Red Cross Torture Report

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Sadly, we live in a democracy, and, as it turns out, democracy means that you are above the law if you are in the right position or have the right connections....

We live in a republic, about which I am not saddened at all.

To date, there have been ZERO human polities where all laws and regulations have been enforced with complete and total impartiality. EVERY historical polity has had members who were "more equal" than others for one reason on another (power, connections, money, lineage, whatever).

In principle, no one should be above the law. It is something for which we should all strive. However, expecting to attain that level of impartiality and to then keep it at that level is quixotic at best.

If, as seems likely based on what we now know, those lower echelons who got hammered for their abusive (and in some instances torturous) efforts were indeed following instructions from those in the chain of command above them, then the charges and punishments should also head up the chain. Such would be mete and fair -- but I'm not gonna hold my breath and wait for it to happen.

[Xiahou]

If, as seems likely based on what we now know, those lower echelons who got hammered for their abusive (and in some instances torturous) efforts were indeed following instructions from those in the chain of command above them, then the charges and punishments should also head up the chain. Such would be mete and fair -- but I'm not gonna hold my breath and wait for it to happen.

I still don't agree with conflating the insanity at Abu Ghraib with the deliberate and methodical interrogations carried out by the CIA.

The much publicized guards at Abu Ghraib were sick perverts, plain and simple. They took torture pictures "for fun", posed with dead bodies, posed with naked detainees, filmed detainees masturbating, and even photographed themselves having sex with each other. They're disgusting and deserve every bit of punishment they got and then some- they broke every rule by which people in the military were supposed to live by. It's also worth noting that not just the perpetrators, but their superiors were also punished for their lack of oversight- probably not as much as they should have been though.

You're free to think that waterboarding, etc (as outlined in the OP) is morally reprehensible and should be punished, but please don't put abusive interrogations on the same level as these sickos. They weren't making porno under orders- they were completely out of control.

[Lemur]

Factual problems with the above post:

"Enhanced interrogations" (that's verschärfte Vernehmung to those of you with a sense of history) have not been exclusively carried out by the C.I.A., and nobody has made any serious argument that this is the case. Organizations known to have been carrying out "enhanced interrogation": various elements of the Army, the C.I.A., private military contractors and the Navy SEALS. (The Marine Corps, with its usual savvy, has avoided stepping into this tar pit.)

The C.O. of Abu Ghraib was merely demoted; a serious punishment for a career officer, but hardly the same as imprisonment and conviction. The theater commander received no punishment of any sort ever.

With the exception of taking pictures and having sex with each other, absolutely nothing done by the guards at Abu Ghraib was outside the scope of the newly released torture memos. Once again, I think what makes everybody get prickly is the fact that they took pictures. Enforced nudity? Legal, says the Bybee memo. Sexual humiliation? Perfectly legitimate. Beatings? Legal. Tying someone up and leaving them there for days? Authorized.

I have this funny feeling that if pictures had been taken at Baghram or Guantanamo, we would be hearing from torture apologists how the "bad frat party" had happened there too. Heaven forbid we consider the possibility that legalizing and instituting torture might have had something to do with the excesses. That's just unthinkable.

-edit-

Not that much of anyone in my country seems to care, but by releasing the torture memos and then declaring that we will not investigate or prosecute anyone involved, we appear to be in breach of the Convention Against Torture. But that's just a treaty we signed, like the Geneva Convention. Who reads those meaningless scraps of paper anyway?

[Lemur]

Reference:

Just so we're all clear on what we're talking about, here are some of the newly released memos. PDF warning.

18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC (Office of Legal Counsel), to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

[Xiahou]

With the exception of taking pictures and having sex with each other, absolutely nothing done by the guards at Abu Ghraib was outside the scope of the newly released torture memos.

How about keeping a mentally handicapped man on a leash and dragging him around the prison as their pet? That on there? Desecrating a corpse?

[Lemur]

Taking the Yoo perspective, show me how any of this is illegal with detainees who are effectively non-persons. Look at the autopsy reports. People were getting killed in these interrogations. How is putting someone a leash legally more reprehensible than driving a detainee's core temp down until he dies?

According to the memos, it's perfectly legitimate to keep a detainee from sleeping for 11 days. This was common practice. It's not nearly as shocking as a picture of a guy on a leash, but it's far worse for the individual who's on the receiving end.

Desecrating corpses? So what? These are legal non-persons. Why should their bodies receive more respect after life than during?

-edit-

Oh, and lest I forget, should charges be brought on the people who waterboarded a (most likely) mentally ill detainee 83 times in a single month? According to most everyone except some people with a vested interest in President 43's "enhanced interrogation" regime, Abu Zubidayah was not even remotely sane, unless sane people maintain journals in which multiple personalities discuss their feelings.

Zubaydah turned out to be mentally ill, keeping a diary "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. The book also quotes Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, telling a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality." According to Suskind, this judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," yet two weeks later Bush gave a speech and labeled Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."

So which is worse: Being naked and on a leash when you're mentally disabled, or being waterboarded 83 times in a month while you're mentally disabled?

[LittleGrizzly]

In principle, no one should be above the law. It is something for which we should all strive. However, expecting to attain that level of impartiality and to then keep it at that level is quixotic at best.

I can't tell if by this you are justifying not going for the upper echelons of command or if you simply are explaining why it is not happening ?

Obama it seems in the view of people here is being pragmatic and quite sensible by letting the previous administration away with its torturing...

To me this seems anything but sensible (i wan't quite sure of the definition of pragmatic and an online dictionary didn't paticularly help) this is some great propaganda for Al Qaeda and anyone who dislike America, but if Obama were to prosecute anyone and everyone involved in torture and allowing its use it would be the greatest PR move against Al Qaeda and American haters everywhere...

What better way to prove that America is not the great satan by prosecuting thier own who have done wrong... what better way to prove that we are far and above Al Qaeda on the moral high ground...

All Obama is doing is ceeding more of the moral high ground and giving a great pr coup to the islamic fundamentalists..

[Louis VI the Fat]

Good news for the Americans, who, no doubt, have been quakeing in their boots the past few weeks.

Spain: No torture probe of US officials

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spanish prosecutors on Friday formally recommended against an investigation into allegations that six senior Bush administration officials gave legal cover for the torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

While their ruling is not binding, the announcement all but dooms prospects for the case against the men going forward. On Thursday Spain's top law-enforcement official Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would not support an investigation against the officials -- including former United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Prosecutors said any such investigation ought to be conducted in the US, not Spain. They also questioned the idea of bringing charges against lawyers and presidential advisers who neither carried out the alleged torture themselves, nor were ultimately responsible for ordering it.

The prosecutors wrote that going after lawyers who wrote non-binding recommendations for the president and his senior staff, rather than targeting higher-ranking officials who authorised the alleged torture, "raises important problems from a legal standpoint".

It also questioned the appropriateness of a case that would effectively put on trial "all of the policies of the past US administration [as reproachable as they may be]," saying such an endeavour would go beyond the scope of the Spanish legal system.

[Xiahou]

Oh, and lest I forget, should charges be brought on the people who waterboarded a (most likely) mentally ill detainee 83 times in a single month?

What are you basing that on? You cite the OLC memo, page 37.... but there are four memos, two of which go as high as page 37. I didn't see any references to how much anyone was subjected to anything. I did see some guidelines on waterboarding on one of them, but again, nothing I saw said anything about anyone being waterboarded 83x in 1 month. What am I missing?

[Lemur]

I am referring to the 5/30/05 memo. Here's a better scan of it. "The CIA used the waterboard 'at least 83 times during August 2002' in the interrogation of Zubidayah, IG Reports at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id at 90."

Does that help?

-edit-

A SERE instructor demands that prosecutions take place. Note that SERE was the basis for the torture enhanced interrogation program. (And note that SERE derived its techniques from various forms of torture used on our soldiers by the North Koreans and the Vietnamese, among others. The irony should be self-evident.)

I have been engaged in the hunt for al-Qaeda for almost two decades. And, as I once wrote in the Daily News, I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people - as we trained our own fighting men and women to endure and resist the interrogation tactics they might be subjected to by our enemies. I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice. [...]

Despite all the gyrations - the ducking, dodging and hiding from the facts - there is no way to say that these people were not authorizing torture. Worse yet, they seem to have not cared a wit that these techniques came from the actual manuals of communist, fascist and totalitarian torturers. It is now clear how clearly - how coldly - Bush's lawyers could authorize individual techniques from past torture chambers, claim they came from the safe SERE program, and not even wet their beds at night. That many U.S. service members over the years have died as a result of these same techniques was never considered.

This is about more than one tactic, waterboarding, that has gotten the lion's share of attention. As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal. Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately. Wearing prisoners out to the point of mental breakdown; forcing confessions through sleep deprivation; inflicting pain by standing for days on end (not minutes like in SERE); beating them against flexing walls until concussion; applying humiliation slaps (two at a time), and repeating these methods over and over. [...]

Worst of all was that an agency advising the Justice Department, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, knew that these coercive techniques would not work if captives devoutly trusted in their God and kept faith with each other. Yet those two characteristics are pre-qualifications for being allowed into al-Qaeda. Other non-coercive methods - the central focus of which is humanely deprogramming them of their religious ideological brainwashing - are now turning al-Qaeda members in Indonesia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But they were never considered. Perhaps they were not macho enough.

[Kadagar_AV]

There are 3 reasons why the US treatment of their prisoners is wrong.

A) The information you get from torture is worth very little.

B) What you do to others, others do to you. You have just set the standards for what it is ok to do to US militarymen caught in combat.

C) It's just plain wrong and barbaric. When I did my military time they drilled us HARD about what we could and could not to do POWs. I'm sad the US doesnt live up to the standard set by themselves.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

There are 3 reasons why the US treatment of their prisoners is wrong.

A) The information you get from torture is worth very little.

As has been noted in discussions on this topic before, the only POSSIBLE excuse for such methods is a requirement for speed (the proverbial ticking bomb scenario). Any other use simply threatens to denigrate the very information you are trying to obtain. Unless torture is the end goal itself (having now read a bit about the frequency of the waterboardings etc., I begin to fear this may have been the case for some -- very disturbing).

B) What you do to others, others do to you. You have just set the standards for what it is ok to do to US militarymen caught in combat.

Since most of the SERE methods were taught to us the old fashioned way in nearly every conflict we've been involved in since the 2nd World War, I could argue that you've got the thing reversed, but Kukri handled this one best -- we should have been the ones strong enough to break the cycle.

C) It's just plain wrong and barbaric. When I did my military time they drilled us HARD about what we could and could not to do POWs. I'm sad the US doesnt live up to the standard set by themselves.

Agreed. R.G.H. Siu once noted that "cruelty is the tantrum of frustrated power." I am coming to believe that this frustration pushed us past limits we should not have gone.