan put it -- "either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution." And, of course, even George W. Bush -- at the height of 9/11-induced Terrorism hysteria -- charged attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid with actual crimes and processed him through our civilian courts.

How much clearer evidence can there be of how warped and extremist we've become on these matters? The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan -- "applying the rule of law to terrorists"; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as "criminals"; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture -- are now considered on the Leftist fringe. Merely advocating what Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy -- "to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against" Terrorists -- is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists. In those rare cases when Obama does what Reagan's policy demanded in all instances and what even Bush did at times -- namely, trials and due process for accused Terrorists -- he is attacked as being "Soft on Terror" by Democrats and Republicans alike. And the mere notion that we should prosecute torturers (as Reagan bound the U.S. to do) -- or even hold them accountable in ways short of criminal proceedings -- is now the hallmark of a Far Leftist Purist. That's how far we've fallen, how extremist our political consensus has become.

Second, consider the company we keep, specifically where our mentality falls on the spectrum that defines the rest of the world. Countries which have been victimized by horrific terrorist attacks over the last several years -- Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia -- have tried and convicted the perpetrators as criminals in their civilian court system, right in their normal courthouses, in the heart of the cities that were the target of the attacks. These countries -- which aren't protected by oceans and (in the case of India and Indonesia) aren't bordered by friendly countries -- didn't invent special military commissions to abridge due process or simply imprison the accused without a trial. They didn't pour water down their throats, freeze them, disorient them with sleep deprivation, or hang them naked from the ceiling. Instead, they followed the Reagan administration's policy for dealing with Terrorists -- "use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them" -- despite the fact that they had suffered deadly attacks.

By contrast, look at what Libya is doing. The U.S. has, for decades, harshly criticized Libya as one of the most tyrannical and uncivilized regimes on the planet. In 2008, the State Department not only amazingly condemned that country for "torture" (which included such U.S.-embraced methods as "depriving detainees of sleep, food, and water; hanging by the wrists; suspending from a pole inserted between the knees and elbows . . . . threatening with dog attacks"), but also for indefinitely detaining people without trials ("The law stipulates that detainees can be held for investigation after being arrested up to eight days. In practice security services can hold detainees indefinitely. Although the law requires that detainees be informed of the charges against them, it was not enforced in practice. The law states that in order to renew a detention order detainees must be brought before a judicial authority at regular intervals of 30 days, but in practice security services detained persons for indefinite periods without a court order").

Consistent with those abuses, Libya just announced its new policy for how it will treat accused Al Qaeda Terrorists -- a policy that should sound quite familiar to all Americans:

Libya will hold up to 300 al Qaeda members in jail indefinitely after they have completed their prison terms to stop them staging fresh attacks, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Thursday.

"These people are heretics. They are followers of (Osama) Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. They killed a number of civilians and police," Gaddafi told a gathering of his top legislative body, referring to al Qaeda's two global commanders.

"It is a necessity to keep them in prison. They are very dangerous as they are ready to resume killing people in our streets here or travel to Algeria or Egypt or elsewhere to stage attacks," he said in remarks broadcast on state television and monitored in Rabat.

At least Libya seems to be indefinitely imprisoning those who were at one time convicted; the U.S., by contrast, is doing so with regard to detainees who have never been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. Saudi Arabia has a similar policy of simply imprisoning people in the name of Terrorism without trials or due process.

So that's where the American consensus now lies. The practices used by Britain, Spain, India and Indonesia (and the Reagan administration) of treating Terrorists as criminals and convicting them in normal courts -- with due process -- is too fringe Leftist for the United States, which has spent decades sermonizing to the rest of the world about the need for due process and the evils of arbitrary detention. Instead, our political and media establishment demands that we replicate the policies of Libya and Saudi Arabia: simply hold accused Terrorists without trials or, at most, invent special due-process-abridging military tribunals to ensure they are convicted.

George Bush and Dick Cheney ended up as two of the most despised American political leaders of the last 100 years, so our establishment had to pretend that they, too, found their policies to be distasteful and extreme. But that was clearly a pretense. In those very rare instances where Obama and his Attorney General try to deviate, they're accused (including by leading members of their own party) of accommodating "the Far Left" and being "Soft on Terror." The undeniable truth is that our establishment craves Bush/Cheney policies because it is as radical as they are. That one is automatically accused of being too Leftist merely by literally reciting Reagan administration policy on Terrorists (in words if not deeds) -- and that one can be "centrist" only by standing with the due-process-denying practices of Libya and Saudi Arabia -- reflects just how far the American spectrum has regressed.

UPDATE: According to Mitch McConnell, it's not only Ronald Reagan, but also George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who were too far to the Left when it came to the treatment of accused Terrorists. McConnell said today on CNN that Bush's mistakes were giving civilian trials to some accused Terrorists and releasing too many people from Guantanamo. McConnell likely speaks for the bi-partisan establishment, as he confidently predicts that there are more than enough votes -- from both parties -- for cutting off funds for trying accused Terrorists in civilian courts.

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: Far Leftist Civil Libertarian Extremists.

Poll: Americans want to torture 'EunuchBomber'

Look, the answer is simple: pass a law. Take the burden off our Chief Executive to re-interpret the Constitution. Congress should pass a law denying normal Constitutional protections to terrorists who commit terroristic acts on U.S. soil. That would solve this whole problem. Sort of. Then we could torture this boy (an "amateur") to our hearts content to find out things that we already know, like this whole thing was planned in Yemen. [Note to self: Find pretext to invade and occupy Yemen. Then maybe re-invade Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden.] Indeed, more than half of the remaining prisoners at Guantanomo are from Yemen.

All this Monday-morning tough-guy talk is just what we came to expect from Bush-Cheney and their neocon coterie in the think tanks and MSM, but really, what good's it going to do us now? Just a thought, but maybe our biggest problem right now isn't to torture this kid, but to figure out how to prevent similar attacks in the future -- for instance, by installing reliable "puffer" detection machines in all points of entry to the USA? Naw, that's too easy. We need fireworks, baby! We need heads on a platter! Bring on the shock & awe! Yemen, your days are numbered! (If it weren't for all your tasty oil, that is.)

Rasmussen: 58% want underwear bomber waterboarded
By Muriel Kane
December 31, 2009 | Raw Story

The latest Rasmussen poll indicates that a majority of Americans support hard-line attitudes towards the would-be terrorist who attempted to blow up an airliner on Christmas day.

Of those polled, 71% would like to see the crime investigated by military rather than civilian authorities, and 58% believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should be subjected to "aggressive" interrogation techniques in order to gain information. Men, younger voters, and Republicans were most strongly in support of the use of harsh methods.

In addition, 79% expect another terrorist attack in the United States during the next year -- a huge jump from the 49% who held that opinion last August -- and 30% believe the terrorists are winning.

Hard-line sentiments were also reflected in the answers to questions about airport security -- 54% would like to see the United States take control of boarding procedures at foreign airports -- closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and probes of CIA torture during the Bush administration.

Liberal blogs have been skeptical all year about Rasmussen polls which show President Obama with an approval rating far lower than any other polling organization, and polling analyst Nate Silver in particular has recently subjected Rasmussen to fierce mockery. This latest poll is likely to only increase the controversy.

The results of the poll have already been proclaimed by conservative blogs. A blogger at Weasel Zippers exulted, "Obama's bleeding-heart liberal approach to national security issues is failing. The Left is pushing their insane agenda too far for most Americans."

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air headlined his version of the story "58% prefer the Cheney option on EunuchBomber," and explained, "I just call it the Cheney Option because it recalls a time when we treated terrorists as unlawful combatants rather than defendants. Apparently, a healthy majority of Americans agree with that approach."

Liberal blogger Greg Sargent, however, headlined his own reaction, "Cheney Camp Rejoices That Majority Wants To Torture Bombing Suspect"

Michael Goldfarb, presumably speaking for the Cheney camp, is really, really psyched about a new Rasmussen poll finding that a majority wants to torture the plane bombing suspect, Sargent writes. "The fact that the Cheney camp is grabbing onto this one poll as vindication says more about the degree to which Cheney has lost the overall national security argument than it does about anything else."

Intel experts: Cheney's claims untrue

Intel experts: Dick Cheney was wrong about Bush Administration moves
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
May 24, 2009 | BostonHerald.com

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's high-profile speech Thursday defending the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements, according to intelligence officals and the historical record, including:

Cheney said waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." He also quoted Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair as saying the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization."

In his statement April 21, however, Blair said "these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." A 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that the information helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four secret Bush-era memos released last month. And FBI Director Robert Muller said in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Cheney said his administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks." In fact, the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan, leaving Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, at large nearly eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since 2001, and extremists have launched a concerted attack on nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.

In fact, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting release of materials that are subject of lawsuits.

Cheney said only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

[But now many of these innocent detainees may indeed be ready for jihad, after being imprisoned with real terrorists for years, and mistreated by guards, and denied lawyers or habeus corpus. Might not you be pissed off and ready for revenge if another country imprisoned you for no good reason, taking away several years of your life? This is the no-win dilemma that Obama inherited from Dubya. And Guantanamo is not the only prison. Dubya set up a network of prisons with no clear plan what to do with these detainees, or how to screen and release the innocent ones. - J]

Cheney denied there was any link between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards." But a bipartisan Senate Armed Services report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to approval of the techniques by senior Bush officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Chomsky on history of U.S. torture

I would pay good money to see Noam Chomsky debate Dick Cheney (or Rumsfeld, Bolton, Negroponte, Kristol, or similar) in public.

Chomsky, to his credit, gives Obama no special treatment, and criticizes him for being as bad as Bush when it comes to legalizing torture.

All moral & legal considerations about torture aside, this excerpt in particular worries me, and confirms some of my earlier fears about the unintended results of our using torture "to keep us safe:"

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the most seasoned US interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.

Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration's harsh interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the US," he believes, not only elicits no useful information but "has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11." From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.

There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of "engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.

After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen soldiers--"the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantánamo detainee," according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.

All much as a reasonable person would expect.

The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia
By Noam Chomsky
May 19, 2009 | The Nation

Obama can't ignore Bush Admin.'s past

Part of me wants to ignore all this because it could distract from achieving Obama's legislative priorities.  But another part of me wants truth and justice.  In any case, it looks like "the truth will out," as the cliche goes. 


Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush

By Frank Rich

May 16, 2009  | New York Times

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in "Godfather III," just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high ambitions.

That's why the president's flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool's errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven't started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here's a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of "Dead Certain," the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld's monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America's most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

The GQ article isn't the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.

What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon's internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective "military analysts."  Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement.  Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press.  Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these "analysts" appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call "the real situation on the ground in Iraq."

When Barstow's story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon's inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld's current spokesman cited the inspector general's "exoneration" to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general's report, not The Times's reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow's charges. The inspector general's office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.

Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general's office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?

In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn't buy the heavily redacted report's claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called "the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history." The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.

But the new administration doesn't want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general's report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. "Sometimes I think just keep walking," she said on ABC's "This Week" as the torture memos surfaced. "Some of life has to be mysterious." Imagine if she'd been at Nuremberg!

The administration can't "just keep walking" because it is losing control of the story.  The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president's "left-wing base" want accountability, but that's not the case.  Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month's Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into "confirming" a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture "worked," and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the "bad apples" made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. "Did President Bush know everything you knew?" Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on "Face the Nation" last Sunday.  The former vice president's uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — "I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew..." — suggests that the Bush White House's once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I'm not a fan of Washington's blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney's watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Taibbi: Who you callin' a traitor?

It's actually sad that Taibbi has to spend several hundred words explaining the obvious like this.  I hope you're one of the smart ones who already understands his thesis implicitly. 

Being anti-torture doesn't make you pro-terrorist
By Matt Taibbi
May 12, 2009  |  SmirkingChimp.com

"WASHINGTON — Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding."

-- Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com.

So I got pelted with emails from the usual lunatics this weekend after making the mistake of saying on television that I thought the lawyers who greenlighted the waterboarding program should be prosecuted. I'm not going to delve into this too deeply, because this is clearly one of those issues that few people are willing to change their minds about, but I feel like I've got to talk about one particular aspect of this debate, because it's just too crazy to let go.

Here's a snippet from one letter I got: "What really gets me about liberals like you is that when other countries torture and kill our people, and cut off their heads, [there's] not a peep from you. But you dunk some terrorist's head underwater for a few minutes and you go all weepy."

I saw the same kind of thing in a letter from a guy named Robert Reeg to the New York Post this morning:

My chest was crushed in the collapse of 2 WTC. If people think waterboarding is torture, they should try having their chest cracked while fully conscious. I haven't had a pain-free day since then, never mind the memories. What outrages me most is the "selective" outrage. No one complains when Americans are tortured and murdered.

Obviously Mr. Reeg suffered a terrible experience; I would never make light of that. What I do want to say is that there seems to be this idea that those of us who are against making torture an allowable practice in the U.S. are somehow condoning the behavior of those wacko/asshole religious extremists, that we're picking "their side" in the debate, like it's an either/or proposition or something. I don't think I could count the number of times I've had this argument on the campaign trail at Republican rallies:

ME: No, actually I'm not even talking about whether torture works or not, although incidentally it doesn't. I'm just saying that no civilized society does it, and we probably shouldn't either, so –

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: But what about what those monsters did to our boys in Fallujah? I suppose you're not outraged about that!

ME: (perplexed) Well, I — wait, what? Where the fuck do you get that from?

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: You're standing in front of me complaining about water-boarding! It just follows that you're not outraged about what they did to our boys in Fallujah!

ME: (scratching head, confused) Um…

The thing is, we've been listening to this stuff for so long that when we hear it, we don't recoil in confused disbelief anymore — we're so familiar with these arguments we've forgotten that they don't make any sense. It's similar to that other Bush-era standard: "We fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here."

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big Stratego game, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the "other side" will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it's completely absurd in a conflict where the "other side" is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of "exchange students" to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won't get into a car accident. What's amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves. I once asked a guy in South Carolina who had laid that line on me if he thought our forces in Iraq were, simultaneous to their occupation mission, physically blocking the airports in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to keep potential terrorists from coming to the U.S.– if that was why fighting them over there kept "them" from committing terrorist acts here.

"You're not listening to me," he said. "The point is that if we weren't over there, we'd be fighting them here. Now that we're over there, they fight us there."

"But why can't they attack us here anyway?" I asked.

He stared at me for something like thirty seconds. I remember having enough time to check to make sure I had tape left on my recorder. "Because we're over there," he said finally.

It's the same thing with this torture business.  There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are "not upset" about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages.  The idea that "no one complains when Americans are murdered" is crazy — of course we "complained," and of course we'd all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American "enhanced interrogation." For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it's possible is that it's been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They've lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

If you give a Yankee fan shit about Joba Chamberlain's fist pumps, his first answer is going to be to wonder why you're not also complaining about Jonathan Papelbon's screaming — because he assumes everyone who disagrees with a Yankee is a Red Sox fan. The same sort of thing is at work here. You bring up the subject of torture as an American citizen, concerned about what allowing torture would do to us as a society, how it would change us, and these people answer the issue by wondering why we're not also complaining about the terrorists on 9/11 or in Fallujah. Because the thinking here is that everyone who disagrees with the torture position is in some degree or another in league with a real murderous enemy.

They don't understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn't get won with force alone, that it's a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can't win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn't "complain" when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you're really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it's just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn't "complain" when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.

Blithe calculus of Iraq's welfare

Yes, I'm glad Saddam is gone and his evil reign is finished, but since then Iraq has not been Candy Land.  The human cost of ousting Saddam includes some 800,000 to 1.3 million dead Iraqis, millions of Iraqi refugees (including the best and brightest professionals and academics from the moderate middle class), rampant mental illness, unemployment, child starvation, privation, lack of education and basic services, more than 50,000 Iraqis imprisoned without charge, and on and on.  (These facts don't get much media "air time" either.)  

By comparison, it is estimated that in his 24 years in power, Saddam executed some 290,000 to 600,000 Iraqis, and sent another 500,000 Iraqis to die in the needless war with Iran.  So which way do the scales tip?  Far be it from me to say.  Nor should you think that you can so blithely perform the moral and physical calculus required to declare that Iraqis are indeed better off thanks to G.W. Bush's invasion and occupation.  To the Iraqis who were killed or forced to flee, Iraq is certainly not better off.

"Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem."

In any case, it so callous and unfair to ask or answer the question as posed by Christopher Hitchens and his ilk to justify the illegal Iraq invasion: "Yes or no, is the world better off without Saddam in power?"  To start asking questions like that, and then, based on whatever answer you receive, attempt to justify whatever it is you did or intend to do, implies that the asker believes he is above the law.

Moreover, it implies that "the world's" needs trumped the sovereignty of Iraq.  (Aren't U.S. conservatives principally opposed to the UN or any kind of "world government" that would limit America's sovereignty?  And yet they would disregard other countries' sovereignty whenever they choose, just because they can, since might makes right.)  And anyway, a majority of the world has always opposed the Iraq invasion and occupation; so it is the height of arrogance and deception for the U.S. and its allies to decree they know not only what is best for Iraq, but also what is best for the world. 

For additional perspective, suppose if some foreigner had managed to assassinate G.W. Bush in office and then tried to justify his crime by asking me, an American, "Yes or no, is the world better off without Dubya?" my answer and the question itself would have been completely beside the point from any moral or legal standpoint, despite my strong political antipathy toward Bush.  In other words, a colossal wrong can't make a right.  

Disturbingly, in the ethically murky days since 9/11, more and more often America's leaders have asked us to accept that wrongs -- like illegal invasion, illegal torture, illegal domestic wiretapping, illegal rendition, detention and denial of habeus corpus, etc. -- do make rights.  It implies that we Americans think our laws and moral values aren't cut out for the "real world," as some put it; that our beliefs are quaint niceties made for a more gentle and civilized world; and therefore, paradoxically, that to survive in this world we must disregard our most basic beliefs in order to preserve them. 

This trend of thought at home worries me more than any cruel dictators or bearded loonies abroad.

And to start -- but not end -- another discussion, or just to give food for thought, consider this: We robbed Iraqis of the chance to free themselves.  Surely the consequences of this can be seen in the ensuing political chaos and the breakdown in national pride, increase in sectarianism, and loss of what it means to be Iraqi.  

By contrast, 200+ years ago Americans took the huge risk to free themselves [with a little help from the French] and it paid off; and those brave, heroic days have provided the unifying ideological and mythological foundations of our country to the present.  Iraq will never have the same chance again, because we took it from them.  We did the hard work for them.  Indeed, isn't it a conservative belief that one can never truly appreciate what one hasn't earned with one's own hard work, sweat, blood, and tears?  From now on, we should leave the hard work of national liberation to those nations who would be liberated.  We are not gods on Earth to decide what's best for everybody.