Torture

[HGervais]

Or how can anyone support something that is inhuman & degrading, ineffective as a method of gathering reliable information, illegal, a violation of all international treaties, an action that undermines America's stature as the world's moral compass and a action which puts our own military personal into greater danger? And why is it that the Christian-right seem to be torture's biggest cheerleaders?

We are quite literally handing as quickly we can so much of what makes America a great country all in the name of security. Not even security, a concept of what we think security is.

And this thread isn't an attempt to convince someone like Future to pull his head out of the ground and see what everyone else around here seems to understand but rather to be a stopping point for information as it relates to the issue and its related topics.

C.I.A. Agents Sense Shifting Support for Methods

WASHINGTON — For six years, Central Intelligence Agency officers have worried that someday the tide of post-Sept. 11 opinion would turn, and their harsh treatment of prisoners from Al Qaeda would be subjected to hostile scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution.

Now that day may have arrived, after years of shifting legal advice, searing criticism from rights groups — and no new terrorist attacks on American soil.

The Justice Department, which in 2002 gave the C.I.A. legal approval for waterboarding and other tough interrogation methods, is reviewing whether agency officials broke the law by destroying videotapes of those very methods.

The Congressional intelligence committees, whose leaders in 2002 gave at least tacit approval for the tough tactics, have voted in conference to ban all coercive techniques, and they have announced investigations of the destruction of the videotapes and the methods they documented.

“Exactly what they feared is what’s happening,” Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, said of the C.I.A. officials he advised in that job. “The winds change, and the recriminations begin.”

The legal siege against the Bush administration’s counterterrorism programs goes far beyond the C.I.A., including lawsuits brought on behalf of hundreds of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more than 40 challenges in court to the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.

For some at the C.I.A., the second-guessing began in 2004 with a decision by Mr. Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, to withdraw the 2002 opinion on interrogation, whose sweeping constitutional claims and narrow definition of torture he found fatally flawed. But he said he regretted the way the agency had been whipsawed — accused of “risk aversion” immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, and now blamed for traducing American values by engaging in torture.

“Things that seemed to them five years ago to have airtight legal and political support are now under investigation,” he said, comparing this cycle to the Senate hearings into C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s and the criminal prosecution of C.I.A. officials in the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s.

Even a C.I.A. officer involved in capturing and questioning leaders of Al Qaeda expresses a striking ambivalence about the policies that were carried out.

John C. Kiriakou, who helped lead the team that caught the Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002, went public on ABC News this week with such a message. He said he saw intelligence reports saying that waterboarding, a technique that induces a sense of suffocation, had caused Abu Zubaydah to start talking after 35 seconds.

But Mr. Kiriakou, a 43-year-old father of four who left the agency in 2004, also said in an interview that he believed waterboarding was torture and should never be used again, because “we Americans are better than that.” He added: “I think the second-guessing of 2002 decisions is unfair. What I think is fair is having a national debate over whether we should be waterboarding.”

Legal hazards were on the minds of Bush administration officials from the beginning of the response to 9/11. The 2002 Justice Department interrogation opinion laid out some defenses interrogators might use against criminal accusations of torture.

“The administration’s success in preventing attacks has become its enemy,” said John Yoo, the former Justice official who wrote most of the 2002 opinion. Since then, he added, “The political environment has changed because people feel the threat is less than it used to be.”

Mr. Yoo’s legal opinions, though criticized as seriously flawed by some scholars, may nonetheless provide impenetrable armor for C.I.A. officers. From the beginning, wary agency officials insisted on what they called “top cover” — written Justice Department approval for what they did.

Most legal scholars say that even under a future administration, the Justice Department would not seek charges against C.I.A. officers for actions the department itself had approved.

Another obstacle to such prosecutions would be the laws passed by Congress in 2005 and 2006 granting extensive legal protection for authorized conduct. But the videotape destruction may not have such protection; the episode recalls the adage of Washington scandals — that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that leads to trouble.

The deaths of several prisoners who had been questioned by C.I.A. officers or contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan — but outside the detention program for high-level Qaeda prisoners — have been referred to the Justice Department. Only one C.I.A. contractor, David A. Passaro, has been prosecuted, receiving an eight-year sentence for beating an Afghan man who later died.

Still, investigations can impose a high price no matter how they end. “It’s not just the fear of going to jail,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “It’s the enormous expense of hiring lawyers. It’s seeing your reputation destroyed. It’s losing your career.”

Overseas, C.I.A. officers implicated in rendition cases have been sought on criminal charges in Italy and Germany, though none have been arrested. And since the international pursuit of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, human rights advocates have often sought criminal charges against former officials on the principle of “universal jurisdiction” for certain grave offenses, including torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which unsuccessfully sought charges against former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld during a recent visit to France, has pledged to pursue criminal torture charges against former Bush administration officials when they travel abroad.

“The only way to restore the moral authority of our country,” said Michael Ratner, the group’s president, “is accountability.”[/url]

Tracking a Paper Trail

A memo from a top intelligence official warned the CIA not to destroy its interrogation tapes

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 9:03 PM ET Dec 14, 2007
[i]In the summer of 2005, then CIA director Porter Goss met with then national intelligence director John Negroponte to discuss a highly sensitive matter: what to do about the existence of videotapes documenting the use of controversial interrogation methods, apparently includ­ing waterboarding, on two key Al Qaeda suspects. The tapes were eventually de­stroyed, and congressional investigators are now trying to piece together an extensive paper trail documenting how and why it happened.

One crucial document they'll surely want to examine: a memo written after the meeting between Goss and Negroponte, which records that Negroponte strongly advised against destroying the tapes, according to two people close to the investigation, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter. The memo is so far the only known documentation that a senior intel official warned that the tapes should not be destroyed. Spokespeople for the CIA and the intel czar's office declined to comment, citing ongoing investigations.

Current and former U.S. officials familiar with the history of the tapes, who also asked for anonymity, told newsweek that Jose Rodriguez Jr., then chief of the CIA's espionage branch, the National Clandes­tine Service, decided on his own authority in late 2005 to destroy the tapes in order to protect the identity of under­cover CIA officers. The officials said that Rodriguez and his close aides had been asking top agency managers for more than two years about what to do with the tapes, but felt they never got a straight answer.

The tapes were kept—and destroyed—at a secret location overseas. It is unknown whether Rodriguez knew about Negroponte's position. Goss believed he had an "un­derstanding" with Clandestine Services that the tapes were to be preserved and was dis­mayed to learn that they had been destroyed, according to a source familiar with his views.

The fate of the congression­al inquiries remains unclear. On Friday, the Justice Department asked the House intel panel to back off its request for documents and testimony on the grounds that it might in­terfere with its own probe. In addition, prominent criminal defense lawyer Robert Bennett confirmed that he is representing Rodriguez. Bennett told NEWSWEEK that his client had been "a dedicated and loy­al public servant for 31 years" and "has done nothing wrong." But he warned that Rodriguez may refuse to cooperate with investigators if he concludes that the probes are a "witch hunt." "I don't want him to become a scapegoat."

And one of the dominoes falling because of our policy on torture...

Control sought on military lawyers-Bush wants power over promotions

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | December 15, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps - the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force - can be promoted.

A Pentagon spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the reasoning behind the proposed regulations. But the requirement of coordination - which many former JAGs say would give the administration veto power over any JAG promotion or appointment - is consistent with past administration efforts to impose greater control over the military lawyers.

The former JAG officers say the regulation would end the uniformed lawyers' role as a check-and-balance on presidential power, because politically appointed lawyers could block the promotion of JAGs who they believe would speak up if they think a White House policy is illegal.

Retired Major General Thomas Romig, the Army's top JAG from 2001 to 2005, called the proposal an attempt "to control the military JAGs" by sending a message that if they want to be promoted, they should be "team players" who "bow to their political masters on legal advice."

It "would certainly have a chilling effect on the JAGs' advice to commanders," Romig said. "The implication is clear: without [the administration's] approval the officer will not be promoted."

The new JAG rule is part of a set of proposed changes to the military's procedures for promoting all commissioned officers, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. The Pentagon began internally circulating a draft of the changes for comments by the services in mid-November, and the administration will decide whether to make the changes official later this month or early next year.

The JAG rule would give new leverage over the JAGs to the Pentagon's general counsel, William "Jim" Haynes, who was appointed by President Bush. Haynes has been the Pentagon's point man in the disputes with the JAGs who disagreed with the administration's assertion that the president has the right to bypass the Geneva Conventions and other legal protections for wartime detainees.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said that Haynes was traveling and unavailable for an interview, and she did not respond to other written questions submitted by the Globe. In the past, Haynes has made several proposals that would bring the JAGs under greater control by political appointees.

As part of the uniformed chain of command, the JAGs are not directly controlled by civilian political appointees. But Haynes has long promoted the idea of making each service's politically appointed general counsel the direct boss of the service's top JAG, a change Haynes has said would support the principle of civilian control of the military.

One of Haynes' allies on the Bush administration legal team, former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, recently coauthored a law review article sharply critical of the JAGs' unwillingness to endorse the legality of the administration's treatment of wartime detainees.

Yoo, who wrote a series of controversial legal opinions about the president's power to bypass the Geneva Conventions and antitorture laws before leaving government in 2003, called for some kind of "corrective measures" that would "punish" JAGs who undermine the president's policy preferences.

Yoo's law review article did not specifically discuss injecting political appointees into the JAG promotions process, and Yoo said in an e-mail that he did not know anything about the new Pentagon proposal. But several retired JAGs said they think the proposed change is an attempt by the Bush administration to turn Yoo's idea into a reality.

Under the current system, boards of military officers pick who will join the JAG corps and who will be promoted, while the general counsels' role is limited to reviewing whether the boards followed correct procedures. The proposed rule would impose a new requirement of "coordination" with the general counsels of the services and the Pentagon during the JAG appointment and promotion process.

The proposal does not spell out what coordination means. But both JAGs and outside legal specialists say that it is common bureaucratic parlance for requiring both sides to sign off before a decision gets made - meaning that political appointees would have the power to block any candidate's career path.

"It only makes sense to put this in if you want [general counsels to exercise the power to give] thumbs up or thumbs down, in order to intimidate JAGs," said retired Colonel Gordon Wilder, who was the Air Force's top JAG specialist in administrative law until last January.

Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor who is also general counsel to the National Institute of Military Justice, agreed that the regulation boils down to giving political appointees the power to veto JAG promotions.

"The message would be clear to every JAG, which is that when you have been told that the general counsel has a view on the law, any time you dare disagree with it, don't expect a promotion," Saltzburg said, adding "I don't think that would be in the best interest of the country. We've seen how important it can be to have the JAGs give their honest opinions when you look at the debates on interrogation techniques and the like."

Key members of the Bush administration legal team have pushed to subject the JAGs to greater political control for years.

In the early 1990s, both Haynes and Vice President Cheney's top aide, David Addington, were politically appointed lawyers in the Pentagon during the Bush-Quayle administration. On their advice, Cheney, who was then the defense secretary, proposed making each service's general counsel the boss of his JAG counterpart, but the Senate Armed Services Committee forced the administration to back down.

In 2001, Haynes and Addington were restored to power in the Bush-Cheney administration, and the conflict over JAG independence resumed amid the fights over such war on terrorism policies as harsh interrogations.

Responding to the conflicts, in 2004 Congress enacted a law forbidding Defense Department employees from interfering with the ability of JAGs to "give independent legal advice" directly to military leaders. But when President Bush signed the law, he issued a signing statement decreeing that the legal opinions of his political appointees would still "bind" the JAGs.

And throughout the past several years, the administration has repeatedly proposed changes that would impose greater control over the JAGs, such as letting political appointees decide who should be the top service JAGs. Each previous proposal has died amid controversy in the Pentagon or Congress.

The new proposal goes further than anything the administration has pushed before because it would affect all military lawyers, not just the top JAGs. Retired Rear Admiral Donald Guter, the Navy's top JAG from 2000 to 2002, said the rule would "politicize" the JAG corps all the way "down into the bowels" of its lowest ranks.

"That would be the end of the professional [JAG] corps as we know it," Guter said.

[Gobear]

I swear, those articles you cited, particularly about the Bush adminstration wanting to enforce greater political control of the JAG corps, make me think I woke up in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

[Ptolemy]

Maybe not as bad as Stalin - no one is going to be sent to a forced work camp or shot (probably) - but still not America. Not worthy of a country that has accepted the sacrifice of so many.

[Erick Harper]

Or how can anyone support something that is...ineffective as a method of gathering reliable information

I think this is an important point, and I'd like to see some more documentation/discussion on it. I agree that we need to reject torture because it is simply wrong, and we are Americans and we just don't do that. However, as even Harold has noted before, the "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" theory could prove tempting if torture actually were to be shown to yield reliable information that would save lives.

However, let us consider as an example - John McCain himself. He broke under torture/duress in Vietnam. He signed a bogus confession for war crimes. He gave information about his ship, his squadron, etc. - including the dimensions of the Captain's swimming pool and the tiki torches on the luau deck - i.e., he gave a lot of absolute BS. Torture, I suppose one could say, worked on him, because he certainly broke, and he certainly talked. However, the information he gave, including his coerced confession, was complete rubbish. He violated the strict principles of "name, rank, serial number," but in the long run gave his captors nothing of value.

[HGervais]

GOP Leader Wants CIA Tape Hearings
Hoekstra Joins Defiance of Bush Administration Over Tape Probe
By JOHN COCHRAN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16, 2007 —

Two influential members of the House on intelligence matters today said Congress should defy the Bush administration's plea to stay out of the controversy surrounding the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes.

On Friday the Justice Department told key committees in the House and Senate to suspend their investigations because they would interfere with the department's own inquiry into the destruction of videotapes made in 2002 during interrogations of two suspected terrorists.

A senior administration official told ABC News that one reason the tapes were destroyed was the fear that they would be leaked to the public, which could have resulted in severe damage to America's image. The tapes reportedly showed suspects undergoing waterboarding, a technique that causes the suspect to believe he is drowning.

Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News he agrees with Chairman Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat, that they should issue subpoenas and hold hearings.

"Once these witnesses appear in front of the committee, then I think we'll have to make the decision as to whether we're going to provide them with immunity or not," he said. "But our investigation should move forward. The CIA did not tell us about the existence of these tapes. They did not tell us that they were going to be destroyed. There's a constitutional responsibility for them to keep Congress informed, and they have not. And we need to hold them accountable."

Meeting later with other reporters, Hoekstra also made a not-very-veiled-threat, noting that if the CIA does not cooperate, Congress could withhold funds: "We have funding options."

Rep. Jane Harmon, a California Democrat, was on the Intelligence Committee when the tapes were made. She told Fox's Chris Wallace: "I -- warned them not to destroy the videotapes. I sent them a letter in 2003, and they did it anyway and they didn't tell us. So, it smells like the cover-up of the cover-up."

Hoekstra was scathing in his denunciation of leaders in the government's intelligence community.

"You've got a community that's incompetent. They are arrogant. And they are political. And they don't believe that they are accountable to anybody," he said. "They don't believe that they're accountable to the president."

Hoekstra did not spare CIA Director Michael Hayden, even though he only took over the post in 2006, several months after the tapes were destroyed.

"I think that we're going to hold Mike Hayden accountable, because some of these misleading statements occurred on his watch," the Republican congressman said.

Reyes, the House committee chairman, told ABC News he wants to go ahead with hearings next week. But that may not be possible.

Reyes wants CIA officials to testify. Those officials, including Hayden, work in the executive branch of the government and are part of the Bush administration. So is the Justice Department, which has asked Hayden not to testify.

The CIA director is expected to tell Congressional committees that he has no choice but to refuse to appear before them, which could set the stage for a test of wills between Congress and, ultimately, the White House.

[IChiWawa]

And why is it that the Christian-right seem to be torture's biggest cheerleaders?

What an incredible bait statement. This is a board moderator? Ignoring or being unaware that the greatest practitioners of torture and murder in the last century were all athiests is certainly the equivilant of having one's head buried somewhere. This is the same sort of 'tortured' thinking that makes criminals such as August Pinochet and Fidel Castro experience completely different legacies based on how favorable they were towards socialism.

A few differing views:

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Publi ... p.asp?pg=1

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... _left.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... rture.html

[HGervais]

How are any of those pieces supposed to be persuasive, especially one edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes? And as difficult as it may be for you to accept, I wasn't making a bait comment but rather a statement of how I see things. Seems like in argument after argument that I have with people, it is the radical right, usually the Christian variety that is most offended by my being offended by torture. I am not unaware of history IChi, which is what makes the actions of this government all the more disgusting and the support of people like Future and you all the more pathetic.

[TemporalWisdom]

Ignoring or being unaware that the greatest practitioners of torture and murder in the last century were all atheists is certainly the equivalent of having one's head buried somewhere.

How about ignoring that some of the greatest torturers in history were employed by the Catholic church to root out heretics?

[Gobear]

And why is it that the Christian-right seem to be torture's biggest cheerleaders?

What an incredible bait statement. This is a board moderator? Ignoring or being unaware that the greatest practitioners of torture and murder in the last century were all athiests is certainly the equivilant of having one's head buried somewhere.

There's a whole of lot of illogic in that paragraph.

The validity of Harold's question has nothing to do with the validity of your statement about the greatest practitioners of torture and murder being atheists. Harold is talking about American politics in 2007; the theological beliefs of Hitler or Mao, or Stalin or Pol Pot have no relevance to the question of the Christian right in this country supporting torture.

Now if Harold condemned torture practiced by the USA but praised or excused torture practiced by the leaders of other governments, then you could scold him for hypocrisy, but he did not do that, did he?

This is the same sort of 'tortured' thinking that makes criminals such as August Pinochet and Fidel Castro experience completely different legacies based on how favorable they were towards socialism.

I'd like to think that sensible people of all poltical stripes would condemn dictatorship of every ideological stripe. The political labels that we attach to authoritarian fascists like Pinochet or to totalitarian communists like Castro are meaningless, except to very simple-minded people. People in any nation have the innate right to live their lives free of fear from governmental tyranny.

And i think we can all agree that useful idiots like Sean Penn and Michael Moore who cuddle up to tyrants like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro merely becuae they oppose the Bush regime are beneath contempt.

This is why I find it so dispiriting that so many Americans seem to want to transform our republic into a despotism in which the claims of "national security" trump the civil rights of citizens. Americans should never have to fear the knock on the door at 3 in the morning.

[Gobear]

Ignoring or being unaware that the greatest practitioners of torture and murder in the last century were all atheists is certainly the equivalent of having one's head buried somewhere.

How about ignoring that some of the greatest torturers in history were employed by the Catholic church to root out heretics?

Before going into historical specifics, let's be clear that both of these statements are asinine. Neither religion nor the lack of it cause any government to become evil--governments do evil because they are ruled by humans. Humans are flawed, and they are capable of both glorious and horrific deeds.

First. Temporal Wisdom is one-sided in his condemnation of the Catholic Church. Yes, the Holy Inquistion tortured people suspected of heresy, but they did so with the cooperation of local governments. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition rooted out secret Jews and Muslims who falsely professed to be Christian at the behest of the Castilian monarchy.In the same way, the Catholic church exterminated the Cathars in 13th-century France with the active assistance of Louis VIII and Louis IX, because the French kings wanted to annex Languedoc, where the Cathars were located. The rooting out of the Cathar heresy was as much a political action as it was a religious one.Moreover, after the Reformation, Protestants in their turn persecuted and burned Catholics for heresy.

Second, I Chi Wawa is wrong to say the greatest practitioners of torture and murder were atheists. He didn;t specify who he meant, so i'll take the top 4: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Hitler, the sole fascist in the group, condemned atheism and couched his persecution of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and other undesirables in Christian language: My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.

The communists, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, persecuted religious believers, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist alike; however, they substituted worship of the leader as a god-king and the Communist Party as an ersatz religion, so it is difficult to call them atheists. When you have Chinese farmers thanking Chairman Mao for making the rain fall, or praising Stalin for a bountiful harvest, you cannot call their regimes atheist.

i've said it before, adn I'll say it again, the prime example of evil done in the name of secularism was the French Revolution. If I Chi Wawa wants to attack atheists as murderers, he ought to use the Jacobins as his object lesson.

[IChiWawa]

I will stand by everything I've already said. Calling someone asinine and in the same post calling communism a religion is pretty funny. Destruction of houses of worship, persecution of practitioners, prohibition of printing of religious material. I will have to disagree that this is a religion.

You can quote Hitler but there is hardly a mention of doing religious work in the Final Solution.

Hitler did cite Christ at times but it's curious that he was an atheist as well. I will leave it to others to decide whether he persecuted the Jews and Gypsies and Slavs due to religious zealotry or rather because of belief in a doctrine of racial purity.

Regarding Gobear's ability to recognize criminality in both Pinochet's and Castro's murders, this is a refreshing change from the condemnation from the left that greeted recent articles that compared the two.


I recognize that certain posters here hate religion. I also find it funny that they are also the ones who most often post religious discussion threads. While this thread is about torture the fact that someone could not resist claiming christians (but only right wing ones, and now suddenly only the ones Harold speaks to) were its greatest advocates required my response.

Temporal Wisdom's need to go back to the inquisition to find something comparable to 20th century communism actually makes my point.


One more article. For those beyond dismissing valid facts based on who wrote them then you may want to have a look.

http://nationaljournal.com/taylor.htm

[Chris_Sax]

guys, I don't see what the big problem is, we've just waterboarded a few really bad guys, right? No one's died in US custody, it's not like we created a network of secret prisons where we do things to people whether or not we have any idea if they are actually guilty of anything, it's just waterboarding and putting underpants on their heads, right?

Right?

[HGervais]

I recognize that certain posters here hate religion. I also find it funny that they are also the ones who most often post religious discussion threads. While this thread is about torture the fact that someone could not resist claiming christians (but only right wing ones, and now suddenly only the ones Harold speaks to) were its greatest advocates required my response.

Oh good lord...blah, blah, blah. I speak to a lot of people. I participate in at least a dozen message boards & forums of both political stripes and it doesn't change that the fact that most of the people who support our current policy are on the right side of the aisle and many claim to be devout Christians. For better or worse, that is in large part today's Republican base. I wish that it were not so and I'm sorry if my calling attention to that fundamental hypocrisy offends you but that doesn't make it not true. And frankly, as I have already noted, the silence coming from many areas of the Democratic party is just as offensive & sickening to me. Again, at its core this should not be a right/left issue. It is just about the most black & white thing I can think of. We either accept these actions, which I see as fundamentally un-American as anything I have ever heard of, or you don't. So if you would actually like to talk about why you think the policy is, you know, a good idea....which, because you have decided to avoid talking about the issue and instead decided to go after the usual suspects in your own special way, you have not....and I'm sorry links to places such as the Weekly Standard don't really do the trick...and maybe you can drop your usual smug & superior I'm-a-independent act and try talking to people instead of talking down to them.
Still, Gobear raises the point that, no surprise there, you don't address. What we are talking about is today. The treatment of assets in our control. What it does to America's moral authority & standing as a leader in the world. We are not talking about Hitler, Chavez, Castro or Pinochet and that you feel the need to direct the conversation in that area lets everyone know just how clearly you have nothing to stand on. And believe me, that there is the possibility that one day George Bush might well be on that same list and that large numbers of people allowed him to do it without saying a word makes me sadder for our country than you can know.

[IChiWawa]

I recognize that certain posters here hate religion. I also find it funny that they are also the ones who most often post religious discussion threads. While this thread is about torture the fact that someone could not resist claiming christians (but only right wing ones, and now suddenly only the ones Harold speaks to) were its greatest advocates required my response.

Oh good lord...blah, blah, blah. I speak to a lot of people. I participate in at least a dozen message boards & forums of both political stripes and it doesn't change that the fact that most of the people who support our current policy are on the right side of the aisle and many claim to be devout Christians. For better or worse, that is in large part today's Republican base. I wish that it were not so and I'm sorry if my calling attention to that fundamental hypocrisy offends you but that doesn't make it not true. And frankly, as I have already noted, the silence coming from many areas of the Democratic party is just as offensive & sickening to me. Again, at its core this should not be a right/left issue. It is just about the most black & white thing I can think of. We either accept these actions, which I see as fundamentally un-American as anything I have ever heard of, or you don't. So if you would actually like to talk about why you think the policy is, you know, a good idea....which, because you have decided to avoid talking about the issue and instead decided to go after the usual suspects in your own special way, you have not....and I'm sorry links to places such as the Weekly Standard don't really do the trick...and maybe you can drop your usual smug & superior I'm-a-independent act and try talking to people instead of talking down to them.
Still, Gobear raises the point that, no surprise there, you don't address. What we are talking about is today. The treatment of assets in our control. What it does to America's moral authority & standing as a leader in the world. We are not talking about Hitler, Chavez, Castro or Pinochet and that you feel the need to direct the conversation in that area lets everyone know just how clearly you have nothing to stand on. And believe me, that there is the possibility that one day George Bush might well be on that same list and that large numbers of people allowed him to do it without saying a word makes me sadder for our country than you can know.

I was replying to your incredibly stupid comment that Christians were the leading proponents of torture. You were the one that said it. If you don't realize that this was incredibly baiting and that to come from a 'moderator' was rather incredible, well....... If you wanted to just have a valid discussion about torture you should have refrained from throwing in that ludicrous aside. THAT is what I was standing on.

I provided links giving views and facts that you chose to ignore, and it must be said none in which you found to refute, instead blaming who wrote or edited them. And if you refuse to read articles in The Weekly Standard you are practicing the same closed-mindedness you condemn in others (you didn't say anything about the other sources). I read everything from Media Matters and Kos to Weekly Standard and Townhall because I have found that an open mind gets much more light than a closed one.

The articles I posted made arguments that waterboarding has worked in the case of Khalid Sheik Muhhamed.

Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton have all refused to completely rule out extraordinary interrogation techniques when dealing with terrorists. Therefore they are somewhat just as 'unamerican' as the right wing you condemn.

Gobear also brought up quotes from Hitler regarding religion but failed to add any such as this:

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."

"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity....
"Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse....
"...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little....
"Christianity <is> the liar....
"We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State."

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."


And I know that it offends you but yes, I am an independant (I'm also an agnostic). I have not voted for a Republican candidate for national office in over 25 years. The fact that you seem to have a huge antagonoism for the postings I make where I supply an opposing or supplemental view is not a case against me doing so.

One last thing, I didn't vote for Dubya but regarding your incredibly naive statement:

"We are not talking about Hitler, Chavez, Castro or Pinochet and that you feel the need to direct the conversation in that area lets everyone know just how clearly you have nothing to stand on. And believe me, that there is the possibility that one day George Bush might well be on that same list and that large numbers of people allowed him to do it without saying a word makes me sadder for our country than you can know."

The very fact that you think he is guilty of the same crimes as those others is just mind-numbingly hilarious. I am waiting to see just how he is going to work the coup before the exchange of powers happens in Jan 2009. I'm sure you'll agree that if he is included on such a list, FDR, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill should be there too.

[TemporalWisdom]

First. Temporal Wisdom is one-sided in his condemnation of the Catholic Church. Yes, the Holy Inquistion tortured people suspected of heresy, but they did so with the cooperation of local governments. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition rooted out secret Jews and Muslims who falsely professed to be Christian at the behest of the Castilian monarchy.In the same way, the Catholic church exterminated the Cathars in 13th-century France with the active assistance of Louis VIII and Louis IX, because the French kings wanted to annex Languedoc, where the Cathars were located. The rooting out of the Cathar heresy was as much a political action as it was a religious one. Moreover, after the Reformation, Protestants in their turn persecuted and burned Catholics for heresy.

Whoa, there. I was just giving a single example. I don't condemn the Catholic Church, just those who tortured and murdered heretics. It was meant as a pointed comment about IChiWawa sidestepping the question re: the Christian right supporting torture, by talking about what atheists had done. If you wanted me to post something with more depth, sorry. I'm not an historian. What's your problem? We're arguing the same side.

Temporal Wisdom's need to go back to the inquisition to find something comparable to 20th century communism actually makes my point.

Right. Because there's a 100-year statute of limitations on torture.

[HGervais]

And yet still more blah, blah, blah where you say a lot without really saying anything at all. And I know, I know. I'm stupid and naive where you are open-mined & independent and so much smarter than everyone else here. Whatever. You ever reach a point where you actually want to discus this with people and talk about where you stand & why...I'll be happy to talk right back but until that point all you are trying to do is change the subject and frankly that act of yours has grown both tiresome & boring.

[Dan Mancini]

...it's not like we created a network of secret prisons where we do things to people whether or not we have any idea if they are actually guilty of anything, it's just waterboarding and putting underpants on their heads, right?

Right. Dudes used to get drunk, waterboard, and put underpants on their heads all the time when I was in college. It was fun. And the chicks dug it.

[Adam Arseneau]

[Steve T Power]

...it's not like we created a network of secret prisons where we do things to people whether or not we have any idea if they are actually guilty of anything, it's just waterboarding and putting underpants on their heads, right?

Right. Dudes used to get drunk, waterboard, and put underpants on their heads all the time when I was in college. It was fun. And the chicks dug it.

you really haven't lived until you've waterboarded Wild Turkey.

[Chris_Sax]

guys, I don't see what the big problem is, we've just waterboarded a few really bad guys, right? No one's died in US custody, it's not like we created a network of secret prisons where we do things to people whether or not we have any idea if they are actually guilty of anything, it's just waterboarding and putting underpants on their heads, right?

Right?

RIGHT!

[HGervais]

A huge open source timelime of torture & destroyed evidence.

[HGervais]

A history of torture and the refinement of various techniques by western democratic states. Not comfortable reading but as the author notes, a hopeful one because as a democracy we can demand the end to those kinds of practices. The surprising force behind torture: democracies

[Belmondo]

A history of torture and the refinement of various techniques by western democratic states. Not comfortable reading but as the author notes, a hopeful one because as a democracy we can demand the end to those kinds of practices. The surprising force behind torture: democracies

Yeah, I get the Boston Globe delivered and that article was what shook me awake even before my morning coffee.
Shame on us and the other so called enlightened democracies. I am disgusted with my own government. I love my country and fought for it at a time when it was unpopular to do so. I feel I have earned the right to say whatever I wish; what a shame that I can no longer look at the uniform I once so proudly wore.
Is this the legacy of a great nation? - that we are the torturers, that we are the ones who invaded a country that never attacked us?
God help us.

[Chris_Sax]

And yet still more blah, blah, blah where you say a lot without really saying anything at all. And I know, I know. I'm stupid and naive where you are open-mined & independent and so much smarter than everyone else here. Whatever. You ever reach a point where you actually want to discus this with people and talk about where you stand & why...I'll be happy to talk right back but until that point all you are trying to do is change the subject and frankly that act of yours has grown both tiresome & boring.

Harold, no one goes hunting every weekend.

[HGervais]

Really good news on the JAG story from the beginning of this thread. The White House has bowed to pressure and withdrawn their power grab.

[HGervais]

9/11 Panel Study Finds That C.I.A. Withheld Tapes
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

Mr. Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or withholding them from the courts and the commission was improper.

A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.

The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogations.

Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.

Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter. Mr. Zelikow served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to the end of 2006.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. McLaughlin said that agency officials had always been candid with the commission, and that information from the C.I.A. proved central to their work.

“We weren’t playing games with them, and we weren’t holding anything back,” he said. The memorandum recounts a December 2003 meeting between Mr. Kean, Mr. Hamilton and George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. At the meeting, it says, Mr. Hamilton told Mr. Tenet that the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents “even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”

According to the memorandum, Mr. Tenet responded by alluding to several documents that he thought would be helpful to the commission, but made no mention of existing videotapes of interrogations.

The memorandum does not draw any conclusions about whether the withholding of the videotapes was unlawful, but it notes that federal law penalizes anyone who “knowingly and willfully” withholds or “covers up” a “material fact” from a federal inquiry or makes “any materially false statement” to investigators.

Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had gone to “great lengths” to meet the commission’s requests, and that commission members had been provided with detailed information obtained from interrogations of agency detainees.

“Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active,” Mr. Mansfield said.

Intelligence officials have said the tapes that were destroyed documented hundreds of hours of interrogations during 2002 of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects who were taken into C.I.A. custody that year.

According to the memorandum from Mr. Zelikow, the commission’s interest in obtaining accounts from Qaeda detainees in C.I.A. custody grew out of its attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Its requests for documents from the C.I.A. began in June 2003, when it first sought intelligence reports describing information obtained from prisoner interrogations, the memorandum said. It later made specific requests for documents, reports and information related to the interrogations of specific prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri.

In December 2003, the commission staff sought permission to interview the prisoners themselves, but was permitted instead to give questions to C.I.A. interrogators, who then posed the questions to the detainees. The commission concluded its work in June 2004, and in its final report, it praised several agencies, including the C.I.A., for their assistance.

Abbe D. Lowell, a veteran Washington lawyer who has defended clients accused of making false statements and of contempt of Congress, said the question of whether the agency had broken the law by omitting mention of the videotapes was “pretty complex,” but said he “wouldn’t rule it out.”

Because the requests were not subpoenas issued by a court or Congress, C.I.A. officials could not be held in contempt for failing to respond fully, Mr. Lowell said. Apart from that, however, it is a crime to make a false statement "in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch."

The Sept. 11 commission received its authority from both the White House and Congress.

On Friday, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, asking them to preserve and produce to the committee all remaining video and audio recordings of “enhanced interrogations” of detainees in American custody.

Signed by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the letter asked for an extensive search of the White House, C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies to determine whether any other recordings existed of interrogation techniques “including but not limited to waterboarding.”

Government officials have said that the videos destroyed in 2005 were the only recordings of interrogations made by C.I.A. operatives, although in September government lawyers notified a federal judge in Virginia that the agency had recently found three audio and video recordings of detainees.

Intelligence officials have said that those tapes were not made by the C.I.A., but by foreign intelligence services.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

[HGervais]

Posted with a minimum amount of comment except to say again, torture is something this country was always supposed to be against. Torture used to be considered un-American. Torture doesn't work. Be it this administration for endorsing these procedures, or Congress for allowing it to happen & continue....Republicans & Democrats alike...shame on all of them and shame on anyone who thinks it is okay or just or needed. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the Congress have set us on a path dictated by fear & weakness and in the process, and in the name of "security", we are watching America's soul being betrayed.

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency’s clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.’s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. “You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?

“By that time,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”

The Decision to Tape

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being a Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah’s precarious condition. “There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,” recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource — direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. “If you’re a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did,” said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. C.I.A. officials did not press the matter.

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Looking for Guidance

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

[Chris_Sax]

Harold, we're the GOOD GUYS. Why aren't you on our side?

[Erick Harper]

Torture doesn't work.

Harold,
"It doesn't work" has been part of your anti-torture mantra for a while now; if true, this is the strongest card you have to play, and yet it is the one you always take for granted and leave unsupported. It seems to me that when dealing with people who support torture, this would be your most persuasive argument, and again, I'd like to see the discussion move down this path some. All this stuff about who destroyed which videotapes or who wants to control which lawyers is interesting but ultimately tangential to the real issue here.

What I'd like to see is some evidence about how it "doesn't work." People at CIA, regardless of your opinion of their methods and motives, aren't stupid. Why would they expend this much time and effort doing something if it didn't produce results, i.e. actionable intelligence?

Just to clarify, my gut reaction is with you on this - torture is not something the USA should be doing. It goes against our principles. However, saving American lives is another big principle here too that can't be overlooked - if something like waterboarding (which, if we agree to call it torture, we must also agree is pretty low on the scale in the big picture) produces intelligence that ultimately saves lives, well, that's very persuasive as well. (And no, I'm not talking about some Jack Bauer fantasy scenario, I'm talking about the undermining of Al-Qaida networks, etc.) I think there are a lot of ambivalent people like myself who can honestly say that yes, all things being equal, we find the idea of torture abhorrent, but in the back of our minds, it might be the lesser evil under certain circumstances. Which brings us back to my original point - you need to support this blanket assertion that "torture doesn't work," because even the hardest of the hardcore would find that a very persuasive argument.

[HGervais]

Erick...honestly..don't you think we would be hearing all about this plot & that plot that had been foiled from information gotten the "enhanced interrogation" route? This is an administration that has been willing to to leak or declassify information at the drop of a hat if it either supports their point of view or ridicules the opposition. If torture worked, don't you think we would all know it in no uncertain terms? The pro-torture crowd, of which I know you are not Erick, likes to talk about the myth of torture not being effective where I find the opposite to be true. It's easy to find military & intelligence officers who will tell you why torture doesn't work, and honestly the answer why is just common sense....people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make the pain stop...then you can find military & intelligence officials who will tell you torture does work and provide examples. The myth here, which some people are willing to easily accept, is that torture does work. Take the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. It was his "confession" by way of waterboadering that produced the information that Saddam was helping Bin Laden's crazies develop biological weapons which in turn was used by the Bush administration as one of the reasons for us invading Iraq. We all know how well that worked out. Still, the fundamental aspect of the torture question is the moral one. It is wrong in every possible way. Torture corrupts and undercuts our moral authority but as I've said several times, if it could be proven to me that torture was effective and does yield results that has saved lives, my pragmatic side would be forced to consider it as a viable alternative. I don't think I'm a lot different from a lot of people on that score and that I have seen nothing compelling to make my pragmatic side stand up and take notice, I think I'm standing on pretty solid ground.

[Dan Mancini]

Erick...honestly..don't you think we would be hearing all about this plot & that plot that had been foiled from information gotten the "enhanced interrogation" route?

I'm with you on being dubious about torture, but arguing from silence doesn't really address Erick's very reasonable questions.

It's easy to find military & intelligence officers who will tell you why torture doesn't work, and honestly the answer why is just common sense....people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make the pain stop...then you can find military & intelligence officials who will tell you torture does work and provide examples. The myth here, which some people are willing to easily accept, is that torture does work.

Huh? Something seems to've been lost in the ellipses. I'm not getting the part where the anti-toture military & intelligence officers have more credibility than the "torture works" guys.

Torture corrupts and undercuts our moral authority...

Considering the fact that we repeatedly fire-bombed civilians throughout the 20th century, I'd say our moral authority was history long before the Bush administration came to power. But that's just me.

[HGervais]

It isn't silence on my part Dan. You can do the same web searches I can. Start looking for specific instances where torture has provided information that saved lives. If torture worked, we would know about it. The silence from the other side is the point. Even in touted instances like the French using torture in Algeria, the deeper you dig the more you find there is less there to support the contention then we were lead to believe. So in a case where the positives are dubious at best, I'm going to side with the group that can point to something that is on solid footing and not with the side that can't.

[Dan Mancini]

It isn't silence on my part Dan. You can do the same web searches I can. Start looking for specific instances where torture has provided information that saved lives. If torture worked, we would know about it.

I think you miss my point. Arguing from silence is coming to a conclusion based on a lack of contrary evidence. It's generally not a good idea. Saying, You can't Google examples of torture working, therefore torture doesn't work is fallacious. It doesn't mean torture does work, but it's not a convincing argument.

So in a case where the positives are dubious at best, I'm going to side with the group that can point to something that is on solid footing and not with the side that can't.

My guess (and that's all this is, I have no data to back anything up here) is that "torture doesn't work" is an over-simplification. I bet it does work sometimes. But how often? And can one tell when it's working and when it isn't? Are there ways to increase its chances of working? In other words, I'm guessing torture's effectiveness is more complex than you're making out, which is why there's debate about it in the first place. None of this really changes the morality of it for me, but it does get the heart of how woefully phony and intellectually bankrupt our entire political class is.

[HGervais]

Torture as a form of information gathering doesn't work and isn't as effective as "softer" questioning methods is perhaps simple. if accurate but the thing we don't talk about is that really isn't the point of torture, is it? The point has always been the pain it inflicts and the message it is designed to send...fear us because there isn't anything we won't do. Still, we are both reasonable people and if we were both presented with compelling evidence that as a practice torture worked, you & I would both probably have to at least consider it as a viable option. That the evidence isn't out there, that a case cannot be made speaks volumes to me. Perhaps it is a case of me being hopelessly simple & stupid but I don't think so. The move to allowing torture is such a radical shift for us as a country it would seem to me that the administration and its allies would be falling over themselves to find a way to prove to people that they are right and that they know what they are doing if they could. As it is there are a lot more cases like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, then there are validated success stories. The absence of proof in this matter is just too damning and can't be ignored.

[Andrew Forbes]

Torture as a form of information gathering doesn't work and isn't as effective as "softer" questioning methods is perhaps simple. if accurate but the thing we don't talk about is that really isn't the point of torture, is it? The point has always been the pain it inflicts and the message it is designed to send...fear us because there isn't anything we won't do. Still, we are both reasonable people and if we were both presented with compelling evidence that as a practice torture worked, you & I would both probably have to at least consider it as a viable option. That the evidence isn't out there, that a case cannot be made speaks volumes to me. Perhaps it is a case of me being hopelessly simple & stupid but I don't think so. The move to allowing torture is such a radical shift for us as a country it would seem to me that the administration and its allies would be falling over themselves to find a way to prove to people that they are right and that they know what they are doing if they could. As it is there are a lot more cases like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, then there are validated success stories. The absence of proof in this matter is just too damning and can't be ignored.

Harold, I'm a bit troubled/confused by the fact that you have so vehemently argued against the morality of torture, going so far as to say that the endorsement of the practice is destructive to the soul of American values, but go on to say that, were there proof that it was an effective technique, you would have to consider it as an option. It seems to me that you must either be in one camp or the other. Either stand against it because of its ineffectiveness, or because it is inherently immoral and ultimately destructive to the society you are trying to preserve.

[HGervais]

Harold, I'm a bit troubled/confused by the fact that you have so vehemently argued against the morality of torture, going so far as to say that the endorsement of the practice is destructive to the soul of American values, but go on to say that, were there proof that it was an effective technique, you would have to consider it as an option. It seems to me that you must either be in one camp or the other. Either stand against it because of its ineffectiveness, or because it is inherently immoral and ultimately destructive to the society you are trying to preserve.

You are not as troubled by it as I am. As I have said several times now, I'm in the fortunate position to have both the moral & the practical positions compliment each other. It is wrong and it is ineffective but it were proven to be effective then I would have a moral dilemma to consider. Like everyone else who lives here I want America to be secure and if there were a method of getting information that worked I would, at the very least, have to consider it. I can't imagine myself ever being okay with torture but if I knew it worked and that it had saved lives, I might be able to live with it. I would not like it but at that point the good-guys-versus-the-bad-guys thing would probably kick in. As it stands now, I don't have to let that shadow cross my mind. My heart is in the right place but my head needs to consider all the options. If that makes any sense at all.

[Dan Mancini]

As I have said several times now, I'm in the fortunate position to have both the moral & the practical positions compliment each other. It is wrong and it is ineffective but it were proven to be effective then I would have a moral dilemma to consider.

See, that's what I mean. I want to believe it's ineffective because then the moral implications are very clear and simple. If it is effective (to one extent or another), then the morality becomes hazy (as things generally do in war) -- Jack Bauer scenarios or no.

Honestly, I don't have enough information about it to really know how effective it is or not. I really only know what I want the truth to be.

[TemporalWisdom]

I want to believe it's ineffective because then the moral implications are very clear and simple.

That's an interesting point. Some people likely do have a skewed perception of torture's effectiveness based on their own personal beliefs.

For my part, I have absolutely no moral compunctions about torturing terrorists...IF I know one hundred percent for sure that they're bona fide terrorists. You're out to destroy my country, my people, and my family? Take a deep breath, because I'll cheerfully submerge you myself.

But it's the same story as the death penalty; innocent people can be and are subjected to it. No getting around it. Most often black people get the needle, and most often Arabs are forced to stay awake for days. The obvious answer is not to execute or torture anyone. Add to that the fact that we're inviting other countries to do the same to our soldiers....

People at CIA, regardless of your opinion of their methods and motives, aren't stupid. Why would they expend this much time and effort doing something if it didn't produce results, i.e. actionable intelligence?

The racial inequality and other such problems with the death penalty are much more well documented. No reasonable person, who knows the facts, supports the death penalty and yet it still stands - a notable part of Bush's legacy in Texas. Best not to assume that the CIA isn't staffed by idiots. And you just know what would happen to a non-idiot who opposed torture.

Dan, Erick, I appreciate that you're playing devil's advocate, but I'm going to have to side with Harold's argument of silence. You ask a reasonable question, but we shouldn't have to provide proof that torture doesn't work - those who support it should have to demonstrate that it does. The burden of proof is on them, otherwise my default assumption will be: torture is an unreliable means of gathering information.

I'm guessing torture's effectiveness is more complex than you're making out, which is why there's debate about it in the first place.

That's probably true. I'd love to hear some honest and intelligent discussion about the questions you raise, but the Bush administration isn't much on two-sided dialogue.

[TemporalWisdom]

As a side-issue, I just called Sen. Webb's office to express my disappointment that he voted to preserve legal immunity for the telcos that helped Bushco engage in warrantless wiretapping.

What's the point of voting for Democrats when they act just like Republicans?

Are we talking wiretapping of criminals or those engaged in acts of war? I'd like to think we can handle the latter a bit differently. Or perhaps we should require our soldiers to give 'knock and notice' prior to bursting into an overseas terrorist hideout?

Are we talking wiretapping of criminals or those engaged in acts of war?

Warrantless wiretapping refers to those suspected of criminal activity, including treason.

I'd like to think we can handle the latter a bit differently.

Why? If sufficient evidence of treason exists to justify a wiretap, that evidence can be summarized to a judge with a security clearance. If such evidence doesn't exist, then it's clearly unconstitutional to wiretap.

Or perhaps we should require our soldiers to give 'knock and notice' prior to bursting into an overseas terrorist hideout?

The one has nothing to do with the other. That said, I would have a major problem with our soldiers bursting into suspected terrorist hideouts based on evidence that wouldn't convince a federal judge that there was probable cause. This is really all about establishing that law enforcement (or the military) takes reasonable precautions not to act against the truly innocent.

We're talking about the electronic surveillance of the general citizenry, even though Bush's original executive order authorizing warrantless wiretapping (itself a violation of the 4th Amendment) specifically targeted electronic communications with foreign contacts suspected to be Al Qaeda agents. We already have FISA, a court authorized to check off on this sort of surveillance which it almost always approves, but Bush felt that even that minimal oversight was too hindering.

Then we found out that the feds had requested that the major telcos like Verizon and AT&T hand over access to all of their customers' telephone and Internet records for massive data-mining on the offchance of catching terrorists. That means the government is asserting the right to read your e-mails and listen in to your phone conversations whenever it pleases, and you cannot sue the companies that cooperate with the government.

Well I applaud all the measures have been employed to keep us safe since 9-11. And I shudder to think of what might have befallen us had all of the left's desired hand-tying been implemented.

Well I applaud all the measures have been employed to keep us safe since 9-11. And I shudder to think of what might have befallen us had all of the left's desired hand-tying been implemented.

Remind me to introduce you to the post hoc fallacy someday.

First, there is no such critter as "the left" in this country. We have the far right extremists (the GOP) and the right of center (Democrat) parties. If "the left" actually existed, Kucinich wouldn't be the fringe figure that he is.

Moreover, Bush hasn't done jack to keep America safe because that would mean inconveniencing his corporate pals. Why don't we check shipping containers that enter this country? That would be a concrete measure that would be far more effective at stopping an attack on US soil. Why hasn't Bush sufficiently funded rail security when far more people use subways and trains than airplanes every day? Why haven't we leaned harder on Pakistan to give up Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of their nuclear program who sold nuclear materials to North Korea and Iran?

Installing the framework of a police state does not equate to making America safe. We are as vulnerable to a devastating attack now as we were in 2001.

Wake up--the government is playing you.

How thoroughly must Gobear devastate Future Man's arguments?

Au contraire. Gobear has committed the rarely encountered post hoc fallacy-fallacy, thus: Just because something has not occurred, it does not mean that it has not occurred because of the efforts to make it not occur.

Mr. G and I voted for Obama here in Northern Virginia, so we're happy with the result (and we're celebrating with Indian takeout and Jacob's Creek Shiraz). BTW, I called Sen. Webb's office today to express my disappointment that he voted for the telcos' immunity from prosecution for handing over consumer records to the government.

Au contraire. Gobear has committed the rarely encountered post hoc fallacy-fallacy, thus: Just because something has not occurred, it does not mean that it has not occurred because of the efforts to make it not occur.

Reverse the parties and have a President Gore putting out signing statements that ignore laws which he has signed on a regular basis, have a President Gore authorizing torture & warrantless wiretaps, ahve a President Kerry disregarding basic constituitional principles and how happy would you be with your percieved safety then? Wrong is wrong Mike no matter where you sit on the fence. Right, left, liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican, Bush has taken this country on a road which has sacrificed the soul of our nation for some false sense of security and I hope to god that which ever person is elected president can return our country to the ideals & principles that has always defined us as a nation. It is the single biggest failing of George Bush. At the point where this country most needed a leader who could bring us together as a nation we instead found ourselves with a coward who used the greatest tragedy this country has ever seen to divide us. At the end of the day it is why I think Obama is going to win. Most people are simply tired of the steady diet or fear & distrust we have been fed since 9/11. Most people know we can do better, most people know we have to do better to survive as a nation. Obama offers that hope in a way that neither McCain or Clinton does.

So yeah, big night for Obama. That is what, 8 straight primaries & caucuses he has taken?...most by huge numbers. With the way the Democrats are dividing up delegates Clinton is going to have to post some huge numbers to even come within spitting distance of closing the gap Obama now enjoys. Like I said a dozen or so posts ago, yeah, I think she is done. The corpse still has a lot of fight left in it but a corpse is still dead even if it doesn't know it yet.

Au contraire. Gobear has committed the rarely encountered post hoc fallacy-fallacy, thus: Just because something has not occurred, it does not mean that it has not occurred because of the efforts to make it not occur.

There. I've transferred the entirety of this argument to a different thread. Don't splash on the other one.

[Chris_Sax]

[Chris_Sax]

By focusing on waterboarding, we can sometimes forget that the other "alternative techniques" for "enhanced interrogation" are also forms of torture, even when they leave no permanent marks, or, in the words of AEI's John Yoo, do not cause major organ failure. The term "stress position" for example, when uttered by someone like Rush Limbaugh, who described some of what happened at Abu Ghraib as nothing more serious than fraternity hazing, can seem banal, even defensible. These positions, which the president strongly supports, can nonetheless become very quickly hideous acts of cruelty. Here's a photo of what the Nazis called Pfahlbinden.



You can seen that individuals are contorted just by the weight of their own bodies into positions of excruciating pain that lasts until it is unbearable. In this picture, it does not appear that the methods are being used to interrogate. They are being used for sadistic purposes. They are worse thah the 'stress positions" we have evidence of in US custody because the Nazi prisoners were literally suspended in the air, their feet barely touching the ground.. But the victums of US stress positions were chained to fixtures and wall with hands chained above and behind the head, with feet barely on the ground. They had a tiny bit more support for their feet, but it often made the procedure longer and in end, therefore, more painful.

When you hear a banal phrase like "stress position", and hear people dismiss it, remember that everything is in the doing. And when human beings are given total control over others, they are capable of great evil. Sane and civilized societies do not give permission for such things. And they do not make excuses for them. And when they discover they have been done, they investigate and prosecute those who broke the law.

I like how we are acting like the three guys on the destroyed waterboarding tapes are the only people that have been tortured in US captivity, and that the practices weren't widespread at prisons from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to secret prisons in the former Soviet Bloc, and it's not like we've been grabbing people on the flimsiest of information from unreliable sources, right?

Warning: the paragraphs in italics were written by a homosexual, so they are inherently untrustworthy, since it's all just a pre-text to recruit more gays.

[Dan Mancini]

This thread is torture. Therefore, you're all evil.

[Chris_Sax]

So this thread is WORSE than waterboarding? Because waterboarding isn't torture. It's only torture if it causes permanent physical harm. That never used to be the definition of torture, but it is now.

[Future Man]

Clearly the guys who saw off the heads of living victims in between planning attacks on civilian centers should be given full Miranda warnings and otherwise be afforded all of the court-created rights of stateside criminals that have had such a demonstrably beneficial effect on our society in the last 40 years and if you say otherwise I will open up a can of post hoc fallacy because the alternative would be to acknowledge that not every implemented liberal policy has proven to be a public benefit and that sometimes we overcorrect problems to the detriment of us all. My opinion is more than the word implies, it carries with it the authority of correctness, and is not merely borne of my being brought up in a region whose intelligentsia tends to sympathize (from a safe distance) with those they perceive to be the Downtrodden over the mean ol' Superpower, and anyone who says otherwise must be a jack-booted sadistic fascist and if you still do not agree with me I will find another Nazi atrocity photo that irrefutably proves my point. How'd I do?

[Chris_Sax]

We are absolutely certain that everyone being detained by the US is guilty. Every one of them has personally beheaded someone AND been to several dogfights. It is an impossibility that we picked someone up on bad intel or they were just some random farmer in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's why it's such a good idea to torture them! It really helps us win the hearts and minds of the people we are trying to convert to stable democracy! The ONLY people who feel differently are big-city coastal liberal elites who studied something other than business or religion in big city elitist colleges! There are NO conservatives or former military officers who disagree with these practices whatsoever! It is important to characterize everyone who objects to the US employing tactics that were also employed by the Khmer Rouge as handwringing pacifists ensconced in the cocoon of liberal denial. Like John McCain.

Also, it is acceptable to do anything that might be morally questionable as long as your opponent has done things that are worse. As long as the US is not as bad as Saddam/The Taliban/The Insurgency, then everything it does is ok. This is not a simplistic, terribly flawed argument, and anyone who disagrees is an appeaser who should have his or her loyalty questioned.

[Dan Mancini]

So this thread is WORSE than waterboarding? Because waterboarding isn't torture. It's only torture if it causes permanent physical harm. That never used to be the definition of torture, but it is now.

I can't say for sure whether this thread is worse than waterboarding because I've never been waterboarded. But I do know that it's causing me permanent physical harm.

[Chris_Sax]

here is a relevant article, Dan.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann/

[Future Man]

It is such a shame that because of Bush, Muslim extremists have gone from loving the U.S. to hating us so much. He squandered so much good will! In fact, until they became distracted by planning 9-11, they were planning a big 'thank you' celebration for our helping their fellow Muslims in Bosnia! Oh, why can't we be more like France, and just count on someone else to provide for our national defense, get rid of any vestige of personal morality and simply live for pleasure.

[HGervais]

Also, it is acceptable to do anything that might be morally questionable as long as your opponent has done things that are worse. As long as the US is not as bad as Saddam/The Taliban/The Insurgency, then everything it does is ok. This is not a simplistic, terribly flawed argument, and anyone who disagrees is an appeaser who should have his or her loyalty questioned.

That is pretty much where I sit. Put all the things to the side..... the additional danger it places our military in, the effectiveness of the procedures, the assumption that everyone we pick up is guilty.....you have to keep coming back to does America stand for something and is being a little better than our enemies a position we really want to be in?
We either trust our system of justice or we don't. And if we don't, what are we really defending?

[HGervais]

It is such a shame that because of Bush, Muslim extremists have gone from loving the U.S. to hating us so much. He squandered so much good will! In fact, until they became distracted by planning 9-11, they were planning a big 'thank you' celebration for our helping their fellow Muslims in Bosnia! Oh, why can't we be more like France, and just count on someone else to provide for our national defense, get rid of any vestige of personal morality and simply live for pleasure.

Single dumbest, most ignorant, most insulting post we will see here, well at least today. Sad & pathetic.