Generals to Dick & Liz: Stop Scaring People!
Josh Gerstein at Politico:
About a dozen retired generals and admirals, trying to add momentum to President Barack Obama’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, are accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz of scaremongering about the dangers of closing it.
“It’s up to all of us to say these arguments advanced by Cheney and his acolytes are nonsense and that really what they’re doing is undermining our national security by delaying the date at which Guantanamo is closed,” retired Brig. Gen. James Cullen, a former chief judge of the Army’s Court of Criminal Appeals, told POLITICO Tuesday.
“Some of the fear issues that are being raised in this are really unfortunate. It gets people excited about things they shouldn’t be excited about and impedes doing what is critical to this country. Get that damn symbol off the table,” said retired Gen. David Maddox, a former Army commander-in-chief for Europe. “We take a setback every time somebody, whether it’s the vice president or his daughter comes out and says the things that they say….We have to get out there again and just keep pounding.”
The former vice president and his daughter declined comment on the criticism.
The former military officers, whose Washington visit was organized by Human Rights First, argued rather bitterly that the Cheneys have exaggerated the risks of bringing Guantanamo prisoners from Cuba to the United States.
“Can you imagine getting a terrorist from Guantanamo convicted and put in a federal penitentiary in your town?” Maddox asked. “Have you ever checked who the hell’s in there already? Have any of them gotten out? The person who we’re putting in is probably a heck of lot less dangerous than most of them who are already in there.”
Needless to say, Michael Goldfarb — being the big supporter of the military that he is — thinks that 12 former U.S. generals and admirals are addled in the head and don’t know what they’re talking about — because, of course, they are not talking the talk that he likes to hear.
Ireland’s Newest Citizens
As reported today, Pres. Obama has freed three more Guantanamo detainees. One is headed for Yemen; the other two are going to Ireland:
More on Obama’s Post-Acquittal Indefinite Detention Plans
Today, Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the Obama administration’s newly revealed plans to continue holding Guantanamo detainees indefinitely even in the cases of detainees who may be acquitted:
Obama Official Claims Post-Acquittal Right to Detain
I suppose I have to get used to maintaining a nothing-surprises-me attitude toward the Obama administration when it comes to anything related to civil liberties or human rights — just as I had to during the previous administration.
Obama Preparing Executive Order to Allow Preventive Detention
The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
[...]
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House was already trying to build support.
Remember that meeting last month between civil liberties and human rights activists and Pres. Obama right before his big national security speech? The one where he was trying to get their support for his Guantanamo plans?
I’m hearing spinning noises coming from the White House:
“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should be prosecuted or released.
I’m not the only one wondering what’s the game here:
What? What civil liberties organization actually encouraged the administration to set up a system of “prolonged detention” — the less euphemistic term would be indefinite detention — in the first place; let alone urged the administration to do it without congressional approval?
Aha!
Update: Zach Roth at TPM reports that the Center for Constitutional Rights certainly doesn’t approve of the idea.
Update 2: CCR representatives say that in a recent White House meeting, they conveyed to administration officials that “any prolonged detention scheme was unacceptable, no matter how it was dressed.”
Regarding comparisons between the White House plan for preventive detention described by Linzer and Finn in the WaPo piece, and the one laid out by Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, see smintheus at unbossed.com and Mytwords at Corrente.
Matthew Alexander: Torture Has Cost Us American Lives
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is worth at least a hundred thousand:
Via The Huffington Post.
Preventive Detention Is a Non-Starter
Pres. Obama’s preventive detention idea, so far, is not going over too well, reports Glenn Greenwald:
The backlash against President Obama’s extraordinary proposal for indefinite “preventive detention” — already widespread in the immediate aftermath of his speech — continues to grow. On Friday, Sen. Russ Feingold sent a letter (.pdf) to Obama which, while praising some aspects of his speech, vowed to hold hearings on his detention proposal, and in the letter, Feingold rather emphatically highlighted the radical and dangerous aspects of Obama’s approach[.]
[...]
On Twitter on Friday, Rachel Maddow pointed to the civil liberties questionnaire from Charlie Savage which Obama answered during the Democratic primary and asked rhetorically: “This is the same guy now proposing ‘prolonged detention’ without trial?”
[...]
It’s a bit difficult to claim that what Obama is proposing is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, given that his own White House Counsel just last February told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that it would be “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” As acknowledged by two of the leading proponents of preventive detention — Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith and Obama’s Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal — the real purpose of preventive detention (contrary to what some are arguing) is not to classify and treat all detainees as “prisoners of war” (since some of them, by Obama’s own description, will get trials in real courts and others in military commissions), but rather, to give “the government an overwhelming incentive to use trials only when it is certain to win convictions and long sentences, and to place the rest in whatever detention system it creates” (h/t EJ). I defy anyone to re-read that description of what this “preventive detention” system does and then claim that what is being described is a “justice system” in any meaningful sense of that term.
Digby has more.
Cheney: Still Cherry-Picking After All These Years
Jonathan Landay of McClatchy goes through the long list of lies, distortions, and convenient omissions in Cheney’s “national security” speech yesterday:
Facts Be Damned
Charles Krauthammer got hammered (sorry, couldn’t resist!) by his readers for that column he wrote a few weeks ago on the two scenarios in which torture was justifiable. (If you don’t remember, the two scenarios were (1) the ticking time bomb scenario; and (2) any other time you think a detainee has important information and won’t give it up). His response is, if anything, worse than the original.
Condi’s Deceptive Response to Stanford Student
Remember this? (emphasis added by Cenk, not me):
“The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” (emphasis added)
That’s what Condi Rice told the student at Stanford who was challenging her on the legality of torture. But as it turns out, internal support for the CIA’s interrogation program had begun to come apart around 2003, and Rice was a key player in a series of sometimes sharp conflicts among senior administration officials about the legality of the program:
She Had a Bad Day
Condi Rice has been breathing the rarefied air inside that bubble she’s been living in for the past eight years. She got pwned on torture earlier this week by a student at Stanford — and she made an admission that she may live to regret if we ever see prosecutions:
Morning Joke
Joe Scarborough flaps his lips, and out comes this:
I don’t want to have a debate about the history of the CIA, but I do want to have a debate about what’s happened since September 11, 2001, and I can tell you what’s happened. We’ve figured out a hell of a lot about Al Qaeda, we’ve killed or captured two-thirds — that was, god, three, four years ago — of Al Qaeda terrorists — men that we had no idea who they were, and there’s been no attack here, in the United States. Now, if you want to debate the morality of waterboarding, talking about putting caterpillars in boxes, making people sit down with their arms in the air, we can have that debate, we can have the debate on morality, but by every objectionable standard — uh, objective standard — the intelligence community has succeeded in cracking the code on Al Qaeda, and preventing another attack in the United States of America. That, it seems to me, is without debate. So let’s debate the morality of waterboarding, and caterpillars, and making terrorists sit down, and if it upsets you that a terrorist is forced to sit down and put his hands in the air for a while, okay, we’ll have that debate, and I’m quite comfortable where that debate comes down, between liberals and conservatives.
That’s right, Joe. We make terrorists sit down with their hands in the air, and that makes all the truth they’ve kept bottled up inside come tumbling out.
I should try that at home. Sit on the floor and put my hands in the air. I don’t want to be too reckless, though. I might not be able to control what would happen if I sat on the floor and put my hands in the air.
Gitmo Detainee Paperwork “Scattered All Over Executive Branch”
I wish I could say that I am shocked by the news — reported by Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn in the Washington Post – that the case records for Guantanamo detainees are an unholy mess, incomplete, missing or lost, with crucial paperwork piled on desks or shoved in desk drawers, sitting in boxes or stuffed into lockers all over the C.I.A., the Defense Department, and Guantanamo itself, but I’m not. I’m disgusted and outraged, but not shocked. Nor am I surprised that former Bush officials are minimizing the extent of the problem or denying there is one, while simultaneously accusing Obama’s people of making excuses because they don’t want to admit that it really is too “complex and dangerous” to close Gitmo.
The Consequences of Torture
The advocates for torture in the Bush administration were so convinced it was the only way to get actionable intelligence in the misnamed “war on terror” that they never considered basing an interrogation program on any other methods and never asked themselves how evidence gained through torture would affect the government’s ability to prosecute.
Bush Says the World Still Respects U.S. Moral Authority
President Bush this morning declared emphatically that “most people around the world, they respect America,” strongly disagreeing with the idea that the country’s moral standing suffered during his time in office. He said he did what he thought was right in facing crises from Hurricane Katrina to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, even though sometimes “things didn’t go according to plan.”
Condoleezza Rice on NPR: U.S. Does Not Torture
It’s unbelievable. Condi Rice flat-out lied in this NPR radio interview (audio snip starts automatically), in which Michele Kelemen questions Rice about closing Guantanamo, and the Bush administration’s torture policies in general:
They’re Ready To Sign the Letter of Confession
The discerning and intellectually rigorous Michelle Malkin:
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