The New Rendition

In addition to the other goodies, the release of documents describing the CIA's involvement in Bush-era war on terror programs includes a shocking look at "extraordinary rendition":

The CIA’s lurid description of rendition — which hasn’t yet been reported — describes in clinical detail a process where the detainee is “securely shackled” before being “deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods” enroute to a “Black Site.” His “head and face are shaved” and a series of photos are taken “while nude.”

The description of rendition is contained in a document that the ACLU obtained as part of its big FOIA request and posted online late last night. It’s an 18-page fax from the CIA to the Department of Justice in December 2004, and looks like a response to a request by Justice for more info about the CIA’s treatment of “high value detainees,” or HVDs.

The document says the CIA’s rendition procedure is designed to ensure that the capture of a HVD helps create a “state of learned helplessness and dependence” that will facilitate the interrogation process.

The description of “rendition” begins on page three of the document, and describes the process this way:

a. The HVD is flown to a Black Site. A medical examination is conducted prior to the flight. During the flight, the detainee is securely shackled and is deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods.

There is no interaction with the HVD during this rendition movement except for periodic, discreet assessments by the on-board medical officer.

b. Upon arrival at the destination airfield, the HVD is moved to the Black Site under the same conditions and using appropriate security procedures.

The procedures, according to the memo, have a dramatic impact on the detainee. It says the process “creates significant apprehension” in the detainee “because of the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, the uncertainty about what will happen next, and the potential dread” the detainee “might have of U.S. custody.”

What's described is basically the total breakdown of the individual. They mean to condition the detainee into a state of helplessness, through a variety of techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, "walling," stress positions, water dousing, and other things, which when delivered in tandem has been identified as a form of torture.

And we're still basically doing this, though not to our own black sites but third-party countries.

The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.

Human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying that continuing the practice, known as rendition, would still allow the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture. They said that promises from other countries of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.

“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.

Asking the countries pretty please not to torture (with a wink and a nod attached, I'm sure) is just simply unacceptable. I give leeway when a prisoner is taken into custody and to a trial, but kidnapping people with insufficient evidence and handing them to countries known to torture so we don't have to get our hands bloody does not play. It continues the dispiriting legacy of the Obama Administration with respect to civil liberties that only gets occasionally disrupted with better news.

Forward, Not Backward

Leon Panetta will close those secret prisons, but let's not fight about who tortured who, right fellas?

The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.

In an e-mail to the agency's work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be "promptly terminated," and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.

Panetta, however, said that CIA officers who were involved in interrogations using "enhanced" methods authorized by the Justice Department during the Bush administration "should not be investigated, let alone punished."

I actually thought these sites were already shuttered. And I don't want private mercenaries involved in the interrogations process, so all to the good. But we have a cancer in this country caused by failing to face up to our actions. I don't think the low-level interrogators who carried out the policies are necessarily responsible - but they can certainly tell us who gave the order, and who was next on the rung in the chain of command. That's how you build a case and seek the truth. Blanket amnesty at any level impedes the eventual reckoning, and it's wrong.

And one of the Gitmo lawyers says Obama's people are stonewalling him, too. Man, they really want to make sure nobody goes down for this? What a corrupt bargain. And it's only fitting that the highest of High Broderists doesn't see a problem at all:

David Broder today, on whether there should be an investigation of the Bush years:

“I understand the reluctance to open a wide-ranging probe of past practices. It seems to me we are better off focusing on cleaning up the policies and practices for the future than trying to settle scores for past actions.”

David Broder, famously, as Clinton’s administration wound down:

“He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”

Sargent, and his former colleagues at TPM, call Washington "wired for conservatism." I prefer to think of it as wired for self-protection. Getting a hummer was all Clinton's problem. But they led the cheers while their golden boy Mr. Bush was authorizing the torture of human beings. They don't want to see their friends hurt, but really they don't want to sully their beautiful minds.

That Mighty Liberal Blog Power Made Manifest

A couple weeks ago, the Justice Department had planned to release a set of internal DoJ memos that, perhaps more than anything previously released, describe in great detail the exact types of interrogation procedures that were approved for use in secret CIA prisons. We know what was done, of course, but the memos would further provide evidence to the authorization and direction of torture at the highest levels. Some inside the White House would rather not see that happen.

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities [...]

Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas "black site" prisons.

Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to become "engaged" in his efforts to block release, according to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans to declassify the memos even though White House counsel Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder's recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an official and another government source familiar with the debate. No final decision has been made, and it is likely Obama will have to resolve the matter, according to the sources who spoke to NEWSWEEK.

Brennan, Brennan, hmm, I can't put my finger on where I've heard that name... oh, wait, he was the guy who "liberal bloggers" supposedly defeated for the post of CIA Director. Here was part of his withdrawal letter:

"It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding," he wrote. "It is with profound regret that I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the intelligence community. The challenges ahead of our nation are too daunting, and the role of the CIA too critical, for there to be any distraction from the vital work that lays ahead," Brennan wrote.

Yes, and those credentials as a "strong opponent" are certainly showing now. And it's fantastic that he's not proving a "distraction" in his role as a national security aide, by, say, pitching a fit and using institutional allies to undermine Justice Department directives.

Forget about Brennan's specific views, which are problematic enough. Clearly he's protecting his friends in the intelligence community and sparing them the embarrassment of having to face up to their actions, to say nothing of the criminal liability. The cover story that Brennan wants to protect foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA is ridiculous, as Hilzoy notes:

Fear of embarrassing countries who cooperated with us cannot possibly be the reason for not releasing the memos. The solution is too simple: just redact their names and any identifying details. Are we supposed to believe that this has not occurred to Panetta or Holder? Or that there is some identifying detail that is so thoroughly intertwined with the legal arguments that it cannot possibly be edited out?

Give me a break.

If foreign countries are so embarrassed by participating in torture, naming and shaming them would maybe stop them from doing it in the future?

Clearly, Brennan wants to keep open the option of torturing in secret, or at the least save his pals some heartburn.

Boy, I know I'm sure glad liberal bloggers fought the good fight and denied Brennan an important voice inside the Administration. We sure showed him, right?

Security Theater

With my gig at the Monthly I hadn't been able to get to this story, which was already covered by one of my fellow guest-bloggers. But it's incredibly important. We already knew a lot of this, but now we have independent corroboration that Abu Zubaydah, who according to the recently leaked Red Cross report was something of a guinea pig for the Bush Administration's torture techniques, had no viable intelligence value, and his eventual breakdown and confession yielded no good intelligence information.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

In the article, Noor al-Deen, a Syrian who was captured along with Zubaydah, admitted that the so-called Al Qaeda leader has little information about operations. This made us demonstrably less safe. While investigators and intelligence operatives were off on wild goose chases, they were not seeking real leads on terrorist plots or the whereabouts of top Al Qaeda leaders. Bush and his gang were more consumed with metrics - the notion that we "appear" to be fighting terror - than actions. Digby had a great piece on this.

This isn't the first time I've heard that the Bush administration was obsessed with getting a volume of information, caring little about the quality or reliability of it. neither is it the first time that we've heard that this pressure came from the highest reaches of the administration itself [...]

They were desperate to keep up the fiction that Al Qaeda was the outsized foe they'd built them up to be. If they were merely a dangerous little gang of criminals rather than a deadly global army of supervillians, it would be hard to justify the spending of trillions on unnecessary wars and suspending inconvenient portions of the constitution. These Vietnam chickenhawks didn't want to hear anything that would imply that they weren't fighting the war of all wars.

They knew these were false confessions and fictional plots and cynically used them to keep up the sense of panic --- even among themselves --- that fueled their global ambitions and fed their damaged egos. Ultimately they failed in that, not because they actually did anything that kept the babies safe, but because the American people just don't have the attention span to stay panicked about anything for very long. Once the spell broke, there was nothing left but the metrics.

In other words, this was a show for the media, to write a script about the good guys getting information from the bad guys and as a result making the world safe. It had no basis in fact whatsoever. And in order to keep up this fiction, the "good guys" had to use torture, maybe to deliberately obtain false confessions to prove they were "getting things done."

When those Spanish courts send out those indictments for Bush officials for violations of human rights and international torture conventions, remember this story. Especially when you hear that the CIA did what it had to do to "keep America safe." That's not the whole story.

Respect Is Earned

The scribblers from the White House Press Corps have dropped their teacups and opened windows for air after the vicious, uncouth attack on their dear friend Dick Cheney by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Rick Klein, chief towel-washer at ABC's The Note (they still print that?), exclaimed "Wow—we’re talking about the former vice president here." NBC's First Read (Facebook to The Note's MySpace) tut-tutted about the return of "petty political squabbling." And Chip Reid, bravely bold Chip Reid, after choking back tears and bolstered by the support of his fellow Villagers, stood up to that horrible bully and gave him a piece of his mind (hopefully he has some left):

Reid: Can I ask you, when you referred to the former Vice President, that was a really hard-hitting, kind of sarcastic response you had. This is a former Vice President of the United States. Is that the attitude—is that the sanctioned tone toward the former Vice President of the United States from this White House now?

The Village is rising in solidarity to defend and protect that most fragile of egos, Dick Cheney. Because they have respect for the institutions and the office, you see.

Slightly less remarked-upon than the honor of St. Dick is yet another verdict on the torture that he directed and authorized while sitting in that office. I know in the Village you can earn respect without being respectable, but this fake outrage over a one-line insult when prisoners around the world were beaten, strapped naked to cots, suffocated by water, dragged around by collars and confined into a small box, to just name a few techniques, at the behest of THE SAME GUY THE PRESS IS DEFENDING, is a little tough to take.

With the help of the American trauma surgeon, Abu Zubaydah's captors nursed him back to health. He was moved at least twice, first, reportedly, to Thailand; then, he believes, to Afghanistan, probably Bagram. In a safe house in Thailand the interrogation began:

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.

During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face [...]

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face....

I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.

Dick Cheney attended the principals' meeting where these techniques were approved. And given the timeline of events, and Abu Zubaydah's testimony, we can divine that he was a guinea pig, an experiment, a test subject for torture.

"I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people."

This article makes clear, then, that about two and a half months after he first woke up in US custody--so probably shortly after mid-June 2002--the US was experimenting on Abu Zubaydah, testing out various forms of torture to see which worked best and left the fewest marks.

Understand what this means: the torturers were conducting their experiments on Abu Zubaydah before John Yoo wrote up an OLC memo authorizing torture (hell--Yoo may have excluded those methods they had decided were ineffective and that my be why they told Abu Zubaydah there were no rules). The torturers were conducting their experiments with the intimate involvement of those back at the White House getting briefed and approving of each technique. And the torturers were being videotaped doing so.

You can put aside, for only this moment, the fact that Cheney helped to break the global economy and has no explanation for it. Or Katrina or Iraq or Valerie Plame or the energy task force or the allegations of an executive assassination ring that reported only to him. This is a man who presided over the experimentation of human beings.

That is who the Village has decided is worthy of respect.

Step Into Marcusland

I finally got around to seeing Taxi To the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning, Peabody-winning documentary that looks at the death of an Afghani cab driver in US custody at Bagram Air Base and expands out to study American detainee policy during the war on terror. There's nothing in there that you didn't know if you've read the articles, the magazine profiles, the books and the official reports about our torture policy. But it's laid out in an almost lawyerlike fashion, a brief for the crimes committed in our name since 9/11, crimes that do make Americans and (especially) American troops less safe, extract misleading and frequently wrong intelligence, and debase us all by acting contrary to American values and principles and lowering our moral authority throughout the world.

These are the crimes that Ruth Marcus wants us all to ignore, by acknowledging that people like Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing their level best to keep us safe, and whether they ignored federal law and international conventions in the process should be overlooked. Despite the fact that, just this week, a Senate Armed Services Committee report emphatically charged top officials inside the White House with creating the conditions for and authorizing the practice of torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons abroad, according to Marcus (and I would imagine the bulk of the political establishment) these crimes should be ignored, not because they weren't illegal but because of who the people were that conducted them. This is what Marcus brushes aside:

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.

These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.

Marcus somehow rationalizes her leniency by claiming that the important thing now is to "make sure this never happens again," not to prosecute the crimes of the past. And yet, as Glenn Greenwald lays out in only the way he can, only through prosecution can we deter top officials from this behavior. The laws are already in place. The determinations about liberty and security have already been made. If Bush officials are allowed to go free, like the many White House officials before them in Administrations past, what becomes learned behavior is that high crimes at the executive level will forever go unpunished. Here's Glenn:

...one of the two principal reasons we impose penalties for violations of the criminal law is deterrence -- to provide an incentive for potential lawbreakers to refrain from breaking our laws, rather than deciding that it is beneficial to do so. Though there is debate about how best to accomplish it and how effective it ultimately is, deterrence of future crimes has been, and remains, a core purpose of the criminal law. That is about as basic as it gets [...]

Punishment for lawbreaking is precisely how we try to ensure that crimes "never happen again." If instead -- as Marcus and so many other urge -- we hold political leaders harmless when they break the law, if we exempt them from punishment under the criminal law, then what possible reason would they have from refraining from breaking the law in the future? A principal reason for imposing punishment on lawbreakers is exactly what Marcus says she wants to achieve: "ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated." By telling political leaders that they will not be punished when they break the law, the exact opposite outcome is achieved: ensuring that this conduct will be repeated [...]

A central observation in Marcus' column is that the controversies that have now arisen over Bush lawbreaking in the areas of interrogation and surveillance are not new. As she points out, these are the very same controversies that we've been confronting for decades.

That's exactly right. The same controversies over government lawbreaking arise over and over. And why is that? Because our political leaders keep breaking the law -- chronically and deliberately. And why do they keep doing that? Because there is no deterrent against it. Every time they get caught breaking the law, the Ronald Reagans and Ruth Marcuses of the world step in to insist that they should not be punished, that the criminal law is not for elite leaders in political office, that those involved in the noble function of ruling America are too intrinsically well-intentioned to warrant punishment even when they commit crimes, that it's more important to look forward than back.

And those who committed these crimes clearly know this. That's why we're seeing Dick Cheney practically boasting about torturing terrorists, having the audacity to call it the moral thing to do. In doing so he makes the same argument as Marcus; that he was doing whatever he could to protect the country from attack, and in those situations, the law does not apply in the same way, and nobody should suffer opprobrium for doing what he thought was right, as if the law is now subject to personal conceptions of right and wrong rather than the federal statutes and written code available to everyone. The lies that torture yields valuable information and saves lives
notwithstanding, what Cheney is saying goes as far as Richard Nixon's famous statement "If the President does it, then it's not illegal." Essentially, his plea is that "if I think it's necessary, then it's not illegal."

This is how we get to the point that the Vice President decides that he has the sole determination for what records he must release to the National Archives, which to some may seem like a smaller point, but is symptomatic of the same pathology - that the laws don't apply to him unless he decides they do.

"The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law," according to a court filing by Cheney's office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.

Cheney is being sued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group that is trying to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.

The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives immediately upon the end of the president's last term of office and gives the archivist responsibility to preserve and control access to presidential records. The law ended the tradition of private ownership of presidential papers, opening White House records to the public and historians.

So here we have a Vice President who has no problem torturing, wiretapping on American citizens, detaining suspects without charges for years, rendering others to countries we know torture, outing CIA agents for political retribution, eliminating habeas corpus and nullifying the Geneva Conventions, and he gets to shred every document he ever wrote and paper over this shameful history. Meanwhile, those brave enough to speak out about these offenses upon the Constitution and the dignity of the office are harassed without end, with their lives nearly destroyed, for intending to uphold American law. This is the topsy-turvy dynamic we have in a country where accountability is removed at the highest levels. This is Marcusland.

As Digby notes, this is a self-perpetuating cycle that insures those Republicans who get back in the White House are more radicalized and more contemptuous of US law because there is no consequence to the radicalism.

In fact, I have long argued that most of the past 35 years have been one long, horrific orgy of undemocratic political thuggery and conservative usurpation of the constitution. They get caught, they suffer some temporary public disapprobation, people like Feldt are caught in strange moral quandries, we define democracy down, but there is never any official sanction. It's become so common that we now this as a natural part of our politics --- the Republicans seize power, they use it in illegal and undemocratic ways, they are exposed, the Democrats win, they fail to hold them accountable and the cycle starts again. (Why, if we didn't know any better, we might think they were all in on it together! Heavens...) [...]

This all began with Nixon and the pardon, in my opinion. Many of us, myself included, believed as Marcus and Taylor still do, that forgiveness is a good thing, that the country needs to heal after a tumultuous time and there is no purpose in dragging people through the mud. But I was wrong then and they are still wrong today. How many times do we have to be hit over the head with this stuff before we realize that these people are getting more and more radical with each successive bite at the apple?

This time around, the depth of the radicalism, the breadth of the war crimes, are so astonishing, that at least some circles are arguing that war crimes prosecutions are necessary to offer resistance to this lawlessness. Unfortunately, most of these rumblings are coming from the same people that have consistently argued the need to speak up and reject war crimes, and clearly the establishment has no taste for it. What's more, the Democratic leadership has been in various ways complicit in many of the crimes and certainly willing to enable the cover-up; in the Military Commissions Act, there are explicit instructions to pardon the President and his top officials for any crimes committed in detainee treatment from 9/11 to the present and to continue the CIA detainee program that we know to be criminal. But in the absence of any attempt at prosecution, or at the very least a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this doctrine will be the lasting legacy of not only this Administration but all of those in the future, and we will have lost our democracy.

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

Wooden Ships, On The Water, (Not) Very Free

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, once said that his ideal factory would be situated on a barge, so it could be "hauled around the world to law-wage areas, where it could operate without labor rules, environmental protections or other standards." The US government under Bush and Cheney took it one step further - the ideal prison would be on a ship, where they could best avoid human rights standards and laws.

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained [...]

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists [...]

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

We have to remember that this Administration is run by a self-described "CEO President." It should come as no surprise that they're putting to use practices like offshoring, outsourcing, etc., to avoid American law. That's why Guantanamo has been put into service and that's the point of these ghost ships. Operating in secrecy and outside the auspices of the law, whether to avoid taxes or labor standards or the penalties for environmental degradation, is a tactic used often by the more psychopathic of corporations. This was about burying the evidence, hiding the extent of the abuse, and floating on that barge to hide away.

Your tax dollars at work.

Mr. Human Rights

The world was treated yesterday to the same kind of hypocrisy we've been experiencing for close to seven years.

UNITED NATIONS — President Bush implored the United Nations on Tuesday to recommit itself to restoring human decency by liberating oppressed people and ending famine and disease.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the president called for renewed efforts to enforce the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a striking point of emphasis for a leader who's widely accused of violating human rights in waging war against terrorism.

Bush didn't mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA's "rendition" kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.

"At first read, it's little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can't help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, 'What was this man thinking?' "

This comes at a time when Guantanamo detainees are talking about guards flinging shit at them and withholding medicine during interrogations. It comes at a time when our imperial project in Iraq has brought thousands of cases of cholera to their people. It comes after secret prisons and prison abuse and the ubiquity of public tasering and a whole host of other incidents that have transformed our country from a beacon of human rights to one of the condemned. It takes more than a speech to put that genie back in the bottle.

UPDATE: By the way, apparently Bush needs the phonetic spelling of the names of people and places around the world after pretending to lead it for seven years. Classy.

A Shining Beacon of Freedom

Jane Mayer has an incredible piece in this week's New Yorker on the "black sites," the secret CIA prisons where terror suspects were rendered to shield them from public view. The Red Cross has finally had the opportunity to talk to some of those detained, and the classified report based on those conversations shows that a system of torture and abuse was put in place at the highest levels, in complete violation of US law and international treaties to which the US is a signatory, which are also legally binding. And these programs to use the tactics of terror to fight terror have never been fully disavowed:

In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.

Administration apologists claim that the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) prove that these techniques are effective and save lives. Only KSM's confessions cannot be fully corroborated. They conflict with other stories. And they are clearly the words of a desperate man who would say anything to stop the pain. The CIA is only looking at the metric of information, not its veracity. And therefore it considers torturing KSM to be effective. Only it DOESN'T work in providing legitimate intelligence. Yet it goes on due to a twisted ideology in the minds of the very top of our political leadership.

By contrast, the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency’s director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, “Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was signed off by the C.I.A. director.”

The interrogation techniques came directly out of Vietnam-era torture programs, and also SERE, a Korean War-era program developed by the American military to teach Special Forces soldiers how to survive Soviet torture techniques. They appropriated the Soviet ideas and turned them around on these detainees.

The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.” [...]

Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

The KGB was looking for propaganda victories, not actual intelligence. They wanted Americans to confess to something, anything, to prove their moral superiority. We took the exact same program and used it to supposedly gather intelligence. But actually we were doing the same thing. The goal was to legitimize the techniques used through any confessions and information possible.

Read the whole article. It sounds like something out of the 13th century. Not only has this kind of torture turned us into the enemy abroad, neutered our voice on human rights issues, and given Al Qaeda the greatest recruitment tool they can imagine, it also doesn't work in giving us a leg up on intelligence. Plus, once we've exhausted the limited time horizon where these detainees can be useful, we cannot put them out into a regular prison population or the larger world because of the crimes we have committed. We've created a small city worth of disappeareds, people with no country, no location, nothing.

I'm disgusted by this and the taxpayer dollars that went to fund it:

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

And the worst part is that we've taught a generation of psychotic conservatives that not of this degrading and humiliating treatment matters, that it's just harmless, that it falls within the legal principle of who cares. We've built an army of moral zombies who follow their Dear Leader no matter where he leads them. It's a nightmare from which I am hoping to one day awaken.

UPDATE: Jack Bauer in 20 years:

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

How The Bush Administration Follows The Law

There are a bunch of reports out in this past week that show the reckless disregard for the laws of the United States displayed by the Bush Administration. Consider this:

• The inspector general for the Justice Department has found that the FBI has misused the Patriot Act by failing to comply with internal regulations in an astonishing 10% of all "national security letters," which allow them to obtain personal telephone, email and bank records of suspected terrorists.

• The Bush Administration deliberately removed 3 citizens from a 2004 re-election event in Denver as part of White House policy, despite the fact that the three had tickets to the event, did nothing to disrupt it and were solely removed for having an anti-Bush bumper sticker.

• FEMA will have to sell 40,000 trailer homes, which never reached families in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for 40 cents on the dollar, and many of the others have rotted away and sunk into the mud in various storage sites.

• The head of the US General Services Administration is under investigation for cronyism, giving jobs to favored friends and using the agency to help Republican candidates.

• Internal memos at the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service demand that officials not talk about climate change or the endagered habitat of polar bears.

• Secret CIA interrogations were held at a former Soviet site in Poland, and US and British officials asked the Polish government to keep it quiet, according to secret memos. In addition, Human Rights Watch has found that scores of detainees are missing and unaccounted for at either CIA prisons or Guantanamo.

This is all in the space of ONE WEEK, and it includes corruption, cronyism, politicizing federal services and organizations, ripping off the American taxpayers, breaking statutes and regulations governing conduct, impinging on American's civil liberties, disappearing prisoners, crushing dissent, and violating maybe every single Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Just a snapshot. And as they say, a fish rots from the head down. Here's Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here -- and it is quite significant -- has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I've seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore [...]

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to. That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

The story here is not merely that the FBI is breaking the law and abusing these powers. That has long been predicted and, to some degree, even documented. The story is that the FBI is ignoring the very legal obligations which George Bush vowed were not obligations at all, but mere suggestions to be accepted only if he willed it. It is yet another vivid example proving that the President's ideology of lawlessness exists not merely in theory, but as the governing doctrine under which the executive branch has acted, time and again and as deliberately as possible, in violation of whatever laws it deems inconvenient.

The biggest question for a new President in 2008 is whether or not they will sanction this culture of lawlessness, or if they will disavow the concept of the unitary executive and the ability to nullify American law through signing statements. Only then will we have a return to the American system of government as we know it. All of these examples of Administration lawbreaking can be traced back to the fact that the chief executive holds the law in contempt, and views it as subservient to his objectives and policies. Until we change that mindset, we can hardly be said to be living in a democracy.