A couple of Quotes from others on Torture

From Ta-Nehisi Coates:
It's amazing, though it shouldn't be, to see the former vice-president of the United States arguing that the government still should be torturing people, and that torture is one of the things he's proudest of. I think the worst thing about the Obama administration's "looking forward" doctrine is that it virtually guarantees that torture will happen again--perhaps even under the very next administration.
It not simply that modern America officially condones torture, it is that modern America condemns torture when executed by people we don't like, and calls it "enhanced interrogation" when we do it. Media has, in disgraceful fashion, bought this Orwellian line. I fully expect to see more enhanced interrogation in my lifetime. I would not be shocked to see it filter down to law enforcement. Foreign terrorists are not the only people who kill.

And for a more comprehensive look, in light of Dick Cheney's book, here's Dalia Lithwick. Basically she makes the point that torture is de facto legal when performed by the US government, thanks to Dick Cheney and to all of those (including Barack Obama) who have averted their eyes.  Many of my more liberal friends still support the torture policies of the Bush administration.  It's shameful.

More on Bradley Manning

I work in a psychiatric hospital, in which we regularly treat people who are truly suicidal.  But listening to the conditions under which Bradley Manning is being confined smacks not of protection from self-harm, but of cruel and unusual punishment.  He spent numerous nights completely naked, allegedly for fear that he would harm himself with his clothing, before eventually being given a smock of some kind.  He's being awakened regularly, he is in his cell for 23 hours a day with nobody to talk to, and his reading glasses have been confiscated.  And remember, he has not been convicted of any crime (not that that even matters- we don't do this to convicted people either).

If my hospital did any of this stuff to our suicidal patients, the state regulatory agency would sanction us severely and people would be fired.  And Manning hasn't made any suicidal threats.

The military is literally trying to drive Manning insane.  It's obscene.  And it's completely on Obama.

Sickening

I'm going to second the thoughts of Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker.  The Obama administration is acting exactly as badly as the Bush adminstration did on civil liberties.

Bradley Manning is an American citizen who has not been convicted of a crime.  He is being held in solitary confinement in a cell 23 hours a day, stripped naked every night "for his protection". 

Now let me be clear: if Manning indeed leaked classified government information to WikiLeaks, he deserves to be prosecuted, sentenced, and jailed for his crime.  I don't want our soldiers dumping information to foreign sources (or anyone else), and I'm all for throwing the book at this guy.

But when Amnesty International is calling for protests over the treatment of a US citizen being held awaiting trial by the US government, something is really wrong.  I guess it's now a bipartisan consensus that inhumane treatment of prisoners is just fine since we're under attack by Islamic fundamentalists.

Sickening.  I think what's most sickening is that there's hardly a peep out there from anyone in the maintream press about this issue.

Torture and the Media Conspiracy (posted by DT)

I know "conspiracy" is a strong word, but I don't see how one can argue it any other way when it comes to the US media and its response to the US torture policies of recent years.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com writes

On Monday, I noted that this Associated Press article twice used the word "torture" to describe what the Chinese Government did to Xue Feng, an American geologist now convicted of obtaining China's "state secrets." AP used the word "torture" despite the fact that (a) the treatment to which the Chinese subjected him (a few cigarette burns on his arms) clearly does not meet the Bush/Cheney/John-Yoo definition of "torture," and (b) the Chinese Government vehemently denies that its treatment of prisoners rises to the level of "torture." I very satirically demanded that AP apologize to China and cease using the word "torture" to describe what it did in light of the prevailing American media standard as articulated by the NYT's Bill Keller, The Washington Post, and NPR: namely, that the word "torture" must not be used by Good Journalists (at least when it comes to the U.S. Government) if the abuse falls short of the Government's official definition and/or if the Government denies that what it does is "torture." That, explained our leading media mavens, would be "taking sides," and only Bad Journalists do that.

Now Greenwald's post goes on to talk about media transparency, but I'm interested in how it portrays torture (Greenwald is too of course). I've had lots of arguments with liberal as well as conservative friends and relatives about whether waterboarding is torture. I am shocked that it has now become the consensus in the US that pretty much anything goes when it comes to treatment of terrorism suspects, and I predict it won't be long before the same logic applies to plain old violent crime suspects too (I mean, hey, they're trying to kill Americans too, right?).

The next time you see a story about mistreatment of prisoners by other countries, just try this thought experiment: change the country from North Korea or Cuba or whatever to "United States". Would that change the tone of the story? Why? Do we get to brutally treat prisoners because we're "the good guys"? If Jack Bauer were doing his work for Iran, would we still be cheering him on?

The Whacked Out Right (posted by DT)

It's a tough time to be a liberal right now- demoralizing. Trying to step back though, we've learned something amazing about radicalism in the 21st century.

After Democrats won the 2008 election, the Republican party moved way to the Right. This was a surprise to some, and many predicted they would have years in the wilderness, as it seemed so clear that they had lost because they had already moved too far right for the electorate.

But a funny thing happened. They've just pulled the whole conversation and the country rightward right along with them! Yes, there's still plenty of great political debate, but now the Right has set its positions so far out there that the center keeps moving in their direction.

So here in 2010 we're debating seriously:

• Is Keynesian economics viable, or did Herbert Hoover have it right after all?
• Should we should hold BP accountable for spilling oil or is that a "government shakedown"?
• Are federal economic policies based on improving lives of the middle class, or should the total focus be on getting easy money to the Rich so we can hope they'll create jobs?
• Why should America take care of its vulnerable people?
• Torture of suspected terrorists (this debate seems over, actually, and I'm on the losing side- Americans are totally fine with a limitless police state when it comes to defending the country from Arabs)

In my email correspondence with my Nut Case Righties, the latest thing is one of them sent around an article from the "Globe" supermarket tabloid about Obama being born in Kenya. Nothing is too far out for these guys, and I'm supposed to have a debate about where the President was born. I'd like to debate about how to eventually balance the budget or what to do about Global Warming, but I can't because we're still stuck on a religious belief in no taxes and a refusal to believe scientists who say Global Warming is real!

If I've learned one thing the last year and a half, it's that nothing lasts long, and I guess liberals will be back. But it's demoralizing right now.

Torture and the NYC Car Bomb Attempt (posted by DT)

It's amazing to hear, after the successful capture of the New York City car bomber from Pakistan and now this week's capture of accomplices, pro-torture people claim that this shows why we need to keep treating terrorists like we're in the Middle Ages.



Yes it's true that these guys are potentially dangerous and want to kill us, and I get tired of hearing people preach that as if I don't understand it. It's just that this incident and outcome are evidence of the positive efficacy of old fashioned law enforcement techniques for terror cases. Without apparently torturing this suspect and even when reading him his Miranda rights, it appears that authorities have gleaned lots of good information from him. As an added bonus, we can actually prosecute him in a court of law! Where's the downside?



People have to stop watching "24" and start looking at evidence of what works. I like vigilante movies too, but grownups should be setting policies in these areas.

Guantanamo & Our (lack of) Shame (posted by DT)

One of the arguments I hear most from people when I try to convince them that it's bad that the US has tortured people during the recent War on Terror is "hey, these guys are terrorists, who cares what happens to them!" Well, maybe not...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of
innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared
that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on
Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations
were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former
Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit
filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have
been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson,
who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was
most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former
Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742
detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was
“politically impossible to release them”.

Now let's make it clear what our country has done: we have tortured and killed and incarcerated for years a significant number of people who were completely innocent. How can that be justified in the name of national security? Because we were attacked, does that give us the right to torture anyone who may possibly be a Bad Guy, even if we don't have any evidence?

Sickening.

Torture Apologists (posted by DT)

Marc Thiessen, a Bush speechwriter with no training in journalism or in interrogation procedure, has written a book explaining why torture has kept us safe. This take-down from a real journalist is pretty good, and not too long:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer?printable=true
Bottom line: torture is not a useful tactic to gain intelligence, and there is no credible evidence that torture has stopped a single terrorist attack from happening.

What torture has helped to do is change our country from one that is seen as the "good guys" into one seen by others as a cruel bully. It's helped Muslim extremists recruit. In short it's a shande.

Abortion, Health Care, & the Christian Right (posted by DT)

Here's something that's been bugging me for a while: the positions of those who identify with the Christian Right.

Now I'm not a Christian, and I don't know much about Christian theology or religious practice. It seems to me, though, that Jesus was a pretty righteous religious figure whose teachings of peace, brotherhood, caring for the downtrodden ("The meek shall inherit the Earth"), etc are in concert with the way I see the world and what is moral behavior.

So there seems to be no question that the Christian position would be that medical care should be accessible to the poor and near-poor. But there's been a hangup in passing this legislation; some pro-life Democrats inserted the "Stupak Amendment" into the House legislation that is very restrictive of abortion, and which would essentially make it impossible for any health plan to cover abortions, even if the government is not subsidizing it. This is clearly an attempt to make abortions more difficult to obtain for middle class women. Stupak and his colleagues are making a stand to get their language put back in the bill somehow. Liberals contend that the Senate language is also plenty restrictive on abortion, and if anything makes abortion more restricted, though not as much as in the House bill. But Stupak & friends are threatening to blow up the whole thing if they don't get what they want.

Now maybe they're bluffing- it actually seems possible that these so-called moderates are just driving a hard bargain but won't let the whole bill go down. But if they're not bluffing, then what does that say about their Christian values? In order to slow abortions they're willing to blithely let living people continue to die without health insurance? The Catholic church too seems to share these priorities- I can understand the maximalist position on abortion, but it would be nice to hear some sort of moral argument from such a powerful institution in favor of legislation that would undoubtedly aid the poor.

Which brings me to what really bugs me about the positions I hear from Christians: what about the torture debate? Is there anything more antithetical to Christian values than the use of torture on our enemies? Why is there no outcry from the churches about waterboarding or about the fact that more than 100 people have been killed in US custody in the War on Terror?

It's not that I think it's wrong for churches to fight with all their power against abortion- it's an important theological issue for them, and they have every right to whip up support for their position- it's just that we hear nothing but crickets chirping from the churches on a similarly huge moral issue. Why don't they care? Wasn't Jesus himself a victim of torture?

Torture link of the day (posted by DT)

This is an old article by Glenn Greenwald, but it has in one place lots of links and information documenting how the US government (that's us) has killed over 100 people in custody when torture tactics went too far.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/30/accountability/

Now I guess it may make us feel better to respond that "they're all terrorists anyway so who cares", but if we're open-minded enough to give this a careful reading we have to conclude that not all these people were terrorists; these are detainees, many picked up on random sweeps through Iraq and Afghanistan. Our government has been doing the same thing that we condemn authoritarian regimes for doing. When the Viet Cong did this to John McCain it was torture. When the Soviet Union did it to dissidents it was torture. And yet in our current political environment we have one party (Republicans) who enthusiastically embrace torture, and a second party (Democrats) who seem at best ambivalent about it and certainly unwilling to take it on.

Our political discourse starts with an assumption that "we're the good guys". But this isn't self-evident to people in other places. We have to prove it every day.

I am now a wacked-out, fringe Leftist nut for taking the position that torture is wrong, which was a majority position in this country on September 10, 2001.

More on Torture (posted by DT)

I guess I'm now considered out of the mainstream when it comes to interrogation and torture. I find this fact depressing, given that it wasn't too long ago that there was a pretty clear consensus in the US that we were the "good guys" who would win the Cold War because we were seen by common people everywhere as the bastion of Freedom and Democracy, bringers of prosperity. The USSR, on the other hand, were the authoritarians who arrested people for no reason or with little evidence, and sent severed limbs back to whoever pissed them off to make sure that they knew who they were messing with.

Now, in the Age of "24", we're so post-modern that we don't believe in that claptrap any more I guess. But there are lots of problems with torture outside of the moral element:

• How are we supposed to know if the guys we're torturing are really terrorists? As I noted in my earlier post, we've been picking up lots of "alleged terrorists" in sweeps all over Afghanistan and Iraq, and lots of them have turned out to be innocent. (Remember even the Bush administration released lots of people from Gitmo because they weren't terrorists). Without any legal system or rules of evidence, we could be torturing the wrong people. Before you sneer that I'm protecting Bad Guys, note that we ALREADY HAVE tortured innocent people: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/world/americas/25arar.html or http://www.truthout.org/1210093
• Torture doesn't work as a method of gaining information. Professional interrogators from the FBI and the military have been appalled by these tactics. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242_pf.html Torture is really good for extracting false confessions- that's what authoritarian regimes use it for, not to get good intelligence. When you're getting tortured, you'll say anything to get the torture to stop, and that certainly includes lying.
• The "Ticking Time Bomb" scenario popularized in the TV series 24 just never happens. It's great drama, but it's not real life. How many people do we torture looking for the one guy in 100 who might know something?
• Torture is a runaway train- it can't be used in a limited way only in extreme cases- it always migrates to everything. Look at Abu Ghraib- people on the ground take it and run with it. Besides, the logic extends to increased use: if torture is OK to find terrorists, then shouldn't we use it to find common murderers? What about rapists? Why only foreign citizens?

Finally, it's important to note that the Orwellian use of terms like "enhanced interrogation" are a smokescreen. We should call it what it is. The difference between waterboarding or sleep deprivation or hanging in stress positions on one hand (all used by the US in recent years), and cutting off fingers on the other is a difference only in severity. There have been dozens of DEATHS of detainees in US custody that occurred because the "enhanced interrogation" went a little too far- how can that not be torture?

The US Double Standard on Torture (posted by DT)

I have this quaint, old-fashioned belief that a free, democratic, ethical society should continue its centuries-long tradition of following the rule of law, even after a terrible terror attack on its soil. Glenn Greenwald here http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/14/haiti/index.html
points out the hypocrisy of those on the Right who now protest Haiti's treatment of Christian missionaries who were allegedly trying to illegally take children out of the country, even after those same commentators from the Right cheered on far worse treatment of detainees of the War on Terror who have been tortured and killed by our government. Keep in mind that at least some of these victims of American torture are completely innocent of terrorism or conspiring against the US, and in fact were just caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't believe me? Read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?_r=2