As a Bush administration holdover, Defense Secretary Robert Gates would seem to be in the crossfire of the Obama vs. Cheney skirmish over national security. It can’t help that President Obama flubbed Gates’ name last week, calling him “William Gates.” But Gates, a Wichita native and East High graduate who’ll speak at the school’s commencement tonight, is handling the issue with his usual candor and care, in a Wall Street Journal interview and otherwise.
On closing Guantanamo Bay prison and moving detainees to U.S. facilities, he decried the “fearmongering”: “If people begin to absorb the fact that we’ve got several dozen very dangerous terrorists in our jails right now . . . maybe a little greater perspective would be brought to the issue.”
On the military limiting its interrogations to techniques in the Army Field Manual: “We have as high a motive to get information that will prevent attacks on our soldiers as anybody does. . . . And yet we find the methods that we use are sufficient.”
Siding with Obama on security issues: “Having been in this business a long time, I think that you never can underestimate the power of American values.”
President Obama has drawn flak from his left for his flip-flop on releasing more photos showing abusive interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the decision to withhold the photos was “absolutely correct,” declared Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass. “Far better to alienate the ACLU in Washington than to alienate people in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Haass said. “When people in Washington get alienated, they write op-eds. When people in Pakistan get alienated, they plant IEDs and kill American soldiers.”
Still, many analysts predict that the administration will lose the court challenge and eventually be forced to release the photos.
“Taking history into account could have protected the United States from engaging in practices that jeopardized our values, our democracy and even our lives,” Brandeis University professor James Mandrell wrote in the Los Angeles Times. He described how he came across an illustrated article on waterboarding published in a Spanish newspaper in 1836, just two years after Spain abolished the Inquisition. Mandrell wrote that the article “claimed that the principal objection to torture was not necessarily moral or ethical. Torture doesn’t work, it said: ‘It’s not efficacious.’”
“When (Dick) Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration,” wrote columnist David Brooks. Brooks noted how by 2005, the Bush administration had already backed away from or ended many of the policies that Cheney is criticizing President Obama about. For example, the CIA had stopped waterboarding and had rejected its legal justification while Bush was president, and Bush officials were working on trying to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. “The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy,” Brooks said. “It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy.” Which is likely why Cheney is so worked up.
The most salient — and most widely ignored — point in judging the competing claims of Nancy Pelosi and the CIA is that regardless of what Pelosi was informed of, whether in a quiet hint or in a full briefing behind closed doors, it wouldn’t make torture any less illegal or any more acceptable. That’s why the Pentagon and the FBI, which apparently did know what was happening in Dick Cheney’s dungeons, refused to participate in this wholesale breach of American and international law. The rush to arraign Pelosi is a transparent attempt to divert attention from that paramount fact — the real crime. Pelosi made the mistake of saying out loud what everyone knows (if not in this instance, then in many others): that the CIA “misled” the Congress. It is hardly beyond belief that the Bush-Cheney regime and its compliant CIA Director George Tenet offered the congressional leaders little more than euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation techniques”— and never owned up to what was actually going on. — Robert Shrum, the Week
We need a get-some-truth-from-the-speaker commission. Pelosi has offered several carefully parsed and ever-shifting explanations on what she knew about harsh techniques and when she knew it. She accused the CIA and the Bush administration of lying to Congress about what was actually happening with the suspects. That accusation rightfully drew a sharp rebuke from CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former Democratic member of the House. Pelosi apparently didn’t have a problem after Sept. 11 with harsh methods that were used on some suspects when the threat of repeat attacks seemed most acute. But now she would like to rewrite history, and extend a political war that voters thought they settled with the last presidential election. Confidence in Pelosi has been eroded by this episode. And, inconvenient for her, that’s the truth. — Chicago Tribune editorial
Former Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed many of the objections to his administration’s interrogation methods as “contrived indignation and phony moralizing.” His speech Thursday to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, was filled with false choices — such as how you either have to support the Bush administration “comprehensive strategy” in its entirety or you think that Sept. 11 was just a “one-off event.” And he claimed that to call some of the interrogation techniques “torture” is to “cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.” Does Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has condemned waterboarding as torture, think terrorists are innocent victims? Cheney needs to go back to an undisclosed location.
On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart “debated” some members of Congress opposed to the prospect of Guantanamo Bay detainees being relocated to their states.
“Not in Kansas,” said a bearded Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., in a clip from a floor speech.
“OK, not Kansas,” Stewart responded. “All right. All right. That’s a ‘no’ from Kansas. That’s fine. That actually makes sense. They’re” — he did a puzzled pause — “tight on space.”
After a few more not-in-my-state clips, Stewart noted that “the United States is really good at imprisoning people. Why can’t we handle this?” and suggested Leavenworth.
To which Roberts was shown saying: “Leavenworth — where we educate, educate, all future Army officers. . . . You think Army officers want to study at Fort Leavenworth if terrorists are there? . . . I don’t think so. Not a chance.”
“But that’s what they’re studying,” Stewart said with exasperation. “They’re not going to be their lab partners.”
Include columnist Leonard Pitts among those not impressed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tortured explanations about her briefings on U.S. torture policy. Though Pelosi couldn’t have done much to stop the torturing, she still should have registered her objections, Pitts argued. “She didn’t say what she should’ve when saying it would have mattered,” he wrote. “Until and unless Pelosi admits that, her ‘truth commission’ amounts to little more than partisanship and politics. And she can evolve no explanation that changes the obvious: It’s easy to speak up now. It would have been courageous to speak up then.”
Saying he was motivated by a suggestion by National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair that released Chinese detainees receive public assistance, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, explained his No Welfare for Terrorists Act of 2009 in a Friday commentary for the Washington Times. A sample: “Instead of keeping remorseless terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility away from our children and our families, the Obama administration is suggesting a welcome mat for terrorists paid for by you and me. Based on what we know from previously released detainees, such men do not want a new life here in America. They want death and destruction for our country and are eager to help make that happen.”
MSNBC’s First Read blog asks: “Would Dick Cheney have spoken out as aggressively — or at all — on defending the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics (if) John McCain had won in November? Remember that McCain, a torture victim, spoke out against waterboarding and torture, and likely would have discontinued their practices as president.”
Meanwhile, many Republicans are concerned about — and Democrats are pleased with — Cheney’s high-profile defense of torture, the Washington Post reported. “Given that Dick Cheney is as popular as Britney Spears at a Sunday-school teacher convention, we hope he continues to be the face of the Republican Party,” said Hari Sevugan of the Democratic National Committee.
“They’re not repentant sinners. I don’t want them in my hometown.” — Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, warning against moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. prisons
Richard Cohen wonders if Vice President Dick Cheney is right about something: “Where I reserve a soupcon of doubt is over the question of whether enhanced interrogation techniques actually work.” Cohen called on the White House to release the memos that Cheney claims prove such interrogation saved lives. “If Cheney is right, then let the debate begin: What to do about enhanced interrogation methods? Should they be banned across the board, always and forever? Can we talk about what is, and not just what ought to be?”
But Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, calling Cheney an “Old Faithful of self-serving nonsense” who should go back to Wyoming, wrote that “it is impossible for Cheney to prove that anti-terrorism methods within the bounds of U.S. law and tradition would have failed to prevent new attacks. Nor, for that matter, can Cheney demonstrate that torture and other abuses were particularly effective.”
“I believe it’s impossible that lawyers of such great talent and intelligence could have written these memos in the good faith belief that they accurately state the law,” David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University, testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on torture. He said Justice Department attorneys — such as John Yoo (in photo) — have a special responsibility not to “rubber stamp administration policies” or “provide cover for illegal actions.”
Kansas GOP lawmakers are helping lead efforts to bar Guantanamo Bay detainees from being relocated to the United States. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, offered an amendment last week to block the transfer of detainees. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., told Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a hearing this month, “Please not at Leavenworth. This is a hot topic in my state.” Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., appears in a fearmongering video produced by the Senate Republicans, in which he says sternly, “Moving those terrorists to Kansas? Not. On. My. Watch.” He also gave a floor speech in the Senate last week in which he threatened to keep the Senate tied up in knots “if someone gets the bright idea of moving these prisoners to Kansas.”
There may be legitimate logistical or security concerns about having detainees at a particular facility, such as Fort Leavenworth. But as Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution observed, “Members of Congress are acting as if Gitmo detainees are some evil combination of Chuck Norris and Harry Houdini, likely to escape into the countryside and wreak havoc.” Stephen Stromberg of the Washington Post also noted how several terrorists are already in U.S. prisons, and the nearby communities are still intact. And the Chicago Tribune editorialized: “Here’s our prediction: The Pentagon will eventually move these inmates to detention facilities here in the United States. Some folks will grouse. Then the grousers will go back to living their normal lives.”
The more religious Americans are, the more likely they are to justify torture, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. Huh? Of those surveyed who attend religious services at least weekly, 54 percent said that torture can often or sometimes be justified, compared with 42 percent of those who rarely or never attend religious services. White evangelical Protestants led the way, with 62 percent saying that torture can be justified.
A fourth-grader at a Washington, D.C., school asked former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the weekend about the Bush administration’s torture policy. Rice responded that “the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”
But when pressed last week by two students at Stanford University, Rice claimed that waterboarding wasn’t torture because President Bush authorized it (see YouTube video). “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture,” she said.
That sounds a lot like President Nixon’s claim in defense of Watergate that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
A paradox of the torture scandal is “that it is not about things we didn’t know but about things we did know and did nothing about,” wrote Mark Danner, author of “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror,” in a Washington Post commentary. “Beginning more than a half-dozen years ago, Bush administration officials broke the law and did repugnant things to detainees under their control. But if you think that the remedy is simple and clear — that all officials who broke the law should be tried and punished — then ask yourself what exactly the political elite of the country has been doing for the last five years. Or what it has not been doing. And why.” Danner noted that “although we have known the general narrative of torture since the summer of 2004, most politicians have been loath to do anything about it,” because they feared being painted as soft on terrorism.
“The Obama administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy,” a Washington Post editorial argued. “The pair of decisions — one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States — struck exactly the right balance.”
The editorial added: “By repudiating the memos, the Obama administration has again seized the high ground and restored some of the honor lost over the past few years. President Obama’s actions not only restore confidence that this country will not torture, but he has also strengthened the nation’s moral authority in condemning these heinous acts wherever they occur.”
Meanwhile, Spanish prosecutors recommended today that Spanish courts not investigate allegations that six senior Bush administration officials gave legal cover for the torture of terror suspects. Obama’s decisions leave open the possibility that such an investigation could occur here, as he focused on CIA agents who followed legal advice, not on the individuals who tried to provide that cover.
After Sept. 11, some liberal anti-war groups complained about being targeted by the federal government. Now it’s conservatives who are upset about a Department of Homeland Defense warning about a possible rise in “right-wing extremist activity.” What has talk radio buzzing is that the report said some returning veterans might be attracted to the messages of some of these groups, and that this extremism “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
The majority of Americans don’t agree with former Vice President Dick Cheney’s contention that President Obama’s actions have increased the chances of a terrorist attack against the United States. Seventy-two percent of those questioned in a new CNN poll disagreed with Cheney, while 26 percent agreed.
U.S. medical personnel were involved in torturing terrorist suspects held overseas by the CIA, according to a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The medical professionals “condoned and participated in ill treatment,” which the ICRC said was a “gross breach of medical ethics.”
The Bush doctrine lives, at least in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s emerging 2012 run for president. Gingrich said on “Fox News Sunday” that if he were president, he would have taken out North Korea’s missile on the launch pad. “There are three or four techniques that could have been used, from unconventional forces to standoff capabilities, to say ‘We’re not going to tolerate a North Korean missile launch, period,’” Gingrich said. He warned that we are underestimating the dangerous combination of North Korea’s “irresponsible dictatorship” and “electromagnetic pulse capabilities,” which he said would allow one weapon to wipe out a third of U.S. electricity generation. “One morning, just like 9/11, there’s going to be a disaster, and people are going to look around and say, ‘Gosh, why didn’t anyone think of that?’ Well, I’m telling you the time to think about it’s before the disaster, not afterwards.”
The Obama administration’s quiet decision to stop using the phrase “global war on terror” — confirmed Monday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — fits its change agenda and should serve its goals of gaining greater support from other nations in Afghanistan and otherwise. But not everybody likes the rebranding. “How can a nation win a war if it can’t call it a war?” asked the Washington Times editorial board.
Nearly all the experts say that Pakistan/Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy threat facing the United States. Today President Obama outlined his new strategy for this problem area. It includes sending 4,000 more troops to train Afghan security forces and increasing aid to Pakistan. He said that al-Qaida “is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan” and that “the situation is increasingly perilous.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended in an interview this past weekend the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation program.” But a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed how indefensible — and likely criminal — that program was. The ICRC concluded that the interrogation methods used constituted torture and were expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. According to the report, terrorism suspects were beaten, slammed head-first into walls and waterboarded, among other “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
