Maine Owl

Bush on torture

President Bush (Sept. 6, 2006): I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world, the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.

U.K. Parliamentary report on Human Rights:

We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future. We also recommend that the Government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US.

A question I have is the same as one a commenter suggests at the Balkinization blog where I linked to for the item on this report: Why the hell is the U.S. Congress not uncovering the fact that Bush statements on U.S. torture practice are false and unreliable? Why does the job fall to the U.K. Parliament? It's a damn shameful situation.

Wouldn't the Republicans have found a way to get tough against this kind of tactic when they were in charge?



Phillipe Sands, whose testimony on U.S. leadership and torture was cut off by the Republican objection, is a world treasure in the pursuit of truth. Maine Owl has three relevant posts:

• Friday, May 02, 2008: Ticking bombs?
• Friday, April 11, 2008: White House torture group
• Thursday, January 31, 2008: Five years ago in war...
  Bush and Blair at the White House, 1-31-2003; The secret memo

At least with the Democrats in charge, there is an attempt to have some sort of hearing when strong evidence of international war crimes by U.S. leaders emerges. However, so far I'm not impressed with their overall handling of the situation. I just get the feeling that the Republicans would not allow something they cared about to be bowled over so easily.

Addendum: I'll propose the hypothesis that it is the Democrats themselves who do not want to hear strong, direct evidence of impeachable offenses. Good luck, Dennis.

The U.S. certainly, definitely, absolutely never ever tortures. I know this because the president said so. And Defense Department documents revealing non-torture treatment like beating to death, strangulation, threats, and sensory deprivation prove it.

Seems like the torture promoters who roam the halls of wingnuttia are all bathed in the fantasy of "24." (According to Philippe Sands, the torture staff at Guantanamo Bay are great fans of this teevee fiction.)

In places like Fox Noise and the U.S. Supreme Court, apologists justify torture with this image of extracting information from "ticking bombs" ahead of "imminent attack."

Well, what about this? Here's a guy who was ripped out of his life and dealt the most cruel and inhuman practices that the Pentagon mind could muster for six years:

After More than Six Years, Al Jazeera Cameraman Sami al-Haj Released from Guantanamo Bay
Arrested in Pakistan in December 2001, Sami al-Haj spent nearly six-and-a-half years at Guantanamo without charge or trial. He had been on a more than a year-long hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. We hear al-Haj’s first public remarks from his hospital bed in Sudan and speak to his brother, Asim al-Haj.

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj has just been released from Guantanamo Bay. The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders issued a statement Thursday saying Sami al-Haj had been tortured while at Guantanamo and subjected to 200 interrogation sessions. He’s lost forty pounds, is suffering from intestinal problems and bouts of paranoia, according to his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith....

After a tearful reunion with his family, he spoke out against the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo in an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera.

SAMI AL-HAJ: [translated] I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than fifty countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals....

I wonder what "ticking bomb" information they might have gotten out of al-Haj after about the second day they held him.

Hullabaloo has an extensive rundown of more recent developments on the torture front.

This today from Democracy Now! headlines:

ACLU Calls for Probe of Admin Torture Talks

Two former senior intelligence officials have come forward to confirm reports top Bush administration officials personally discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. This week, ABC News revealed a Principals Committee on the National Security Council agreed on controversial interrogation techniques including physical assault, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The officials included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. In an interview with the Associated Press, a former senior US intelligence official said the group met in the White House Situation Room and deliberately insulated President Bush from their discussions. The meetings were said to include live demonstrations from CIA officials of the interrogation methods in practice, including waterboarding. The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for a congressional investigation. ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said, "With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House. This is what we suspected all along."

In the old blog, there are many posts on torture. Generally I assume that my opposition is to "torture and killing being done in my name by the leadership of my own country." However, there is precious little confirmation that infamous documents, like the Bybee memo of August 1, 2002, that clearly indicate top-level involvement in covering up torture, were actually discussed by senior officials. Now we have that.

See also, this extraordinary April 3 interview on Democracy Now! with British journalist, Philippe Sands. Excellent reporting by Seymour Hersh (see the book "Chain of Command") plowed this ground. Sands recent article in Vanity Fair on the Green Light also describes the real workings of the Torture Administration:

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I think that the administration’s narrative has always been they really didn’t authorize these things; what happened was it started on the ground at Guantanamo, they faced a situation with individuals who they thought presented a threat to US security, and from the ground, from the people at Guantanamo, new security, new interrogation measures were requested. And so, it’s a bottom-up theory that the administration has always pushed.

What of course emerged, as many I think suspected, is that that’s not an accurate narrative. It in fact came from the top down, and there was a small group of lawyers coalescing around the President, around the Vice President, around the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, who basically drove the whole thing through.

What really struck me in the Sands interview is his statement about how foolish it has been following the Supreme Court Hamden vs. Rumsfeld decision for the political branches of the U.S. government to immunize themselves on torture through the onerous Military Commissions Act of 2006:

Justice Anthony Kennedy put in a separate opinion. He was with the majority. And he opened the door to war crimes possibilities. He said this means that war crimes violations may well be investigated in relation to situations in which the Geneva Convention was not followed. The administration recognized the threat that it faced, and within three months it had adopted legislation in the Military Commissions Act which created an immunity for any person who was involved in the interrogation of al-Qahtani, as well as many other people. That immunity applies within the United States.

But, as I write in the article in Vanity Fair, it doesn’t go beyond the United States. And I describe in the Vanity Fair piece, in much more detail than in the book, the meetings I’ve had with a European judge and a European prosecutor, who basically said the fact that the US has created a domestic immunity significantly increases the prospects of international investigational prosecution, if any of these people set foot out of the country. And as the prosecutor said to me, that was a very stupid thing to do, to create an immunity.

No one will cheer louder than I if Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, and others one day are forced to face justice for their crimes against humanity.