All Posts Tagged With: "torture"

Running Time: 26 Minutes, 45 Seconds.

The following video clip is an excerpt from the documentary Outlawed, a film produced by WITNESS, in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups around the world. You can read more here.

Ross Douthat makes a compelling argument:

One would hardly expect Dick Cheney to endorse his own prosecution. But I think there’s a reasonable case that given what I take to be his own premises about the torture debate — that the acts of interrogative violence the administration employed were justified by the stakes involved and the intelligence they produced — the outgoing Vice President should support an investigative commission charged with assessing the consequences of the Bush Administration’s detainee policy. Time and again, Cheney has insisted that any gains the U.S. has made in its efforts against Al Qaeda have depended on information from “high-value” detainees like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah that could only be extracted through extreme measures. But so far, the evidence marshaled to support his contention has been distinctly limited — and most of the insider-ish testimony on the subject, usually filtered through the work of the administration’s critics, has tended to support the argument that torture is both morally wrong and largely ineffective. This is a high-stakes debate, to put it mildly. And if Cheney (or any of the many conservatives who share his perspective) believes what says he believes — if he thinks the future security of the United States depends on a willingness to take a consequentialist approach to, say, the waterboarding of leading terrorists — then he ought to be willing to advance a public and detailed case, before an independent commission, that the consequences were and are worth the moral costs.

Ann Coulter parodied on SNL:

(Note: Video may take a moment to load)

Think Progress reports:

During his confirmation hearing today, Attorey General nominee Eric Holder unequivocally rejected torture. “No one is above the law,” Holder said repeatedly during the hearing.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) could not fathom that an Attorney General would reject a practice that both is unlawful and endangers Americans. He tried to get Holder to back off his anti-torture stance by presenting an absurd “ticking time bomb” hypothetical in which thousands of American lives are at stake. “You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques?” Cornyn asked. When Holder replied that waterboarding is not the only interrogation method, Cornyn insisted, “Assume that it was.”

Watch:

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Cornyn perpetuates a repeatedly debunk fallacy: the “ticking time bomb” scenario. What’s Cornyn’s source of authority on the topic? Perhaps the right-wing favorite TV show, “24.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) identified where Cornyn most likely thought up his torture-is-the-only-option scenario: “I understand Senator Cornyn’s questions. They are questions that anyone who watches Jack Bauer on ‘24′ would ask.”

So what do the experts think?

Intelligence officials have repeatedly rejected the idea of a ticking time bomb scenario. Jack Cloonan, who spent 25 years as an FBI special agent and interrogated members of al Qaeda, said that he has “been hard pressed to find a situation where anybody” can say “that they’ve ever encountered the ticking bomb scenario” when interrogating terrorists. He said it is a “red herring” and “[i]n the real world it doesn’t happen.”

One law professor, who has extensively researched interrogation, said she had heard of only one ticking time bomb scenario. “It’s on the show ‘24.’ And that’s the only one I know of.”

A Daily Dish reader notes:

Crawford’s report talked about how Qahtani’s torture took place over a nearly two month period. Presumably the intelligence officials were not able to get whatever information they thought he had in a short time frame. Doesn’t this seriously undermine the “ticking time bomb” defence of torture?

If it took two months to break this man, how urgent was the information that he had? Also, isn’t it at least conceivable that in that two month period the intelligence officials could have gotten the information from him by methodically developing a relationship, a level of rapport, that would have ultimately lead Qahtani to realize that at America’s core is a decent society full of decent individuals, committed to treating the rest of the world with some core level of decency?

Andrew Sullivan adds:

The ticking time bomb scenario has not happened in the US or anywhere else in human history. It was a rhetorical device to cover for Bush and Cheney’s desire to use torture as a routine weapon in the war on terror. It’s a talking point in a propaganda war designed to conceal and enable war crimes from the very top of the American government.

From Bob Woodward:

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 by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Eventually, the truth always comes out.

A provocative point worth pondering from Jim Henley:

The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What’s different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations. After the period from Grant and Sherman’s Indian policies to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, America’s powerful learned to at least talk a good game. This led to real improvement in people’s lives when proles and poobahs from Portugal to Poland to the Philippines took our rhetoric seriously. Now our rulers and their auxiliaries view their highest calling as insisting on torture, panopticon and aggressive war as the highest ideals. Esthetically, this may represent a gain in frankness. Practically, I don’t expect it to better the world.

A Daily Dish reader shares his expert viewpoint on the “ticking time-bomb” defense of torture:

I was an officer that ran interrogator teams in the Marine Corps from 2001-2004.

Reuel Marc Gerecht uses the biggest fallacy in all of the torture debate–the ticking time-bomb fallacy. He assumes that an ideologically driven terrorist like [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] or Abu Zubaydah would answer the questions truthfully even under torture when all he had to do was withstand for 4 days to let 9/11 happen.  This is absurd.

They would withstand because they are so close to the “finish line.”

Even more likely though, assuming that KSM was captured on 7 September, would be to give us thousands of leads (which he did anyways when he was captured) with a little truth at the core and we would go ragged chasing them all down while the terrorists boarded the planes without a problem.

Bottom line, the ticking time-bomb scenario is just not a justification for torture of an ideologically motivated person who has immense incentive to withstand and disseminate false information. Finally, there are other methods that could “break” KSM in the above scenario like the shock of capture and some thoughtful, sophisticated tricks that are certainly not torture and in the Army manual.

The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat has been “thinking about torture.”

I keep waiting, I think, for somebody else to write a piece about the subject that eloquently captures my own inarticulate mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt about the Bush Administration’s interrogation policy, so that I can just point to their argument and say go read that. But so far as I know, nobody has. There’s been straightforward outrage, obviously, from many quarters, and then there’s been a lot of evasion - especially on the Right, where occasional defenses of torture in extreme scenarios have coexisted with a remarkable silence about the broad writ the Bush Administration seems to have extended to physically-abusive interrogation, and the human costs thereof. But to my knowledge, nobody’s written something that captures the sheer muddiness that surrounds my own thinking (such as it is) on the issue.

Some difficult truths:

So as far as the bigger picture goes, then, it seems indisputable that in the name of national security, and with the backing of seemingly dubious interpretations of the laws, this Administration pursued policies that delivered many detainees to physical and mental abuse, and not a few to death. These were wartime measures, yes, but war is not a moral blank check: If you believe that Abu Ghraib constituted a failure of jus in bello, then you have to condemn the decisions that led to Abu Ghraib, which means that you have to condemn the President and his Cabinet.

Given this reality, whence my uncertainty about how to think about the issue? Basically, it stems from the following thought: That while the Bush Administration’s policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn’t fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose … and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

Ross’ very honest “thinking” about this issue was refreshing. He framed it beyond the typical partisan framework, rather framing the issue from a very personal, morally troubled, yet pragmatic viewpoint. His post is long but well worth the read and worth considering. The last sentence that I quoted above was a profound one…

… while the Bush Administration’s policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn’t fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose …

This is one of those uncomfortable truths that many Americans don’t realize or choose not to accept. A careful analysis of our nation’s policies throughout our history will find far too many examples of immoral and unlawful policies and actions. One example Ross cites:

The use of the atomic bomb. I think it’s very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that’s the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a “war crime” that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank’s argument that “it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs” - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman’s shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

While I completely disagree with this administration’s policies and actions, I realize that this is indeed not “quite so new.” Which goes to this starkly profound statement from Ross…

… and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

And that’s the fundamental point. Given the same circumstances with the same responsibilities, any of us might have made similar decisions as Bush and Harry Truman. That’s because we as humans fail, especially when under extreme circumstances. And that’s why we have laws — to help us make the right decision when the right decision is the most difficult one to make in the midst of the worst of circumstances.

An analogy: If someone were to harm one of my daughters in any way, I undoubtedly would be consumed by rage. My fatherly instinct would be to exact pain and suffering in a proportionally magnified degree greater than that which was inflicted upon my child. What keeps me from unleashing this instinctive (and some would argue justifiable) revenge are laws and the consequences that come with those laws. And those laws are there to maintain a civilized and orderly society and to protect us all from our human failings — things like misidentified persons being wrongly caught up in regrettable, yet nonretractable retaliation (such as killing the wrong man whose later proven to be innocent).

As much as I abhor this administration’s policies and actions, I find myself among those who have no stomach for a major reckoning of those who made these disastrous decisions. What I do want, as a condition of immunity from future prosecution, is a full accounting of the decisions made, the orders given and the actions taken by all those involved as well as an acknowledgement that these were wrong and regrettable.

We have to learn from our mistakes. But we have to acknowledge them as mistakes before we can truly learn from them and take corrective action.