December 20, 2008

"A direct cause of detainee abuse"

One of the topics that I haven't weighed in on yet is the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first I assumed that the story was going to be so well covered that I didn't need to write about torture again, and then I got busy. But as Glenn Greenwald chronicles, the story was almost entirely ignored by everyone outside the blogosphere:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:


The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections. "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said. Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

A bipartisan report issued without a single dissent explicitly connects senior administration officials and even the president himself to war crimes, and the entire country just shrugs its shoulders and moves on?

Andrew Sullivan:

The Senate's bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.


The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves.

It gets worse:

The torture and abuse techniques authorized by the president of the United States were drawn from methods designed by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions from broken human beings (although many of the torture methods - from hypothermia to sleep deprivation - had been pioneered by the Gestapo using George Tenet's precise phrase "enhanced interrogation". The historical proof of this is here - and Americans tried and executed those responsible for the same techniques now used by the president of the United States.)

Of all of the people involved in this, the one's I've always thought should be held least accountable are the enlisted men and women who were put into the middle of this god-awful mess, and yet so far they are the only ones who have been held accountable. This makes less than no sense. The entire premise of the chain of command in the military is that responsibility flows up the chain, not down. When people are issuing orders that might send people to their death, there simply is no other way for things to work. And yet in this instance, things have been deliberately manipulated by the administration, its defenders, and by some of the military brass to make sure that we only look down and not up.

Scott Horton:

The report tells us that when photos and other evidence of abuse first surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their policies and the abuse, then attempted to scapegoat a group of more than a dozen young recruits (but not, of course, any of their supervising officers, who knew the details of the administration's involvement and would have made things messy if disciplined). The report puts these actions in an unforgiving light:


The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

One final point before I let this go, and for that I head back to Andrew:

The MSM also made torture possible - especially cable news. Even PBS demanded that guests not use the word torture to decribe torture. The issue was barely present in the last campagn; and Bush has not been asked about his war crimes in any single exit interview so far. The AP and the NYT and the WaPo collude in robbing the English language of its plain meaning. This is not to bely that amazing work that many MSM reporters have done - from Dana Priest and Jane Mayer to Scott Horton and Charlie Savage. But so many of their editors seem unable to tell the truth about this country's war crimes in the past seven years.

The fact that it all this is inconvenient and uncomfortable makes it more important to speak the truth, not less. And yet up and down the line, there's silence.

This country has not always been this way. From the time of George Washington straight through to the Greatest Generation, we were better than this. We did not behave this way. We stood up to fight those who engaged in this sort of behavior. What has changed? Where did it all go so wrong?

December 13, 2008

Entirely Predictable

This won't surprise those of you who have been following along closely, but...

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.


The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag -- particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army -- the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.' "

Mr. Powell's assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

Now would be as good a time as any to plug Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the best history I've yet read on the early years of the Iraq War.

December 12, 2008

Inside the Cocoon...

Inside the conservative cocoon, people like Michelle Malkin are predicting that we on the left will "turn on a dime" on Patrick Fitzgerald as he investigates Democratic corruption.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, actual liberals are doing things like suggesting that Fitzgerald should be promoted from US Attorney to Deputy Attorney General.

Not only do I agree with this suggestion, I can add that I would have preferred Fitz over Holder as the actual AG. Can you imagine someone that committed to the idea of public service, the rule of law, and the constitution as our AG? A guy can dream....

December 10, 2008

An Update From Minnesota

I've made this prediciton to all of my students, but I don't think I've ever written it down here. Let's correct that.

Even if Coleman wins the recount for the Senate seat in Minnesota, he won't serve out his full term. Here's why.

Will They Never Learn?

It's funny... After spending months trying quite unsuccessfully to bring down Obama through a guilt-by-association campaign, you think that Republicans would know better than to try the same stupid tactic with this whole Balgojevich story.

Blagojevich is a jackass. Everyone who has even a passing understanding of the guy knows this. Blagojevich is also apparently a moron. I don't live anywhere near Illinois, and I knew that he was under investigation for a whole slew of different things. If I knew, then Obama knew. Now...

Having just won the Presidency of the United States, do you really think that Obama would choose to get involved with this idiot in his harebrained scheme? What about Obama's behavior over the last 2 years would suggest that this is a reasonable assumption?

And I'm not just speculating here, either. Patrick Fitzgerald has Blago on tape complaining that Obama's people, unlike some others (bye bye Jesse Jr.! looks like people jumped to conclusions on this one!), wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole:

Also during that call, Blagojevich agreed it was unlikely that Obama would name him Secretary of Health and Human Services or give him an ambassadorship because of all of the negative publicity surrounding him, according to the complaint.

In a conversation with Harris on Nov. 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew Obama wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them."

Or as Fitz himself said:

MR. FITZGERALD: Anna, I'm not going to go down anything that's not in the complaint. And what I simply said before is, I'm not -- I have enough trouble speaking for myself, I'm never going to try to speak in the voice of a president or president-elect. So I simply pointed out that if you look at the complaint, there's no allegation that the president-elect -- there's no reference in the complaint to any conversation involving the president-elect or indicating that the president-elect was aware of it, and that's all I can say.

Not that any of this has stopped the fevered speculation, of course. I mean, Blogo was trying to sell Obama's Senate seat. Isn't it obvious! That sentence has the name "Obama" in it! He must be involved!

OK, I'll bite:

Indeed, the prosecutors say that it was the ethics bill Obama was instrumental in getting passed that prompted Blagojevich's spree.

I give. You're right. Obama was involved. He passed the ethics reform law that helped box Blogo in. What an awful, horrible, terrible, no good, very bad thing to do.

And we still don't know who snitched on Blago, either.

But seriously...

Call me crazy, but I consider this a very good week for the Democratic Party. First Rep. Cash-in-the-Freezer Jefferson goes down to defeat, and then Blogo gets arrested. Everyone knew they were corrupt. It's nice to see they'll both be going away.

November 5, 2008

Still Awake! The Senate Version

Following up on the previous post...

+ GA: It's now not clear to me whether its just the early votes in Fulton and Gwinnett Counties that are missing or if its all of the early votes from the entire state. Either way, if I had to bet on this I'd put my money on a runoff. And if its the whole state that missing, I'd put my money on an Obama win.

+ OR: With about 70% in, Merkley is trailing the Incumbent Republican Smith by just a few thousand votes. But given the counties that are still outstanding, I'm feeling pretty good about this one right now. Not great, but good.... One question for my OR people: What's taking you so long? With vote-by-mail, you've got no excuse for not getting this one done tonight.

+ MN: With 99% in, Al Franken is up by about 1,100 votes. That's less than 1%, so it looks like we're headed for an automatic recount here.

+ AK: What the hell is wrong with you people? You're sending both Ted Stevens and Don Young back to DC? Really? Really? Just you watch: if Stevens wins, Palin will pick herself to fill his Senate seat. Mark my words...

October 28, 2008

Sen. Palin?

An odd thought: Can a governor name themselves to replace a resigning sitting Senator? Not that Uncle Ted is going to resign, but still...


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