The Torture Investigation Mystery Show
So there’s been a lot of speculation in blogtopia about Attorney General Eric Holder’s reportedly renewed intentions of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the authorization and use of torture in the previous administration. The speculation — which revolves around the question of who Holder intends to prosecute, more than whether he intends to prosecute — has been fueled by these three articles:
- Daniel Klaidman’s piece, published Saturday in Newsweek, which reported that AG Holder had returned to the possibility of prosecutions.
- Carrie Johnson’s Washington Post article titled “Probe of Alleged Torture Weighed,” published on Sunday, which speculated that any investigation would be limited to CIA interrogators who had gone beyond the “guidelines” prescribed by the Bush lawyers.
- Scott Horton’s “Torture Prosecution Turnaround?” published in The Daily Beast, also yesterday. which suggested that the scope of prosecutions, if they happened, would be wider.
I certainly agree with Tim, Glenn, and Spencer that if investigations and/or prosecutions are going to be limited to low-hanging fruit, it would be better not to do anything at all. But I don’t think it’s at all clear that’s what Holder has in mind.
Keep in mind, first, that — as Glenn himself pointed out – the predictions as to what Holder will do in both articles — Johnson’s and Horton’s — are being made by anonymous sources. I’m not going to take any claims seriously that come from sources without names or identities attached to them. It’s not even that I think these people are unreliable, whoever they are. I’m sure they are high-ranking officials who know Holder well. But no matter who they are, if they are anonymous, they might as well be no one, because there’s no accountability. No other journalist can call them up and confirm what they said. So they can say whatever they want, but it has no gravitas until they are identified.
And that leads me to the other reason I don’t take these claims about Holder’s intentions seriously: They’re not meant seriously. They’re meant to test the waters. Isn’t that what corporate journalism is about these days? Anonymous sources test-driving major decisions by calling reporters at major papers and sending out trial balloons?
It can actually be entertaining sometimes to see how reporters for top national papers parse the reasons for not naming the sources. There’s a whole structure and style to presenting sources anonymously. First, there is the obligatory first mention, “…according to three sources. …” This is usually included in the opening paragraph, but sometimes it’s the second or third. Then, several paragraphs further down in the article, you get the “reason” why these sources are not being identified. And I put “reason” in quotes because, obviously, there’s only one reason. But Carrie Johnson can’t very well tell us that her sources would only agree to speak to her on background “because they don’t want to be held responsible for the information they’re leaking.” So instead, she writes that the sources “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing process.”
Thank you to Digby for inspiring the above rant by saying exactly what I had been thinking (in the first Update to her post about the Brain Trust at This Week With George Stephanopoulos).
Scary, Scary Glenn
At the end of his post about Barack Obama’s post-acquittal detention plan, Glenn Greenwald gives us an update on NPR’s policy of using various euphemisms for the word “torture” in its coverage of the previous administration’s detention and interrogation policies:
Finally, I was on an NPR station yesterday in Seattle to discuss NPR’s ban on the use of the word “torture” to describe Bush administration interrogation tactics. I originally understood that I would be on with NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, but alas, it turns out that she agreed only to be on the show before me, so as not to engage or otherwise interact with me, so I was forced to listen to her for 15 minutes and wait until she hung up before being able to speak. The segment can be heard here, beginning at the 14:00 mark (though the quality of the recording is poor in places).
Why the “Neda Video” Is Important
Because her murder by Iranian government forces would not have sparked the international outrage it has sparked if we had just read about it in the paper.
Obvious?
Maybe.
Getting Down to Basic Truths
Gawker, that rock-solid investigative reporting site (just check out the article teasers at the top if you doubt their reportorial chops), puts up an article saying that Erich “Mancow” Muller faked his waterboarding. It wasn’t a “hoax,” exactly, according to Gawker’s informed sources — it was meant to “look real” but actually was only “simulated.” Mancow, in short, was not really drowning — it was a staged waterboarding, not an actual one. No, really. It’s true. It was fake. So just don’t anyone put down investigative journalists while I’m around, cuz man, how else would we find out about the lies we’re being told if dedicated seekers of truth like The Cajun Boy were not willing to work so hard to dig out the truth?
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.
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:
Is Waterboarding Torture? Ask Mancow Muller.
Via Joe Gandelman at TMV:
Kudos to Mancow Muller for his courage and his honesty.
Nancy Pelosi, Congress, and the American Public
Despite what Republicans in Congress, right-wing bloggers, and conservative media pundits would have us believe, Nancy Pelosi is not about to be thrown under the bus by her House colleagues — nor, it seems, has the sincere Republican effort to make Pelosi responsible for the CIA’s interrogation torture program convinced the American public that it’s all her fault that the Bush administration violated every known domestic and international law against the use of torture.
Although it’s true that the House Speaker’s job approval rating is only 39%, with 48% disapproving, the approval rating for Republicans in Congress is the same. What’s more, Americans are not strongly opinionated on the question of whether the CIA misled Pelosi or not. Neither conclusion gets 50%, and by a couple of percentage points, more Americans believe she might have been misled than believe that she was not. Those are the nationwide numbers; unsurprisingly, the results break down significantly along party lines.
Believe it or not, most Americans do not have Nancy Pelosi’s statements about the CIA foremost on their minds:
Another Connecticut Democrat, Chris Murphy, said there’s a “total disconnect” between what pundits and talk show hosts are talking about and what he hears from his constituents. Murphy said there might be some impact on the speaker’s ability to continue leading if the issue were something people were talking about in his district, but it’s not.
Here is the amen point (emphasis mine):
Conservative Indiana Democrat Baron Hill said that people who are zeroing in on the speaker are trying to move away from the broader issue of who authorized the harsh interrogation methods.
“I think a lot of people have lost focus on the people who put those torture policies in place in the first place,” Hill said. “Nancy didn’t do anything wrong, in terms of the legalities, that I’m aware of. I don’t know what she was told. I’m not here to cast judgment on her at all.”
Hill said he made a half a dozen visits in his Indiana district over the weekend, and no one raised the issue of Pelosi with him.
One… two… three: AHHHHMEN!
Frank Rich to Pres. Obama: Can’t Stand Athwart History, Yelling “Stop!”
Or, as Bonnie Raitt said, “Can’t stop a river, once it’s burst its banks. …”:
To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
[...]
… The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew…” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Frank Rich column, here.
Bonnie Raitt, “Storm Warning” lyrics here.
Faux News Reveals True Motivation Behind Attacks on Pelosi
Not that reality-based bloggers didn’t know this already, but it definitely should be pointed out as frequently as possible (emphasis in original):
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.
Truth and Dick Cheney Are Not Even Nodding Acquaintances
Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to Colin Powell) has a must-read guest post at The Washington Note. He completely deflates Cheney’s “torture saves lives” argument:
First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the “seven and a half years” after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.
There was absolutely no policy priority attributed to al-Qa’ida by the Cheney-Bush administration in the months before 9/11. Counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke’s position was downgraded, al-Qa’ida was put in the background so as to emphasize Iraq, and the policy priorities were lowering taxes, abrogating the ABM Treaty and building ballistic missile defenses.
Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11–much touted by Cheney–is due almost entirely to the nation’s having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to “the Cheney method of interrogation.”
Those troops have kept al-Qa’ida at bay, killed many of them, and certainly “fixed” them, as we say in military jargon. Plus, sadly enough, those 200,000 troops present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qa’ida than the United States homeland. Testimony to that fact is clear: almost 5,000 American troops have died, more Americans than died on 9/11. Of course, they are the type of Americans for whom Cheney hasn’t much use as he declared rather dramatically when he achieved no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
Third–and here comes the blistering fact–when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops “the Cheney method of interrogation and torture”, the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.
My investigations have revealed to me–vividly and clearly–that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering “the Cheney methods of interrogation”, simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.
What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the “Cheney interrogation methods” will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?
Obama Now Says He Will Not Release Detainee Abuse Photos
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
Wow. Those photographs must be truly, shockingly horrendous if Obama and his advisers are so concerned their release would put U.S. soldiers’ lives in danger and threaten our national security:
A couple of points here: First, it isn’t the photos; it is the acts themselves that put US troops in danger. The abuse is widely known among Iraqis, and those inclined to act don’t need photographic evidence as justification.
Second, the White House has a tough argument to make here. The Second Circuit Court has ruled that the Bush claim of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act was not meant to be an “all purpose damper on global controversy.” Since a controversy already exists, and photos of abuse from Abu Ghraib have previously been released, the current administration is going to have to argue that the new photos are somehow substantially more controversial.
Makes one want to ask: controversial how?
Exactly.
On the other side of the issue, Neptunus Lex thinks this was a “good call“:
Nothing new would have come of this but propaganda for the enemies of civilization. Apparently, the administration has determined that the increased risk to our troops – something he should care about both personally and politically – outweighs the delicious opportunity to further harrow his increasingly irrelevant predecessor.
I’d call that growing in the job.
I, on the other hand, would call it missing the point. How many times has Barack Obama said, both as president and during the campaign, that the previous administration’s use of harsh enhanced interrogation techniques torture has been one of Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools? It’s the torture that endangers our troops’ lives and makes us less safe, as Gregg Levine wrote in that quote above. It’s the torture that the “enemies of civilization” have been using and will continue to use as propaganda until they know it’s ended and the people responsible are being held accountable. Our “enemies” are not going to see anything when those photos are released that they didn’t already know about, or that, indeed, they haven’t already seen up close and personal. It’s us — the American people — who need to see and fully know what’s been done in our names.
And that “enemies of civilization” concept — what’s that about? Is torture not uncivilized? (Not to mention, illegal.) Is it okay that we perpetrated such unimaginable cruelties against the “enemies of civilization” if we can persuade ourselves that everyone we brutalized was an enemy of civilization? Surely some of them were not uncivilized!
I’ve gotten to know Lex a wee bit as a person, and he’s a decent, smart guy with a cool sense of humor. But on this, he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
White House Poised To Release IG Report on Torture
In a Washington Post article about ongoing congressional investigation into CIA compliance (or lack thereof) with DOJ interrogation guidelines, there is big news about the May 2004 Inspector-General’s report that has been much referred to recently, but so far remains classified (emphasis in original):
Bipartisan Complicity
Yesterday, Rick Klein of ABC News announced that “a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News” showed that the CIA did brief Nancy Pelosi and other select members of the House Intelligence Committee on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT). Pelosi says she and other House members were only told that the White House had legal opinions that would allow them to use such techniques, not that they were being used or would be used.
Torture, Accountability and the Faux-Absolution of Collective Guilt
In a must-read post, Dan Froomkin takes on recent attempts by OG ‘eventheliberal’ Michael Kinsley and pseudo-contrarian Slate guru Jacob Weisberg to whitewash the Bush Admin’s torture record by arguing that “the nation’s collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out.”
Now Condi Tells a Fourth-Grader That Bush Admin Did Nothing Illegal
I guess if you can tell a brazen lie to a group of college students, telling the same lie to a classroom of fourth-graders would be even easier:
Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal “by definition if it was authorized by the president,” former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.
Rice, in her first appearance in Washington since leaving government, was at the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital before giving an evening lecture at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. …
The questions had been developed beforehand by students with their teachers and had not been screened by Rice. At first, they were innocuous: What was it like growing up in segregated Birmingham, Ala.? What skill did she want to be best known for?
Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?
Rice took the question in stride. saying that she was reluctant to criticize Obama, then getting to the heart of the matter.
“Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country,” she said. “But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”
She added: “I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country.”
Misha’s mother, Inna Lerner, said the question her son had initially come up with was even tougher: “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for torture?”
“They wanted him to soften it and take out the word ‘torture.’ But the essence of it was the same,” Lerner said.
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