TheAgitator.com
Put Them in Prison. Really.
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009The Bush administration’s motives for employing the harsh techniques are also called into question by the report. The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence.
In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Apparently, one of the individuals applying pressure for results was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major advocate of the Iraq invasion. Wolfowitz called the man in charge of Guantánamo at the time, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey. Wolfowitz called “to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production” at Guantánamo, the report says. Wolfowitz suggested the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques. The report cites the Guantánamo interrogation chief at that time, David Becker, as the source of this information about Wolfowitz. Dunlavey, however, told the Senate investigators he could not recall the Wolfowitz call.
So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.
And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.
These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.
They let these guys skate and we should posthumously pardon all the guys condemned at Nuremberg.
Hangin’s too good for ‘em. Burnin’s too good for ‘em. They should be torn into little bitty pieces and buried alive!
Par for the course…should we even be surprised?
Prison? No. I am against the government using the death penalty on citizens, but I hold no such reservations for the people using the death penalty against those who govern. Hang ‘em. Hang ‘em HIGH.
I’m concerned that we’ve had insufficient intelligence so far on how the Bush administration made and disseminated policy decisions.
Unfortunately I don’t think we’re really going to get to the bottom of this without using harsh interrogation techniques. I can only thank the Lord that they’re now legal.
Sick and unholy.
Is there an interdimensional reptilian force controlling things from behind the scenes? I saw their minions slither away from the Iranian president this week in Geneva.
I still think that a lot of the anti-Bush attacks were ridiculous and paranoid. But the more inside information comes out, the more it looks like those Bush administration assholes did their damnedest to live down to their harshest critics.
With the Democrats assailing individual freedom on a massive scale these days, it sure would have been nice for people disillusioned with Obama to be able to contrast them with the previous administration, to perhaps slow down this train wreck.
No such luck.
In that one memo we have 3 different people with 3 different views of what happened in the 2, let me say that again, TWO MONTHS after the worst terrorist attack in the history of the nation. Since some of you have forgotten, the press wanted people tossed in prison because they failed to “connect the dots” leading to 9/11, now people want them tossed in prison because a LTC wanted to know why they interrogators were not using stress positions. Since the first witch hunt didn’t work out, let’s try it again.
All this uproar, wanting people hung or tossed in prison, because of stress positions. I had to wait 2 hours at the DMV standing in line. I considered it absolutely torture and obviously I’m going to demand my governor go to prison for the heinous crime of making me stand against my will.
This is a political mistake the dems are going to regret not only during this uproar but the next time the repub’s take control. What will the next administration decide demands jailtime? With all this TARP money being lost it seems a real easy target.
The NYTimes this morning disagrees:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30335592/
I’m sure there are a few cells available for these guys at Abu Ghraib. Treat ‘em the same way we treated many of the other inmates of that fine establishment. I’m certain that they’d love to be on the receiving end of the frat-boy hijinx.
All this uproar, wanting people hung or tossed in prison, because of stress positions. I had to wait 2 hours at the DMV standing in line. I considered it absolutely torture and obviously I’m going to demand my governor go to prison for the heinous crime of making me stand against my will.
That’s probably the most callous and ignorant comment you’ve ever left on this site. Reeks of Rumsfeld’s infamous “I stand up in my office for eight hours per day” scribble on one of the torture memos. Do some reading on stress positions. They’re one of the more insidious forms of torture, and can be fatal. They were used during the Italian Inquisition, by the KGB, and by the Japanese during WW II. That’s some fine company we’re in. They’ve been banned as torture by the supreme courts of Ireland and Israel. Yes, even Israel. The U.S. has also used particularly painful and damaging variations on the torture.
You can start your education process here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2119122/
Better yet, go rent the movie “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
As for the memo, note that in the same article the intelligence chief says there’s no way of knowing now if that “helpful information” could have been obtained by less coercive means, and that he also considers torture a regrettable stain on America’s reputation and moral authority. It’s hardly an endorsement.
Radley,
While I agree that someone should be held accountable, I don’t think that those who performed the measures should carry the full weight. As a matter of fact, if Obama allows for these “street-level” soldiers/agents to go scott free, with no possibility of being jailed, maybe they’ll roll over on the superiors who pushed it. Kind of like the drug game in The Wire where they would capture the street kids and try to make them roll up on the higher ups.
Also, having been a soldier myself, I know that your life can become very, very unpleasant for not following orders, even illegal ones. There isn’t a soldier in 100,000 that will do much more than bitch, and then do as he was told. For that reason alone, I support Obama in not prosecuting those who performed the acts.
However, those who pushed it, like the Wolfowitz’, Cheney’s, and Hayden’s should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
But I think I’ll wake up now and stop dreaming.
Pretty much concur with Nando’s remarks. The architects of the policy should be punished to the fullest extent possible. That said, Tokin42 does have a point. The political blowback from prosecutions could be huge. Remember, this is a country where a not insignificant number of people think former Lt. William Calley shouldn’t have been punished at all for My Lai.
Now, I know most here aren’t fans of the dems, and I can hardly blame you, but it has been established repeatedly that when given the choice between the right but unpopular thing and the politically safe thing, the safe policy will usually win out. Why would Obama risk taking a harder line? I can already hear the political adds now: “They protected us while we slept, kept us safe from al-Qa’ida, and now the Obama administration has stabbed them in the back, prosecuting these heroes for their service. Vote Palin in 2012.”
Nando one of the many disgusting parts is the Bush Administration made scapegoats out of the Abu Ghraib people knowing full well they approved and sanctioned the very things to be done at Abu Ghraib they convicted Lyddie England and her cohorts for. They don’t give a flying fuck about the grunts. They threw them to the wolves.
Talk about sociopaths.
Also we know that the CIA destroyed several CDs containing videos of these very techniques. So we’ve got obstruction of justice. It’s a sad state of affairs that these guys are probably going to walk scot free while being cheered on by large segments of the population.
I don’t think they will ever prosecute these guys. Too much fear that it could happen to them down the road. They may call themselves democrats and republicans, but under the surface they’re solid politician right to the core.
I wouldn’t get much satisfaction if they went after Bush’s henchmen but not Bush himself.
Nando:
I pretty much agree. The fault lies at the top of the command chain, not the bottom.
“These people belong in a prison cell.”
Oh, Radley, falling into the old trap of “locking human beings in cages” will actually accomplish something. You’d make a fine prosecutor.
Heh…I wonder if anyone realizes that crucifiction is a “stress position”…well, I did wonder until I googled it and saw people yelling about the comparison. Nevermind.
On a lighter note, I clicked on the ‘power4home’ ad banner, and now I generate the 1.21 Gigawatts of of electricity needed to run my Flux Capacitor with just a 4×8 foot solar panel I built for 150 bucks!
I’m gunna use the money I earned by selling all that power back to the utility company to buy a new boat.
Oh: And yeah. Torture is wrong. Don’t do it, it leads to abuse. Too bad people don’t think before responding emotionally.
Tokin42,
Is there a rule of law in this country or not?
You seem to be advocating that our political leaders should be held to a lower standard than ourselves. Do you feel these people are your betters and know what’s best for you?
Take a look at this article:
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/21/the_olc_torture_memos_thoughts_from_a_dissenter
This is the ending statement:
“The underlying absurdity of the administration’s position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest — if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.”
Is this what you want?
As Dave said, the reason nothing will be done about this is that they know it could happen to them. The Obama people are just as bad (though they may be focused on different illegal things at the moment). Each politician wants to establish (and continue) the tradition that once he is out of office, the next administration basically pardons all his crimes. And, of course, that very tradition assures that such crimes continue, since there is no direct consequence for any of the perps.
As far as how far down the chain to prosecute, I generally think that the people in the field have to be given something of a pass if they understood what they were doing to be legal. It’s important to remember that these are not discretionary jobs, like a prosecutor’s; if a soldier is given an order and his CO points to a Justice Department or DOD ruling that the order is legal, he can’t (legally) refuse it.
On the other hand, if he is ordered to do something that he knows is against our law or against international treaties to which we are a party, he is obligated to refuse. If he doesn’t, then I say prosecute him. This is another case where, though I feel sorry for anyone who has to refuse a CO’s order, it won’t encourage someone to refuse illegal actions if he knows he will face consequences for refusing but will face no consequences for going along.
People point to the article in the NYT that makes the claim that good information was obtained with torture. The article has ZERO examples of that claim.
The incident (the LA tower bombing) people have tried to point to as being broken up by torture was actually broken up PRIOR to the capture of the person they tortured to supposedly get the information.
#11
It was meant to be callous. The hyperbole over the “enhanced interrogation techniques” got out of hand as soon as the pics of those idiot national guardsmen putting people in naked piles at abu-ghraib came out. (The opening photo’s of the slate article link you posted) When we’ve twisted the meaning of torture all the way down to include putting caterpillars on people and slapping then it’s well past time someone pointed out the idiocy. This issue was completely overblown in order to embarrass a president the press and the dems hated and I don’t believe for a second that if the president were a democrat we’d have all this hand wringing over the treatment of these detainees. Radley and Sen. Feinstein are the only two people I’m willing to give a pass since I think they’re both true believers but the rest of the political class in this country chose hyperbole that intentionally damaged the worldview of our country in order to score political points. We’ve done nothing any worse than any other nation on the planet does, the only difference is we talk about it in the open. I am embarrassed about Gitmo, I’m embarrassed we treat foreign detainees captured in the field with weapons in their hands better than we treat the guys in my local county jail.
I appreciated the slate link but I believe I’ve mentioned before that I belonged to the Army Intelligence branch. Part of my training at huachuca and my first division level job included dealing with interrogators so I’ve known for a long time what the army considered their obligations under the geneva conventions to be and what the loopholes were. I had an interrogator tell me that while he wasn’t allowed to strike a detainee there is nothing that says the detainee can’t hit himself, and that after 3 days he could make a detainee prefer beating himself rather than to be left alone with an interrogator. We’re always going to disagree whether waterboarding is considered torture but since the military forces some of their forces to undergo training that includes being waterboarded, I’m going to say it shouldn’t be classified as torture.
Lastly, again I want to point out that these techniques were passed along to congress, some of whom apparently wondered why these techniques weren’t even more harsh. For them to now say this was torture goes beyond being two-faced and IMHO borders on treasonous. Not one report from the Red Cross, not one congressional oversight report, not one internal military report has said we’re not living up to our obligations under the geneva conventions. Politics lost us face in the world, not making people cold, not slapping them in the face, not making them stand in odd positions and that’s why I’m more than just a little angry about this.
I know a lot of people on the right think this site is one step away from pinko commie land but, I want to mention that I appreciate the fact I’m able to vehemently disagree with the host and not get banned. I know I have a tendency to be snide so I try to be polite but it may not come across as well as I’d like. I made the mistake of politely disagreeing with a rightwing site (LGF) and got banned.
I have a song stuck in my head for some reason.
“The Inquisition
What a show
The Inquisition
Here we go!”
The International Red Cross did vehemently object to what we are doing. They objected to not being allowed near the people as required by the Geneva Conventions. They vehemently objected to our treatment.
You are living in a fantasy land with your trite descriptions of what actually occurred. There’s the difference between what Bush Admin said we did, and what the Bush Admin actually did. Originally told KSM broke after 1 session of waterboarding (which has been for a long time been described as torture by the United States with prosecutions to go along with it) when the reality is it was done to him over a 180 times.
#25:
I’ll partially agree with you. I shouldn’t have listed the red cross in there, I got caught up in the middle of a diatribe. The red cross has said the treatment some detainees faced “might” constitute torture. I also left out the military judge who has said the treatment of one detainee also constituted torture. There is a big difference between the possibility that 3 detainees were subjected to what could be argued is torture (I would obviously disagree) and that as a matter of principle the US tortures detainees, which isn’t close to being reality. That’s the problem with political hyperbole, instead of dealing with this rationally, people were out looking to score political points and the entire nation gets dragged down in the process. Instead of asking how Abu Ghraib became so mismanaged that guard troops were playing games with detainees people start screaming “CHENEY IS EVIL AND WANTS TO EAT THE MUSLIMS!!!”.
Tokin @ #23:
re: LGF
That’s because LGF is populated by a bunch of wannabe fascists, authoritarians, religious whackjobs, and morons. Why you were wasting time there is truly a mystery. Tell me, do you frequent DU and Dailykos as well? To balance your daily dose of wingnuttery?
‘ Instead of asking how Abu Ghraib became so mismanaged that guard troops were playing games with detainees people start screaming “CHENEY IS EVIL AND WANTS TO EAT THE MUSLIMS!!!”.’
and you complain about political hyperbole?
[...] The Agitator: Put Them in Prison. Really. [...]
As Dave said, the reason nothing will be done about this is that they know it could happen to them.
I’m going to go even further and say that is why this sort of talk should end now.
The day a change in power in Washington results in the previous administration being jailed is the day representative government in America dies.
Do you really think that any administration is going to give up their office if it means that they go straight to jail? Really? This is a real simple calculus. No matter how bad the elected officials were in the last administration, they are still the last administration. If they can’t be reasonably safe that they will be free from political persecution (and yes, the torture argument is still a political argument) after they leave office, they will never allow anyone to remove them from office.
If we prosecute former administration officials once they leave office, then we leave the ones in office nothing to lose. A man with nothing to lose has no limits on what he is willing to do.
#28 you know it was a joke, i hope, but not far from the truth. I did a quick google of “cheney eats children” and up popped 211,000 links.
Well, to be fair, we were very sure that those who were tortured were engaged in witchcraft. You shouldn’t hold accountable those who were trying to get them to confess.
/off to get the comfy chair
Radley,
Let me quote every person that whores for votes (which is every politician save Ron Paul)…”No abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.”
This POS government is beyond fixing. It needs to be the motivation for some hot fiddle playing.
Looks like Tokin and those Chinese finger-cuffs are in full force on this comment stream.
[...] » I missed this a couple of days ago, but it’s too good to overlook: Radley Balko pushes for punishment for the folks who ordered torture to establish a spurious link between Al Qaeda and [...]
“We’re always going to disagree whether waterboarding is considered torture but since the military forces some of their forces to undergo training that includes being waterboarded, I’m going to say it shouldn’t be classified as torture.”
Utter nonsense. SERE training includes things like safe words, is utterly voluntary, has a set start and stop date for the program, is known by trainees from the start to be essentially unreal and artificial, and is focused around training people in techniques on how to resist interrogations, not simply endure torture endlessly.
The whole point of stress positions is to cause incredible pain without leaving legally inconvenient physical marks. But intense pain is intense pain, and inflicting that sort of pain for days on end is torture. Anything else is pathetic dissembling. And all the more vile when it’s aimed at helping the President save face rather than saving lives.
If you want to defend the use of flat out torture, man up and do it. But don’t wuss out and try to minimize or euphemize it because you can’t actually make a serious case for what you’re defending.
Drew | April 23rd, 2009 at 12:56 am
…
Utter nonsense. SERE training includes things like safe words, is utterly voluntary, has a set start and stop date for the program, is known by trainees from the start to be essentially unreal and artificial, and is focused around training people in techniques on how to resist interrogations, not simply endure torture endlessly.
Another thing about SERE training is that the people going through it are assets with a lot of time and money put into their training.
It is great there are people defending torture and torturers. If I ever have to torture anyone let it be in this country where I will be defended by many upstanding citizens. Let me not go to trial at another Nuremberg.
Actually I can, and I did. If you want to dumb down the meaning of the word “torture” to make yourself feel morally superior then knock yourself out. IMHO I believe most americans don’t view stress positions, sleep deprivation, caterpillars, or turning off the a/c as torture. I never said it was pleasant or fun, all I said is it’s not “torture”.
My biggest beef is I think the constitution is very, very clear when it comes to who has the authority in deciding how detainees are held and who decides what rights those detainees have. This is a political issue that should be decided by voters not courts. If the nation as a whole agrees with you, then fine, but I’m betting they agree more with my position. Right now it’s Obamas turn to decide what’s right and the voters will have a say in 4 years or so whether they agree. Turning this into a witch hunt when the president and members of both parties in congress knew and approved what was going on is lunacy and can only end badly.
There’s nothing “dumbing down” about calling a forced stress position maintained for days, even weeks on end, a form of torture. The only difference between it and sticking hot pokers under fingrenails is that stress positions don’t leave lasting physical marks: which appears to be part of the rationale for the technique: that it allows people like you a thin tissue of deniability and is far easier to conceal. I suppose that once we develop drugs that stimulate pain receptors directly, you won’t call that torture either.
But the thing is, if someone kidnapped your child and inflicted it on them, I bet you’d call it torture. When it happens to American soldiers, no one has or had any problem calling it torture. For goodness sakes, the stated purpose of SERE is to teach our assets how to resist interrogations that employ torture.
drew, you and I are just going to continue to disagree. temporary discomfort is not torture, it’s temporary, and these people are not your children, they’re terror suspects. If the worst thing that could happen to american soldiers if they’re captured is waterboarding then the world is a beautiful place, but that isn’t the case is it.
http://www.aliennationreport.com/DAN.asx
watch this video and then try to tell me stress positions are torture.
[...] or even competent in the first place. Given that we not only apparently used torture to try and gin up an ultimately non-existent case for Saddam’s operation connection to 9/11, but we even apparently ran around chasing down [...]