Don’t Look Under That Rock

Knowledge is power, which is perhaps why our glorious liberal media has ignored this story:

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t some hearsay or gossip Wilkerson is spreading to boost book sales. This declaration is significant:

Still, Skinner said Wilkerson's declaration is signficant because it marks the first time a Bush administration official is willing to state, under oath, that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew many of the prisoners were innocent when they were sent to Guantanamo.

And had them tortured.

I’ve said this before (notably here) that the point of our torture program was not to gain accurate, actionable intelligence. It was to justify war. No one cared that intelligence obtained under torture might be wrong. Who cared? In fact, the more wrong the better (see Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi).

Some folks are calling for a "truth commission.” Screw that shit. I want a special prosecutor. I want subpoenas and frog marches and jail time.

We won’t go there, of course. We’re too candy-assed to look under the high crimes and misdemeanors rock of the Kennedy assassination let alone something that happened five or six years ago.

C’mon, America. What are you scared of? A little justice? A little soul-searching? It would do you some good.

The David Margolis Memory Hole

Apparently there is no law that cannot be circumvented if you are really, really scared:

The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture. That report was among the documents made public Friday.

But David Margolis, a career lawyer at the Justice Department, rejected that conclusion in a report of his own released Friday. He said the ethics lawyers, in condemning the lawyers’ actions, had given short shrift to the national climate of urgency in which Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo acted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Among the difficulties in assessing these memos now over seven years after their issuance is that the context is lost,” Mr. Margolis said.

So apparently the law is fungible, susceptible to circumstance and the political climate of the times. This is good to know.

Also:

The report quotes Patrick Philbin, a senior Justice Department lawyer involved in the review, as saying that because of the urgency of the situation, he had advised Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum, despite what he saw as Mr. Yoo’s aggressive and problematic interpretation of the president’s broad commander-in-chief powers in trumping international and domestic law.

Mr. Philbin said that “given the situation and the time pressures, and they are telling us this has to be signed tonight — this was like 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night on the day it was signed — my conclusion” was that it was permissible for Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum. “They” apparently referred to White House officials.

So this was the "climate of urgency" Margolis was referring to. Apparently a really urgent deadline, and someone yammering at you that they need this thing right now goddammit! and it being past someone’s bedtime, are also more important than what the document actually says and the specious legal arguments to which it lays claim.

I would say there are some rather obvious flaws to David Margolis’ conclusion. The whole idea that you can commit professional misconduct if the situation is really really urgent is absurd. But I’m sure if anyone were so impolite as to point that out he would just say he was on a really tight deadline, and it was like 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock and his boss was yammering at him to turn the goddamn report in already, and also he was really scared that Liz Cheney would be mean to him on Meet The Press.

Although I just read the piece in yesterday’s New York Times, news of the Margolis report was leaked at the end of January. Jeff Kaye looked into the David Margolis memory hole at the time and found some pretty interesting “skeletons,” including a possible connection to the government’s persecution of Leonard Peltier.

He also may have covered up alleged misconduct by FBI interrogators:

More speculatively, and intriguing, given the claims involved, is Margolis’s involvement in the investigation of a forgotten FBI sting operation against NASA contractors in the early 1990s. Operation Lightning Strike was, according to a Washington Post article at the time, a "20-month Justice Department sting operation focusing on NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston… [resulting] in criminal fraud and bribery charges against nine men and one contractor."

Later, in 1996, a defense committee was formed to support the "NASA-13". The committee, in a petition to the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee claimed that the men caught up in the Operation Lightning Strike, some of whom were victims of "’frame-ups’ and torture, to obtain prosecutions." David Margolis was mentioned as admitting that an OPR investigation into the case was begun in 1994 to look into "investigative and prosecutive misconduct." However, no results from that report were ever made public. The involvement of Margolis in this case deserves further scrutiny, given it involved serious allegations about coercive interrogations and torture.

There’s more over at the link, including excerpts of this press release claiming torture and “CP”--Coerceive Persuasion, aka “brain washing.”

It gets worse. Harper's found this:

But “Yoda” Margolis also knows the “dark side” of political intrigue. He was long the man to whom political appointees could turn for protection and guidance when the going got rough, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. For instance, Bloomberg reported that both Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling turned instinctively to Margolis for protection and support when the U.S. attorney’s scandal erupted.

What this means in practice can be seen in dozens of cases involving seriously unethical conduct by political appointees. Margolis has a one-size-fits-all solution for these cases: sweep them under the carpet.

[...]

Justice Department insiders also note that Margolis single-handedly blocked efforts to secure a meaningful review of the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman, after more than 90 attorneys general from around the country advised the Justice Department of a series of gross irregularities. Instead, with Margolis’s apparent knowledge, the Department fired a member of the prosecution team who had blown the whistle on some of the misconduct. (“What the Justice Department is Hiding.”)

As Kaye observed:

Margolis appears to have a long history of involvement in government frame-up and/or obfuscation of internal misconduct by the FBI or Justice Department prosecutors.

It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the FBI and DoJ have a “fixer” at the Justice Department.

Surprises me even less to learn that we’ve possibly been torturing people (and covering it up) for decades.

During the Clinton years I seem to recall an Independent Counsel being appointed for the most ridiculous fauxtroversies, from the death of Vincent Foster to Monica Lewinsky to "Whitewater." But the Independent Counsel Act was allowed to expire in 1999, which in retrospect seems unfortunate.

The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Revisited

The Abu Ghraib photos President Obama has suppressed allegedly show prisoners being sexually violated by U.S. troops

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

Will there be no end to the horror that is the Iraq War, the insanity of our misguided exercise there, the fact that everything we've touched has turned to shit? Will no one be held accountable for this black spot on our country's name?

And from the Memory Hole, Rush Limbaugh’s justification of the Abu Ghraib abuses, saying troops were “just blowing off steam”:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?"

Not like this, buddy. Not like this.

Liz & Eugene’s Torture Comedy Hour

I made a movie!

And now I know why Robert Smigel gets the big bucks.

This is the actual dialogue between Liz Cheney and Eugene Robinson on MSNBC's Morning Joe--at least until the very end. (see the original here.)



Grateful h/t to The Kenosha Kid for directing me to the xtranormal site!

Rebutting Cheney

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, rebuts Dick and Liz Cheney’s lies with a column that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Note. It is an absolute must-read.

Some highlights:

[W]hen Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

My investigations have revealed to me--vividly and clearly--that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama's having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?

Excellent point and one which all of the Cheney lies cannot ignore. Plus, if torture is so good at preventing attacks on the homeland, what kept attacks at bay from 2005-2009? (And let me point out, there have been plenty of terrorist attacks over the past few years. Just not here at home.)

There’s more:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

This is really the nut of the matter. Cheney and his daughter Liz are doing their damnedest to keep daddy and his friends out of jail.

Meanwhile, in today’s Wall Street Journal Karl Rove does some finger-pointing of his own:

Someone important appears not to be telling the truth about her knowledge of the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). That someone is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The political persecution of Bush administration officials she has been pushing may now ensnare her.

Here's what we know. On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee's ranking Democrat, on EITs including waterboarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.

”EIT’s,” for those of you who haven’t kept up, is the polite way former Bush Administration officials refer to torture.

Of course, the name “Nancy Pelosi” is a Republican dog-whistle for “scary-lesbo-San Francisco-liberal-socialist-vagina.” Somehow this whole mess is supposed to be Nancy Pelosi’s fault but someone needs to remind Karl Rove which party was in power in 2002, and it wasn’t the Democrats. Someone is trying to insinuate that a member of the House Intelligence Committee from the minority party, who was not even House Minority Leader at the time (that was Dick Gephardt) would somehow be able to exert some kind of influence over the Republican Party and its rush to war at a time when we were being told to run out and buy duct tape and plastic sheeting because ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!11!!1!!1!

Right. So torture was perfectly OK and if it wasn't, well, it's all Nancy Pelosi's fault. Nice try, buddy.

This is, of course, not even taking into account Pelosi’s own assertions that the CIA misled Congress, which was corroborated by former Sen. Bob Graham.

We still have a lot to pick apart here, but the basic argument--torture works, it's legal, it’s OK if it’s used to protect Americans, Jack Bauer is real and oh yeah, we didn’t torture anyway--that argument seems to have been lost. And let's not get distracted by Karl Rove's "ooh look, shiny sparkly Pelosi thing over there!" ploy.

It's time to start some serious investigations into criminal activity here.

Tortured Logic

Sen. Lindsay Graham says that because torture techniques are still around after 500 years, “apparently they work.”

Lindsay Graham: The Vice President is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.

Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan responded, “Because, sir, there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to interrogate, and it’s easier to hit somebody than outsmart them.”

Hey Senator Graham: Here are some other things that have survived for hundreds of years, of dubious efficacy:

• Tossing a pinch of salt over your shoulder after accidentally spilling it.

• Astrology, palm reading, rune stones, reading tea leaves, tarot cards, etc.

• Knocking wood to ward off bad luck.

• Wishing on a shooting star.

Tortured Arguments

Liz Cheney tries to defend the indefensible, and it’s painful to watch. There’s so much wrong with this clip, it’s hard to know where to start. Really, the whole thing is just awful.

Watch it:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I feel sorry for Eugene Robinson, who at one point seems to throw up his hands because Liz Cheney isn't making any sense. She's still living in some wingnut post 9/11 fantasyland, Eugene. Reality does not live there.

One of the worst aaaargh moments starts at 10:45 when Liz Cheney makes what I call the “24” argument. Here’s my written transcription, if you don’t have the time--or blood pressure--to watch the whole clip:

Liz Cheney: Eugene let me ask you a question then. So, if you knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had information about an imminent threat on the United States. Information that would result in the death of your family members and the death of the people you care about and love, and that if he were waterboarded you would be able to get that information and prevent the attack, you wouldn’t do it? You’d let him go ahead and launch the attack?

Eugene Robinson: How would I even know that?

LC: That’s exactly the situation these folks were in. That’s the choice you’ve got to make.

I put the word “if” in bold face because it seems quite obvious to me that when your entire argument is predicated on an “if” situation, you’ve lost the debate.

The reality is, we weren’t in that situation, not one terror plot was uncovered by torture, but we got plenty of false information:

Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.

Powell later called the speech a "blot" on his record, saying he was not given all available intelligence and analysis within the government. The Defense Intelligence Agency and some analysts at the CIA had questioned the veracity of Libi's testimony, which was obtained after the prisoner was transferred to Egyptian custody for questioning by the CIA, according to Senate investigators.

In their book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a "mock burial" by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.

(Hat tip to Attaturk for that link, BTW.) This is the whole problem with torture as an interrogation technique: besides being immoral, it’s simply ineffective because the information obtained is always unreliable.

But I’m not sure efficacy was the point. I am starting to fear that obtaining a certain kind of information, accuracy be damned, might have been the point all along. But Bush-Cheney got their pet war, KBR and Blackwater got their lucrative government contracts, and Liz and Dick Cheney can continue to flog 9/11-related fear mongering, because without fear, the Republicans have got nothing.

Did Bill Frist Heart Torture?

Amid all of this discussion about the Bush Administration’s approval of torture and holding Administration officials who justified its use accountable, it bears remembering that Tennessee’s own former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist played an important role in ensuring the use of torture became SOP.

He did so by quashing a Senate bill sponsored by John McCain, Lindsay Graham and John Warner which would have limited the use of torture and upheld the Geneva Conventions. And he did so at the behest of the Bush White House.

From the memory hole:

But Frist struck a more jarring tone, telling reporters that the trio's bill is unacceptable despite its majority support.

For a bill to pass, Frist said, "it's got to preserve our intelligence programs," including the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, and it must "protect classified information from terrorists." He said that "the president's bill achieves those two goals" but that "the Warner-McCain-Graham bill falls short."

The disagreement centers on the Geneva Conventions, which say wartime detainees must be "treated humanely." Bush backs language saying the United States complies so long as CIA interrogators abide by a 2005 law barring "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of captives. Warner and his allies say they are concerned that Bush's approach would invite nations to interpret the Geneva Conventions in lax ways that could lead to abusive treatment of captured U.S. troops.

The Warner contingent also opposes Bush's bid to allow detainees to be convicted on secret evidence they are not allowed to see.

So Bill Frist would not allow limits to the Administration’s use of torture. He wanted us to waterboard someone 183 times in one month, and he wanted this over the objection of the one U.S. Senator who has actually been tortured as a prisoner of war and knows torture doesn’t work.

And he’s a doctor?

(And I’m with Jon Stewart on this one: at one point does the law of diminishing returns come into play? After the 50th waterboarding, don’t you think a suspect will have figured out that he’s not actually drowning? And wouldn’t the interrogators have figured out they’re not actually getting any useful information? If torture worked, would it have been necessary to waterboard someone 183 times in one month?)

I suspect the Administration didn’t care if torture works or not. According to a Senate Armed Services Committee report, Gitmo interrogators used torture to produce a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, though none existed. They were just going to keep torturing people until someone gave them the information the Bush Administration needed to justify their illegal war. And Tennessee’s own Bill Frist had his own small role to play in making sure this happened.

I repeat: he’s a doctor???! Do no harm, Dr. Frist. Do no harm.

Bill Frist has undergone a major bluewashing in recent months. As part of his Great Political Makeover™, the kinder, gentler Bill Frist is suddenly concerned about progressive issues like global poverty and education. But that doesn’t mean we’ll forget the Bill Frist who was Senate majority leader, the one who sailed in to rescue Terri Schiavo and killed an anti-torture bill and, oh yeah, pushed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, too.


Does Bill Frist seriously think we’re going to forget his dirty past?

Torture, It’s Strictly Confidential

A confidential Red Cross report on the use of torture by the CIA on high level detainees has been leaked.

You can read it here.

I’m reading it now. Next time someone asks if we’re a Christian nation maybe we should just point them to this report.

BTW, none of the prisoners tortured were either Iraqi or arrested in Iraq. So much for “flypaper” and "the central front on the war on terror."

Sign Of The Apocalypse #51

Coney Island amusement park has opened a waterboarding “attraction”:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it's not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York's Coney Island amusement park.

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

"Waterboard Thrill Ride" beckons a sign along with cartoon character "SpongeBob SquarePants" who appears tied down and exclaiming: "It don't Gitmo better!"

The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Dude, this is all so, so wrong. It trivializes a serious issue and frankly I'm not sure turning torture into an amusement park attraction is a sign of progress.

Just sayin' ....

She Was Lying

We know this because her lips were moving:

What A Legacy

Bush vetoes anti-torture bill. Wow, what a headline.

There are things I just don’t understand, and this is one of them:

Bush’s Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy

By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: March 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using interrogation methods like waterboarding, a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning and that has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad. Many such techniques are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

First, boo-hiss to the New York Times for using the polite euphamism, “harsh interrogation techniques.” It’s torture. No need to polite here, let’s call things what they are.

Secondly, Bush’s legacy will not be “strong executive powers” but supporting the use of torture. Own it, folks. This will be Bush’s legacy, and what a sick one it is. It will be the legacy of the Republican Party, including John McCain, himself a victim of torture, who voted to allow the CIA to use these techniques.

That is something else I just don’t understand.

Torture is one of those things that didn’t seem real to me until I did this post on rendition back in December:

... a University of Glasgow pathology report shows one man “died of immersion in boiling liquid” after being seized by the authorities. Post-mortem photos of an 18-year-old Samarkand resident reveal similar marks: “The right hand looked like cooked chicken.” In addition, Murray writes, “one technique was widespread throughout the country — they would strap on a gas mask and then block the filters. I presume that the advantage of this was that it would suffocate without bruising.”

This is torture, Uzbekistan-style, which is relevant because Uzbekistan is reportedly one of the destination countries for our CIA rendition program. To America’s credit, we have routinely criticized Uzbekistan’s human rights record. Well, sorta:

President Bush welcomed Uzbek President Islam Karimov to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Add that to the Bush legacy while you’re at it.

This is insane, Upside-Down Day stuff. What president wants fear, torture, violence and war as his legacy?

It is generally known that the information one gets from torture is unreliable. A person being tortured will say anything to get the torture to stop. So, what does work? We don't know. We haven't studied it, not since the 1970s (with good reason, too: the studies we did were barbaric and horrific).

Right-wingers agree with the President that

[...] information from the C.I.A.’s interrogations had averted terrorist attacks, including plots to attack a Marine camp in Djibouti; the American Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; Library Tower in Los Angeles; and passenger planes from Britain.

but there’s no evidence that this is true. None. Just Bush’s word, which we all know is as good as $3 bill. For instance, it’s not the “Library Tower” in Los Angeles -- it’s the U.S. Bank Building. Secondly, there was no “plot,” it was debunked long ago. Bush likes to bring it up, though, along with a host of other phony terror plots, because the government wants you scared.

What better way to keep people scared than to keep reminding us that they need “tools” like torture, warrantless wiretaps and telecom immunity. Whether they actually use these new powers is beside the point: they are telling us that they need them -- just in case. It’s another way of saying “Boo!”

Keep the people scared, which is another Bush legacy. It’s the oldest trick in the book:

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs: when he first appears, he is a protector." -- PLATO, The Republic

Wit & Wisdom Of Antonin Scalia

Just to remind everyone about what’s at stake in November, we have these pearls of wisdom from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

“Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?" he asked.

“It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game."

Oh wow! I saw that episode of “24,” too! Yeah, that was so cool how Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles by smacking that .... oh, wait. That was a TV show.

Never mind.

British human rights law expert Conor Gearty exposed Scalia’s intellectual dishonesty:

"Antonin Scalia works hard to protect himself from having to think seriously about torture," he said. 

"His devices are quite obvious, the idea of a smack on the face - rather than sensory deprivation, or waterboarding or any of the Abu Ghraib images - and the comment about 'so-called torture'..."

Professor Gearty accused Justice Scalia of creating a "nightmare scenario of mass destruction that all defenders of torture so need, to hide the fact that the reality of torture will be quite different."

Indeed it is. And the last thing this country needs are more intellectually dishonest people like Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

The Horror of "Cooked Chicken"

Queasy stomach alert: if you don’t want to be thoroughly revolted by what our government has done in our name, stop reading now.

I really mean it.

For those of you still reading, we’re going to talk about rendition. You know, where the American government works with the governments of foreign countries whose human rights standards aren’t quite the same as ours. Our government gets these foreign agents to perform outrageous acts of torture on our behalf--things that would spark outrage in Americans if it were discovered U.S. agents were doing this. So we get someone else to do it for us.

See the difference?

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review contained a story on "Dirty Diplomacy” by Craig Murray. Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004. Despite (or perhaps because of) its “despotic leader” and the brutal torture of prisoners, since 2001 Uzbekistan has been an important ally to the U.S. and Britain in the “war on terror.” They are one of the chief countries in the CIA’s rendition program.

I think when we’re talking about torture, we should be absolutely clear what we’re talking about here. Torture isn’t just a word or a fuzzy concept, it’s actual suffering perpetrated by one human being on another. Murray’s book provides a shocking example of the kind of torture that happens in Uzbekistan, and I thought I’d share it with you here.

Last chance to navigate away. Anyone still here? OK, read this:

... a University of Glasgow pathology report shows one man “died of immersion in boiling liquid” after being seized by the authorities. Post-mortem photos of an 18-year-old Samarkand resident reveal similar marks: “The right hand looked like cooked chicken.” In addition, Murray writes, “one technique was widespread throughout the country — they would strap on a gas mask and then block the filters. I presume that the advantage of this was that it would suffocate without bruising.”

Let’s repeat: an 18 year old whose right hand looked like cooked chicken.

What have American and British officials done with this knowledge of what goes on? Endorsed it:

Uzbek officials seemed to use coercive techniques routinely during investigations, he says, yet there was little outcry from the Americans or the British. The executive director of Freedom House, a Washington-based organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties, tells him in 2003 that the group has decided to back off from its efforts to spotlight human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. The shift in policy occurred, she explains, because some Republican board members (in Murray’s words) “expressed concern that Freedom House was failing to keep in sight the need to promote freedom in the widest sense, by giving full support to U.S. and coalition forces.” Meanwhile, British officials insisted that information from coercive interrogations was valuable and that relying on it did not violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture. “That is my view of the legal position,” a Foreign Office legal adviser tells Murray in London. “I make no comment on the morality of the case.”

It has been documented repeatedly that torture does not reveal reliable information. If someone were holding my hand over a boiling hot Fry Daddy, I’d say anything to get them to stop. Anything. I’m sure some 18 year old kid would feel the same. Regardless, there’s simply no way to know whether the information received is true or not. This is the worst way to get information about terrorists.

America and Great Britain have turned a blind eye to these atrocities, even taken part in them by allowing Uzbek agents to perform them on our prisoners. We won’t do it ourselves, but we have no problem getting someone else to do it for us.

Remember this:

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States has been confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent is in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes -- a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 -- landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by the New York Times.

[...]

The logs show that at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.

That’s the same time period that Murray was operating in Uzbekistan.

So, did American prisoners get boiled alive in Uzbekistan at the behest of the U.S. government? We can’t know exactly what happened, but it's likely. We would't have sent prisoners to Uzbekistan if we didn't want some acts of horrible torture performed on them; otherwise, we'd have kept them in Gitmo. The mere fact that this activity goes on while we continue to consider Uzbekistan a “great ally” is incomprehensible.

America, I fear, has lost its mind and its soul.

Rights: Yours, Mine & Ours

I hate cell phones. I rarely use mine; I only keep it for when I go out of town and I find this generation of cell phone addicts annoying beyond belief. So I can sympathize with anyone driven to desperate measures like these:

He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.

“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

“She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,” he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? “Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.”

Yeah, that probably felt good; I get why there’s a boom market in these illegal cell-phone jamming devices. But the fun’s all over when a doctor can’t receive her emergency page, or a mother doesn’t get that desperate phone call from her child, or a law enforcement officer doesn’t get that phone call he needs to receive, or a thousand other scenarios, both profound and mundane, that make cell phone jamming devices illegal.

Just because it annoys you isn’t reason enough to keep me from using my phone. And, on the flip side, just because you want to yak, like, ohmygawd, like, everyone does it, doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying.

When did people lose all patience and tolerance for the feelings and habits of their fellow commuter, co-workers, neighbors? When did it become OK to forget about other people in general? When did we decide that our wants and needs were the only ones that mattered?

Salon.com has an interesting story today about the biological basis for altruism. Apparently all primates but especially humans are hard-wired for altruism by something called “mirror neurons.” In addition to allowing us to feel another’s pain, these neurons could be responsible for such human advancements as language and social structure. It might also answer the old question about the evolutionary basis of altruism and empathy.

But back to our cell-phone jammer. How does ones justify this kind of behavior in light of our neuro-biology?

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

Ah yes, that old individual rights vs communal good argument. We seem to be having this debate a lot lately. As the Salon article notes,

Alan Greenspan and the rugged individualists may love Ayn Rand's libertarian vision of each person alone against the world, but another set prefers to think of humans as inextricably tied to one another, creating codependent realities and sharing inter-subjective space.

In other words, humans are above all social animals, this aspect of human behavior is hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s why humans have evolved into the dominant force on the planet that we are today.

But I’m not seeing much empathy at work in this country these days. I’d like to ask these neurobiologists under what conditions--fear, for example, or stress, or malnutrition or who knows what else--might these mirror neurons be repressed. We seem to be getting meaner as a society; witness the fact that we’re actually discussing whether or not torture is acceptable, when for centuries we’ve prosecuted those who participate in these activities.

Digby wrote the quintessential piece on this last week. Here’s the thought that resonated with me:

I think the debate is over, folks. Every time they normalize state sanctioned sadism, from tasering to waterboarding, we are one step closer to fully accepting a police state. That's how they do it. It never happens over night. It happens one taboo at a time.

We are a torture culture, immoral, vulgar and profane. We actually think it's fun. If college boys and reporters can laugh about it, how bad can it be? Thanks Dick and George.

Unlike Digby, however, I’m not going to heap all of the blame on Dick and George. I think the blame is ours. It’s been in us all along. Like the frog in the pan of water that heats slowly to boiling, when we indulge in little “punk’s,” can we be surprised that torture isn’t far behind?

When we indulge ourselves like this:

“Just watching those dumb teens at the mall get their calls dropped is worth it. Can you hear me now? NO! Good,” the purchaser of a jammer wrote last month in a review on a Web site called DealExtreme.

can we honestly claim surprise when millions of people scream “nuke ‘em all” about fellow human beings in the Middle East?

When we put ourselves above our community, when we forget our innate connectedness to one another, when we ignore our very biology that enables us to feel empathy for one another, we descend into barbarism. We become animals.