Red Cross investigators concluded last year that the CIA’s interrogation methods for high-level al-Qaida prisoners were “categorically” torture, according to a new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.” The book by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for the New Yorker, provides details about torture techniques used on detainees and says that the Red Cross warned the Bush administration that “the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
President Bush likes to call himself a “wartime president,” but Fareed Zakaria, in a smart column, debunks the whole idea that the United States is “at war” and needs a wartime president:
“It is by now overwhelmingly clear that al-Qaida and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization’s ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an ‘existential threat’ to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al-Qaida and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself.”
In short, we’re not at war, and we don’t need a “wartime president.”
He was mocked at the time, but presidential candidate John Kerry was right in 2004 when he said the most effective way to fight terrorism was with enhanced international police work, intelligence sharing and special operations.
A Washington Post article this week pointed to the remarkable success of U.S. efforts to fingerprint hundreds of suspected terrorists detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other countries. The compiling and cross-checking of data with Interpol and other agencies have paid off by identifying and linking suspects in new ways, keeping hundreds of potentially dangerous suspects from traveling to this country.
“That’s the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We’re pushing our borders back,” said Thomas Bush, an FBI assistant director.
From a New York Times article today: “The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of ‘coercive management techniques’ for possible use on prisoners, including ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘prolonged constraint,’ and ‘exposure.’
“What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
“The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
When someone is named a “person of interest” in a case, especially one as big as the 2001 anthrax murders, the authorities had better have the goods on the guy. Because they didn’t when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft put that label on former Army scientist Steven Hatfill in 2002, the U.S. Justice Department will now pay Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit. Those involved in the investigation say that there was a fixation on Hatfill, a graduate of Southwestern College in Winfield, unjustified by the facts. So now the public will pay for the government’s mistakes, and the killer of five remains at large.
In another blow to the credibility of the Bush administration’s detention of suspected terrorists, a federal appeals court ruled that the military didn’t have credible evidence to show that a Chinese detainee who has been held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay is an “enemy combatant.”
Al-Qaida has been allowed to establish significant training bases in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan, according to a New York Times article, which cited feuding counterintelligence agencies, a risk-averse policy and the Bush administration’s shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 as reasons for the continued failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week expressed “real concern” about the rising violence in Afghanistan and blamed Pakistan for failing to put pressure on militants in the tribal areas.
“Our enemies will test the new president early. Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. Sept. 11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration.” — Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., sowing fear, along with support for the “tested” John McCain, on CBS’ “Face the Nation“
Robert Gates has won bipartisan praise as defense secretary. Now there is buzz about whether the Wichita native might be persuaded to stay on, no matter which presidential candidate wins. “My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration,†said Richard Danzig, a top national security adviser to Barack Obama and a former Navy secretary. John McCain’s campaign is making similar suggestions, though more quietly. What does Gates say? “The circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me.â€
Congress has agreed on a surveillance bill that would shield from lawsuits the telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap phone and computer lines, Associated Press reported. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the bill “balances the needs of our intelligence community with Americans’ civil liberties and provides critical new oversight and accountability requirements.” But a New York Times editorial today said that the bill doesn’t appear to be balanced or a compromise. “President Bush and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president’s powers to spy on Americans without a court order,” the editorial argued.
Columnist George Will took John McCain to task for calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last week on detainee rights “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
“Did McCain’s extravagant condemnation of the court’s habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents?” Will asked. “More likely, some clever ignoramus convinced him that this decision could make the Supreme Court - meaning, which candidate would select the best judicial nominees - a campaign issue.”
The conservative columnist defended the ruling as beginning to mark “a boundary against government’s otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can’t have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they’ve been unjustly imprisoned - not even on grounds of mistaken identity,” columnist Eugene Robinson wrote about the court’s Guantanamo Bay detainee decision. “But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch.”
But a Wall Street Journal editorial complained that the court had declared judicial supremacy over Congress and the White House. “Justice (Anthony) Kennedy’s opinion is remarkable in its sweeping disregard for the decisions of both political branches,” the editorial said. “In a pair of 2006 laws - the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act - Congress and the president had worked out painstaking and good-faith rules for handling enemy combatants during wartime.”
Those who think that torturing terrorism suspects is a necessary evil should consider the case of Maher Arar. The Canadian citizen and telecommunications engineer was detained in 2002 while changing planes in New York City on his way back to Canada from Switzerland. He was mistakenly identified as having ties to al-Qaida. Rather than sending him back to Canada or even Switzerland, U.S. officials sent him to Syria, which tortures prisoners. Arar was imprisoned for a year and beaten with a metal cable before finally being released and allowed to return home. Canadian officials apologized to Arar and awarded him about $10.3 million. But it wasn’t until last week that the U.S. Justice Department acknowledged that it was investigating the case, six years later.
It wasn’t only FBI agents who complained about interrogation techniques used on detainees. According to a Justice Department report released this week, so did former Attorney General John Ashcroft (in photo), FBI Director Robert Mueller and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, then assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division. One of their concerns was that the abuse could taint any legal proceedings against the detainees. And that has happened. A top Pentagon official recently chose to drop charges against a detainee who was roughly interrogated at Guantanamo, the Washington Post reported.
Include FBI agents among those who objected to the interrogation techniques used on detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Agents repeatedly complained that the techniques might violate the law and jeopardize future criminal trials, according to an exhaustive report released Tuesday by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine. But those protests didn’t appear to trigger any response from the National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
It’s shameful that the United States has become, under the Bush administration, a country that tortures prisoners, we argue in today’s editorial.
This is a dark stain on our country’s honor and ideals.And it’s disturbing, although not surprising, to learn this week that top White House officials, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, were deeply involved in shaping and approving a torture policy — including giving assent to specific harsh techniques such as waterboarding, according to Associated Press.Â
President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress need to tap some of the cooperative spirit they used on the stimulus package to deal with terrorist surveillance. The administration may be using some “overheated rhetoric†to obscure the facts and “scare tactics†to try to get its way, as congressional Democratic intelligence committee chairmen said in a Washington Post commentary.
But the potential consequences of inaction are scary. And Bush makes a strong argument for the Senate version of the surveillance bill, which gives cooperating telecom companies retroactive legal immunity. “Our government told them that their participation was necessary – and it was, and it still is — and that what we had asked them to do was legal. And now they’re getting sued for billions of dollars. And it’s not fair.†Already, according to two Bush administration agencies, the delay has “impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information.†The priority here should not be how this fracas will play at the polls in November but how to safeguard the nation now.
The moral and legal morass the Bush administration has created for itself on waterboarding was on full display this week in a tangled web of tortured statements from the administration.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding might be illegal under current law — the same week the White House admitted the United States had used the water torture technique on three al-Qaida suspects and left open the possibility that it would use waterboarding in the future.
Vice President Dick Cheney called the president’s authorization of torture “tough and courageous†and asked, “Would I support those same decisions again today? You’re damn right I would.â€
Meanwhile, the nation’s highest defender of the law, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (in photo), said he wouldn’t pursue a criminal investigation of past Justice Department-authorized torture “because that would mean that the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting someone who followed that advice.â€
In other words, any past criminal act by the executive branch is unpunishable as long as the president and Justice Department approved it.
The Bush administration has taken this country down a dark and dangerous path on torture.
Amid all the focus on elections and Super Tuesday, it’s worth noting the lonely death of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati at Guantanamo prison in Cuba. Many Afghans regard Hekmati as a war hero for his resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He also organized a daring 1999 escape of three prisoners held by the Taliban.
But in 2003, Hekmati was accused — falsely, say Afghan officials — of being a Taliban commander himself and sent to Guantanamo prison.
Five years later, on Dec. 30, he died there of natural causes — cancer. Under the military tribunal system, he never had the chance to defend himself in court, call witnesses or clear his name.
This is American justice?
The Supreme Court is expected to decide soon whether Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. Meanwhile, 275 prisoners continue to languish there in legal limbo. And Guantanamo continues to be a black mark on America’s good name.
The recent uptick of attacks on Western targets in Afghanistan and suicide bombings in Pakistan (see photo) expose the faulty premise of the Bush administration’s terrorism strategy: the notion that Iraq is the “central front†in the war on terror.
There is an al-Qaida element in Iraq, and U.S. troops have made progress in hunting down terrorists, but clearly the situation is much more complicated.
The terrorists have no need to fight where we think they should. After all, this isn’t a conventional war. Even if we put terrorists on the run in Iraq, they can regroup in Pakistan and Afghanistan and cause trouble there with a guerrilla war, as they’re doing now, while we’re still in Iraq.
The assassination today of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto shows again how Pakistan — our ally in the war on terrorism and a nuclear-armed country — is volatile and extremely dangerous. The 54-year-old Bhutto returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18, and she narrowly escaped an assassination attempt that very day. Though Bhutto had much popular support in Pakistan, she was hated by Islamic extremist for her support of the war on terror, and she was a fierce critic of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto’s assassination raises new concerns about the stability of Pakistan. Meanwhile, American military official acknowledged earlier this week how our more than $5 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan has largely failed to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Instead, Pakistan has spent much of the money to purchase weapon systems aimed at India.
The White House needs to come clean about the role its attorneys played in the CIA’s decision to destroy interrogation tapes of terrorist suspects. The White House has downplayed this involvement, but at least four top White House attorneys at the time, including Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, took part in discussions with the CIA about whether to destroy the tapes, the New York Times reported.
One former senior intelligence official told the Times that there had been “vigorous sentiment†to destroy the tapes among some top White House officials, who were concerned that the tapes could be damaging after the abuses at Abu Ghraib. However, other officials said that the attorneys didn’t advocate destroying the tapes, though they also didn’t order that the tapes be preserved.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
While the surge is seeing success in Iraq, U.S. military and State Department leaders are worried that past successes in Afghanistan are slipping away. As a result, they have begun top-to-bottom reviews of the entire mission, the New York Times reported. Concerns include a rise in attacks by the Taliban and al-Qaida, a weak and corrupt government, soaring poppy production and inadequate NATO forces.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
ABC News aired a bombshell interview on Monday: Retired CIA agent John Kiriakou appeared on camera to give details, for the first time, about the capture and waterboarding of al-Qaida detainees in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
In the interview, Kiriakou appeared to still be wrestling with the morality of waterboarding, which he said he now believes is torture but was "necessary" at the time and successful, he said, in extracting information and foiling several emerging plots.
"What happens if we don’t waterboard a person, and we don’t get that nugget of information, and there’s an attack?" Kiriakou said. "I would have trouble forgiving myself."
If that’s the loose standard, then why not torture when you capture any terrorist suspect? Why not pull out their fingernails one by one? This is the slippery moral slope the CIA has gone down.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The CIA destroyed videotapes that reportedly showed its agents using harsh and possibly illegal interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. But in doing so, the CIA likely is in even bigger trouble, because it withheld and destroyed evidence sought in criminal and fact-finding investigations. The CIA destroyed the tapes after telling a federal judge that they didn’t exist, and it also didn’t provide the tapes or acknowledge their existence to the Sept. 11 commission, which had requested transcripts and other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Red Cross investigators concluded last year that the CIA’s interrogation methods for high-level al-Qaida prisoners were “categorically” torture, according to a new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.” The book by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for the New Yorker, provides details about torture techniques used on detainees and says that the Red Cross warned the Bush administration that “the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
