Obama: Gitmo won’t close on time

I guess this means I officially lose my bet with Ben Boychuk:

BEIJING — President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.

When Obama took office and immediately pledged to close Gitmo within a year, I was — to put it mildly — thrilled. I thought it was a bold declaration of values and intent. But boldly declaring your intent makes it pretty easy to fail.

For what it’s worth: I still think closing Gitmo is a net plus to America. In a war against lawless, stateless terrorists, it seemed to me we ceded some necessary moral high ground by trying to create a lawless, stateless base to contain them. It told the world that we didn’t really believe in our own civilization. In a battle that is just as much about ideas as it is about bullets and bombs, it was a crucial concession by the Bush Administration. Reversing that concession, it turns out, is more difficult than I thought it would be.

Gitmo: Not quite closed for business

I bet a conservative friend a small bottle of nice scotch that Gitmo would be closed by the Obama Administration’s one-year deadline. Looks like I’d better start shopping.

Torture

I’m still making my way through the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture which was released (with some redactions) yesterday. I’ll have some thoughts, I think, once I’ve given it a closer look. But for now, I think, publius sums things up nicely:

The highlights include:  (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees’ faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it “poignant”); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one’s bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) “hard takedowns” (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).

There will be folks who will say that all of this is justified: We’re at war! But it’s still torture. Not “enhanced techniques,” but torture. Plain and simple — let me say it again — torture. Almost certainly in the legal sense, but also (because the law can be an ass) quite certainly in the moral sense.

Go ahead and defend it. But if you try to tell me it’s not torture — that it isn’t what it plainly is — I must conclude you’re either delusional or lying.

Moral equivalence

This kind of treatment is obviously needed to protect our national security:

“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”

Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall.

The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.

Walling. Sleep deprivation. Stress positions. The threat and implication that even worse forms of pain will result if the suspect doesn’t talk: These are all means of keeping our country safe from attack.

…

Oh, wait. Sorry. These are the techniques Iranians are using to extract false confessions from democratic reformers. Well, then: Torture is bad!

The torture memos are released

Today, the Obama Administration did a good thing: It released a number of Bush Era legal memos that laid the foundation for the torture of terror suspects, giving Americans — and the world — better insight into the details of what the CIA did behind closed doors.

I have so far read only one memo in its entirety: An August 2002 document by Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge. It is an amazing piece of rationalizing and ass-covering. It considers the legal definition of torture, then goes to some lengths to prove that each of 10 techniques is not torture.

The law:

(1)“torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2)“severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(A)the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; the threat of imminent death; or
the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality;

“Prolonged mental harm” is the escape clause here. We’ll get to that in a minute.
The techniques in the memo range from a swift grabbing of the lapels to slapping to sleep deprivation stress positions to waterboarding. And each is rationalized away in Bybee’s memo via euphemism, obfuscation and good old-fashioned lying.

Slapping, for example, is meant to make the terror suspect think physical harm could become him. The memo says so. But here’s the kicker: If nobody actually explicitly threatens further physical harm — if the terror suspect merely infers, as he’s meant to, that such harm may be imminent — it’s not even close to being illegal!

Though it may hurt, as discussed above, the effect is one of smarting or stinging and surprise or himiliation, but not severe pain. Nor does it alone constitute a threat of severe pain or suffering … Like the the facial hold and the attention grasp, the use of this slap is not accompanied by a specific verbal threat of further escalating violence. Additionally, you have informed us that in one use this techinque will typically involve at most two slaps. Certainly, the use of this slap may dislodge any expectation that (terror suspect) had that he would not be touched in a physically aggressive manner. Nonetheless, this alteration in his expectations could hardly be construed by a reasonable person in his situation to be tantamount to a threat of severe physical pain or suffering. At most, this technique suggests that the circumstances of his confinement and interrogation have changed.

But wait. If you’re trying to get a terror suspect to understand that they can be treated with physical aggression, why in the world would that suspect be unreasonable to think that further, more severe types of violence would be visited upon him? Particularly when that slapping is followed within days or weeks — the introduction of all these techniques was supposed to take place over 30 days — by escalations in the assaults on his physical comfort: stress positions, sleep deprivation and (eventually) waterboarding?

(And truthfully, a slap or two across the face — which I find personally distasteful — probably is pretty small beans as far as this stuff goes. But it’s important to note how Bybee (and the Bushies) try to pretend that even this small thing isn’t doing the thing they intend it to do.)

Here’s where the euphemisms come in. Stress positions don’t cause pain, they cause “muscle fatigue” which causes “discomfort” — never mind that the positions, as described, would cause your muscles to feel as though they were on fire. Sleep deprivation — for a week at a time — doesn’t inflict suffering; again, it’s “discomfort.” And waterboarding, well, sure, that actually does create the threat of imminent death…

Wait. Seriously? They’re admitting that waterboarding is supposed to make a suspect feel like they’re about to die?  Yes. Luckily, the Bushies have it covered: It’s not torture, they say — despite hundreds of years of precedent that, yes, it is torture — because no prolonged mental harm results.

And how do they know that? Because all the people who went through the military’s torture resistance training program emerged without long-term mental problems! There was no prolonged mental harm!

Forget the irony of the torture resistance program for a minute, though. There’s a basic difference between the terror suspects and the military trainees that is integral to all of this, and it undermines Bybee’s premise: The military guys knew they were going home, eventually. No amount of role-playing was going to change that. But Bybee was approving the techniques to knock such certainties out from under the terror suspects. They didn’t know they were going home. They were meant to believe that more and worse things were going to happen to them — perhaps in perpetuity, or perhaps until death. Mightn’t that cause prolonged mental harm? Heck, we already know that sustained solitary confinment causes such harm. Why wouldn’t this bad treatment?

And that’s where the “prolonged mental harm” clause becomes a “get out of jail free” card — at least, in the eyes of the Bush Administration. Because it could take years to make such determinations — and by then, who is going to want to pursue it? Not President Obama, that’s for sure. Under this logic, the only way to commit torture would be to kill a person in the course of interrogation. And maybe not even then.

More to come. Maybe.

OK. Go ahead and investigate the Bush Administration for war crimes

I went on record a few months ago saying that I believed the Bush Administration had broken the law by ordering the torture of terrorism suspects — but that the Obama Administration shouldn’t get into the business of prosecuting its predecessors for those crimes. Why? Politics.

What (Americans) want from the Obama Administration is not to relive the worst parts of the last eight years, but to get started on the hard work of stabilizing the economy and getting the troops out of Iraq. Presidential administrations are not great at walking and chewing gum at the same time; an investigation into the excesses of the Bush Administration will suck the energy out of every other effort Obama needs to succeed if he — and the country — are to be successful.

And there’s simply no way to pull it off, anyway, without seeming like an exercise in the extreme partisanship Obama has tried to tamp down. Which, incidentally, is one key to him having the support he needs to get stuff done.

I’ve changed my mind. Why? Three reasons.

• It’s increasingly clear that President Obama won’t get the Republicans to come along for much of anything he needs or wants to accomplish. And that’s fine: Republicans have their own beliefs and priorities, and they shouldn’t support the president’s agenda if they don’t support the president’s agenda. But politics is a horse-trading business, at heart, and if the GOP doesn’t want to play ball, there’s no reason for Obama to shirk his other obligations as president in hopes of playing nice.

To be clear: I’m not saying prosecutions should happen for political reasons. I’m saying there were politicial reasons not to investigate and prosecute. But those reasons haven’t materialized quite the way I thought they would.

• In any case, it appears the GOP is playing hardball politics in defense of torture, refusing to confirm several Obama appointees unless the administration promises not to release secret Bush-era torture memos. The Obama administration should absolutely take that dare. But there’s no reason for Democrats to worry about appearing to politicize the issue when that’s exactly what Republicans have done.

• And in any case, we now know — thanks to the reporting of Mark Danner at the New York Review of Books — that the International Red Cross believes the United States committed war crimes in its detaining and torturing of terror suspects. And amid its many suggestions about how to deal with those crimes, the Red Cross report urged

that the US authorities investigate all allegations of ill-treatment and take steps to
punish the perpetrators, where appropriate, and to prevent such abuses from
happening again.

Simply put, our international credibility is on the line. If we brush aside credible allegations of war crimes — and the International Red Cross is no fly-by-night bleeding heart lefty organization; its job is to look into these matters on behalf of the international community — then we forfeit whatever moral leadership we claim on human rights matters. “Torture for me, but not for thee” is not going to cut it.

Investigation and prosecution of Bush-era officials  — accompanied by their conviction or exoneration — would be painful. It would undoubtedly be a political firestorm. Those are the reasons I urged hesitation. But it’s increasingly clear that absent some sort of “truth and reconciliation” commission, it’s also the right thing to do.

Torture

I have for a few days been trying to figure out my response to Mark Danner’s report — in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books — about the International Red Cross report that offers yet more evidence that the United States tortured terror suspects in violation of our own laws, international treaties and hundreds of years of custom. Danner’s conclusion:

1. Beginning in the spring of 2002 the United States government began to torture prisoners. This torture, approved by the President of the United States and monitored in its daily unfolding by senior officials, including the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, clearly violated major treaty obligations of the United States, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, as well as US law.

2. The most senior officers of the US government, President George W. Bush first among them, repeatedly and explicitly lied about this, both in reports to international institutions and directly to the public. The President lied about it in news conferences, interviews, and, most explicitly, in speeches expressly intended to set out the administration’s policy on interrogation before the people who had elected him.

3. The US Congress, already in possession of a great deal of information about the torture conducted by the administration—which had been covered widely in the press, and had been briefed, at least in part, from the outset to a select few of its members—passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and in so doing attempted to protect those responsible from criminal penalty under the War Crimes Act.

4. Democrats, who could have filibustered the bill, declined to do so—a decision that had much to do with the proximity of the midterm elections, in the run-up to which, they feared, the President and his Republican allies might gain advantage by accusing them of “coddling terrorists.”

That about sums it up. And I guess it’s why I haven’t had much to say about Danner’s reports: There’s not much new I can say that I haven’t said before. The United States has committed torture. Torture is plainly immoral and illegal — and, just to be clear, wrong. And as Danner suggests, it’s not just a few people who are responsible for this — no, not even the despicable John Yoo. There was widespread complicity throughout our political class. And this was done in our names. It’s all very dispiriting.

Gitmo, secret prisons will close

NYT:

WASHINGTON — Saying that “our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground” to combat terrorism, President Obama signed executive orders Thursday effectively ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program, directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year and setting up a sweeping, high-level review of the best way to hold and question terrorist suspects in the future.

“We intend to win this fight,” Mr. Obama said, “We are going to win it on our own terms.”

All other things being equal — but they’re not, because of things like the economy, and because of the ongoing threat of terror attacks — Barack Obama could now go on cruise control for the next four years and I’d be satisfied with the accomplishments of his presidency.

Conservatives had hoped that President Obama would preserve the anti-terror structure and rules created by President because, as has often been said, “governing is more difficult than campaigning.” It undoubtedly is. And keeping America safe from attacks is undoubtedly going to be difficult. But I’d rather march into battle with the pride of knowing that we were working to safeguard American lives and values rather than the despair of knowing we’d too easily given up some of what made us great.

Report: U.S. torture has compromised our national security

Washington Post:

A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

And let me quote from the report:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of
“a few bad apples” acting on their own.  The fact is that senior officials in the United States
government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to
create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.  Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Gosh. Sounds like the kind of thing liberals were saying four years ago already. You’d almost think that certain conservatives are more interested in looking tough than in actually protecting American security and ideals.

The terrorists have won

The New York Times reports:

In the first hearing on the government’s justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

Judge Leon, in a ruling from the bench, said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.

“To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation,” he said. He directed that the five men be released “forthwith” and urged the government not to appeal.

Judge Leon, who was appointed by President Bush, had been expected to be sympathetic to the government. In 2005, he ruled that the men had no habeas corpus rights.

Guess who is angry? National Review’s Andy McCarthy, of course:

All that said, though, Judge Leon concluded that “[t]o rest [combatant detention] on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation.”  That is puzzling.  There is nothing in the training of a judge that makes him an expert in military matters.  In our system of divided government, the question of who is an enemy combatant should be committed to the executive brach — specifically, to the military professionals waging the war.

No it shouldn’t — at least, not exclusively. The Bush Administration has proven it’s more interested in preserving the power of the executive branch than it is of actually assessing the innocence, guilt or intelligence value of prisoners at Guantanamo. In her book, “The Dark Side,” New Yorker writer Jane Mayer tells the story of a CIA officer who determined many Gitmo detainees were, in fact, innocent of terrorism.

After completing his survey in Guantanamo, the CIA officer wrote up a detailed report describing his findings. He mentioned specific detainees by name, so there was no confusion about whom the United States was wrongly holding. He made clear that he believed the United States was committing war crimes by holding and questioning innocent people in such inhumane ways.

(Condi Rice’s legal counsel, John Bellinger, read the report and tried to set up a meeting to address the problem. There he ran into opposition from Dick Cheney’s counsel, David Addington.)

“No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!” Addington said, according to two sources.

“This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Gordon and Bellinger argued back. “Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?”

Addington’s response was adamant and imperious. “We are not second-guessing the President’s decision. These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that phrase,” he said. “They’ve all been through a screening process. There’s nothing to talk about.” The President had made a group-status identification, as far as he was concerned. To Addington, it was a matter of presidential power, not a question of individual guilt or innocence.”

That’s morally repugnant. It is, in fact, evil.

And though I generallly disdain shrillness in politics, I don’t think you can be shrill enough in the face of the attitudes of David Addington or Andy McCarthy. These attitudes need loud and even angry pushback every time they’re encountered, because it’s obvious these men have had the ears of people in power. And someday, they will again.

A nation that declares itself dedicated to the notions of freedom and justice — a nation like ours, in other words — cannot let the executive have the last and only word in who is free and who is imprisoned for life. That should be just as true under an Obama Administration as under Bush’s.