Torture

Jane Mayer has a story in the August 13, 2007 issue of The New Yorker which describes practices in the CIA’s secret prisons, whose existence was recently admitted by the president. Some excerpts: [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. 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. … The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th. The program has been extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the nomenclature of the intelligence world. By design, there has been virtually no access for outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security. The Justice Department argued this point explicitly last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the government said, had to be prohibited from access to a lawyer specifically because he might describe the “alternative interrogation methods” that the agency had used when questioning him. These methods amounted to a state secret, the government argued, and disclosure of them could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.) … Finally, last year, Red Cross officials were allowed to interview fifteen detainees, after they had been transferred to Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has been kept from the public. The committee believes that its continued access to prisoners worldwide is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore it addresses violations privately with the authorities directly responsible for prisoner treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report. ...

David at Blue Mass Group offers comment on the Boston Globe’s story which reveals that Mitt Romney used to strap his dog’s carrier to the roof of the car and put the dog in it for 12-hour trips from Boston to Ontario (the specific story takes place in the mid-1980s). In the story, the children are disgusted because the dog, Seamus, has emptied his bowels in his crate, and the animal waste is dripping off the back of the car: As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ‘‘Dad!’’ he yelled. ‘‘Gross!’’ A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours. As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.David at Blue Mass Group, quoting Ana Marie Cox: Massachusetts’s animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal “in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon.” An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying “it’s definitely something I’d want to check out.” The officer, Nadia Branca, declined to give a definitive opinion on whether Romney broke the law but did note that it’s against state law to have a dog in an open bed of a pick-up truck, and “if the dog was being carried in a way that endangers it, that would be illegal.” And while it appears that the statute of limitations has probably passed, Stacey Wolf, attorney and legislative director for the ASPCA, said “even if it turns out to not be against the law at the time, in the district, we’d hope that people would use common sense…Any manner of transporting a dog that places the animal in serious danger is something that we’d think is inappropriate…I can’t speak to the accuracy of the case, but it raises concerns about the judgment used in this particular situation."In the comments, several people correctly observe that a crate-trained dog won’t relieve itself in its own crate unless it absolutely has to or is under extreme stress. Not surprising from a man who wants to double the size of Guantanamo.

Andrew Sullivan reports on the origin of the term “enhanced interrogation techniques," as well as justification for their use that directly parallels those of the Bush administration.

My buyer’s remorse about contributing to his campaign has been greatly reduced, if not eliminated. MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as – almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination? ...

The Village Voice has an excerpt from the book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, which is fascinating reading. The hobby of planespotting–watching and recording information about planes that take off and land–led a few individuals to deduce that planes spotted at “Base Camp” in Nevada were being used by the CIA to transport prisoners to locations in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Individuals correlating data with each other over the Internet and comparing to flight logs and testimony from released prisoners yielded very specific results. Civil Air Landing Permit data was used to identify obscure companies with clearance to land anywhere they want, including restricted military bases–such as One Leasing, Richmor Aviation, Stevens Express Leasing, Tepper Aviation, Path Corporation, Rapid Air Trans, Aviation Specialties, Devon Holding and Leasing, Crowell Aviation, and Premier Executive Transport Services. The planes owned by some of these companies were found to be visiting military bases, Guantanamo Bay, Morocco, Romania, Poland, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Jon Sifton of Human Rights Watch has conducted analysis of the resulting flight data to determine which stops were merely for refueling and which were for destinations–acute angles for inbound and outbound flights from a stop are indicative of a destination rather than a refueling stop, for example. ...

Maher Arar, a Canadian (born in Syria) who was arrested by the U.S. and sent to Syria where he was tortured as a result of the RCMP’s erroneous labeling of him as someone associated with al Qaeda, was unable to receive a human rights award in Washington, D.C. because his name is still on the TSA no-fly list. Arar currently has a lawsuit pending in Canada against the RCMP. (Also see the Wikipedia entry on Arar.) This is further evidence of the TSA’s failure to competently maintain the no-fly list. UPDATE (October 20, 2006): Ed Brayton has discussed this story today. UPDATE (January 23, 2007): The U.S. Attorney General and head of Homeland Security are both insisting that Arar remain on the no-fly list for reasons which they have disclosed only to officials in Canada. The Canadians don’t think those reasons make any sense. My guess is that they think somebody they sent off to be tortured might have a beef with the people who did it to him.

Today the Senate, following the House, voted to legalize the right for the government to engage in physical interrogation techniques that most people would consider to be torture and to detain individuals permanently without criminal charges by designating them “unlawful enemy combatants,” even if they are U.S. citizens who have never left the country. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, Congress has legalized tyranny. Both of Arizona’s Senators (John McCain and Jon Kyl) voted for the bill, S. 3930. Arizona’s Representatives voted as follows on the detainment bill, H.R. 6166 (the Senate bill is S. 3930): In favor: Jeff Flake (R-District 6) Trent Franks (R-District 2) J.D. Hayworth (R-District 5) Jim Kolbe (R-District 8) Rick Renzi (R-District 1) John Shadegg (R-District 3) Against: Raul Grijalva (D-District 7) Ed Pastor (D-District 4) Once again, a completely partisan vote in which the Republicans demonstrate their disregard for this constitutional republic. You can find the complete House vote results here. UPDATE September 29, 2006: Ed Brayton has more at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The founders of this country would have found this grounds for revolution. UPDATE October 1, 2006: I fully expect the courts to overturn this, since the U.S. Constitution allows only two conditions for the temporary suspension of habeas corpus in Article I, Section 9 (“when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”). It is also worth noting that there is some simplification, above. The designation of “unlawful enemy combatant” (UEC) in the bill is made by “a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense." Also see Richard Epstein’s testimony to the Senate (PDF) urging them to kill this bill, which they disregarded.

Under the headline “The end of the high road,” The Economist reviews Joseph Margulies’ new book, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. The review begins: IN HIS new book on the American jail at Guantánamo Bay, Joseph Margulies recounts the story of a prisoner who told his interrogators of plans to use bacteriological weapons. The man named many others involved, and before long his interrogators had confessions from 35 further prisoners, “page upon page of chilling, meticulously detailed admissions”. The problem is that the prisoners he is writing about here were not suspected members of al-Qaeda, but American soldiers. The questioning took place 50 years ago and the interrogators were North Korean. ...

Radley Balko reports on the torture of Lester Eugene Siler, an illiterate man, by five sheriff’s deputies in Campbell County, Tennessee, trying to get him to consent to search warrant without telling him what it said. The deputies denied nearly beating him to death, hooking electrodes to his testicles and shocking him, and threatening to kill him and go after his family, but his wife was present and got it on audio tape, which is available online. After the story was picked up by Andrew Sullivan, who wonders about whether this became possible as a result of the climate created by the Bush administration, which right wing bloggers have mocked by mischaracterizing his position, as described in a followup by Balko.

Scott McClellan maintains that when Bush presented discredited information about mobile bioweapons laboratories in Iraq, he had no choice because the discrediting data was classified and it would be inappropriate to make use of it to modify a set of talking points to make sure that it wasn’t full of falsehoods and misrepresentations to present to the American public: I think the CIA will tell you – and I spoke to them earlier today – that a finished product like this, a white paper like this, takes coordination, it takes debating, it takes vetting, and it’s not something that they will tell you turns on a dime. It’s a complex intelligence white paper and it’s … one derived from highly classified information takes a substantial amount of time to coordinate and to run through a declassification process. And they will tell you this. And the intelligence comes in many different forms – human intelligence, signals intelligence, open source – and it’s not a trickle, it’s a constant flood, is what they told me this morning. And weighing and assessing it is something that takes a lot of time and is a technology-intensive process. So you’re making an assumption that something is immediately taken and assessed by your comments.Yet at the same time, the Bush administration takes such a cavalier view of the declassification process (or rather, such a strong view of the power of the President to act upon the whims of the moment) that he can approve leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent in order to get revenge on a U.S. Ambassador who is criticizing the administrations falsehoods about Iraq attempting to purchase uranium in Niger. Meanwhile, Alberto Gonzales says that the President could legally intercept domestic communications without FISA Court approval as a result of the AUMF (authorization for the use of military force in Iraq), in addition to being able to unilaterally declare U.S. citizens to be enemy combatants and hold them indefinitely without trial and engage in torture. It is growing more and more clear that the current administration thinks the President’s powers are unlimited, and Bush’s December 18, 2000 comment that “if this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier–so long as I’m the dictator” and his July 30, 2001 Business Week comment that “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it” weren’t really jokes.