The Debatable Land

The Rendition Problem

Ross Douthat has a very interesting, honest post about torture here. (With subsequent posts here and here.) As if by magic, National Review appears with an editorial defending the Bush administration's approach to interrogation here. I don't find it especially persuasive, and doubt you will too. Conor Friedersdorf has more too.

Amidst the debate on torture and "torture-lite" (or "enhanced" interrogation), one element of US policy is often overlooked: Extraordinary Rendition. To some extent you can argue about policies applied at Guantanamo and CIA black sites around the world, but there's no denying, I think, that Extraordinary Rendition amounts to anything less than state-sponsored torture. After all, that's the entire point of the programme: send these guys to dark places (Egypt, Jordan, Syria) where god knows what kind of brutality may be unleashed upon them. Enough, certainly, to meet even Dick Cheney's definition of torture. But when you send a guy to be tortured (and let's not pretend that studied indifference to these men's fates counts as ignorance) you're just as responsible, morally speaking, for his suffering as are those who actually inflict. More so, in some ways, since they're following your orders. Orders given with a nod and a wink, for sure, but given nonetheless.

Now ER is something people don't like to talk about, largely because it's such a grisly, nauseating subject. Also, of course, both parties are guilty: after all, it was a policy endorsed by President Bill Clinton, not something dreamt up by John Yoo or David Addington. Clinton's defenders insist that the policy never ran "out of control" during his time in office; nonetheless on his watch the United States took the view that it had the right to kidnap anyone anywhere in the world and send them off to be tortured by some of the more brutal regimes on the planet.

And of course, whatever elese one may feel about it, ER makes no sense on a strategic level either. On the one hand you have Washington calling for reform and greater openess in the Arab world, on the other you have Washington taking advantage of these same regimes expertese in torturing people. People aren't stupid: they can see that Washington colludes with the very people it says are the problem. No wonder plenty of folk get cynical when they hear the American president waxing lyrical about freedom and human rights and all the rest of it.

There are all sorts of reasons for why Barack Obama may find it hard to close Gitmo quickly. But there's no reason at all - beyond finding the policy "useful" - for him to wait a single day before rescinding the Presidential orders authorising Extraordinary Rendition. Failure to do so will be a moral embarrassment, as well as a political and strategic blunder.

Obama's Test

Hope has a short half-life. Right now most of the world is simply happy to see an end to the Bush years. Even so, there's no denying that Obama generates much more excitement internationally than, say, Hillary Clinton would have had she been elected President. Much, though not all, of this excitement is generated by Obama's personal story, not his policies. Nothing either wrong or surprising about that, though foreigners do like all the stuff about how Obama intends to restore America's standing in the world.

But there will come a time, not immediately but sometime, when flesh needs to be put on those rhetorical bones. A time when promises must be followed by action. A time for cheques to be cashed. And that means action on Guantanamo Bay and Extraordinary Rendition. Understandably, we haven't heard much about thos sort of thing on the campaign trail. Certainly, there's not much mention of these issues on Obama's website. Equally understandably, one appreciates the domestic political concerns that make any immediate action on these matters unlikely. To put it mildly, it's not a good idea to begin your presidency with actions that can, however absurdly, be misinterpreted as being "soft on terrorists".

Nonetheless, at some point something needs to be done. The Iraq War was, for sure, unpopular across much of the world, but its Guantanamo and rendition and secret CIA prisons around the world that have done far more damage to the United States' reputation. And, I'm afraid, rightly so.

Obama has talked about closing Guantanmo and opposing rendition. But of course that's easier to do on the campaign trail; rather harder once you're in the White House and pressed by all manner of institutional interests in favour of the status quo. Better to be safe than sorry, you know. So this is a test of character as well as of policy and something that will tell us quite a lot about the new president.

As I say, it's not too tricky opposing this ghastly stuff in opposition; rolling it back once you're in government is a different matter.

If there's been no announcement on the future of Guantanamo and rendition by, say, this time next year then, Washington, we're going to have a problem...

For more, see this usefulish James Rosen piece in the NYT. Also, Obama speech on habeas corpus.

UPDATE: Danny Finkelstein seems to agree with me.

The Trials of Guantanamo

From a WaPo dispatch from the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

Mohammed appeared to have equal disdain for the process, but he only briefly mentioned his "torturing" at the hands of U.S. officials, something he acknowledged he was warned not to mention in open court, lest a security official hit a button muting the audio to observers in the courtroom and at a media center nearby. That button was pushed at least a few times on Thursday when detainees appeared to discuss elements of their early captivity in secret facilities or the way they were treated.

Embarrassing, yes? And doesn't this "mute" button give extra credence to KSM's claims, while doing almost nothing to aid the US case? Then again, the truth would almost certainly be as depressing as it would be damaging.

[Hat-tip: Dana Goldstein.]

Washington, You Have a Problem

The invasion of Iraq may have been deeply unpopular in much of the world, but this is the sort of horrific story that has done the United States much more damage than the initial decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. And, alas, it's hard not to think that this damage is entirely deserved. The shame of it.

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

Five years later he was finally released from Guantanamo. Naturally he'd been tortured. Do read the whole thing.

Or you can watch the full 60 Minutes video here:

Also: if you haven't seen it yet but have the opportunity to do so, I unreservedly recommend that you watch the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

[Hat-tip: Outside the Beltway]

Department of Unfortunate Friends

An endorsement Obama could have done without. He better hope McCain wins the GOP nomination because any other Republican candidate will be happy to use this to argue that Obama is the terrorists' friend.

More than 80 volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees today endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid.

The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to "restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community." The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.

Like it or not, when a Mitt Romney says he'd like to "double Guantanamo" he is only echoing what most American voters think.

Does the Republican party deserve to be saved?

Thanks to John-Paul Pagano for ensuring I didn't miss this while on hiatus. In an illuminating passage National Review's Kathryn-Jean Lopez reveals the reasons why John McCain cannot be considered a conservative:

I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us. Rush Limbaugh has emphatically stated that McCain is not a conservative — and he has more than a few listeners with similar instincts.

John McCain, of course, opposes water-boarding, taking the old-fashioned view that the United States should not be subjecting prisoners to the kinds of torture favoured by the Khmer Rouge. For this heresy he must be cast out of the conservative movement.

What's wrong with these people?

Exceptions don't prove the rule

Marty Peretz writes:

Torture is a repugnant practice, and especially so if it becomes a habit.  It may have become that, although I don't know.  No one outside the alleged practitioners does.  But, believe me, I'm not trying to shrug the matter off.  Andrew Sullivan has persuaded me of its centrality to a humane society.

So far so sort of good. Then, alas, he concludes:

One last point.  The two prisoners the tapes of whose questioning were destroyed by the C.I.A. were certifiable monsters: Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda planner of the 9/11 atrocity, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the mastermind of the Aden bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.  It's a bit strange that such monstrous men should evoke so much concern.

But torture isn't justified by the monstrousness or guilt of those being tortured. It is easy  -or at least it should be - to oppose the torture of the innocent but it should be just as important  - and necessary - to oppose the torture of the guilty too. So, no, it's not strange that the mistreatment of fellows as unpleasant as Abu Zubaydeh should be a cause for so much concern. That Mr Peretz thinks it is fosters the suspicion that he's not as exercised by torture as he claims. Perhaps that's an uncharitable judgment but his conclusion seems to suggest that, well, they had it coming didn't they so who are they to complain?

Meanwhile, Andrew posts this withering verdict:

"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," - Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

If you only see one documentary this year...

Public Service Announcement: the news that the CIA has taken to destroying videotape of its interrogations depresses but does not surprise. It also reminds me that you really ought to see Alex Gibney's new documentary Taxi to the Dark Side when it is released in January.

It's a dispiriting, devastating indictment of the Bush administration's detention and torture policies that have done so much* to destroy the United States' reputation around the world (as well as, of course, increasing the dangers faced by captured US servicemen). Anyway, loony tunes conservatives will be able to ask why the Academy Hates America whe the movie is, as I'd bet it will be, nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar.

Steve Clemons hosted a screening earlier this week and has more here.

*And, I'm afraid, deservedly so. Almost as sadly, I guess these policies remain more popular than folk in Washington like to think. Remember Mitt Romney's pledge to "double Guantanamo" is intended - and received - as an applause line.

Signs of the Times

Deroy Murdock's remarkable National Review Online column saying Americans should be "proud" of waterboarding prisoners was bad enough. In response Ramesh Ponnuru suggested that the logic of Murdock's argument was that the Bush administration should be waterboarding more prisoners. Murdock now tells Ponnuru that:

[T]he whole point of my piece is that I AM complaining that we do NOT waterboard enough. Yes, we need to waterboard more. At the moment, waterbaording appears to have been banned by both the CIA and the Pentagon. As I say pretty directly in my piece, Bush should reinstate waterboarding publicly and proudly, and I called him deluded for thinking he would gain anything by going along with the Left and ditching waterboarding. . . .

I hope this clears up any confusion you might have had.

It's stuff like this that makes it clear that it's actually pretty important for everyone - Americans and non-Americans alike - that the Republican* party be booted** out of the White House next year.

*Possible exception, in this area at least, if John McCain (or Ron Paul!) wins the GOP nomination.

**The Democrats are, um, rather flawed too, of course, and desperately timid on this sort of stuff. But, desperate times can demand desperate measures...

A spade is not a shovel. It's a spade.

American conservatives who seem to think that waterboarding is perfectly ok - and there are, shamefully, many such people including the two leading candidates for the Republican party's presidential nomination and, judging from his equivocation on the subject, the nominee for attorney-general, should be required to read this detailed post from Malcolm Nance.

Mr Nance is no hand-wringer. His bio states, inter alia, that he is:

A 20-year veteran of the US intelligence community's Combating Terrorism program and a six year veteran of the Global War on Terrorism he has extensive field and combat experience as an field intelligence collections operator, an Arabic speaking interrogator and a master Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) instructor.  From Beirut in 1983 he has deployed on numerous anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism intelligence operations in Balkans, Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and other small wars in direct support to the principle agencies of the Special Operations and Intelligence Community.  In 1997 at the US Navy SERE School’s Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival program (ATAHS) in Coronado, California, he created and led the terrorism training team tasked to simulate the Al Qaeda organization and its tactics, techniques and procedures.

The whole post repays reading, but here's some of what he has to say:

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22. Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American...

...Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again...

... According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.

A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?

What next if the waterboarding on a critical the captive doesn’t work and you have a timetable to stop the “ticking bomb” scenario? Electric shock to the genitals? Taking a pregnant woman and electrocuting the fetus inside her? Executing a captive’s children in front of him? Dropping live people from an airplane over the ocean? It has all been done by governments seeking information. All claimed the same need to stop the ticking bomb. It is not a far leap from torture to murder, especially if the subject is defiant. Are we willing to trade our nation’s soul for tactical intelligence?

Quite so. But apparently - and according to Rudy Giuliani - all this is the creation of the anti-American liberal media who want to see the United States defeated. This moral turpitude might be laughable if it weren't so wicked and, worse, so widespread. This issue alone, I should have thought, ought to make it impossible to endorse either Giuliani or Mitt Romney.

[Hat-tip: James Joyner]

Why does John McCain hate America?

John McCain tells ABC's This Week that - shockingly! - torture is " a very important issue to me" and consequently that he can't guarantee that he will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General if the nominee continues to fudge on the question of whether or not he believes waterboarding constitutes torture. McCain, noting yet again that it was a favourite method of Pol Pot's happy warriors, would, one senses like to vote No but there's the problem that... well, let's go and see what the GOP blogs are saying.

Here's Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, confirming that supporting the use of waterboarding would indeed seem to be a prerequisite for anyone hoping to win the Republican nomination. This (cheese-eating?) equivocation shows that:

The senator sure knows how to court conservatives

Question: how tainted is any victory that depends upon winning the votes of people who think like this?

The Indefensible in Support of the Unspeakable

Rudy Giuliani in Iowa:

Asked at a community meeting here whether he considered waterboarding torture, Mr. Giuliani said: “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”

I think what that means is that if the Iranians were to waterboard a captured US pilot it would be torture but if the Americans were to waterboard a captured Iranian intelligence officer it would not. Such is the moral clarity of our times.

How anti-American is Jason Bourne?

Chris Orr decries Mickey Kaus's decrying of The Bourne Ultimatum as "anti-American". Chris is right to observe that the film's good guys are also American government officers and that Joan Allen's character says of water-boarding etc that "This isn't us" but ultimately (ha!) I can't quite agree with his conclusion. I thought it a rather searing indictment of the United States, albeit for rather different reasons.

As my friends know I'm generally a pretty pro-America kind of chap. Some of my best friends are American, don't you know. Even so, there are limits.

What The Bourne Ultimatum did capture was an arrogance that gives the United States a permanent right to do as it pleases anywhere in the world. In this movie this even includes a CIA assassination squad bumping off a British citizen at a mainline London railway station. I confess to being infuriated by this sequence  and the mindset behind it: We're the USA, It's Our World, You Just Live In It. Fiction, of course...

As the murder of Alexander Litvinenko demonstrated, this is what the Russians do; the Americans are supposed to be better than that. It's not greatly reassuring that the good guys prevail in the end; the grimly striking parts of the movie all concern the bad guys. Watching these sequences, I developed a rather acute sympathy for all those countries in which the CIA has interfered and bumped off people whose continued existence it finds inconvenient.

Now, yes, this is the work of the bad guys in The Bourne Ultimatum but surely it's more significant that the bad guys are the people running the agency and the good fellows are relatively junior officers? (True, this is also just adhering to established movie conventions; heroic bosses not being such entertaining or compelling drama). Joan Allen may say "This isn't us" but much of the movie's audience is going to think, "No, this shouldn't be you but it is what you are or have become."

PS: The other irritating thing? Why does Jason Bourne tell the bad guys where he is, not once, but twice? Only a moron would do so, yet the whole point of JB is that he's the best he is. It makes no sense for him to help his enemies like this. Consequently the final 20 minutes of action is fake: an interesting exercise in technical proficiency and it's fun to see how close JB will come to being caught, but it's all even more phoney than usual since it relies on JB making two stupid out-of-character and gratuitous mistakes. Stupid.

The Cheney Way...

It's easy - and proper- to mock the portentous type of journalism American newspapers publish to impress the Pulitzer Prize judges, but sometimes it does work. At its best the reader is treated to a sort of journalism that scarcely exists anywhere else in the world.

The Washington Post's series on Dick Cheney's accretion of power and mania for secrecy is one such example. Today's episode focuses on how Cheney's office was instrumental in creating the rules governing the treatment of detainees captured in Afghanistan and Iraq and, consequently, how Cheney must be held responsible for the enormous moral and public relations disaster that ensued:

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

This is also right:

"The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington [Cheney's lawyer] is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally. "What both of them miss is that ..... in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration -- a complete and total indifference to public opinion."

Geneva conventions? The US Constitution?

A commenter (who is, I think, from the UK not the US) is disheartened by the "nonsense" I wrote about Mr Cheney's West Point speech and asks:

Why should non-citizens who have taken up arms against the US be protected by its constitution? Why should non-state actors be protected by a treaty that regulates the treatment of soldiers in conflicts between states?

But this isn't actually very difficult. Because it's the right thing to do. Because to deny these protections to the enemy is to demean and shame ourselves. Simple stuff really.