Torture

It was interesting to go back through the old posts on this blog about the CIA torture program in light of the new film, The Report, which can be seen on Amazon Prime. One of the early posts on this blog resulted in a debate in the comments about the ethics and efficacy of torture, which the 2014 Senate torture report (PDF link) and the film resolve decisively against torture. The CIA torture program was ineffective and unethical. Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Daniel Jones about the CIA program and the Senate investigations and report is quite illuminating, and highly recommended listening, as is the podcast associated with the film. A couple other items of interest: Jason Leopold’s exposure of an accidentally leaked draft letter from John Brennan to Dianne Feinstein apologizing for hacking the Senate investigation. Senator Mark Udall’s questioning of CIA general counsel Caroline Krass during her Senate confirmation hearing. New York Times book review of Frank Rizzo’s memoir, Company Man, which confirms that George W. Bush was not briefed on the torture program but was a “stand-up guy” by lying and claiming that he was.

About a week and a half ago, I heard NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepherd, defending NPR’s policy on refusing to identify waterboarding as torture. Her argument was that NPR had a journalistic responsibility not to take sides on any issue, and that to identify waterboarding as torture was to take a side. She actually wrote that “I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things." I think this is not only ridiculous, but an abdication of journalistic responsibility in favor of a bogus view of reporting “objectivity” by using only “he said, she said” descriptions, to an extreme. Here’s what I posted to the NPR blog on July 2: There is no reasonable debate about whether waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding has been legally determined to be criminal torture by U.S. courts in 1947, when Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor for it (among other war crimes). Other Japanese war criminals, such as Kenji Dohihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, and Hideki Tojo, were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for engaging in torture during WWII, including waterboarding, and several were executed for it. U.S. soldiers who undergo waterboarding as part of SERE training receive that training in order to understand what torture is. It is bad journalism to defend “there are two sides to every issue” as a form of phony objectivity. Sometimes there are more than two sides of merit, and sometimes there is only one (and there is always some nut who will take issue with any well-established claim). In this case, there is no reasonable argument by which waterboarding is not torture. It makes no more sense to call it “what some people refer to as torture” than it does to insert similar qualifications on the front of every noun used in a sentence on NPR.Another commenter replied to point out that waterboarding has been legally torture for longer than that in the U.S. I was glad to hear Adam Savage of Mythbusters, at TAM7, answer the question “what has been the biggest media failure of skepticism lately” by saying that the biggest failure has been the NPR ombudsman’s statement that calling waterboarding torture is taking sides and they have to be “balanced.” ...

“It’s important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there’s an allegation of abuse … there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. … It’s very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. … In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn’t be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn’t be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation." And on the treatment of war crimes: “War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders." The former quote is from the video below, the latter quote is from this March 2003 CNN transcript. (First quote via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, second quote via The Agitator.) And, for your edification, please read Scott Horton’s article, “Busting the Torture Myths." ...

So much for change. ABC News: The Obama Administration today announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration in the lawsuit Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. The case involves five men who claim to have been victims of extraordinary rendition — including current Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, another plaintiff in jail in Egypt, one in jail in Morocco, and two now free. They sued a San Jose Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured. ...

Obama’s inauguration speech was censored in China. They didn’t like these two sentences: “Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.” The words “and communism” were removed from the Chinese translation by the state-run Xinhua news agency. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.” That whole sentence was removed from the Chinese translation. Rick Warren’s invocation speech was the low point in the career of a U.S. Army officer who gave in to pressure to conform when his commanding officer expected everyone to applaud, saying “God Bless him for having the courage to pray for all of the lost souls in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ!" On Obama’s first day in office, he issued executive orders to suspend military commissions for 120 days, close Guantanamo Bay in the next year, require all government agency interrogations to comply with the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogation, freeze salaries for the 100 top executive branch officials, reverse George W. Bush’s executive order allowing former presidents and their relatives to keep presidential materials out of the National Archives beyond the 12-year statutory limit, close all CIA secret prisons, and call for a review of all U.S. government detention procedures. The Obameter is tracking Obama’s campaign promises. So far he’s kept five, compromised on one, stalled on one, taken no action on 488, and broken none. He will need to delay, if not break, some of his spending promises… UPDATE (February 17, 2009): So far, it appears that Obama has no intention of keeping his promise to post all bills to the web for five days of public comment prior to signing them. He’s broken that promise repeatedly already.

The Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico last year with 3.7 tons of cocaine on board was frequently used by the CIA to fly terror suspects to Guantanamo Bay, and may have also been used for “extraordinary rendition” flights to CIA prisons overseas, as well as for Bush fundraisers. Donna Blue Aircraft, the company the plane was registered to, took down its website yesterday. (Via The Agitator.)

The latest ApostAZ podcast is out: Episode 007 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- Go to atheists.meetup.com/157 for group events! Monthly Meetup Epilogue. Debate Tactics and Rhetoric. Sweden Rules Against Prayer as Truth: http://www.guardian.co.uk/. Prayer and Aggression. Obama and Faith Based Initiatives. Pickett Church? http://www.atheistrev.com/ Aggression study: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120083092/abstract. Greydon Square’s Album ‘The Compton Effect’Funny analogy from Shannon: “Prayer is a homeless dude on your couch." Charity Navigator is another site similar to CharityWatch. Shannon incorrectly states that McCain is a creationist. He’s not. And the Creation Museum is in Kentucky, not Tennessee. Picketing churches on the basis of its beliefs and doctrines is a terrible idea that should be left to Fred Phelps and similar kooks. The picketing of the Church of Scientology has generally been based on its behavior, not its doctrines–to the extent the focus is on opposing criminal behavior, that’s reasonable.

When in 2002 military trainers came to Guantanamo Bay to teach a course on interrogation techniques, they included a chart of the effects of prospective techniques. That chart came from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War on U.S. soldiers to extract false confessions. The study, by Albert D. Biderman, was titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War." UPDATE (July 8, 2008): Ed Brayton comments on how McCain’s torture using these very techniques led to a false confession–so why do we believe that torture will lead to true confessions? ...

Christopher Hitchens decided to experience waterboarding first-hand at the hands of experts, and he did so twice. He vividly describes the experience in Vanity Fair, which also has video.

I just figured out that Trevor Paglen, the co-author of Torture Taxi, a book about how planespotting was used to track information about the CIA’s extraordinary rendition flights, is also the author of I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World, for which he appeared on the Colbert Report. At his blog, I’ve learned that the pilots of the CIA rendition flights associated with Khalid El-Masri have been identified at Sourcewatch, where you can also find extensive information about the planes and the fictional owners of the companies that operate them (in particular see the companies Premier Executive Transport Services and Bayard Foreign Marketing, which have both owned the same Gulfstream V (PDF), nicknamed the “Guantanamo Bay Express”). El-Masri, a German citizen, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken to a CIA black site called the “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan, where he was tortured, then later released in Albania after a second order to do so by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (the first was ignored). He was taken because his name resembled that of suspected al Qaeda operative Khalid al-Masri. El-Masri’s lawsuit against the CIA and three private companies that operated planes involved with his transport was dismissed in 2006 on grounds of state secrets privilege, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied cert in 2007. He has also sued in Germany, where there are outstanding warrants for pilots Eric Robert Hume, James Kovalesky, and Harry Kirk Ellarbee. All three of these pilots work or worked for alleged CIA front company Aero Contractors Ltd., live in Johnston County, North Carolina and have been visited by the German press in unsuccessful attempts to interview them. The German warrants were passed to Interpol, but the German government declined to ask the U.S. for extradition after an informal request was given a negative reply. El-Masri was sent to a mental institution in 2007 after being arrested for arson and an assault on a truck-driving instructor.