At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

“Sure,” said Yoo.

via Report: Bush Lawyer Said President Could Order Civilians to Be ‘Massacred’ – Declassified Blog – Newsweek.com.

Apparently not. No limits on barbarity and no moral bright lines these people would not cross.

So how might so-called conservatives who defend torture by our government respond to that kind of cognitive dissonance? Reagan worship on one hand, and mindless support of barbarism on the other. Oh how can they possibly choose?

Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway – Balkinization.

But Margolis argues that the Office of Professional Responsibility chose too high a standard to judge the professional responsibility of Yoo and Bybee. The OPR argued that Yoo and Bybee had “a duty to exercise independent legal judgment and to render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice.” This standard, Margolis explained, is much too high a requirement and not one that Yoo and Bybee were previously warned was the standard to which they would be held.

I know what you are probably saying: shouldn’t every government lawyer have to live up to this standard? Of course, they should, but the point is that this is a disciplinary proceeding. It’s not about what people should do, but about how badly they have to screw things up before they are subject to professional sanctions.

Instead, Margolis argues that, judging by (among other things) a review of D.C. bar rules, the standard for attorney misconduct is set pretty damn low, and is only violated by lawyers who (here I put it colloquially) are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused.

Margolis concludes that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. But lawyers often make arguments that are bad or even laughably bad, and this by itself does not violate the very low standard set by rules of professional responsibility. These rules are set up by jurisdictions to weed out the worst offenders, leaving the rest of the legal profession to make entirely stupid, disingenuous and asinine arguments that normal people with functioning moral consciences would not make. That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America.

It’s hard to say how much our national interests were damaged by abandonment of various international treaties (like the Geneva Conventions or the United Nations Convention Against Torture) and American laws. Under the cover provided by Yoo and Bybee or government adopted the interrogation techniques and rhetoric of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Khmer Rouge and the Soviet Union.

Our institutions and leaders have decided that this is just fine, we can do exactly what we hanged Japanese Officers for after World War II. The argument is that it protected us and is therefore OK. This is the ultimate “the ends justifies the means” argument and is completely divorced from moral grounding.

Many have pointed out that there isn’t one terrorist plot foiled by this barbaric behavior. The Los Angeles Library Tower plot is trotted out as proof despite it being provably false. Dick Cheney loves to mention that, you can’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially if it’s part of an effort to cover you own ass.

For me it all comes down to this: either we are better than the terrorists that would destroy us or were not. Democracies don’t use the kind of techniques the former VP champions, we necessarily take certain behaviors off the table. This is as it should be, we keep the moral high ground. Fans of torture have no problem dragging us down to lowest levels of human conduct.

I say we can take these assholes without destroying the rule of law or lowering ourselves to their level. These religious fanatics are not now, nor have they ever been, an existential threat to our country.  They should be treated as the thugs and criminals they are.

…captives have information in long-term memory that they choose not to share. Extended application of techniques that will induce stress and discomfort will make the captives release the information. The underlying assumptions are that the coercive techniques are more effective than standard interrogations, and that the information they produce is reliable. O’Mara concludes this section by noting, “No supporting data for this model are provided; in fact, the model is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.”

via Science behind US coercive interrogations missing in action – Ars Technica.

This, of course, will not stop ardent fans of torture like Dick Chenney. His world view has never been science or reality based in the first place. Torture fans seem to prefer truthiness to, you know, actual truth.

*Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart.

It was quite a juxtaposition this weekend. If Saturday was for remembering the Kennedys, Sunday was for dealing with the Cheneys. Camelot vs. Torture-a-lot.

Dick was mumbling up a storm about how awesome torture was, including an even more twisted cheer of “drill, baby, drill!“, to which the FoxNews position was F%@$ YEAH!!

Meanwhile, Liz Cheney, born in time to keep Dick out of Vietnam was on ABC working to keep Dick out of jail. Truly, the gift of a child that keeps on giving…at least to Daddy. With Liz’s appearance, as Scarecrow mentioned for ABC it came down not to a means to an end, but rather just for the means themselves.

But at least CBS had John McCain on to say that Cheney is wrong and torture is wrong, but that torturing people should not result in any consequences for anyone actually torturing someone.

So in summary, we said goodbye to Ted Kennedy one day and the next we were deciding how much we as a nation can torture people. And even more disturbing were the proposed answers.

Nobody said “NO”. Rather the responses were: “Yes”; “Oh Yes!”; and “Oh well”.

USA! USA! USA!

via Firedoglake » Legacies.

I guess you have to give a bit of credit to McCain for not buying the party line about how swell torture works. But, failing to support investigation and prosecutions that are the consequences in our system means there’s no deterrent to doing it again.

A Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s report set to be released Monday provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including details of how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.

via Report Provides New Details on C.I.A. Prisoner Abuse – NYTimes.com.

There’s no preventing future occurrances without punishing those responsible for the policy. I’m not talking about so low level guy in a room with al-Nashiri, I’m talking about the the policy makers and lawyers who wanted to make believe this was defensible moral behavior and US law.s and treaties.

First of all Glenn Greenwald deserves a lot of credit for championing  basic human rights for US prisoners. In this piece he recounts the plight of Boumediene:

…who, while living in Bosnia working for the International Red Crescent, was arrested by the Bosnian government (at the behest of the Bush administration) shortly after 9/11 on charges of plotting to blow up a U.S. and British embassy, but was then quickly cleared by Bosnian courts of any wrongdoing and ordered released.  But as he was about to be released — in January, 2002 — he was abducted by the U.S. military inside Bosnia and shipped to Guantanamo, where he remained without charges for the next almost 8 years, and was clearly tortured.

Congress passed Military Commissions Act of 2006 which would have cemented the fate of people like Boumediene. We had no evidence to keep him, yet the Bush administration fought every attempt to release him. The Obama administration “which continues to claim that ‘state secrets’ would be jeopardized if the victims of our torture and wrongful detention such as Boumediene are permitted to have their claims heard in an American court.”

This is not how a civilized nation behaves. We ignore basic human rights as detailed on our own laws and consitiution at our own fate. We have for too long justified they very worst types of tyranny with our own fears. We have decided that the best way to fight those who “hate us because of our freedoms” is by destryoing those freedom, which is the only way terrorists could ever win.

She seems to be having a problem coming to terms with conflicting statements she made about when she knew about torture as a Bush era policy:

Pelosi’s performance in the Capitol was either a calculated escalation of a long-running feud with the Bush administration or a reckless act by a politician whose word had been called into question. Perhaps it was both.

For the first time, Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that in 2003 she was informed by an aide that the CIA had told others in Congress that officials had used waterboarding during interrogations. But she insisted, contrary to CIA accounts, that she was not told about waterboarding during a September 2002 briefing by agency officials. Asked whether she was accusing the CIA of lying, she replied, “Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States.”

Her contention is that she didn’t find out until Feb. 2003 and did not protest because she was focused on winning control of Congress back from Republicans. That just doesn’t ring true to me. I suspect she knew more than she’s said so far.

via U.S. officials slam Dick Cheney’s claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind 183 times was a ‘success’.

“Cheney is full of crap,” one intelligence source with decades of experience said Tuesday.

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of Mohammed, known as “KSM,” said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

“Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking – they didn’t even reach the planning stage,” the retired counterterrorism official said. “So it’s a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted.”

Krugman ties the torture program to a desperate search for a way to link 9/11 to Iraq.

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

From: Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link – McClatchyDC.com

It has been stated by many before me, torture is unreliable as a source of information. The SERE techniques our “enhanced interrogation” program was based on were developed to help US pilots resist techniques used against them during the Korean War to  force false confessions.

Perhaps this was the real point: They didn’t want to extract intelligence information. The pressed interrogators to get rough so they could get a “confession” to “prove” a link to Saddam and improve the case to invade Iraq. Perhaps this is why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Either they wanted to force him to say that Saddam was involved or it was simply torture for torture’s sake. Either it says nothing good about America.

Andrea Mitchell notes that the CIA denies that they have received any such request for the former VP. And why would it matter if he did? He should have no more influence than any other private citizen over the CIA’s decisions on de-classification of documents.

In any case, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s wrong, it’s illegal and goes against everything we’ve ever stood for. Because an old man wet his diaper in fear after 9-11 doesn’t mean that torture is right. If it worked or not is irrelevant. The ends do not justify the means. Either we live by a moral code or we are as bad as any of our foes.

Most interrogation experts seem to think that it’s not a useful tactic, that it leads the torture victim to say whatever they believe the torturer wants to hear. I wonder how many false leads were followed and resources diverted because of false information? How many jihadis were recruited based on our torture program? How can we possibly claim any moral authority when we refuse to follow our own laws? Sully noted that there was a Kafkaesque and deliberate effort to create a public face of freedom on the march, while privately trying prevent the same for detainess:

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.

If a hear an Obama spokesman say “we should be looking forward, not backwards” again, I’m going to scream. Does that imply that if a robbed a bank during Bush administration I shouldn’t be arrested, tried and jailed becuase that would be looking backwards? Hardly. Seems like the bankers already did that anyway.

Sully accurately makes the point that neither Bush nor Obama have the authority to torture, that Congress alone as the authority to make rules regarding captures. Laws and treaties have been passed that make torture clearly illegal in the US., therefore:

no legal authority in  human history would judge the waterboarding of a prisoner 83 or 183 times in one month as anything but torture. If it were done to a US soldier, would Dick Cheney refuse to call it torture? Of course not, although it is telling that no reporter has ever asked him this obvious question directly.

And so it is simply an empirical fact that president Bush broke the law and violated his oath of office by ordering the torture of prisoners.

Note that this wasn’t an emergency moment, or a ticking time-bomb scenario. It was a decision to torture made months after the 9/11 attacks and re-asserted years after the 9/11 attack, and set up as a program, with elaborate rules, staffing and bureaucracy, to torture prisoners for the indefinite future.

Now fast-forward to February 2007 when the International Committee of the Red Cross notifies the president of the United States that it believes that his administration has engaged in what was unequivocally torture of prisoners. At that point, the president is required, by law and by treaty, to open an investigation and prosecution of the guilty parties. The president failed to do that, another breach of the law. Moreover, any president privy to that information is required to initiate an investigation and prosecution – or violate the law and the Geneva Conventions.

And so Obama’s refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture’s cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.

America becomes a banana republic.

(Emphasis mine)

Just so.  You can’t parse or nuance your way out of this. Obama, through inaction, makes himself complicit with the clear crimes of the Bush administration. He has a duty to investigate and prosecute should evidence lead in that direction. It’s  not an option. There have been some stirrings of independence in the DOJ. Let’s hope that if Obama lacks the stomach to follow the law, Eric Holder will see it as a clear matter of duty.

Wrong is wrong. This a a battle for the soul of our republic, for whether or not we’re a nation of laws, or as Sully says above,  “banana republic”.

MSNBC is saying right now that Obama is leaving it to Holder and the DOJ to decide if it’s appropriate to persue the policy makers who approved torture as a valid interrogation technique. We’ll see what Holder is made of. An independant prosecutor would be a good first step.

He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

If it fails to shock the conscience, then you have no conscience.

Kristoff seems to suffer from the common illusion that Republicans want to work together for the good of the country and putting them in charge of investigating Bush Administration abuse of detainees and blatant law breaking will somehow win them over. They only want one thing: to destroy Obama in particular and Democrats in general so they can take back power. There is no winning them over. They will take your grand gesture  of bipartisanship and use it as a political bludgeon.

Here’s what the last 8 years have taught me. They have no interest in truth, morality, the Constitution, human rights, international treaties or the rule of law. Their only interest is in the exercise of raw political power to reward their narrow constituancies (Big corporations, the ultra-wealthy and religious extremists, in case you haven’t been paying attention the last 8 years). The rest of you, well you can just go fu%& yourself.

Everything the Obama administration does needs to be viewed through this prism of sad experience. They will take your consessions and hopefull promises to work together and turn them into a garrote to throttle the life from their enemies, which are defined as any and all who fail to mindlessly mouth GOP talking points or have the audacity to point out the reality doesn’t match their idealized fantasies. Working together is an illusion.

File this under “no shit?”

The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration’s system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee who has sometimes been described as “the 20th hijacker” in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The public record of the Guantánamo interrogation of the detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has long included what officials labeled abusive techniques, including exposure to extreme temperatures and isolation, but the Pentagon has resisted acknowledging that his treatment rose to the level of torture.

But the official, Susan J. Crawford, told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that she had concluded that his treatment amounted to torture when she reviewed military charges against him last year. In May she decided that the case could not be referred for trial but provided no explanation at the time.

Also see the Woodward report in the Wapo.

Glenn Greenwald weighs in on Ross Douthat’s post at the The Atlantic. Douthat believes that while Bush et al.  may have violated international laws, treaties and domestic laws against the torture of prisoners, but it was justified, and still is, by a real fear of Islamic terrorists. Glenn goes on to point out that just about every genocide, war crime and violation of human rights ever committed can be justified exactly the same way.

Sullivan weighed in here and here. He’s vicerially opposed to torture in any form for moral and practical reasons. It doesn’t work, it endangers us, it destroys any moral standing we may have had, it wastes resources on false intelligence.

I think Glenn makes a persuasive point. If fear, either real or imagined is a justification for torture, then it’s a free for all. There must be a line drawn about what is and is not permissable. Torture has no justification. Imagined “ticking time bomb” scenarios from 24 not withstanding. It does at least as much damage to us, to our institutions and our moral grounding as it does to it’s victims. Especially when sanctioned by our leader so openly.

Let me say this as clearly as I can: There is no justification for the torture of prisoners, ever.

Ezra defends Andrew Sullivan by way of an actual real world example of interrogation techniques that work, as opposed to the Reuel Marc Gerecht fantasy created whole cloth from episodes of 24. Important points to note:

1. Torture and abuse at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib was a prime motivating factor in recruiting terrroists.
2. American lives were lost because of the policy.
3. Torture does not work.

Any questions?

Follow Omar Khadr From an Al Qaeda Childhood to a Gitmo Cell : Rolling Stone
There is no scientific evidence that such coercion is better than any other kind of interrogation; it is probably worse. SERE techniques were not designed to be used in the real world; they were designed to test the psychic endurance of Air Force pilots. When the FBI sent some of its best counterterrorism agents to Guantanamo soon after the camps opened, the agents chose to use what is known as rapport-based interrogation, which apparently worked. The FBI agents found the coercive tactics used by military intelligence both disgusting and stupid: The abusive treatment instantly destabilized detainees, making the information they provided unreliable as intelligence and useless in court.

I find the comments to the article to be sad. Many seem to believe that a 15 year old, fighting for a national army, deserves torture. It says much about our savagery and lack of humanity has a nation.

They should be in jail, but you know they’ll never see the inside of a court as defendants.