Happy Torture Of July

I have pulled back from writing about the torture debate of late because it's just too painful. There can be no question that this country used taxpayer-funded federal agencies like the CIA and the Department of Defense to enact cruel, degrading and illegal techniques on terrorism suspects as young as twelve, pushing them into false confessions and generally making it impossible to separate the guilty from the innocent, in a mad search for evidence, including confessions linking Iraq and Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda and 9-11. These acts of torture, which we reversed engineered from the Chinese Communists (who also used them to extract false confessions) were far from benign or even ephemeral; indeed, at least 100 prisoners in custody died from torture, both at secret prisons abroad, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where the very same base of operations for the torture of prisoners, Bagram, continues to house hundreds of suspects without charges. When civil liberties groups and ordinary Americans learned of these acts of torture, authorized and directed at the highest levels right out of the White House, those in power sought to destroy the evidence, and even to this day, the Administration that succeeded them has done everything in its power to cover up much of the worst abuses and ensure no accountability for these actions. To this day, some of the people directly involved in the torture regime continue to work in their positions under the Obama Administration.

Some would consider this a terrible subject to write about on the Fourth of July. I think it's the perfect time. I believe that the founding of the nation rings hollow when we can no longer say without laughing that here, the people rule, that no man is king and nobody is above the law, that we have a government of, by and for the people. The difficulties of passing legislation that moves us forward into the future were in many ways baked into the checks and balances of the system. Those processes can change. But the stain of torture, combined with the complete lack of accountability for it, must not get swept out with the old Administration like a bad policy. Indeed, the spectacle of watching the Democratic President essentially follow the Republican President in enshrining civil liberties abuses into law , gaining support on both sides, is deeply distasteful and distressing to me as an American.

I guess I'm supposed to be cheered by the fact that the President won't sign an executive order bringing the concept of preventive detention, the idea of indefinitely holding prisoners without charges, into this American experiment. And I should take solace that some in the Justice Department believe that detainees in our custody do have protections in the legal system against being charged using evidence gained through torture or coercion. But none of this is really good enough. Torture is a bright line that should separate civilized societies from the uncivilized. It is true that the courts and even some of the internal Justice Department mechanisms at the Office of Legal Counsel have resisted this headlong push into codifying some of the worst abuses of the Bush Administration. And yet those tactics and actions seen as wrong, as illegal, as the cause of hundreds if not thousands of deaths, have no sanction. And we live with this moral rot. And it's a rot which almost necessarily leads to other abuses, as we get swept up in almost a fever dream, where security trumps liberty and fear overpowers reason.

Donald Rumsfeld has finally said he's sorry. Sort of.

In an interview with biographer Bradley Graham, the former secretary of defense says he has regrets about the administration's controversial detainee policy.

The twist is that Rumsfeld doesn't regret the policy itself -- specifically the abandoning of the Geneva Conventions for detainees picked up in Afghanistan. Rather, he regrets how the policy was formulated.

Here's the relevant section from Graham's book:

With the passage of time, Rumsfeld has come to recognize that he made a mistake, although he sees the error as one of process, not basic judgment. He faults himself for taking too legalistic an approach initially, saying it would have been better if senior Pentagon officials responsible for policy and management matters had been brought in earlier to play more of a role and provide a broader perspective. As he explained in an interview in late 2008, policies were developing so fast in the weeks after the September 11 attacks that he did not follow his own normal procedures. "All of a sudden, it was just all happening, and the general counsel's office in the Pentagon had the lead," he said. "It never registered in my mind in this particular instance--it did in almost every other case--that these issues ought to be in a policy development or management posture. Looking back at it now, I have a feeling that was a mistake. In retrospect, it would have been better to take all of those issues and put them in the hands of policy or management."

Further, Rumsfeld conceded, more should have been done to engage Congress in drafting the new policies on detainees--something he said that White House officials had opposed. Although Congress did eventually get involved, he noted that this occurred "in duress" after the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 against the administration's original approach.

"All of a sudden, it was all just happening." Rumsfeld doesn't really take responsibility for the deaths of people in custody, but he recognizes the environment that leads to such mistakes and lapses, a groupthink that eventually consumes the policymakers. It makes a mockery of deliberative democracy to think this could ever happen.

It's not the most festive message on this day, but if we celebrate these United States on the day of its founding, then we must also strive for that union to live up to the founding principles. All men are created equal reads like a punchline in light of the past eight years and even these last several months. And there is no better time to ruminate on how we can be worthy of the sacrifices of those who started a revolution to bring self-government to this colonized collection of states.

And A Child Shall Lead Them

Don Rumsfeld never struck me as the religious type, and the assumption being made about this GQ article and his use of Bible quotes in intelligence briefings prepared for George Bush is that he played upon his boss' evangelicism to present the war in Iraq in a language well-understood to the then-President, the way a father would appease a son by playing a game of peek-a-boo. In the article, Robert Draper assigns the impetus for these cover sheets as a Major General working in intelligence for Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers, and according to him "my seniors ... appreciated the cover pages."

That clever bureaucrat, Rummy, always winning the battles inside the corridors of power, or at least making appearances to that end. Except this desire to work the system to his advantage crashed on the rocks of his own obstinacy during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"In many ways," says one of Bush’s national-security advisers, "Rumsfeld was more interested in being perceived to be in charge than actually being in charge." When I repeated this quote to an administration official privy to Rumsfeld’s war efforts, this person’s eyes lit up. “One of the most fateful, knock-down-drag-outs was over postwar reconstruction,” says this official. “It was the question of who’d take charge, State or DoD. Rumsfeld made a presentation about chain of command. ‘If State takes over here, are you saying Tommy Franks is going to report to a State official? Mr. President, that’s not in the Constitution!’ ” [...]

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.” [...]

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

And through this we learn who was the ACTUAL child in the White House. Bush may have been the boy king but at least he had a spark of recognition, if only about his own legacy, that kicked in four days late every once in a while. Rumsfeld simply had an insatiable desire not to control everything, but to make it appear like he controlled everything. He wanted to strut around as the main gatekeeper in the White House, and such gatekeeping mattered far more than. This report almost makes the turf wars sound like a game, like a child protecting his blocks at playtime in kindergarten. And this need for control, this petty outmaneuvering without regard for the real-world implications of the actions, permeates the entire neocon thought process, the entire way they relate to the world.

Rumsfeld comes off like the most insecure bastard that ever lived. And I came away learning far more than I expected about the ideological project with which he associates himself.

The SASC Report - "Designed To Elicit False Confessions"

The very long Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture and interrogation tactics used by the military has been released in unredacted form, on the heels of the OLC torture memos. Because the report gives a broader history of the Bush torture regime, it is unquestionably more damning, with more details and a more coherent timeline. For instance, we learn that the Bush Administration made a "wish list" for torture, before the first detainees even came into custody. Unlike the familiar narrative that torture techniques were only employed after the subjects refused to give up information, this was their M.O. from the beginning.

A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night says that some harsh interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison weren’t approved by officials in the George W. Bush administration until after they were already being put into use.

“Intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval to use such methods — and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect, Senate investigators have concluded,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The paper adds, “Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said the new findings show a direct link between the early policy decisions and the highly publicized abuses of detainees at prisons such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq.”

“Senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses.”

We knew that President Bush's order in February 2002, months before the Bybee torture memo, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda or Taliban subjects kicked off the finding of legal rationales for torture. But the Administration actually started the process in December 2001, when the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William Haynes, solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the agency that oversees SERE (Survival, Evasion, Rescue, Escape) training. And we know now, although I think we already knew this, that the SERE techniques were based on Chinese communist techniques, used against Americans to ELICIT FALSE CONFESSIONS.

Leading us to this:

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 [...]

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Yes, it was all connected. They approved the torture to gather the false intelligence to push forward their agenda in Iraq. And it was done at a shadowy level, without disclosure to most top officials that these techniques were banned by the United States and prosecuted when used by foreign countries for decades. And nobody involved bothered to consult the past, either. Or at least, they didn't want to know. Ignorance was bliss.

And once and for all, we know that tactics used by the military at Gitmo were rapidly outsourced to Abu Ghraib. The work of Charles Graner and Lynndie England and the gang was not the work of "a few bad apples." It was policy, as was obvious at the time.

Nobody should buy the argument that, because Americans at SERE school don't have lasting physical or psychological damage from these techniques, they don't constitute torture. It should be obvious that going to school and being held captive with no end in sight are two different things, and the two experiences have different effects on the mental state.

Emptywheel notes that DoJ's guidelines on waterboarding differed from the CIA's, but the CIA followed the more expansive DoJ guidelines.

And if you believe that there were no objections, consider that all the briefings for Congress were classified (are they supposed to reveal classified information?), and then this:

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.

The conservative response to all this inevitably devolves into they're not like you and me, those Arabs. I'd prefer to see them try that excuse in court. (They'll also probably whip out Dennis Blair's statement that the interrogation tactics yielded high-value information, as if the ends justify the means, and as if we should take Blair's claims at face value against mounds of evidence that the information was essentially useless). And this report implicates practically everyone at the highest levels, particularly Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney.

John Conyers wants hearings. I think it will be virtually impossible to stop this from becoming a full-blown investigation. The reckoning is coming.

...in re: The Blair memo - the National Intelligence Director's conclusion was that torture does more harm than good, which I suspect you won't hear much when conservatives talk about it.

Seeking Justice, Part I

I mentioned this the other day, but I think I was too hasty about it. The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee treatment is a bombshell. Here we have the US Senate stating very plainly that members of the Administration, all the way to the very top, committed war crimes by directing interrogators in the field to use torture. They reverse-engineered techniques used to teach American soldiers how to resist torture, and turned them on the detainees captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, in violation of US and international law.

The Committee concluded that the authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials was both a direct cause of detainee abuse and conveyed the message that it was okay to mistreat and degrade detainees in U.S. custody.

Chairman Levin said, “SERE training techniques were designed to give our troops a taste of what they might be subjected to if captured by a ruthless, lawless enemy so that they would be better prepared to resist. The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody.”

Senator McCain said, “The Committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody. These policies are wrong and must never be repeated.”

Chairman Levin also said: “The abuses at Abu Ghraib, GTMO and elsewhere cannot be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples. Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable. The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees. Our investigation is an effort to set the record straight on this chapter in our history that has so damaged both America’s standing and our security. America needs to own up to its mistakes so that we can rebuild some of the good will that we have lost.”

If you've been paying attention for the past several years, none of this is new. There have been many books written on the subject, loads of documentary evidence from those tortured. But never has a body as esteemed as the US Senate pointed the finger right at the White House. We're talking about the President, the Vice President, the chief counsel, the Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, all guilty, going back to a February 2002 order when the President signed an authorization claiming that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to members of Al Qaeda, which has since been rejected by the Supreme Court. That they based their authorization on warped legal theories is immaterial, in my view. Just because you are told that you're allowed to break the law doesn't men you're absolved from blame when you do so.

There is a legal case with which this report can be put to use. Yesterday the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to make a decision in the case of four British Muslims who were detained at Guantanamo and tortured.

The former prisoners are attempting to hold top Pentagon officials responsible for the abuse, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The lawsuit was thrown out last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, which concluded that the Guantanamo prisoners had no rights under the Constitution because they were foreigners held by the military.

In a one-line order Monday, the justices set aside the appeals court's decision and ordered the judges to take a new look at the case.

There are many dedicated lawyers who are not going to stop advocating for holding the Bush Administration responsible. They will be filing motions and seeking arrests in civil and criminal court for the rest of George Bush's life, for the rest of Dick Cheney's life, for the rest of Don Rumsfeld's life. They believe in the rule of law and reject the idea that anyone is above it.

They are seeking justice because they believe in the Constitution.

American Pride

Where to begin? How about with the privatization of basic military functions and corporate muscle firing anyone who stands in their way?

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

This is a version of the "too big to fail" circumstance that "forced" the government to bail out Bear Stearns - we've given so much away to companies like Halliburton that their power is outsized compared to the ability to rein them in. KBR has threatened to stop providing food to the troops in the past if they didn't get their payments promptly. It reminds me of telecoms shutting off wiretaps due to late payments. These are the companies we're supposed to consider "patriotic." And in the case of KBR, they are a middleman performing job functions that the Army has traditionally done and ought to do again, lest we continue getting in situations where soldiers' well-being is essentially held for ransom.

Then we have the creeping official secrecy department.

The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration's biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday.

In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades.

This is documentation showing the possible commission of a crime, the destruction of evidence in matters like the US Attorneys firing, the CIA Leak case, and the pre-war propaganda. The precedent has been set that future governments can seek to destroy incriminating emails right out in the open and fear no discovery.

And finally, we learned this today.

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

I think this was actually known; Philippe Sands' Torture Team discusses Administration bigwigs like David Addington going down to Gitmo to deliver lists of torture techniques. But the gambit was to always make it look like they bubbled up from underneath, at the staff level, and that the higher-level guys were shocked at the findings. Not true. Your government authorized and directed torture.

Aren't you happy with your country today?

SCOTUS Throws A Life Preserver To The Rule Of Law

I gotta say, I didn't expect this to happen:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court's liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

If it weren't for Anthony Kennedy or any of the more liberal justices, of course, that would no longer be true. Which is yet another reason why this election is so vital. Check out this quote from the Chief Justice. It reads like a comment at RedState:

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."

This action that has now been ruled invalid, the decision that Guantanamo detainees had no legal rights under the Constitution or Geneva, was the original sin that led to all the other abuses. And it won't surprise anyone to learn that it was "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet" Doug Feith's idea. In his book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, which is excerpted in this much-discussed Vanity Fair article, Philippe Sands talks to Feith, who's proud of his achievement of getting the Administration to agree that detainees had no rights:

He was keen to talk about his role as the architect of President Bush's decision of February 7, 2002. He didn't buy the argument that the decision had the effect of casting the detainees into a great legal black hole. On the contrary, the President's decision was actually a strike for the Geneva Conventions and for international law. "This was something I played a major role in," he said with pride [...]

In late January 2002 Feith and (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard) Myers went to meet Rumsfeld to talk about Geneva. Before they got to Rumsfeld's office, Myers turned to him. With fire in his eyes he said: "We have to support the Geneva Conventions... if Rumsfeld doesn't go along with this, I'm going to contradict them in front of the President." Feith was amazed. It was an unusually tough statement, and the reference to the Secretary as "Rumsfeld" was uncharacteristic. As they approached Rumsfeld's office he was at the door, not wanting to let them into the room as he had other matters to attend to. Myers was grilled by Rumsfeld, who asked questions but didn't adopt any position. Rumsfeld was "more of a lawyer than most lawyers when it comes to precision and question," a stickler for the law who constantly invoked the Constitution and statutes, Feith reported.

As Rumsfeld fired his bullets at Myers, Feith described how he jumped protectively in front of Myers. He paused and looked me straight in the eye. "I gave a little speech - I remember - I don't often remember what I said in meetings - but this I remembered. This was an interesting moment." This was how he put it.

"There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting the respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States, and there is no institution in the US government that has a stronger interest than the Prentagon." And then I said something else that was kind of interesting to them. "Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional. The U.S. Constitution says there are two things that are the supreme law of the land - statutes and treaties." He said, "Yeah." And I said, "The Geneva Conventions are a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute." [...]

I was impressed, but how had they gone from that discussion to the decision that none of the detainees had any rights under the rules reflected in Geneva? Feith seemed surprised by my question and went on to explain [...] In his view, Geneva didn't apply to Al Qaeda fighters, because they weren't part of a state and so couldn't claim rights under a treaty that was only binding on states. Geneva did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva's own terms Taliban fighters weren't entitled to POW status because they hadn't worn uniforms or insignia [...] He referred again to the incentive system that was built into the Geneva Conventions, providing the greatest protection to non-combatants and the least protection to "fighters who don't obey the rules." "If we promiscuously hand out POW status to fighters who don't obey the rules," Feith offered, "you are undermining the incentive system that was wisely built into the Geneva Conventions." This was at least arguable, I thought. But what should have been left was the safety net provided by Common Article 3, including the prohibition on abusive interrogation. But that too went: none of the detainees could rely on Common Article 3 since its provision only applied to "armed conflicts onot of an international charter."

This was the legal argument that the SCOTUS rejected today. It's simple to do, since Common Article 3 was backed up by customary law, every judgment of international courts and tribunals, and the official commentary to Geneva. Feith spun this as a protection of Geneva, when it in fact was a destruction.

Because Feith's argument rested on defending Geneva, the senior officers were confused with the ruling, and more so the soliders carrying out the dictates. As Sands says in the book, "with confusion comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes a greater likelihood of abuse." And this original sin created intentional confusion. If the detainees had no legal rights, there was no restriction on doing whatever necessary in interrogation to extract intelligence.

Sands, by the way, appeared on Capitol Hill this week to discuss his findings in the book, but Republicans attempted to use a rare objection to unanimous consent to force the Senate into recess and shut down the hearing. They didn't even want these words to come out. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't shut down the court.

Playing Hooky

Sorry, I jetted up to San Francisco for the day, kind of unexpectedly. So I was away from blog for a significant amount of time. My apologies. Here's what I'm reading:

• Obama got 80,000 people to a rally in Portland. Wow. I've never heard of such a number for a political rally. I think he'll win Oregon by plenty, lose Kentucky by plenty, and clinch a majority of pledged delegates (which he won't spin as a total victory), and if he keeps racking up superdelegates, he'll have the nomination in hand by June 4. As for the general, poblano has some good stuff.

• The trap was laid to assassinate Zimbabwean ruler Robert Mugabe's chief rival ahead of a Presidential runoff election, but Morgan Tsvangirai was tipped off and escaped. That's just one missed effort, though. You can be assured there will be more.

• McCain lobbyists are dropping like flies. Also check out McCainpedia from the DNC, some really good bits from McCain's past in the files there. And there's a new Real McCain video.

• What is it with conservatives thinking that Americans need the wake-up call of a terrorist attack to get them focused again? And not only random whack jobs on the Internets, but powerful conservatives like Don Rumsfeld? This is pretty much akin to wishing for the deaths of your fellow citizens.

• The Olbermann-O'Reilly feud escalates. I don't think there's a lot of overlap in their audiences, so I'm not sure it matters. Mutually assured non-destruction.

"You are the leader."

The deafening silence from the corporate-owned media on their employment of official propaganda sources inside their news broadcasts is typical, but at least one leak has sprung. The Pentagon released all of their documents that the New York Times obtained in FOIA requests to fill in their reporting. And there are more hidden gems inside that set of documents.

But most immediately intriguing is audio of some of the briefings at the Pentagon, including two featuring Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The audio we've excerpted here comes from a meeting on April 18, 2006. It was an emergency meeting called because earlier in the month, several retired generals had hit the airwaves demanding that Rumsfeld resign. 17 analysts attended the briefing, which featured Rumsfeld and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace. It was a remarkable display of servility, with one analyst at one point proclaiming that Rumsfeld need to get out there on the "offense," because "we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy."

The audio is worse than the summary makes it out to be:



This all worked out, by the way. The analysts who were in the room all trudged right out to their news stations and repeated Rumsfeld's talking points, basically mainlining the view from inside the Pentagon right through to everyone's TV set. The charitable word for this is propaganda. It is indeed illegal. And the fact that the news outlets won't utter a peep about it means they know they have to keep their head down in the face of this.

On Tuesday, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin “urging an investigation of the Pentagon’s propaganda program” to determine if the networks or analysts violated federal law.

FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, applauded their efforts. “President Eisenhower warned against the excesses of a military-industrial complex,” Copps said in a statement. “I’d like to think that hasn’t morphed into a military-industrial-media complex, but reports of spinning the news through a program of favored insiders don’t inspire a lot of confidence.”

DeLauro said by phone that the Pentagon’s program was “created in order to give military analysts access in exchange for positive coverage of the Iraq war.”

The reckoning of this Administration, and its servile media, is coming too late for my money.

The Watchers

Let's be clear about the acts of torture planned and authorized out of the White House that The New York Times has editorialized about. Some of the details were laid out in the 2002 Haynes memo signed by Donald Rumsfeld.

These techniques were new to the military. Category I comprised two techniques, yelling and deception. Category II included 12 techniques, aiming at humiliation and sensory deprivation, including stress positions, such as standing for a maximum of four hours; isolation; deprivation of light and sound; hooding; removal of religious and all other comfort items; removal of clothing; forced grooming, such as shaving of facial hair; and the use of individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress.

Finally came Category III. These methods were to be used for only a very small percentage of detainees - the most uncooperative (said to be fewer than 3%) and exceptionally resistant individuals - and required approval by the commanding general at Guantánamo. In this category were four techniques: the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact", such as grabbing, poking and light pushing; the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences were imminent for him or his family; exposure to cold weather or water; and, finally, the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation. This last technique came to be known as water-boarding, described on a chat show by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, as a "dunk in the water" and a "no-brainer" if it could save lives.

Many of these alone were a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. But rather than coming from a few bad apples at the various detention sites, there was a parallel process of improvisation and brainstorming happening at the highest levels. Before the activities were codified, the interrogators got to play Jack Bauer and draw up a wish list.

(Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo Diane) Beaver told me she arrived in Guantánamo in June 2002. In September that year there was a series of brainstorming meetings, some of which were led by Beaver, to gather possible new interrogation techniques. Ideas came from all over the place, she said. Discussion was wide-ranging [...]

Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo Bay, Beaver said, "he gave people lots of ideas." She believed the series contributed to an environment in which those at Guantánamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline - and to go further than they otherwise might [...]

The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A wan smile crossed Beaver's face. "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached."

However, an authoritarian Administration was not going to let the sexually aroused grunts drive this policy. In fact, proxies to the highest-ranking officials in the executive branch went on a field trip to carry out their boss' desires.

Dunlavey told me that at the end of September a group of the most senior Washington lawyers visited Guantánamo, including David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, Gonzales and Haynes. "They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in DC." When the new techniques were more or less finalised, Dunlavey needed them to be approved by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, his staff judge advocate in Guantánamo. "We had talked and talked, brainstormed, then we drew up a list," he said. The list was passed on to Diane Beaver." [...]

Beaver confirmed what Dunlavey had told me, that a delegation of senior lawyers came down to Guantánamo well before the list of techniques was sent up to Washington. They talked to the intelligence people, they even watched some interrogations. The message from the visitors was that they should do "whatever needed to be done", meaning a green light from the very top - from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

The interrogators were allowed some jollies in the idea formation phase, but once the rules were put in place, it was Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush - their top deputies, sitting around and WATCHING live interrogations, and demanding that the most strenuous techniques be employed, going around Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, whose bitterness suggests he was a key source for the ABC story.

In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, a professor of law at University College London, reveals:

• Senior figures in the Bush administration pushed through previously outlawed measures with the help of unqualified and inexperienced military officials at Guantánamo.

• Myers believes he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.

• Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army's field manual.

This is a familiar pattern of the power center in this Administration, Rumsfeld and Cheney, subverting the will of everyone else and implementing their agenda. In this case, Myers was flat-out lied to and told that the techniques were covered under the UCMJ.

And today there's a new allegation - prisoner drugging.

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle.

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.' "

Nusairi, now free in Saudi Arabia, was unable to learn what drugs were injected before his interrogations. He is not alone in wondering: At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.

I don't know if drugging was part of the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program on which most of the tactics were based, the very program used to train American troops for what they expected to face if captured by a brutal enemy. I do know that these tactics resulted in an unknowable amount of murders, more of which are just coming to light.

Today’s documents reveal charges that Special Forces beat, burned, and doused eight prisoners with cold water before sending them into freezing weather conditions. One of the eight prisoners, Jamal Naseer, died in U.S. custody in March 2003. In late 2004, the military opened a criminal investigation into charges of torture at Gardez. Despite numerous witness statements describing the evidence of torture, the military’s investigation concluded that the charges of torture were unsupported. It also concluded that Naseer’s death was the result of a “stomach ailment,” even though no autopsy had been conducted in his case. Documents uncovered today also refer to sodomy committed by prison guards; the victims’ identities are redacted.

Here we see how this thing was both tightly controlled and yet uncontrolled at the same time. The White House offered a menu of techniques, but they also gave that "green light." A bunch of kids who relished the power to an almost sexual degree came up with their own plans and saw that they were basically unleashed and protected from prosecution. So we advance to drugging, sodomy, and murder.

I'm watching the President dancing with a mariarchi band on cable news right now, despite our knowing all this. There are those who are paying attention, however. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility are looking at the memos used to justify torture, and I imagine that will continue beyond the term of this President. Those who have been following the story see the potential for criminal indictments, and legal experts agree, at least in theory. This, by the way, is why it's going to be nearly impossible to close Guantanamo, because the human rights abuses there will find standing should detainees be allowed on US soil. Behind the scenes there is likely to be a furious effort to indemnify and immunize this President and his senior staff.

We need truth and reconciliation.

60 Minutes of Hell

I'm punishing myself this afternoon by watching the Hardball college tour at Villanova University with Chris Matthews and the exalted John McCain. It's about enough to make you throw up.

The show starts with Tweety asking McCain how he's different than Bush, which is not a question but an opportunity for McCain to ways to set himself apart from Mr. 28%. So this being a college crowd he starts in with a discussion about how he believes in global warming and that man is to blame and how we need to reduce our reliance on greenhouse gases, that the consequences of inaction are too great. This is the guy who this morning - THIS MORNING - called for a gas tax holiday for the entire summer, which would surely increase greenhouse gas emissions.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Then he asked the leading question "You also have a different view on torture," and McCain got to make his serious principled face and say "We should never torture anyone in American custody... we're in a war for hearts and minds, and if we're not any better than our enemies then it makes it harder to people to choose.... Abu Ghraib was (the insurgency's) greatest recruiting tool... We should not do anything that our enemies do. It's a very important question about what kind of country we are." McCain, of course, supported Bush's veto of the intelligence authorization bill that would have banned torture techniques like waterboarding from the CIA's menu of interrogation options.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Then there was a discussion on Iraq, where McCain got to say how the war was mishandled and how he was the only one to criticize Rumsfeld and call for his head. None of that is true.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Matthews gave McCain a free hand to spin his 100-year comments, saying that he was describing a situation after the war is over, but of course he's willing to keep troops there until the war is over, so I don't see the difference. McCain admitted that the Maliki move into Basra had a downside to it and actually said "maybe I'm digging for the pony here," but this was an unforced error, as Matthews followed up absolutely nothing.

Then he went to the student questions, which they pick beforehand, by the way, and the first guy asked if McCain considered himself a "typical white person" (a hit on Obama), and the second guy took a hit on Hillary Clinton's beer-and-shot photo-op. This gave McCain an opportunity to play the serious bipartisan maverick and say that he wants a respectful campaign free of character attacks. He must have been napping when his suspended staffer Soren Dayton started pushing "Obama is an elitist" messaging, or when his number one surrogate Holy Joe Lieberman agreed with a right-wing radio host that Obama might be a Marxist, and his campaign adviser Karl Rove agreed.

Tweety came back and called out those two students for asking "wise-ass questions", because he hasn't focused on non-issues his entire, you know, career. And then, Tweety came back from break and immediately asked if Obama was an elitist. After McCain said "no" but then went on to talk about how elitist the comments were, Tweety asked his first follow-up question, which was essentially: But given his upbringing, WHY is Obama an elitist?

I'm telling you, they should put this thing in a time capsule. It's a symbol of everything that's wrong with the media.

... Just have to add this section when McCain boldly denounces 527s and says that he'll work to stop them during the general election, and that he intends to attack Obama for breaking his word if he opts out of the public financing system, and there's no mention of the fact that McCain is currently a fugitive from justice, breaking the law with each passing day by spending excess money while remaining inside the public system for the primaries.

Shoot me in the mouth.

UPDATE: Apparently the kid that asked the question about Hillary "hitting the sauce" is Fox News anchor Steve Doocy's son. Having worked in television, there's no way that the Hardball folks didn't know about this unless they're complete boobs.

Toast

Peggy Noonan's WSJ column from Friday gently nudges our wrists to pick up our glasses and join her in a "toast to American troops, then and now."

Likely prompted more by editorial deadline than news hook, Ms. Noonan opens with a yarn about a hot-air balloon mishap in Normandy. The ballooning party had am emergency landing in the field of a nonogenarian French farmer ("he was like a Life magazine photo from 1938: 'French farmer hoes his field' "):

The farmer said, or asked, "You are American." We nodded, and he made a gesture--I'll be back!--and ran to the house. He came back with an ancient bottle of Calvados, the local brandy. It was literally covered in dust and dry dirt, as if someone had saved it a long time.

He told us--this will seem unlikely, and it amazed us--that he had not seen an American in many, many years, and we asked when. "The invasion," he said. The Normandy invasion.

Then he poured the Calvados and made a toast. I wish I had notes on what he said. Our French speaker translated it into something like, "To old times." And we raised our glasses knowing we were having a moment of unearned tenderness.

Ms. Noonan, the Martha Stewart of the opinion pages, is big on gracious living. Her columns are the rhetorical equivalent of a finely embroidered linen tablecloth she throws over a battered card table when the guests come for dinner.

Continuing:

We know of the broad humanitarian aspects of the occupation--the hospitals being built, the schools restored, the services administered, the kids treated by armed forces doctors. But then there are all the stories that don't quite make it to the top of the heap, and that in a way tell you more. The lieutenant in the First Cavalry who was concerned about Iraqi kids in the countryside who didn't have shoes, so he wrote home, started a drive, and got 3,000 pairs sent over. The lieutenant colonel from California who spent his off-hours emailing hospitals back home to get a wheelchair for a girl with cerebral palsy.

[snip]

And it is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own. The actor Gary Sinise helps run Operation Iraqi Children, which delivers school supplies with the help of U.S. forces. When he visits Baghdad grade schools, the kids yell, "Lieutenant Dan!"--his role in "Forrest Gump," the story of another good man.

(I wonder if it's just a coincidence that Ms. Noonan chose to highlight the charity work of one of the few actors with winger sensibilities? An acquaintance who worked on CSI: NY a couple of years ago winced at those times when lead actor Sinise would bring his bosom buddy Donald Rumsfeld to the set.

And another fun fact about Mr. Sinise: he headlines the Lt. Dan Band. What's with these winger actors who just can't let that one big role go?)

Moving along.

But - but... one reads these soothing words of no-nonsense, can-do Americana right out of the Office of War Information... and yet some specter is tap-tapping at the windowpane, daring us to look out into the dark. Weren't there some horrible, ghastly pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis -

(Gentle cough.) Ah. I had a feeling that might come up.

Some say we're the Roman Empire, but I don't think the soldiers of Rome were known for their kindness, nor the people of Rome for their decency. Some speak of Abu Ghraib, but the humiliation of prisoners there was news because it was American troops acting in a way that was out of the order of things, and apart from tradition. It was weird.

Weird! (Weird?!)

I will slide right by Ms. Noonan's sleight of hand here about Roman Empire/Roman soldiers, there to define the end of the scale of military brutality. (Particularly so for those who have seen The Passion of the Christ.) Ms. Noonan would like to inoculate us from absorbing the full scope of the example that followed: Abu Ghraib.

I would have to agree that people torturing other human beings should be considered "out of the order of things, apart from tradition."

(Aside from Chris Shays, who saw those pictures and pronounced Abu Ghraib a "sex ring.")

How would we conclude, though, that such acts were out of "the order of things"? For one, by how the public reacts to the news. Another way would be by how our leadership reacts:

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

[...]

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba's report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their "extremely sensitive nature.") Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said.

What a heartening response to the public revelation of what was certainly already known in the West Wing. Worse still the fact that everything about Abu Ghraib was intended and planned - except the homemade videos.

Today, the Mustache of Understanding sends an urgent bulletin from Doha, Qatar, where he stopped by the newsroom of Al Jazeera. Over here! he windmills his arms from six thousand miles away. We're losing the PR war... to Osama bin Laden!

Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo Bay” are thrown at you.

Those rude people, throwing examples of U.S. perfidy right in your face. Perhaps Peggy Noonan should take note of the well-traveled Mustache's point here: maybe, just maybe, Abu Ghraib is becoming a new American "tradition" in the wider world. That perhaps she could have tied these two illustrations of American soldiers together - the one on the beaches of Normandy, the other in Abu Ghraib - to note that whatever your hoped-for notions of continuity may be, it is just possible that for billions on the planet, Abu Ghraib is the new "order of things."

Friedman does pose an interesting question:

One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?

(I am amused by his suggestion that we dig up a talent like Karen Hughes for the job - because her previous efforts at that very task were such a smashing success.)

But the Mustache of Understanding is onto something here. One laments his focus on the PR fixes while short-shrifting the actual causes of such PR "challenges"; one wishes that the Mustache would demonstrate a wee more concern about the fact that Abu Ghraibs actually occur. But with all due seriousness: Why indeed do those so adept at domestic slash-and-burn politics demonstrate such a feeble return on an even feebler effort at making the case for the U.S. abroad?

Could it be, perhaps, that they simply don't care? Or rather, that they care more about other things that make the outward projection of what Ms. Noonan believes to be our "traditions" impossible?

Here's what the Bush Administration cares about:

Pentagon Setting Up Iraq Information 'War Room' as Progress Report Approaches

Shaping the Bush administration's message on the Iraq war has taken on new fervor, just as anticipation is building for the September progress report from top military advisers.

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad - serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

According to a memo circulated Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, is looking for personnel for what he called the high-priority effort to distribute Defense Department information on Iraq.

The move - requested by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England - comes as administration officials are gearing up for a rash of reports on progress in Iraq and recommendations from the military on troop levels going into next year. The key report will come from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Ah yes: another demonstration that what the Administration does best, cares about most is Swift-boating the American people. Full stop.

What say you, Mr. Friedman?

If you can’t win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq.

That'll do.

The Tillman Hearing

I don't have C-SPAN 3, so I am unable to watch the Rumsfeld/Myers/Abizaid hearing on Pat Tillman's death. The Gavel has an early writeup:

Chairman Waxman: “Much of our focus will be on a ‘Personal For’ message, also known as a ‘P4,’ that Major General Stanley McChrystal sent on April 29, 2004. This P4 alerted his superiors that despite press reports that Corporal Tillman died fighting the enemy, it was ‘highly possible that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.’ Three officers received this P4 report: Lt. General Kensinger, General Abizaid, and General Brown… The Committee did issue a subpoena to General Kensinger earlier this week, but U.S. Marshals have been unable to locate or serve him.”

What now? A General, the same guy who was officially censured for his role in covering up the facts of Tillman's death, the guy the Army is trying to make the scapegoat, CANNOT BE FOUND? Bizarre. I expect a subpoena to be served.

Meanwhile, Rummy didn't recall.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military's bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld, in his first public appearance on Capitol Hill since President Bush replaced him with Robert Gates late last year, reiterated previous testimony to investigators that he didn't have early knowledge that Tillman was cut down by fellow Rangers, not by enemy militia, as was initially claimed.

He told a House committee hearing that he'd always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.

''Early in my tenure as secretary of defense, I wrote a memo for the men and women of the Department of Defense,'' Rumsfeld told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. ''You will note that principle number one -- the very first -- was: 'Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of DOD.' ''

Rumsfeld gave the committee a copy of that memo.

The memo apparently told officers "to tell the truth or give the appearance of telling the truth". Because that's what it's all about. Appearances. By the way, I'm supposed to believe that because a MEMO was sent, everything was OK?

This is a textbook example of the military's tendency to secrecy and propaganda during wartime. Message control is favored well above the truth. And so the integrity of the government is called into question. And Rummy's appearance is doing nothing to improve that image.

Mr. Rumsfeld Goes To Washington

After originally saying he would not testify to the House Oversight Government Reform Committee in the Pat Tillman case, Donald Rumsfeld had a change of heart. This should be a REALLY interesting morning.

In a late breaking development, Secretary Rumsfeld will appear before the Oversight Committee tomorrow, Wednesday, August 1, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.

The Committee is holding a hearing entitled "The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew." The hearing will examine what senior Defense Department officials knew about U.S. Army Corporal Patrick Tillman's death by fratricide.

The following witnesses will testify:

The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld
Former Secretary of Defense

Gen. Richard B. Myers (Retired)
Former Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Gen. John P. Abizaid (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Central Command

Gen. Bryan Douglas Brown (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command

Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger, Jr. (Retired)*
(supboena issued/not confirmed)
Former Commander, U.S. Army Special Operations Command

I may experiment with liveblogging this one. Sure, Rummy will just go off on known knowns and unknown unknowns and "I don't recalls," but there's a lot of information he'll have to deny, and Henry Waxman is cagey as hell. He made mincemeat of Paul Bremer and I would expect nothing less here.

Who Would Convict Daffy Duck?

Sure, he didn't do everything within the law, but he was saving the world from alien invasion! What jury would punish him?

Oh yeah, here's what I mean:

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge's passing remark - "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?' " - got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Kill me. Really, shoot me in the head.

You have a Supreme Court Justice using a FUCKING FICTIONAL CHARACTER as evidence that torture works. Never mind the fact that WRITERS WRITE THE SCRIPT to ensure that Bauer's methods work. See, Antonin, there are these things called scripts, and actors, and gaffers, and cameramen, and editors. Jack Bauer is not ACTUALLY saving anyone from anything. We can't ACTUALLY draw conclusions from his success.

What we do know is that torture debases us as human beings, and that anyone who tries to investigate the abuse which has obliterated our moral standing in the world will be lied to and dumped.

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?” [...]

“The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

Jack Bauer is not a role model, you idiots. Antonio Taguba is. He understands the meaning of America. Antonin Scalia only understands covering for his own party, and putting it above his country.