Briefing on Torture

Avedon Carol on Congressional oversight:  

And the very idea that the administration had any legal right to withhold information on their reasoning is ludicrous on its face - Congress is obliged to review such policy issues, and the executive isn't entitled to keep secrets from them.

And that's the part that really sticks in my craw: the fact that members of Congress, who were fully briefed on the fact that the administration was torturing but refused to tell them what their rationale was, simply accepted that they were obliged to shut up and let it happen. Where the hell did they get that idea?

Charmed snakes, weaving back and forth.

Scott Horton brings the facts:

Those who have taken the time to learn something about the history of the issue know that in the American setting, opposition to torture and insistence on its prohibition as a tool for warfare come from the Republican Party. The first prohibition issued from Abraham Lincoln (General Orders No. 100 from 1863), and it came from the pen of Francis Lieber, a Columbia law professor and leader of the Union League. The idea was propelled forward by figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, who famously called the push to make this prohibition a part of international law a tribute to Lincoln and one of the principal foreign policy accomplishments of the Republican Party. So if we’re putting a label on the opposition to torture, it surely wouldn’t be marked “Democrat.”

Then he quotes Ronald Reagan, who so opposed torture that he urged ratification of the UN Convention on Torture, back in '88. (The U.S. signed it that year.)

There need to be trials.  Not just exposés.  Not just essays.  Trials.  Actual crimes were committed.  These people committed, aided, abetted, and wrote apologia for crimes.

Well. There It Is

• Via Digby via Southern Beale, Rand Paul goes off (it's difficult to discuss Rand Paul without falling into ablist language.  Really).  With video.  
• And speaking of ablist language, Comrade Misfit gets at a flaw in libertarian logic.

  Paul exposes the ground-level logic fault of Libertarian/Randist ideology, which is that businesses will do the right thing because doing the wrong thing will cost them business and their reputation. Right.

   (There are others.)
• Sen. McCain on torture.  Also via Comrade Misfit, who said:

  Torture was illegal before 9-11, it was illegal while the Bush Administration authorized the use of torture, and it has been illegal since then. McCain has also waffled in the past on whether it would be permissible for the CIA to torture people, although that 2008 position may have been part of his general whoring-out to the wingnuts during his failed campaign.
  
  The use of torture was and is a crime, both under U.S. law and international law. It should be prosecuted. And some day, it will be.

• Pennsylvania judge.  Via The Way the Future Blogs.

Because It NEEDS Repeating

• TORTURE IS MORALLY AND ETHICALLY WRONG.
• TORTURE DOESN'T "WORK."
• TORTURE IS NOT A CHRISTIAN VALUE.  (No, the Inquisition and witch hunts don't count for this.)

Yes, I am considering the source.  (Crooks & Liars.  Warning:  video clip.)  Pecunium, who is way more articulate about this than I am and has taught interrogation techniques, has a posting here in which he says:

One of the principle part of SERE school, where pilots and aircrew are trained in what it’s like to be tortured, is that everyone breaks. Everyone. Even when it’s known that the tortures are part of the drill, and one won’t be maimed, much less killed, they all break. So why do our politicians, and pundits, pretend that “bad guys” are different?

Because it sells. [...]

[...]

Fear sells. Torture advocates (you can’t call them apologists when they use the word, and say we need to do the deeds) are selling fear, and fear is like yeast, once you put it in the dough, it won’t stop so long as it is fed.

Mr. Trump might consider jokes about his hands grounds for torture. Really, you don't want that.

In slightly more encouraging news, Radovan Karadzic has been convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 40 years.

Because They Know They are Doing Evil in the Sight of God

Why it's rare to hear apologies for torture.

Excerpt:

In the second half of the 20th Century, Britain's security forces developed what they called the "five techniques": hooding, white noise, a diet of bread and water, sleep deprivation, and being forced to stand in a stress position against a wall for long periods.

We now know that British agents trained officers of Brazil's military dictatorship in these techniques.

The report of Brazil's Truth Commission into the excesses of the dictatorship - published on the same day as the US Senate Intelligence committee's report into the CIA's "detention and interrogation program" - quoted former Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel saying that officers learned from the British secret service. They "practised torture with discretion", he said, while Brazil's "inexperienced staff did it in a more extrovert and open manner".

The British government, like the US until the Obama presidency, has always denied that its techniques, which were still being used in the Northern Ireland conflict in 1971, constituted torture. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled in 1978 that they constituted "inhuman and degrading treatment" rather than torture, though it will soon be asked to reconsider.

Regardless of the label, the brutality of these techniques was widely condemned when details were revealed. The UK's international reputation was tarnished and it lost a good deal of moral authority in its fight against terrorism. [Added emphasis mine.]

ETA: See also Jon Carroll's column. And don't buy into fear.

Before the Blues

• Yes, three days in a row.  So exhausting.
• Via Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I and AlterNet:  "Psychologists' Collusion With US Torture Limited Our Ability To Decry It Anywhere" related to "US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 'collusion.,'" both from The Guardian for obvious reasons.  (Links to older references to articles on torture here.  Along with occasional statements of opinion.)  Humans do much rationalizing, some of it twisty, in the service of evil; oath-breaking tends to be frowned upon, but oath-worming-out-of is the mark of intelligence (spit).
  
  Torture is still immoral. And wrong. And evil.
• The Pope's a Christian!  Who'd have thought?

Just So You Know

I may not have been clear in my scribblings over the last six or so years.  It's possible.  There's a school of thought that says if any misinterpretation of writing is possible, that is the misinterpretation that will be seized upon.  Unearthing examples will be left to the reader.

So.

Let me be blunt:

Torture is wrong.  Torture is unethical and immoral.  Torture is counterproductive.  Torture is evil.

Are we clear on that?  If not, the Internet is huge.

Commentary on the Feinstein report.  (James Wimberly, The Reality-Based Community.)

Wider implications.  (Pecunium, Better Than Salt Money, who has been writing about interrogation from the point of an interrogator for a long time now.)

Roundup of "conservative," "right-wing," and "Republican" responses to the report.  You may notice a certain bent to their reactions.  (Terrance, Republic of T) Additional video for the strong of stomach.  (Three of these videos come with Mature Content warning screens.  Take that seriously.)

Note and Reminder

Pecunium thwacks a torture apologist.

Again:  Torture is capital W Wrong:  Morally repugnant, un-American (anti-American, in fact), and ineffective.

It's not a kinky scene.  There are no safewords.

Got it?

Quartet

• Group suggests age-appropriate sex education; pearls are clutched.

  This exposes a big problem with the most popular models of sex education in the Western world, whether they be comprehensive sex education that aims to teach students about contraception and STD prevention, or the abstinence-only model that is so popular in the U.S. Both models at their base attempt to not teach young people how to be sexually healthy human beings who respect their own bodies and the bodies of their partners, who know how to draw and respect boundaries, who understand how to both give and receive pleasure, and who have the tools they need to assess risk and keep themselves and their partners as safe as they reasonably can. They attempt to prevent young people from having sex by emphasizing all of the negatives and failing to mention any of the benefits — and then, if we’re lucky, they do harm reduction. And while harm reduction can certainly be important, it shouldn’t be the be all and end all of teaching other people how to be sexually healthy.

  Via The Curvature.
  
  Hmmmmm. Healthy sexuality, fluid gender roles, and non-privileged persons being people who must be respected--all of these terrify some people. (Yes, the word is "terrify.")
  
  Why?
  
  What do they lose? (OK, in the case of non-privileged equality, what tiny scraps of self-worth escape the "we're not special!" vortex, but other than that? Really?)
• The other side of the conservative mouth, Constitutionally speaking. (via Angry Black Bitch.)
• Anna Van Z excerpts an article from Rolling Stone on the Gulf oil gusher and the corporate policies that made it possible.

  We owe no allegiance, no unquestioning solidarity to any political party or movement. We think for ourselves, and question everything. When we see the public interests being utterly betrayed at every turn, in every realm of life, we speak up. Loudly. We take action. That's what citizens do. That's what individuals capable of independent, rational thought do. That's what real Americans do. We owe that to each other, to the earth and all the beings that also live here - and we owe that to future generations.
  The nonsensical group-think that the liberal conformists espouse is utter hypocrisy and a cop-out.

• And the Supreme Court declined to review the Maher Arar case.

  The nation’s greatest attorney general, Robert Jackson, reminded the world in 1946 that “legal responsibility cannot be the least where power is the greatest.” He insisted that no doctrine of state immunity could be invoked by individual government actors to shield them from the consequences of committing certain serious crimes, including torture. In 1946, the Justice Department fully backed him up. That was in an era when the Justice Department counseled the president about his obligations to act consistently with his international treaty commitments. Today, notwithstanding President Obama’s assurances in Oslo, we see only evidence that the Justice Department holds those international commitments, specifically those under the Convention Against Torture, in contempt.

  And apparently some legislator retracted his suggestion of land mines at the border. So we haven't yet become East Germany. Yet.

(Crossposted to the other blog because grrrrrrrrrrr.)

We Have No Right to Prate About Morality

or:  Arthur Silber is right.

No one will be prosecuted for the deaths of prisoners tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These outcomes should once again focus international attention on the Justice Department’s conduct. Mandatory provisions of the Convention Against Torture should have compelled the department to open criminal inquiries into cases in which concrete and credible allegations of torture exist. It failed even to open inquiries in almost all such cases, and in the tiny handful of cases in which inquiries were opened, Justice Department figures were busy murmuring assurances from the outset that these investigations were a mere formality, and that actual prosecutions were unlikely. So did Durham conduct a bona fide investigation? We can never know the answer to that question, because everything that Durham did was cloaked—as proper process in fact requires—in secrecy.

Reciprocity

Scott Horton at Harper's:

This weekend tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt stormed the headquarters of the Mubarak regime’s secret police in Alexandria and Cairo—flooding the Internet with pictures of the cells and torture devices used there. Leaders of the effort said their raid was undertaken to preserve evidence of the mistreatment of prisoners so that appropriate measures could be taken for accountability in the future. Around the world, the outcry against this regime of torture and terror is rising and fueling massive public uprisings–as we see today in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. This movement was spurred in part by WikiLeaks disclosures that helped lay bare the corruption and venality of these regimes. The brig commander at Quantico should consider carefully whether it is really wise to deal with a young whistleblower by using watered-down versions of the tools of tyrannical oppression with which regimes like Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qaddafi are so closely associated.

ETA: Uh-oh.

Scrutiny

Scott Horton on the Washington Post and WikiLeaks:

It’s also untrue that the new disclosures contain no “major revelations.” It will take some time to fully digest this material, but the disclosure of a Fragmentary Order (“Frago”) authorizing soldiers not to investigate cases of torture that do not involve coalition forces is extremely important. It counts as evidence of high-level policy to countenance war crimes and violations of the prohibition on torture, which requires not only investigation but also intervention. Recall this astonishing exchange that occurred between Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace at a DOD press conference in November 2005. Pace stated “it is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it…” Rumsfeld interrupted and contradicted him, but Pace stood his ground. He was reciting well anchored military doctrine. He was also overruled by Rumsfeld.

The WaPo editors think this is “nothing,” but a court or tribunal examining the matter would likely come to a starkly different conclusion.

Strange Juxtapositions

(Is the Dread Dormammu running HYDRA?  It would explain so much.)

• Vagabond Scholar on the ongoing adversarial relationship of civility and bullshit.

  For example, maybe you sincerely believes that someone calling Dick Cheney a "war criminal" is distasteful, because, uh… he hasn't been formally convicted as such. Or it sounds harsh. Okay, but you should be more outraged by what Cheney actually did, his role in constructing a a torture program and his dishonesty in selling a war of choice. Don't agree with all of that? Fine. But the defining feature of civility trolls, the smarm patrol, the bullshitters, is that they're trying to shut honest discussion down. They don't want to investigate. They don't want accountability (not for their team, anyway). For example, there's a reason torture apologists steadfastly ignore all the accounts and mountains of data proving their claims false. Pick another issue if you like; the same dynamics often play out.

• Paul Krugman discusses why conservatives are upset about California.  (AlterNet's Janet Allon, on Mr. Krugman's column.)
• Remember the psychological profiles of conservatives ten years ago that caused some hoo-hah?  More evidence.

  The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

  (From Mother Jones, via AlterNet.)
  

Out of the Mouths of Babes

• Little Jimmy Madison (quoted by Scott Horton):
  

  Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.

• "Young" Scott Horton (on a torture apologist at the Washington Post):

  The reason that the laws of war condemn “disappearings” and torture, making such conduct universally punishable, but still give combatants broad license to kill their adversaries, is that taking killing out of warfare is a hopeless cause, while eliminating or punishing certain specific practices has been a project of the community of nations since roughly the time of the American Revolution.

• "Mommy, that Emperor has pimples all over!"

Pirate Treasure

And away we go!

1. Lisa Golden (That's Why) on fielding calls at AARP during the previous attempt to reform health care insurance:

   My colleague, the one who used to narrate her whole fucking day, turned and gaped at me. Then she actually laughed out loud, started holding her sides, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and finished by falling out of her chair and onto the floor where she rolled around laughing until her ass fell off.

2. Shark-fu (Angry Black Bitch) on the upcoming presidential address:

   The partisans have been weighing in from jump, but a bitch overheard something this weekend that I think speaks to an under-covered factor impacting health care reform. I read an article about parents who intended to keep their chil’ren out of school rather than expose them to President Obama’s back-to-school message of staying in school and working hard. The thoughts of one father caught my attention – he said that America is the greatest nation in the world and he didn’t want his son to hear that there was something flawed about this nation.

   As if the kid won't find out anyway. But I digress.


3. Avedon Carol (The Sideshow) proposes agitating for reform directly to the media:

   The thing is, the media seems to be dominated not by people who want to cover issues or who consider the needs of the populace anything more than a side entertainment, but by people who truly seem to believe that the priorities of rich, influential people matter more than the literally millions of lives that are being lost to an increasingly bizarre system. ... But they care about themselves, and more than that, they think reporting on each other is actually hot stuff - they think people who are having to make the choice between going into massive debt that will cost them their homes or allowing their own children to die because the costs of medical care are really out of their grasp should care more about the concerns of overpaid celebrity journalists.

4. Lower Manhattanite (Group News Blog) on the former Vice-President:

   Cheney isn't worried about what you or I—crazy moonbats us—think of him. He is however sweating a little bit at how conservatives ultimately remember him. Oh yes, right now he's still for the most part the tough, fuck-the-world, J. Press-suited “Master Of The Universe” they slobber over...but the concern on his part is over what we'll find out he signed off on in terms of “exquisite rendering”...a.k.a. torture of anybody deemed if not dangerous, at the very least, questionable. Let me amend that. It's not over what we'll find out, but rather, what the whole world—especially the Muslim world finds out about just how crazy he was down for us to get “in the name of preserving America”. If the news breaks that the sick he urged on is documented...in detail, and those awful deeds (rape as leverage for information, willy-nilly torture and brutality for scraps of information that meant squat, etc.) become an obvious rallying point behind the likes of an upswing in recruiting for “Al Qaeda 2.1”...then that is the thing more than drunkenly shotgunning a buddy in the face that cracks his tough guy veneer like nothing else could. The flop-sweat on his brow during his reach-around “interview” with Chris Wallace on Fox News and his daughter's desperate keening on “This Week” is borne of his biggest fear. ... His fear is of his legacy being that of him cast as an idiot. A fool. An unthinking clod who fucked it all up and catalyzed terrorist hellfire thanks to his ill-conceived efforts.

   I'm so glad he's back.

There. Are. No. Words.

As more-or-less promised:  via Just An Earth-Bound Misfit I, links to Guardian articles on renditions and torture:

1. Inner workings of finance and logistics of rendition;
2. "How US firms profited from torture flights" with euphemisms; and
3. How much the planes cost (in monetary terms).

We really have turned into the Roman Empire, haven't we?  Shouldn't Caligula be in the wings?

More on the Margolis Memo

Scott Horton of Harper's continues to deconstruct the defense of the torture memo:

Let’s be clear about what makes David Margolis tick. He’s not a partisan Republican or a partisan Democrat. He has no real engagement in terms of partisan politics. He represents a culture of craven clientalism in which lawyers are not the champions of the law but instruments in the hands of their employers, dedicated to getting them the results they want. Margolis is prepared to do the bidding of his master, whether his name is Alberto Gonzales or Eric Holder. In the case of the torture memo writers, he also saw a threat to the culture he has promoted at the Justice Department. It would lead, he thought, to internecine warfare within the department between Democrats and Republicans.

Becoming the Bad Guys

From Consortiumnews.com, via Republic of T: Christians (of various flavors) on torture.

With side order of Dostoevsky citation.

I don't think they realize that supporting torture means they're not following Christ, but then I don't know which Christ they're following. That's why fora such as this are so important.

Revenants

Sherilynn Ifill at The Root:

When lawyers at the highest levels of government twist, obscure and ignore legal principles to reach the conclusions they want, when a legal analysis of detainee treatment is focused not on the prohibition against torture in both the United Nations Convention Against Torture and America's own domestic statutes , but on finding legal justification for inflicting the maximum mental and physical pain, a nation is well on the way to losing its soul.

That makes us the Undead. And it explains the glut of zombies and vampires in popular culture.

Though frankly, nations don't have "souls," only ideals that they fail to adhere to and eventually slough off as unattainable and/or silly on the way to becoming, well, the word(s) that should be here would probably translate as "lacking in honor" or "decadent," and I tend to dislike the connotations of both honor and decadence.  The U. S. may well be the current analog of the Roman Empire, but it's also the barbarians.

Aide-Memoire

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast (yes, I quote her entirely too much.  Deal) on the Bush Administration's near-usurpation:

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

We do, you know, easily forget. And we posterize the Big Picture; there's something to be said for low contrast shadow-detail worldview.  This went on within living memory; and anyone who can hold the plots of the six Star Wars movies in memory should be able to hold at least current history in the same place, if not on the same bunch of neurons.

ETA:  Avedon Carol, The Sideshow, adds this:

But in a free country, you don't prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you're trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don't refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn't a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don't personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.

I remember knowing people who hung out with rogues because, well, the rogues hadn't tried to rob them, up until the rogues robbed them.  (No one you'd know, thirty or so years in the past, in another country, wench moved to Coruscant.  I mean Beta Colony.  Yes, Beta Colony.)

Just Stuff

1. There's a Journey to God post that's been coming and going and slipping around the edges and not appearing when I'm at the laptop.  When it deigns to occur to me (when I can record it), I'll let you know.
2. What New Yorkers learn young (and outsiders mistake for rudeness).
3. Jay Bybee sings Edith Piaf. (via Scott Horton at Harper's.)

   The record is clear that Bybee, on departing the White House’s legal counsel’s office, told Alberto Gonzales that he wanted a federal judgeship. Gonzales responded to him that that would take some time, and meanwhile he had another appointment in mind—at the OLC, from which Gonzales was commissioning the torture memos. The facts suggest a clear-cut quid pro quo, under which Bybee got his judgeship in exchange for delivering the most outrageous legal memoranda ever uttered by the Justice Department—memoranda that in fact gave a green light to carefully orchestrated criminal conduct.

4. Yesterday, for reasons of assignment (no, not assignation; assignment), I had a not-bad lunch at a hotel sports bar.  It is apparently legally mandated that every wall in a sports bar have several telescreens TV monitors, and therefore I usually arrange myself so that I see as little of the shenanigans as possible.  The two stories getting play yesterday noonish were:
   • Lindsay Lohan apparently being hauled off to jail after a car chase out of The Blues Brothers (not really, but that was the effect); and
   • Shirley Sherrod, who had saved somebody's farm, being hounded out of her job. (This article by Ken Silverstein.) (The case is being reviewed.)
   Now I'm wondering what's happening that these stories have obscured.  Maybe this.  Ya think?
5. Terrance at Republic of T has hit the wall.  Now, I admit I post links to him because I enjoy his analyses and share a lot of his political beliefs.  Also, he has posted more than once on the value of good teachers, and I am a sucker for those stories appreciate that I did as well as I did schoolwise because I read a lot and mostly had teachers who encouraged this shy kid with a book attached to my nose.  (No, I'm not a teacher.)  And I think we need good teachers more than we need Sarah Palin.  But, y'know, those who post long-form or with research and all that (and I'm not, really, one of those; I sometimes run off at the fingers, that's all) are doing the intellectual work of centering the community of what for convenience gets called "the left" (essay in waiting, mostly to be shredded by political science people for being too simplistic); and after a while the work gets too hard and the rewards too small and there's not enough time, outrage, or words and life wants a cut.  Some of my favorite bloggers have cut back or are mostly posting links or have quit altogether.  Naming no names.  I'm not going to suggest dropping comments on the guy, but if you see something you like there?  Give him the credit.  Really.  (That goes for everyone.  I try to remember to do that myself; it's why there are all those vias messing up the page.)
6. You are, No. 6.
7. Dave on figuring out what to write about "nothing."
8. Walking out of Auschwitz.