Category: The Bush Legacy

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Law Morality National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Name, Rank and Serial Number

[digg-reddit-me]Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. “Name, rank and serial number” does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask.

Porter Goss, former director of the CIA, in the Washington Post.

Right-wingers from the National Review to Rush Limbaugh to Porter Goss has repeated this line ad infinitum – this constant suggestion or occasionally accusation that opponents of torture only want to ask members of al Qaeda for their “name, rank and serial number.” This is a distortion of the position many opponents of torture take – that the Geneva Conventions do apply even to terrorists. A commenter called salubrius provides a decent breakdown:

There are two standards for interrogation in the Geneva Convention. One standard applies to POWs or prisoners of war. These prisoners have a preferred status in that they may not be coerced to provide information other than their name, rank and serial number. The other standard applies to those who do not qualify as POWs. These are also referred to as unlawful enemy combatants. The Supreme Court in 1942 referred to this classification of lawful and unlawful combatants. 

Terrorists and suspected terrorists are still protected under the Geneva Conventions – though not to the extent of prisoners of war or civilians. Geneva provides certain mininimal protections for “those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.” Namely, Geneva provides that such persons “shall nevertheless be treated with humanity” and “shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention.” This is the position held by most if not all of those who insist that Geneva still applies to terrorists.

Proponents of torture try to mislead those not following the political conversation closely by disingenously claiming that their opponents consider asking anything more than “name, rank, and serial number” to be torture. In fact, the most successful interrogators of terrorists so far have also been opponents of torture – from Ali Soufan of the FBI to Matthew Alexander of military intelligence.

Continue reading “Name, Rank and Serial Number”
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Barack Obama Morality National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

When Obama Should Torture Osama

[digg-reddit-me]I feel compelled to respond to Michael Scheuer’s op-ed in the Washington Post. A friend of mine who is in military intelligence brought the story to my attention with an approving comment.

Scheuer is a interesting thinker who have lived and breathed the world of Al Qaeda since before anyone else knew its name. His analysis is always interesting – but his opinions are usually marred by his constant imputation of base motives to anyone with whom he disagrees on policy grounds. This often makes him sound like a political hack rather than an intelligence analyst. In his most recent op-ed, he claims that Barack Obama is “a genuine American Jacobin” placing ideology above reality. (Scheuer doesn’t acknowledge that one of the worse abuses of the real-life Jacobins was their torturing of opponents.) Scheuer goes on:

[T]he president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families.

Scheuer believes that by ending American torture, the administration is “enthroning Obama’s personal morality as U.S. defense policy.” He argues that the bases for getting rid of torture are simply lies – that torture did not inflame Muslim anger and that it is effective. Scheuer fails to make either point convincingly.

His proof that torture did not inflame the Muslim world is that other things make them madder. (“[T]hey do not even make the Islamists’ hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools”.) Certainly, American torture was not one of the core objections of Al Qaeda – but it did apparently inflame the insurgency in Iraq – as any student of history could have predicted, as torture has served a similar purpose in Algeria under French occupation and in Ireland under British occupation.

On torture’s effectiveness, Scheuer simply expresses outrage that Obama would implicity question the integrity of those who authorized torture. (“[T]he president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know…that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation’s defense.”) Scheuer point should be complicated by the fact that these officials now are seen to be liars because came forward to publicly castigate President Obama, at least in part on false premises – not because the president went out of his way to paint them as liars

Most inanely, Scheuer seems to think that it is merely Obama’s “personal morality” rather than a concern for Rule of Law and our national character that motivates him. This assumption of Scheuer’s part makes him look like a political hack – as Obama has always expressed his opposition to torture as a matter of law and national morality – rather than his own human queasiness. It’s hard to understand how Scheuer can get into the mind of an Al Qaeda operative and convincingly describe the motives of a terrorist but is unwilling or unable to convincingly describe the thought-processes of his opponents closer to home, such as the president.

But the most interesting point Scheuer makes is in his opening hypothetical situation- which he abruptly drops in favor of his piss-poor political analysis. 

The scenario Scheuer describes is this: we have captured Osama Bin Laden. He declares that he knows where and when a devastating nuclear attack will hit America, but he refuses to give any further information. Scheuer presumes torture is an efficient method of getting information, a kind of magical truth serum. This is the type of ticking-time-bomb scenario that theorists often discuss but has never yet happened in recorded history.

Under these circumstances, Scheuer explains, Obama must order Bin Laden be tortured.

Given this hypothetical example – and if torture was believed to be effective – even Obama would have to agree based on his public statements and liberal positions. This is what Scheuer does not understand. 

Liberals do not oppose torture merely because they think it makes us look bad in the eyes of the world or because it violates their individual ethical principles or because they do not believe America has ruthless enemies or because they instinctually take the side of America’s enemies – all of whcih either Scheuer or various other right-wingers have suggsted. Liberals oppose torture because they know history – and they know that even the great and good can be corrupted by power. That means, even America can be corrupted.

America was founded on a certain conception of the individual as having inalienable right that cannot be abrogated by the state. Because of this, America has always been able to differentiate itself from it’s enemies by the fact that it did not torture. While the British tortured Americans during the Revolution, our fledgling nation survived; as the American and Soviet armies marched across Germany our reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners led the highest value Germans to flee towards American lines to surrender to us. To highlight this fundamental difference with our enemies, Ronald Reagan championed the United Nations Convention on Torture. Liberals believe in the idea that is America – and refuse to preemptively surrender it out of fear. Liberals know that once a government is allowed to torture, it is a very slippery slope to tyranny. Which is why this torture debate has never been about the terrorists – it is about us.

Which is why I am sure that Obama would, and if not he should, order that Bin Laden be tortured in the hypothetical example above. But to preserve the Rule of Law and “the idea that is America,” he would not try to hide behind talk of “bad apples” and legalistic memos. He would have to take personal responsibility for this extraordinary and illegal use of authority – and once the crisis has passed he would have to appoint a special prosecutor to examine his actions and put them before the public in an open and transparent matter.

To preserve the Rule of Law, any one who ordered torture or who tortured would have to place himself or herself at the mercy of the public and law enforcement. 

Postscript: Antother thing that Scheuer fails to acknowledge is that George W. Bush’s torture regime was nothing like the hypothetical he offered. Torture did not work quickly – and indeed lasted for months in the publicly acknowledged cases. Interrogators had no ticking time bombs forcing their hand. And in fact, we also know that some false information gleaned from torture was used to justify the Iraq war. This is what torture has always been good for – not as a truth serum, but for extracting politically necessary confessions.

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National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Torture Works…For Some Things…

[digg-reddit-me]Throughout history, the main purpose of torture – from the the castration of William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace to the water boarding of heretics before councils of the Inquisition to the various stress techniques used by the Soviet Union to break dissidents – has been to extract politically necessary confessions to justify the policies of the state (or church). In this, history has shown that torture has been extraordinarily successful.

Frank Rich in the New York Times suggests a similar motive for American torture in his latest column:

Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002…: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Rich suggests a level of malintent which I do not think is necessary to understand the White House decision to torture. But the connection he makes is a valid one. It was largely the confessions extracted by torture that made the case for Iraq seem urgent – beyond the various circumstantial evidence presented. It is known, for example, that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah, each of whom provided key information linking Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, were tortured in order to extract this information. We now know the information they provided was false.

In other words – torture works – it can break someone’s will – and force them to tell you what you want to hear. But history has not demonstrated it can force someone to tell the truth. In action movies it always works – in real life, apparently not.

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National Security The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Cheney Didn’t Panic

[digg-reddit-me]Andrew Sullivan begins to explain Dick Cheney’s recent odd agreement with anti-torture journalist Mark Danner – as both call for the release of memos which demonstrate the efficacy of torture with this typically insightful observation:

The one thing you saw most plainly in the Plame affair is how obsessed Dick Cheney is with public image, the chattering classes and spinning stories that might reflect poorly on him. The act is the elder statesman, authoritatively reviewing the world scene, soberly making judgments, calmly explaining it later to those pesky people who are required to elect you every four years.

This seems obviously true now that I’ve read it – although I cannot remember this point being discussed before. Cheney demonstrated that he cared a great deal for his public image – even if he was not concerned with that other related quality which we can call popularity. Where I think Andrew goes wrong is in how he explains Cheney’s support for torture in the next sentence:

The reality is a man who lost it on 9/11, leapt immediately to apocalyptic conclusions, and then, as the dust cleared, was unable to go back on the war crimes he had authorized and so dug in ever more deeply to justify them.

I cannot know what precisely motivated Cheney in the aftermath of September 11. But my impression is not that he lost it – but that he saw it as an opportunity to do what needed to be done. Certainly Andrew would agree with this assessment as to Cheney’s motivation regarding executive power and the unitary executive and even the invasion of Iraq. Cheney wanted to do all of these things beforehand and saw September 11 as a justification for each of his preconceived policy prescriptions. Andrew is now trying to account for why Cheney authorized torture – starting with the presumption that he did not plan on doing so beforehand. I too doubt that Cheney intended to institute a policy of torture before he came into the White House. But I believe that given his beliefs, it was inevitable that he would support it, whether September 11 happened or not. Without September 11, he may never have been given the chance to support it – but he would have done so if he had been given such a chance.

There is little evidence of Cheney’s thinking about torture before September 11 – although Barton Gellman in The Angler describes Cheney’s beliefs about torture in the context of the kidnapping and torture of William Buckley by Hezbollah in Beirut in 1984:

Cheney had been thinking about the power of cruelty since at least 1984. In March of that year, the CIA’s chief of station in Beirut, William Buckley, fell into the hands of Hezbollah. “He has kidnapped and tortured,” recalled Tom Smeeton, a former CIA officer who served then as minority staff director of the House Intelligence Committee. Cheney, a committee member, followed the Buckley case closely, reviewing a secretly obtained videotape of the station chief’s decline. Cheney “was quite concerned about the implications of his torture and what that could mean in terms of revelations of various intelligence operations going on in the Middle East,” Smeeton said. The presumption they shared, with foreboding, was that torture worked.

I’m sure Cheney – like many who watch action movies – believed that torture was effective. At the same time, Cheney seemed to have a romantic notion of doing the hard, unpopular thing – of living in moral gray areas – of the dark but necessary arts. This of course was evident in his infamous Meet the Press appearance on September 16, 2001. You can see this attitude in his opinion of the crimes of the Richard Nixon and Iran-Contra scandals. This romanticization of the Dark Side of power – the necessary evils done by rough men in the night to protect the rest of us made torture was inevitable. Of course, torture is not normally considered a “gray” area – so a legalistic distinction had to be made:

After September 11, Cheney and his allies pioneered a distinction that the U.S. government had not claimed before. “Torture,” narrowly defined, would remain out of bounds. But violent, cruel, or degrading methods, the terms of art in Geneva, were perfectly lawful.

But the main reason I don’t buy the idea that Cheney’s decision to torture was a product of panic was his apparent composure on September 11 – and the coherence of his response. Back to Barton Gellman in The Angler again:

If a mandarinate ruled America, the recruiting committee on September 11 would have had to find someone like Cheney. “I don’t want to get too poetic about this, but it’s almost as if his whole life had been a preparation for this moment in history,” said Jack Kemp, who used to be a future vice president himself. Scooter Libby quoted that line, too, giving credit to Winston Churchill. Cheney professed no knowledge of fate. He had some acquaintance, though, with force and counterforce. Al Qaeda having struck on his watch, Cheney made clear by word and deed that he would take a leading role in the nation’s reply. So, too, did Libby and Addington. The three of them simply knew what had to be done, a considerable advantage in the debate that would soon follow.

By my reading, the Bush administration approved torture because in the aftermath of September 11, every one panicked – except Dick Cheney – who calmly applied his governing philosophy to the crisis. Cheney himself fomented and controlled the panic with such things as the One Percent Doctrine. His romantic attitude is best demonstrated by the character of Jack Bauer:

Except apparently for the fact that Bauer is humanized by his guilt over what he has done and believes it is necessary for the system to bring him to justice.

Cheney has exhibited no such guilt for his actions – and in fact has demonstrated pride.

Cheney didn’t panic on September 11 – and I don’t think he is panicking now. He does not believe he did anything wrong – and he does believe that no matter what the press says today, history will support him in the end. This is part of his romantic self-image – of a master of the Dark Side. He knows that if torture is held to be not only evil, but an ineffective (and indeed counterproductive) tactic, his legacy will be forever blackened. He’s fighting for his legacy – part of which is the endorsement of torture. He truly believes torture works – and he seems to feel no shame about having authorized it.

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Humor Politics The Bush Legacy

A man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters.

Bush is “a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters..”

So said conservative magazine editor James Poulos according to Charles Homan’s new article in the Washington Monthly on Culture11.

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Foreign Policy Iran Iraq National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

The Iran-Iraq Balance

Musings on Iraq writes:

For the last several decades, security in the Middle East has been largely defined by outside powers. From the 1970s on the U.S. tried to play Iran off of Iraq. The 2003 invasion disrupted this balance of power, and the U.S. has been attempting to rebuild it ever since. Iran has been adamantly opposed to re-creating this system, preferring a friendly Iraq rather than a new enemy. This conflict over ideas about security is at the heart of the dispute between Iran and the U.S.

(H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

This observation is not new – but it is concise and distills the essence of Iran’s moves with regards to Iraq – whether they be asserting influence over the Iraqi leadership, undermining the American occupation by supplying weapons and other support to the Shiite insurgency, pulling back the Shiite insurgency to allow the surge to succeed, offering help in the run-up to the war. A less charitable phrasing of the above – which states that Iran just wants to avoid having Iraq as an enemy – is that Iran wants to have significant control over Iraq, or at least influence there. But either way, the essential dispute between America and Iran in Iraq is not over issues but over Iranian influence itself. This is true if you look at most Iranian-American disputes – they are not over issues as much as they are over limiting or expanding Iranian influence. 

In the end, there are only two real points of contention: Israel and nuclear arms. They are serious issues, but it seems likely that a pragmatic Iranian leadership could make bargains on each. If America is able to finally create a Palestinian state – or make significant progress on this front – it will give Iran an opening to accept Israel. On nuclear weaponry, a pragmatic government might be persuaded to refrain from taking the final steps in developing a nuclear weapon once it could prove that it had reached the point where it had the knowledge and equipment to do so. If Iran remained an adversary in the region, the prospective nuclear weapon could still cause significant trouble – but if it were brought into an alliance with America, it would not.

And as I have maintained before – Iran and America are natural allies on most issues – even if the current president Ahmadinejad represents the part of Iran Americans are most suspicious of.

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Foreign Policy National Security Pakistan The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Pakistan: The Nexus

Barton Gellman on page 229 of his book, The Angler:

By his own declared measurements of danger, Iraq should not have been the center of the spiderweb for Cheney. The nexus, if it was anywhere, was in Pakistan – a nuclear state whose national hero sold parts to the highest bidder, whose intelligence service backed the Taliban, and whose North-West Frontier Province became a refugre for al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia, too, had a lot more links to bin Laden than Iraq did. As Cheney saw it, there was nothing decisive to be done about those countries. Washington needed whatever help the Saudis and Pakistanis were willing to provide, and if either government fell, the successor was almost sure to be worse.

The Bush administration’s failure to deal with Pakistan may be it’s most profound misstep. Of course, the lack of appropriate information and pressure on the part of the CIA and the Clinton administration also contributed to the problem. Regardless, it is clear that when we refer to the fight against terrorism, the nexus of our concerns and our war is Pakistan. Christoper Hitchens wrote a column entitled, “Pakistan is the problem” back in September in which he discusses the role the ISI, Pakistan’s security service, plays in sponsoring terrorism against India and Afghanistan – about how the Taliban and al Qaeda were both financed, supported, and to some extent created by Pakistan to encourage their strategic depth – and how A. Q. Khan created a global bazaar in nuclear weaponry, seemingly with the consent and support of the Pakistani military:

[W]e were too incurious to take note of the fact that Pakistan’s chief nuclear operative, A.Q. Khan, had opened a private-enterprise “Nukes ‘R’ Us” market and was selling his apocalyptic wares to regimes as disparate as Libya and North Korea, sometimes using Pakistani air force planes to make the deliveries.

At the same time, Pakistan is – whether intentionally or not – furthering the chaos in Afghanistan. American national security types have expressed their frustration about this in various ways:

It’s tough to fight a war in Afghanistan when the opposing team decides to fight the war in Pakistan.

Alternately, David Sanger explains the boozy hypothetical question asked by one of his friends involved with Pakistan and national security:

How can you invade an ally?

The situation, as complicated and fraught as it already is, is growing more unstable. The New York Times editorial board sums it up:

Almost no one wants to say it out loud. But…Pakistan is edging ever closer to the abyss.

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Barack Obama Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

A Summary of the Civil Libertarian Case for a “War” Against Terrorism

[digg-reddit-me]Liberals and those concerned about civil liberties should embrace the term “war” and policies consistent with some form of a war against terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror has largely discredited this idea because he abused the term, used it as a political wedge issue, and used it as a cloak for his attempts to remove checks to his power. But Obama has a chance to create a framework for a rational and effective war against terrorism – by redefining the aims of this war from aggrandizing the power of the president to preserving the rule of law and our way of life.

Bush’s War on Terror too quickly evolved from a struggle against terrorism to an attack on the rule of law and on any other checks on the president’s power – a war planned in advance of September 11, but justified in the aftermath by a fear of terrorism. The goal of this war was to ensure maximum flexibility for the executive to act which distracted the president from determining and taking the most effective actions. Bush focused on whether he could use torture rather than on whether torture was effective; he wanted the power to detain any individual without any oversight – without taking into account that this would hurt our war aims; he wanted the authority to wiretap and otherwise intercept communications without any limits, and so he authorized the commission of felonies based on a wacky legal theory that expanded his power rather than asking the law to be changed. Bush declared War on Terror but waged war on any checks to his power.

Obama must continue to fight the Wars Against Terrorism ((I think the term “War on Terror” is misleading and vague. We need a new formulation. I’m not crazy about “Wars Against Terrorism” but for the moment, it’s the best I’ve got. It conveys both the multiple fronts of the war as well as the primary enemy, a tactic that strikes at the Achilles heel of our society.)) while reversing Bush’s war against checks on presidential power. Obama must focus on strengthening our society and its’ instutions (including our civil liberties and the rule of law); he must take measures to protect America from catastrophic events and attacks; and he must focus on creating resilient structures that can bounce back after an attack.

Some have asked if war is the right model to achieve these goals. They usually suggest a law enforcement approach instead.

I believe war is the right approach – as war is how a society has always responded to violent existential threats. Terrorism is such a threat. The term war has evolved over time to cover different state responses to these violent existential threats – and in this case it must evolve again. As part of our strategic approach to this war, we must aim to preserve the rule of law and create a more resilient society after an attack. 

At the same time, civil libertarians should realize that if we were to declare the war over, we would leave our society’s values vulnerable in the aftermath of the next attack – as perhaps, Americans shaken and vulnerable, seek a return to war footing, as they sought after September 11, and those liberties granted in peacetime will be once again revoked.

Instead, we must continue this war; but rather instead of seeing the rule of law as an obstacle, preserving it must be our fundamental war aim.

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Law National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Congressman Pete King Wants Club Med Investigated For Human Rights Violations Just Like Guantanamo

[digg-reddit-me]He must have had a bad experience with Club Med. 

Military.com reports that:

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who led a group of congressmen to Guantanamo, told the New York Post the facility was like a Club Med for terrorists.

Club Med? The most reasonable explanation is that Congressman Pete King (my congressman and likely 2010 Republican Senate candidate) was treated very badly at this resort chain, and I’ve contacted Club Med inquiring about this. If Pete King is saying that Club Med is like Guantanamo, he is apparently alleging that they have treated their guests similar to how the prisoners at Guantanamo were treated. So, what types of things happen at Club Med, according to Pete King? Here’s a few examples:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed.

The Guardian.

Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, was assaulted in January 2003 [at Guantanamo Bay] after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee. Baker said the MPs, who were told that he was an unruly detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant, inflicted a beating that resulted in a traumatic brain injury…

[Pentagon] officials conceded that he was treated for injuries suffered when a five-man MP “internal reaction force” choked him, slammed his head several times against a concrete floor and sprayed him with pepper gas…

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, “red,” and shouted: “I’m a U.S. soldier! I’m a U.S. soldier!” He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

The Los Angeles Times.

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions…

Bob Woodward in the Washington Post.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The New York Times.

Then there’s the fact that Khadr claims to have confessed under torture. Videos of him weeping during an interrogation surfaced last year and served only to remind the world that he was a teenager confined at Guantanamo among “the worst of the worst.” Khadr was allegedly shackled in stress positions until he urinated on himself, then covered with pine solvent and used as a “human mop” to clean his own urine. He was beaten, nearly suffocated, beset by attack dogs, and threatened with rape. In May 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canada v. Khadr that the detention of Khadr at Guantanamo Bay “constituted a clear violation of fundamental human rights protected by international law…” We need to start to make amends for the fact that children in our custody were tortured.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.

Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was doused with water. He was prevented from praying. He was forced to watch as an interrogator squatted over his Koran.

That much is known. These details were among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani’s aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…

[Later h]e was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours per day [using coercive rather than sexually humiliating methods, including waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and extreme temperatures], for 48 of the next 54 days, according to an Army investigative report. On Dec. 7, 2002, he had to be revived at the detainee hospital when his heart rate fell to 35 beats per minute, according to a log of the interrogation published by Time magazine. Then the interrogation continued.

FBI agents at Guantanamo joined the opposition. A Nov. 27 FBI “legal analysis,” since reported by Newsweek, labeled several parts of the plan as “coercive interrogation techniques which are not permitted by the U.S. Constitution.” It also warned that several of the proposed tactics could constitute torture, depending on how a judge viewed the intent of the interrogator.

MSNBC.

Clearly, if Club Med is anything like Guantanamo is, it should be investigated for torture, prisoner abuse, child abuse, and various violations of international treaties. I’m awaiting a response from Morgan E. Painvin, Club Med’s listed press contact, as to whether Pete King has any substantiation for his apparent allegations of torture and human rights abuses at Club Med.

An alternate and plausible explanation would be that Pete King has been involved in sadomasochism for too long and that it has warped his sense of pleasure and pain. Of course, it’s brave of a suburban politician to admit such a fetish. So I must commend him for his honesty if this is his way of coming out.

I’m not sure I can think of any other reasonable explanations for this statement by Congressman King without calling him delusional, a liar, incredibly ignorant, or a propagandist.

[Photo licensed under Creative Commons courtesy of Ed your don.]

Categories
Barack Obama History Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

A Confession of Love To The Paradox That Is America

Andrew Sullivan sees the essence of America’s strength as it’s constitutional Burkean conservatism:

I’ve learnt over the years that the constitutional system that seems designed to prevent change has more wisdom in it than some more centralised parliamentary systems; and because the very chaotic, decentralised and often irrational mess of American state and federal politics also allows for real innovation and debate in ways that simply do not occur as vibrantly elsewhere. The frustration and innovation are part of the same system. You cannot remove one without also stymieing the other.

Yet:

America can drive you up the wall. To Europeans and world-weary Brits, it can sometimes seem almost barmy in its backwardness. It is a country where one state, Arkansas, has just refused to repeal a statute barring atheists from holding public office but managed in the same session to pass a law allowing guns in churches. It incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than even Russia and aborts more babies per capita than secular Europe.

Darwin remains a controversial figure, but Sarah Palin was a serious candidate to be vice-president…

On race, of course, this is especially true. No civilised country sustained slavery as recently as America or defended segregation as tenaciously as the American South until just a generation ago. In my lifetime, mixed-race couples were legally barred from marrying in many states. But equally in my lifetime, a miscegenated man who grew up in Hawaii won a majority of the votes in the old slave state of Virginia to become the first minority president of any advanced western nation.

That is the paradox of America; and after a while you find it hard to appreciate anything more coherent. What keeps America behind is also what keeps pushing it relentlessly, fitfully forward…

You live with the worst because you yearn for the best, because the worst in its turn seems somehow to evoke the best. From the civil war came Abraham Lincoln; from the Great Depression came Franklin D. Roosevelt; from segregation came Martin Luther King; and from George Bush came Barack Obama. America may indeed drive us up the wall, but it also retains a wondrous capacity to evoke the mountain top and what lies beyond.

Read the whole thing.