Yesterday, riding a wave of adulation and military-reverence, the Obama administration tried to end the life of this American citizen — never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — with a drone strike in Yemen, but missed and killed two other people instead:

A missile strike from an American military drone in a remote region of Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in the country, American officials said Friday.

The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

The other people killed “may have” been Al Qaeda operatives. Or they “may not have” been. Who cares? They’re mere collateral damage on the glorious road to ending the life of this American citizen without due process (and pointing out that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expressly guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law” — and provides no exception for war — is the sort of tedious legalism that shouldn’t interfere with the excitement of drone strikes).

There are certain civil liberties debates where, even though I hold strong opinions, I can at least understand the reasoning and impulses of those who disagree; the killing of bin Laden was one such instance. But the notion that the President has the power to order American citizens assassinated without an iota of due process — far from any battlefield, not during combat — is an idea so utterly foreign to me, so far beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, that it’s hard to convey in words or treat with civility.

How do you even engage someone in rational discussion who is willing to assume that their fellow citizen is guilty of being a Terrorist without seeing evidence for it, without having that evidence tested, without giving that citizen a chance to defend himself — all because the President declares it to be so? “I know Awlaki, my fellow citizen, is a Terrorist and he deserves to die. Why? Because the President decreed that, and that’s good enough for me. Trials are so pre-9/11.” If someone is willing to dutifully click their heels and spout definitively authoritarian anthems like that, imagine how impervious to reason they are on these issues.

I’m not squeamish, these guys need to die, but if it’s not on a battlefield, then we have process for this as broadly defined in our Constitution. Something about not depriving citizen of life or liberty without due process. Is that just words? Does it have any real world meaning? Or is it just empty platitudes for the chumps?

via George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’ – Times Online.

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.

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of “security v. privacy and civil liberties” — as though it's a given that increasing the Government's surveillance authorities will “make us safer.” But it has long been clear that the opposite is true…

…The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot — despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers — illustrates this dynamic perfectly.  As President Obama said yesterday, the Government — just as was true for 9/11 — had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country.  Yet our intelligence agencies — just as was true for 9/11 — failed to understand what they had in their possession.  Why is that?  Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism.  In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists — in the name of keeping us safe — has exactly the opposite effect.  Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

Today in The Washington Post, that paper’s CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, explains that Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a daily basis, which causes the system to be “clogged” — overloaded — with information having nothing to do with Terrorism.  As a result, actually relevant information ends up obscured or ignored.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

A democracy cannot function in a permanent state of fear. We give up a bit of safety for our freedom. It’s small price to pay. There was another piece by Nate Silver at 538.com that puts it into perspective:

The Odds of Airborne Terror

…there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning

You have a much better chance dying in a car crash on  the way to an airport, with odds of roughly 1 in 100 in a lifetime of driving. Maybe we should focus more on real dangers instead of imagined ones? Our media establishment lives off of hyping fears to drive ratings and underminds the basis of our democracy in the process.

…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.

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.

Glenn points out that recently Turkey and Germany  both managed to use actual legal means to prosecute and imprison terrorists:

While the U.S. continues to debate whether it must imprison accused terrorists without charges or trial — and now even refuses to say whether it will release those who are given trials but then acquitted — numerous other countries are, with their actions, adhering to the values and principles which we, with words, righteously claim to embody…

…Numerous countries that aren’t the U.S. — including those targeted by Terrorist threats at least as serious as those faced by the U.S. — have routinely and repeatedly given what are called “trials” and “due process” to those it accuses not merely of harboring terrorist wishes, but also actually having carried out atrocious terrorist attacks.  During the Bush era, even the U.S. — when we were moved to do so — successfully did the same.

But who needs legal means when you have a craven legislature that refuses to defend the Consititution and executives whose only concern about the the Constitution is how to best circumvent it?

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.

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.

Josh at TMP makes an intersting point bout the Harman-AIPAC-Gonzalez issue:

… But it does not take too big a leap to see this going down rather differently — seeing Harman, fairly or unfairly, compromised by these wiretaps and thus beholden to the administration.

Whether or not there’s anything to that hypothetical about Harman, this issue of wiretapping members of Congress gets into extremely dangerous territory. And I think we’re at the point where we need some clearer explanation of how many times this happened under the tenure of the previous (and for that matter the present) administration.

Deeper down the rabbit hole we go. Maybe this will help focus the matter for some of our more apathetic Congresscritters. Those who were happy to cheer lead while the Bush administration ignored the law and the constitution. Maybe a surveillance state ain’t such a great idea if it’s catching their nasty little secrets at the same time.

Greenwald reports that the ranking democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and Bush wiretapping enabler, Rep. Jane Harman D-Ca was caught on tape offering to interfere with the espionage investigation of two American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee officials. Now here’s the good part, it was picked up by the NSA wiretapping program that she’s been such a cheerleader for. Let me savor the delicious irony of that, ahhhh yes…

This was captured on tape while Alberto (Fredo) Gonzales was AG and he personally intervened to kill the investigation in to Rep. Harman. She was a useful tool in protecting and defending Bush’s illegal wireptapping program. That makes this sort of a twofer.

Perhaps Rep. Harman has a better taste now of why allowing the government to sweep up massive streams of telecommunications is such a bad idea. Hoisted by her own petard, indeed.

via George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution—By Scott Horton Harper’s Magazine.

Here’s Neil Lewis’s summary in the New York Times:

“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away, they said, since any possible privacy offense resulting from such a search is a lesser matter than any injury from deadly force. The Oct. 23 memorandum also said that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink.

We need to know how the memo was used. Bradbury suggests it was not much relied upon; I don’t believe that for a second. Moreover Bradbury’s decision to wait to the very end before repealing it suggests that someone in the Bush hierarchy was keen on having it.

No 1st or 4th ammendment concerns for them, at all.

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.

Administration Invokes State Secret Argument – NYTimes.com.

“This is not change,” he said in a statement. “This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Matt Miller, said the government did not comment on pending litigation, but he seemed to suggest the Obama administration would invoke the privilege more sparingly than its predecessor.

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.

That was quick! This is one of the main reasons why I voted for him. Gitmo will be remembered as a national shame, much like the WWII era imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent. Gitmo has only enabled the recruitment of more sucide bombers and encouraged further hatred for the US.

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.

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.